The Blue Pen

by Lisa Rusczyk

CHAPTER NINE

  I brought Patrick food and books every secret chance I got. On Wednesday night I found the courage to stay longer than his meal, feeling a false sense of safety from my parents finding us. We leaned against a square, dry hay bale, little pieces prickling my skin through my nighty, our knees touching like birds in a nest. I asked him why he had so many brothers, hoping to get him talking about his family. I wanted to find out about his father telling him to go to war. Instead, he told me about his religion.

  He said, “Catholicism says we can’t use birth control. Catholics have big families because they think God says they should. My mother has even had a few miscarriages. What do you think about that?”

  “I think it’s people’s choice what they should do about -” I couldn’t say sex, so instead I waved my hand and was grateful for the candlelight.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I agree. But Catholicism has good things that these country religions don’t have.”

  “Country religions?” I said.

  “Like Baptists don’t have saints.”

  “Saints?” I asked. I had heard Mother refer to her sister as a saint many times, but it didn’t sound like a compliment. I had a vague idea that they were people from Jesus’ time who had done something good, but that’s all I knew. I didn’t listen to sermons very often; usually I thought about anything but God when in his house.

  He told me, “Saints are people who did great things in the name of God during their lives.”

  I said, “Like what?”

  “Lots of them died for Christ,” he answered.

  “Huh.” I said. I let my knee press harder against his. “What’s so neat about them?”

  He said, “Well, they can be like angels, and Catholics can pray to them for help. Religions out here say you can only pray to Jesus, or else you’re disobeying a commandment.”

  I asked if he prayed.

  “Sometimes,” he said.

  I urged him to tell me who he prayed to.

  He smiled and poked his finger in and out of the candle flame. “I’ve prayed to Saint Michael before.”

  I asked, “What does he do that God can’t?”

  He told me St. Michael could slay demons.

  “Have you demons?” I said it in jest, and he turned to me. The flickering light lit half his face. With the finger he’d been dragging through the candle, he touched my lips. I felt warmth like the fires of hell itself inside me and I slapped his hand away. He laughed quietly and pretended to slap my hand back. We grabbed each other’s fingers and pulled and wrestled until he had his arm around me and my hand in his. I took care to remember how his hand felt in case I told Barbie about it someday - rough and bumpy like warm tree bark. We stayed like that for a long time, and I left him leaning back into the hay as sound asleep as I would never be that night.

  It was late Thursday night when, after his sandwich, he said, “Today’s my birthday.”

  “It is? How old are you?” I asked, although Cecil had already told me.

  “Nineteen.” He chugged tea and said, “Does your mother ever wonder where all her food and tea goes?”

  I said, “But aren’t you a senior? How can you be nineteen?”

  He leaned back against hay and stretched his legs out to where his feet were inches from my bent knee. I pulled a horse blanket around my cold frame. He told me he had missed a year of school.

  “Happy birthday,” I told him.

  “Want to celebrate with me? I went down the road last night to a friend’s house.” He reached into the hay and pulled out a tall, dark, unlabeled bottle that wore a half-inserted cork. “Homemade plum wine. Ever tasted it?”

  “No.” I had only had sips of alcohol now and then when my parents brought it out on holidays. They said it was okay as long as it was in moderation.

  He said I was to have the first sip, and he pulled the loose cork from the bottle with a thwoop. I made a toast to warm weather and drank it like it was Mother’s tea. It was sweet, and tart, and fruity, and we both smiled more after our first tastes. It was like our mouths were naturally turned at the corners, and our eyes lit up since birth.

  I asked him to tell me about Philadelphia. He told me about his neighbor, Willie, who had played kickball in the alley with him, and about a street fight he’d seen in which one man sliced open another man’s entire arm with a switchblade because his wife had been unfaithful. “There was always a fight going on somewhere,” he said. He told me about his favorite place on top of their apartment building where the air seemed cleaner than the smoggy traffic-covered streets below. He told me how the different races had their own neighborhoods, but how they also lived mixed together in some places. “I bet you’re a city girl and you don’t even know it,” he told me.

  “Why do you say that?” I laughed and laughed at the idea of Mother and Barbie and I wearing pants and paying for parking meters. He did too. The bottle was almost empty and the before-freezing hayloft was a sauna from our hot, drunk bodies.

  He told me, “I say that because, although you’ve been a country girl all your life, you have a brain in there that’s just ticking away until you can see the world.”

  How could he see these things in me? I was just a little girl. Was it even true? Suddenly, the outside world felt just that, and digging through its cities would be like being able to fly out of the hayloft of my own will and seeing the clouds and trees from above.

  Whatever it was he thought he could see, I was thrilled he was looking, and we might have touched our wine-swollen lips together at that moment if Barbie’s head hadn’t appeared floating in the air next to us.

  She said, “So this is where you’ve been sneaking off to.” She climbed up the rest of the ladder and sat next to him and said, “Hi, Patrick. I’m Barbie.”

  I saw him find the situation acceptable, and he asked her to join us for a drink.

  She clasped her hands together in front of her chest and asked, “What are we having?”

  I said, “It’s Patrick’s birthday and we’re celebrating. It’s plum wine.”

  “I haven’t had wine in months,” she said, although it had been since Christmas that Dad let us share a glass. She tipped the bottle back. Her eyes were watering when she lowered the bottle, and she tried to hide them from Patrick by rubbing her lids and saying, “1875, it must be. A fine year for wine.”

  He pointed at the collar of her nightgown and said, “Nice bunnies.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and pulled one of the white bunnies forward. “This is Whitey. Say hi, Whitey.”

  He looked at her the way one looks at adorable puppies when they lick each other’s behinds.

  Barbie said, “I’m freezing, Patrick. Can I have your jacket?”

  He took it off as slowly as a Southern preacher delivers a sermon, and I pulled my blanket around me more tightly.

  She asked him, “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m enjoying the weather,” he said.

  Barbie said, “You’re so funny. You didn’t tell me how funny he is, Cleo.”

  But we were interrupted. My father’s voice, sounding like his alarm clock at dawn, echoed despite the sound-muting hay. “What the hell is going on?”

  The bottle slipped from Patrick’s hands. I noticed how soft and shiny his lips looked.

  My father called out, “Cleo? Barbie?” We heard his slippers sticking to the wooden ladder as he climbed. Then there he was. His face was white and his eyes were thunder skies in April. I saw relief there when he found we were okay, then hatred when his eyes met Patrick’s. I’d never seen my father hate. What did he see but two young girls, a man, and a bottle?

  He cursed then. He cursed at Patrick and told him to get out of his fucking barn.

  “Drunk,” my mother cried as the sun’s yellows whispered to the hungry trees. “Drunk with that boy. How could you do this to me?”

  And so it had been for hours. Somehow, Mother had woken in the night just knowing her daughters were gone.

&n
bsp; I begged Dad not to call Patrick’s father. I said, “He’ll kill him.”

  Mother called me dramatic and threw her white tissue at me. It didn’t make it far enough and fell at my toes.

  Barbie picked at the lace on the wrists of her nighty. She seemed as concerned about our parents’ anger as an air-born kite is with the ground. The flush of her swig of wine had not left her face.

  We both worked at the clinic the next day after school. Our parents said we had to be seen every second we were not in school from then on so that we wouldn’t get into any more trouble.

  Barbie wasn’t in the room when my father finished spaying a white puppy. “Too young,” he had muttered as he sowed her up, then he looked at me over his glasses.

  The young dog breathed easy, and my father laid down his tools.

  “Cleo, hand me a towel.” I handed him one and he wiped medicines and blood from his fingers, but he dropped the towel to the floor.

  His forehead wrinkled like he’d been kicked in the shin, then his eyes actually vibrated in their sockets with the flicker of the fluorescent lights. He slapped his right temple with his left palm. He stared at me and said, “The pain –”

  He fell.

  Strokes can be brought on by great stress. I heard a doctor say to another doctor right in front of me in the hospital room, as though I were only my father’s phantom, that Dad was dead before he hit the ground. His corpse was lumpy under the white sheet, like nothing was under it but more white sheets. Mother didn’t come to the hospital or the funeral. She wouldn’t come out of her room even for a glass of tea, and she muttered through the bedroom door to me when I knocked that, “It is all hell out there.”

  To summarize the next few months, because that is all they seem to me, a summary, I took over at the clinic so that we could have money, and Patrick went off to the war. Barbie stayed with Mother, and I stopped attending high school.

  Barbie and I didn’t know how to be vets, but we kept the kennel open and sympathetic townspeople brought their pets for minor things like shots and stitches, which I could do. They overpaid for my services and we got by.

  Cecil was sent from the Lord himself, and came to the clinic each afternoon to help me with my duties. He’d say things like, “History already happened, no need to study it,” but he had deeper circles under his eyes as the weeks passed and I just knew all his marks were still A’s.

  Mother came out of her room one month to the day after father’s death, and she was wearing a red dress and red heels. She said it was Father’s favorite dress, but did not make another personal reference to him for years.

  CHAPTER TEN