by Joe Hill
His mother looks back over her shoulder at the approaching vehicles. They travel another few yards, and then Bloom’s feet catch up to her brain and they stop walking. She sets the suitcase down by her heels.
The truck eases to the side of the road, slowing in the chalky margin and throwing up a haze of dust. Jack’s father sits at the wheel, staring at them from behind a pair of mirrored shades, Connor right beside him. The Road Runner parks behind the pickup, and Beth gets out. She stands holding the driver’s-side door, looking frightened.
“Whyn’t you come over here, Jack?” Beth calls. “I’ll drive you back to the house. Grown-ups gotta talk.”
Bloom tightens her grip on Jack’s hand. He stares up at his mother, then catches a movement from the corner of his eye and glances behind them. There’s another car coming, this one from the direction of town: a police cruiser. It glides along with the lights and siren off, and when it’s about fifty feet away, it parks on the other side of the road.
Only then does Hank McCourt, Jack’s father, the Separatist, climb out of the big beige F-150. Connor gets down from the other side, careful not to put his weight on his carbon foot. Jack’s cousin is the luckiest man he knows: he has a twenty-first-century mechanical leg, that souped-up Road Runner, and Beth. Jack would commit multiple homicides to have even one of them.
Jack’s father ambles toward them with his hands out to either side, palms down, in a gesture that seems to recommend calm. He’s armed, a Glock in a black leather holster on his right hip, but that’s no surprise. He only takes it off to shower.
“Get in the Road Runner, Jack,” Hank says. “Beth will drive you home.”
Jack looks at his mother. She nods and releases his hand. Bloom picks up the suitcase and moves to follow, but Hank steps between them. He reaches for the handle of the suitcase—a husbandly thing to do—but then he puts his palm against Bloom’s chest to keep her from taking another step.
“No. Not you. You can go wherever you were going.”
“You can’t just take him away from me, Hank.”
“And you can?”
“What’s going on here?” This from the lawman standing in the road behind Jack’s mother. “Hank, what can you tell me?”
Two town cops have spilled out of the cruiser. Jack recognizes the one doing the talking, one of his father’s friends, a hefty white-haired cop with a swollen nose full of twisty purple veins. The other is a scrawny kid who hangs a few steps back, hands resting on his gun belt. A white stick pokes out of the corner of his mouth. A lollipop, maybe.
“My wife decided to walk off with the boy, take him who knows where without discussing it.”
“He’s my son,” Bloom says.
“He’s Hank’s son, too,” says the white-haired lawman. Spaulding. Rudy Spaulding. That’s his name. “Are you leaving your husband, Mrs. McCourt?”
“We’re both leaving him,” Bloom says. She glares at Hank, both of them clutching the handle of her suitcase.
Hank looks past her to Spaulding. “She’s a danger to my son, Rudy. She’s probably a danger to herself, too, but I can’t do anything about that. I want my kid home, with me, and with his educator, Beth. She handles the homeschooling.”
“We do the homeschooling,” Bloom says. She wrenches at the suitcase. “Will. You. Let. Go?”
Hank gives it a twist as he releases his grip, and the suitcase falls open. Piles of clothes flop onto the gravel. A bottle of gin strikes the pavement with a clink. Bloom’s shoulders leap in surprise.
“That’s not mine,” she says. “I don’t drink anymore. I didn’t—”
She raises her head and stares at Hank, spots of color high in her cheeks.
“This isn’t yours either,” Hank says, bending and digging through the pile and coming up with a money clip stuffed full of twenties. He looks at Rudy Spaulding. “I was on my way to Wichita when I noticed I didn’t have this. That’s why I turned around.”
“He’s lying,” Bloom says. “I didn’t take his money. He planted that, like he planted the bottle.”
“What about these pills?” Spaulding asks, bending and picking up an orange plastic tube. “He plant these, too?”
“I have a prescription for those,” Bloom says. She snatches for the bottle, but Spaulding turns a shoulder to her, keeps it out of reach. “I need those.”
“What for?” Spaulding asks, squinting at the label.
“I get bad ideas,” she says.
“You said it. Running off with my kid was one of them,” Hank tells her.
“They help. Jack needs help also. It’s not too late. He doesn’t have to wind up with a head full of my crazy—or yours, Hank.”
“The only thing he can get from the mainstream medical establishment is a bunch of feel-good pills to make him docile. Easy to herd. No thank you.”
Spaulding grips Bloom’s arm. “Tell you what, Mrs. McCourt. Why don’t you come into town and unload your troubles to me? I’m a good listener.”
“Fuck you, Rudy Spaulding,” Bloom spits. “He’s setting me up with his money clip and his bottle of gin, and you’re helping him because you want to suck his dick. You want to get down on the gun range with him and oil his pistol.”
“Oh, goodie,” Spaulding says. “I get bored doing things the nice way.” He turns her suddenly, almost yanking her off her feet, spinning her to face his cruiser. “Let’s take a walk.”
She shoots a furious look over one shoulder. Hank stares back from behind his mirrored shades.
“I’ll get a lawyer,” she says. “I’ll drag your fascist ass into court.”
“Do that. See who a judge thinks should have custody of our kid. An unstable drunk with a history of mental illness and an arrest record long as my arm? Or a decorated former marine who makes a point of employing disabled vets? We’ll see how it goes. Rudy, that’s good gin. All yours if you want it.”
Rudy Spaulding frog-marches Bloom to the cruiser while she twists and spits. The young cadet tugs the bottle of gin out of the pile of clothes. He turns it flashing in the sunlight to inspect the label.
“Is Mom getting arrested?” Jack asks.
Hank puts his hand on his son’s shoulder. “Probably. But don’t let it weigh on your mind. She’s had plenty of practice.”
2.
Jack sits with his legs hanging over the side of a hole gouged deep into the earth. His mother stares up at him from the bottom of the pit with a sad, apologetic smile. She’s buried to her neck so that only her dirty face is visible. Her hair is all worms: fat, glistening earthworms that flex and squirm. The bottom of the hole is lit with a flashing blue light.
A screen door slaps shut with a bang loud as a gunshot, and Jack comes awake sitting on the top of the stairs. He has been nightwalking again. There’ve been times his mother has found him out in the yard at two in the morning, eating handfuls of dirt. Once he went down the road bare naked, carrying a trowel, slashing it at imaginary enemies. It has been worse in the three weeks since she left.
He can still see that flashing blue light, and at first he doesn’t know why. Beth appears at the bottom of the stairs and looks up at him with eyes bloodshot from crying. She mounts the steps three at a time, pulls on his arm to bring him to his feet.
“Come on, buddy,” she says, her voice grainy with emotion. “Back to bed.”
He climbs under the covers, and she sits on the edge of the bed beside him. She smooths his hair down with one palm, thoughtlessly stroking him as if he were a cat. He can smell her hands, a spicy sweetness, like geraniums.
Red and blue lights strobe across the smooth white plaster ceiling, throbbing around the blinds. Jack hears low male voices outside and the staticky squabble of people talking on the police scanner.
It isn’t the first time law has come around to the house. The ATF raided them two years before. The feds tossed the house but didn’t find the guns, which were buried in a sack, six feet deep, out in the barn, directly beneath the parked John Deere.
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The bedroom door eases open. Hank looks in on him.
“Jack? It’s your mother.”
“Oh. Did she come to get me?” He hopes not. He’s perfectly cozy under his blankets, with Beth’s hand gently stroking his hair, and he doesn’t want to get up.
“No.”
Hank McCourt crosses the room and sits down beside Beth. Beth takes his hand and gazes miserably up at him. The round lenses of Hank’s spectacles flash crimson and sapphire.
“Your mother is coming home,” Hank says.
Beth shuts her eyes, the muscles of her face straining against some powerful emotion.
“She is? You’re not mad at her anymore?” Jack asks.
“I’m not mad at her anymore.”
“Did the police bring her home?”
“No. Not yet. Jack, do you know why your mother wanted to leave?”
“Because you wouldn’t let her drink.”
He has been taught this like a mantra over the last three weeks, has heard it from all of them: his father, Beth, Connor. His mother has been sober for two years, but her self-restraint finally split and tore, like a wet paper sack. The only Jack that concerned her now came in a bottle.
“That’s right,” Hank says. “She wanted to go someplace she could drink and take her crazy pills. She chose those things over you. It’s awful to think she needed those things more than she needed us. She was staying in the efficiency apartments near High Street Liquor. So she didn’t have to go far to do her shopping, I suppose. She bought a bottle of gin this afternoon and took it into the bath with her. When she stood to get out, she slipped and cracked her head.”
“Oh.”
“She’s dead.”
“Oh.”
“She was ill, you know. She was ill when I met her. I thought I could make her better, but I couldn’t. It runs too deep in her family. Your mother had peculiar ideas, and she tried to drown them with drink. In the end she only drowned herself.” He waits for Jack to reply to this, but Jack doesn’t have anything to say. Finally his father adds, “If you need to cry, no one will think less of you.”
Jack searches his emotions but can’t find anything yet approximating grief. Later, maybe. When he has time to get his head around it.
“No, sir,” he says.
His father studies him for a time, from behind the bright blinking lenses of his spectacles. Then he nods, perhaps with approval, and squeezes Jack’s knee again and rises. They do not hug, and Jack isn’t surprised. Jack is not a little boy anymore. He’s thirteen. Thirteen-year-olds fought in the Civil War against Yankee oppression. Thirteen-year-old soldiers carry machine guns in Syria to this very day. Plenty of thirteen-year-olds are ready to die or kill, whichever might be required.
Hank lets himself out of the bedroom. Beth stays behind. Jack doesn’t cry, but she does, holding him to her and shuddering with soft sobs.
When she’s all cried out, she gives Jack a peck on the temple. He takes her hand, kisses her creamy white palm, and tastes that spicy-sweet geranium soap. After she’s gone, the taste remains, as lovely as a trace of cake frosting on his lips.
3.
They bury his mother on a windy day in early March on their own land, out beyond the orchard. Jack is not sure this is legal. His father says who is going to stop us, and Jack supposes the answer is no one.
Bloom doesn’t have a coffin, and she hasn’t been embalmed. Hank says embalming people is a waste of time. “You don’t need to poison someone after they’re already dead. God knows she had enough poison in her when she was alive.”
She’s wound up in a dingy white sheet with a few old stains on it that look like coffee spills. Jack’s father has wrapped loops of silver duct tape around her ankles and throat, to draw the sheet tight to her body. He digs the hole with some of his friends, Separatists like him.
They have come from all over the state to honor Hank’s loss. They are a crowd of ten-gallon hats and cowboy mustaches and blank stares. Some of them stand at the graveside with their AR-15s over their shoulders, as if a twenty-one-gun salute might be called for. One man, fleshy, sunburnt, with goggling eyes and a shaved head, wears crossed bandoliers and chaps, like he is on his way to a weekend engagement at the Alamo.
When the hole is deep enough, Connor and some of the others hand the body down. Hank kneels in the grave with his wife’s shrouded head in his lap, gently stroking her brow. Perhaps he whispers to her. Once he glances up and meets Jack’s gaze. Behind his John Lennon spectacles, his father’s eyes are bright and brimming with tears, although they do not spill over.
Jack has the terrible idea his mother’s eyes are open, too, and she is staring at him through the taut white cotton. He can see how her lips are parted. The sheet has sunk a little into the pit of her gaping mouth. At any moment he expects her to groan—or shriek.
Beth clutches Jack to her side, as if to comfort him, although she is the one who is crying. His head knocks against her big soft breasts.
Connor offers a hand, but Jack’s father ignores it and lifts himself out of the grave under his own power. He dusts his palms off, walks to Jack’s side, and puts a hand on his shoulder.
“Do you want to throw dirt on her?”
“Why would I want to do that?”
Hank’s head jerks, and he stares down to see if Jack is giving him lip. He seems to decide his son is genuinely curious, and his face softens.
“To honor her memory,” Hank says.
“Oh,” Jack says. He picks up a handful of soil but then just lets it trickle out of his fist. He doesn’t feel like honoring her with a faceful of dirt.
“That’s all right,” Hank says. “Maybe you’d like to bring her some flowers one of these days.”
Beth is the first to grab a clump of earth and toss it in. She almost seems angry, the way she flings it at the body. The dirt makes a resonant thwock falling on the tight sheet, like a child’s hand slapping a toy drum. Others join her. The man with the crossed bandoliers finds a shovel and begins to fill in the hole. Some of the cowboys fire their six-guns and wahoo mournfully. A bottle of Bulleit Bourbon begins to go around.
In less than a half hour, she has been planted like a seed.
4.
Five weeks after they plant his mother in the soil, Jack is on his way into town with Beth and Connor. His father has loaned them the F-150. Connor has farm business at Cordia Agricultural Supply, and Beth tells Jack he has to come along to protect her. She says she’s trying to take care of her teeth, and she’s worried about the candy machine in the lobby. She never can control herself around SweeTarts. But if Jack comes with them, he can eat most of her tarts for her, and her teeth will stay white and bright and straight, and Connor will still want to kiss her.
“Mmmmmmaybe,” Connor says, squinting at her with one eye, like a man contemplating a challenging assignment.
She laughs and gives him a kiss that turns into a bite, Beth chewing on his lower lip. On the walk to the truck, he casually swats her heart-shaped behind. Such casual intimacies make Jack sick at heart, and for an instant he’s sorry that Connor ever came back from Afghanistan—such an evil thing to wish, he feels he might wilt with shame. Longing should be a sweet thrill, but for Jack it is a worm in a rotten apple.
They are two miles from the farm and two miles from town when Beth casts a wild look out the window and shrieks, “Pull over!” as if she has seen someone mangled and bloody at the side of the road.
Connor jerks the wheel, the ex-soldier handling the truck like a man who has had to drive through gunfire more than once. The pickup flings a milky cloud of dust into the air as they batter to a tooth-rattling stop on the shoulder.
Beth cranes her head to peer through the rear window at a farm stand. “The sign says she’s got quail eggs.”
Connor stares at her.
“Don’t you get sick of eggs out of a chicken’s butt?” Beth asks. “Don’t you ever wanna eat something different?”
“I just did,” Con
nor says. “I just ate the goddamn steering wheel.”
Beth and Jack walk hand in hand to the farm stand, with the morning sunlight on their faces.
The stand is no more than a plank table on wooden trestles, covered with a green-and-white check tablecloth. Wicker baskets contain masses of radishes and bunches of kale. An elderly woman sits in a folding chair, looking as if she has nodded off, chin touching her chest. Jack can tell she’s elderly because she wears a striped T-shirt that leaves her arms bare, and those arms are hatched with wrinkles, pale blue veins showing through the skin. But he can’t see her face because she wears a wide-brimmed green straw hat, and with her head down her features are hidden beneath the floppy brim. The hand-lettered cardboard sign reads:
Quail Eggs! Yum yum good!
Tobacco-Leaf Hunny!
Apple Butter!
Small cakes, big tomatoes,
Seeds for the Garden
Beth peers into a shoe box stuffed with hay and oohs over the speckled eggs inside.
“I’ve never had quail eggs before,” she says.
“I have the remedy for that, dearie!” says the old lady, and she straightens and lifts her head.
The sun shines through the thin material of the green straw hat and casts her face in an otherworldly green light. When she grins, her mouth opens so wide it’s like she’s been poisoned by the Joker. She keeps her gray hair pulled tightly back off her high forehead, and she has a Roman aquiline nose, and it comes to Jack that she looks something like George Washington. No sooner has the thought crossed his mind than she winks at him, as if he has spoken out loud and she wants him to know she isn’t offended in the slightest.
“I heard about you folk. You’re the tax resisters, over there starting your own nation. I hope you don’t want to buy quail eggs with your own money—I only deal in American tender.” She laughs, a dry cackle that sends a shiver through Jack.
“Glad to pay in American,” Beth replies, her smile tightening. “Why not? It isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. Hasn’t been since we left the gold standard in 1933. You’d be better off taking payment in cigarettes. At least they’ll still be worth something when the country falls.”