by Minrose Gwin
“That’s the rule?” June said.
“Yes, that’s the rule. Are you listening, Grace?”
The light had finally faded, and a sliver of moon had come up. In the passing dark, the half-green polar bear stared back at me through the window’s reflection, his eyes empty of questions, the bare fields swirling behind him in the night.
Dad turned on the radio. The Russians were winning the space race. They were going to launch the Bomb from the moon. They had sent up a little stray dog named Laika to orbit the earth, like one of those lost birds our mother had told us about, the accidentals who’d gotten off track and ended up somewhere they didn’t belong. In Laika’s case, about as off track as a dog or any other earthly creature could possibly get. Now, Laika was believed dead, though still orbiting in her capsule. The announcer called her Curly the Muttnik, a real sweetheart. She had liked the scientists; she had liked her capsule, which was the size of a country mailbox; she’d thought it was her bed and slept in it. How would it feel, I wondered, to be so cozily at home and find yourself shot into endless space, betrayed by kind hands?
“Remember this day,” our father said solemnly, “November 3, 1957.”
AS IT TURNED out, I didn’t know everything there was to know about giraffes. In the years ahead I would learn I wasn’t as smart as I’d thought where giraffes were concerned. I would learn that the males hit each other with their necks to decide who is the strongest and who gets to breed with the female. This is called necking, an odd name if you consider the human equivalent. So perhaps it wasn’t dancing our giraffes were doing, perhaps it was fighting. But given what I saw, the care the big one, surely a mother, took in hitting the small one, surely her own child, the pretty way it all took place, the tenderness between them, I don’t believe they were fighting. And who’s to say what is fighting and what is dancing when something you see takes your breath away?
Those giraffes, they opened the world for me, made me crave what the eye loved. What I had yet to learn is how the eye can betray, abandoning us to orbit a vast outer darkness, dazed and alone. Forever too early, forever too late.
The man dropped his camera when he ran from my father. After Dad took us back, I found the third picture, lying facedown in the dust. Now, in the growing dark of my father’s Nash Rambler, I pull it out of my shorts pocket and turn it to the light on the dashboard. In the picture my sister and I, we look like we’re having the time of our lives.
4
June
HERE’S HOW IT HAPPENED:
When we got home from seeing the giraffes that last time, the house was dark and our mother nowhere in sight. It was almost seven o’clock. We were later getting home than we’d ever been, thanks to Grace’s demand to go to the zoo. We hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast and were frantic with hunger. I was thinking about eggs, how good a plate of scrambled eggs would taste. When we looked around the empty kitchen, we thought Mama had had her day the way we’d had ours and was now back asleep, without a thought of us. We rolled our eyes at each other. Grace opened the bread box and handed me a slice of Sunbeam. The bread stuck to the roof of my mouth and made me gag.
There was a foreignness about the house, as if we were sneaking into someone else’s place in the dead of the night. The leaky faucet at the kitchen sink dripped without a sound. Even the birds, who usually sang well past sunset, had hushed. The house had that silence a place has in the early morning hours when nothing stirs but the cockroaches that scuttle here and there. It was like I’d been struck deaf.
Dad slipped in behind us, turned on some lights, and headed down the little hall to his and Mama’s bedroom. The door was closed and there was a note taped to it. He read the note, dropped it on the hall floor, opened the door. We were right behind him and we saw her arm dangling off the bed before he snatched us up and shoved us out the door and shut it in our faces. Not before we caught sight of a dark pool beside our parents’ bed. We looked down and saw dark tracks going along the hall to the bathroom and back. I went into the bathroom first. There were red smears on the black-and-white floor tile, as if someone had tried to wipe up. A towel, covered in blood, lay wadded up in the tub. “Grace!” I screamed and she came running and took one look. Then we ran back to the bedroom and turned the doorknob, which was locked. “Go to your rooms,” our father said on the other side.
We picked the note up off the floor, took it to Grace’s room, spread it out on the bed, and peered at it. Didn’t mean to make a mess of it don’t let girls see. The paper torn jaggedly from my school notebook, a brown smear on it.
We sat on the bed, not looking at each other, picking at the nubs on the spread as if we’d been instructed to groom it. Our father was speaking to someone on the phone, his voice rising and falling as though it were a radio being turned up and then down. He stayed in the bedroom a long time, talking on the phone, then not, then talking again, faster and faster now, his voice like the tear in a fabric.
There was a long silence. Grace took my hand and squeezed it. I pulled away. “We shouldn’t have been late, we shouldn’t have gone to the zoo,” I said. When I saw her face, I wanted to pluck the words from the air and shove them back down my throat.
Then Dad came into Grace’s room. His shirt was wet and sweat glistened through his crew cut. His lips had disappeared as if he’d swallowed his own mouth. His eyes were stones.
“Grace,” he said. “Take care of your sister. Keep this door closed.” Then he shut the door and went back into the bedroom where our mother was.
Grace got her Girl Scout sash from a hook on the inside of the bedroom door and started telling me what each badge on it stood for. She started with the campfire badge. “You place the twigs first, for kindling,” she said. “Then the branches.”
After she’d worked her way through to the cooking badge, reciting all the steps in frying a chicken, Dad came back in, his face the color of wet sand. He said, “Go across the street to the Bakers’. Your mother’s sick. She needs to go to the hospital.”
“No,” we said in unison.
Then he put his hands on us, one on each of our shoulders, and herded us out the front door. On the porch he gave us a little push. “Get on over there.”
We headed across the street, dragging our feet. We didn’t know the Bakers well then and were embarrassed to show up at their door like stray dogs. When Dad went back into the house, we hid in the nandina bushes in the Bakers’ side yard and waited. It had begun to drizzle. We started to shiver and wrapped our arms around each other.
“Let’s sing ‘This Little Light of Mine,’” said Grace. We began to sing in a whisper, each holding a forefinger upright.
It was full dark when the ambulance came and the men in white jackets went inside. The red light on top of the ambulance kept going around and around, making me dizzy. The drizzle turned to rain. We were soaked to the skin by the time they carried our mother out, strapped down. There was a white sheet over her that looked like it had been splattered in brown paint. The rain plastered the sheet over her body so we could see the shape of her high cheekbones. Just as one of them opened the door to the ambulance and they lifted her, the fingers on her left hand edged out from under the sheet a little, then a little more, until we could see her wedding ring glinting under the streetlight. Raindrops rolled off her hand and onto the pavement below.
When the ambulance pulled away, slowly, without a sound, Grace took my hand and we both stood up and came out of the bush.
Dad hadn’t gotten into the ambulance but had walked back over to our front porch stoop. He sat down and put his face between his legs, his knees up around his ears, like a giant grasshopper. It had begun to rain hard, splashing the puddles on the sidewalk.
Atop our father’s crew cut, drops of water sparkled under the streetlight.
I pulled away from Grace and ran back across the street to my father. For a moment he looked up at me like he’d never seen me before in his life. His face was wet, and the shadows from the
ragged leaves of the elm tree in the front yard flickered across it. He snatched me up and held me so tight I could feel his own heart beat inside my ribs, as if it had taken a giant leap through skin and flesh and bone and docked right there inside my own chest.
“Too late,” he said.
Then he looked over my shoulder at Grace, and I turned too. She was standing, hunched and forlorn, in the middle of the street, her wet hair plastered to the sides of her face. The streetlight caught her from behind and cast a shadow.
Dad took my hand and led me inside. When I turned, Grace was following us the way a stray dog will follow, a few paces behind, skittish and wary of the stick.
5
Holly
THERE’S A STORY ABOUT THE WAR I USED TO TELL TO Olivia the first time I got her pregnant.
I’d start out by saying there are only so many hours a man can stay awake. Nights, I would fall asleep in the foxholes after a day of fighting, my face tucked to the frozen ground. The snow hip deep, deeper in the trenches. My feet would go numb in my boots and the darkness would settle over my face like silk. Then I would dream about having a baby in my belly the way a woman does.
It was always a big one, a boy. It pressed against the hinge on my belt, kicking and turning and reaching for the light. It felt like hunger. In the dream I would laugh and pat my belly and tell the other soldiers they could touch me there if they wanted, feel it kick, listen to its beating heart. Holly’s got one in the oven, they’d laugh and say. They’d tell me to hurry up and have my boy, give him a Browning so he could shoot some Krauts, help us win this goddamn war.
Olivia didn’t think much of my story. She wasn’t hot on having children, said there were too many of them in the world already. What she wanted was a place to go in the morning. She missed building boats, she wanted to go back to school. She’d trade places with me in a heartbeat. I could stay home and wipe their noses, change their diapers, figure out something to cook for supper.
I wouldn’t have minded staying home. I’d always wanted kids. My own dad was a good man, a good father. Holland McAlister Sr. and me the Junior, called Holly after him. Until the day he died, he was Big Holly and I was Little Holly. One October morning, when he took me duck hunting, he told me a man is judged by his children. If he is a good man, they will be the proof of it, the way a fine coat on a dog or a horse proves it’s been well cared for. When he said that, I pictured a little naked child with a fine down all over its body, like the fuzz of a peach. Then my dad’s dog, a shiny retriever named Joey, ran into the water and flushed a covey of mallards and we each took two. The wind was coming up from the north. It gathered the falling birds, tossed them around in the air until their wings opened and they looked alive as they fell to earth.
The dreams about my boy started in the middle of the war. I’d met Olivia, but we’d only spent one night together and not in the way you think. It was July of ’43. It had just rained late that afternoon, tapping back the New Orleans heat. Steam was rising from the streets and sidewalks. I’d just come into Pascal’s Manale with four other wet-behind-the-ears soldiers from the 99th. The bunch of us just setting out, training at Camp Van Dorn over in Centreville, twenty thousand of us, stuck in that red clay mudhole in south Mississippi in the heat of summer. Swampy and crawling with water moccasins the size of tree limbs. That night I first met Olivia, our faces were flecked in blood from the mosquitoes and chiggers. We’d come into the restaurant to try to sober up on spaghetti so we could go out and drink some more before we got on the four o’clock Greyhound back to the swamps.
When I first spotted Olivia, she was sitting at a round table with some other girls, over by a window with a red velvet curtain. She was dark-haired and leggy. Smoking and laughing, leaning on her elbows, both hands flapping like she was some swamp bird about to take off. She was telling a funny story and her girlfriends were laughing and wiping their eyes and hitting the table with their palms.
I eyed her all through my meal. She was eating oysters on the half shell. She ate like she was going to be there all night, mixing her ketchup, horseradish, lemon, and cayenne together, dipping the oyster in the sauce she’d made, then arranging the thing, dripping and alive as a beating heart, on the saltine cracker she held in her hand. She’d pop the whole thing in her mouth, roll her eyes at the other girls like she was in hog heaven, chew for a long time, her cheek bulging. Then she would take the empty shell and tilt it back so the liquid ran into her mouth, her neck white as marble against the curtain behind her, her lips red and wet.
She caught me looking at her and eyed me back. On my way out I stopped at her table. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” I asked. It sounded like a line, but I didn’t mean it that way. She looked oddly familiar, like some of the Cajun girls back home.
She winked at her friends. “Maybe. Where are you from?” She took out a cigarette and I lit it.
“Opelika, over in Mississippi, south of Picayune.” I was holding my hat in one hand and suddenly realized I had knotted it up. “You from around here?”
“I’m from here.”
“Opelika’s an hour northeast. Guess we’re neighbors.” It felt like the dumbest thing I’d ever said.
She grinned and winked at her girlfriends. “Never heard of it.”
I gave it one more try. “It’s just a bump in the road. Hey, wonder if you could give us some directions to Bourbon Street.” It was the only street name I could remember.
She rolled her eyes. “You don’t want to go there. Seeing as how you’re almost a hometown boy, I can show you where there’s a little place up on Chartres. You can hear some nice music, dance.”
That was the beginning of it. We didn’t talk much that night. She liked to sing while she danced, belting out “Stormy Weather” and “That Old Black Magic” as I swung her around. When it was time to go, she walked me to the bus station. After a few blocks I took her hand.
When we stopped to wait for the light to change, she leaned down and pulled a leaf off a scraggly wisp of mint growing on the neutral ground and popped it into her mouth. Then she reached over and took my head and pulled it to her and kissed me on the lips, deep and sweet. She tasted like mint and horseradish. She fished around in her bag, came out with a napkin she’d picked up at the bar, wrote down her address and handed it over. Then she turned and walked away.
The first thing I did when I got back to camp was write and ask for a picture. It came in the mail with just her name, Olivia Grace LaMonde on the back, and the red mark of her lips.
THAT WINTER OF 1944, I didn’t think I was going to make it. We were hayseed doughs in the 99th, farm and small-town boys, mostly from Pennsylvania with a few of us locals sprinkled in. Green as grass, fresh from the swamps of the Mississippi and Texas camps we’d trained in, having never seen a single day of action. So what does the army do but plop us down in the middle of the Ardennes Forest in Belgium, smack-dab up against Hitler’s west wall? They threw us out there like bait, spread us out over a twenty-mile front. No reinforcements, no reserves. It snowed day and night, night and day. For a few days after we got there, it was dead quiet. We’d set up camp next to a grove of giant trees, their limbs heavy with snow, touching the ground around us. A mist rose from the snow like steam from a pot. Nothing moved but a few birds. We crossed and recrossed our tracks, trying to find our way among the shrouded trees and hedgerows and rolling hills, trudging through the snowbanks like ghosts in the mist, as though this war was only a dream somebody had conjured up.
It was ten days to Christmas when they came. By then, we’d gotten our bearings and fanned out. Wave after wave of German steel rained down on us. Tanks and infantry and rockets, you name it. Command Post sent in a relief squad of cooks and KPs. Cooks and KPs! They hopped in and out of the snowbanks like scared rabbits, leaping up into the air when they were hit, then vanishing below the snow line. We rushed in to help. My hands shook so, I can’t tell you whether I killed anybody, and if I did, whose side they were on. We wer
e pinned down, then one of the cooks hollered, “Hell, no use laying here like dogs.” So we all broke into a run, hollering like banshees.
I ran up the middle, not out front where the rocket fire could pick me off, not in the back where they could snag me from the outside or behind. Running through the drifts, hollering at the top of my lungs, I felt heavy and clumsy, tilted into the line of fire. That boy in my belly, he jounced along, not complaining, but not happy either. He wanted to live, he wanted to be Holland McAlister III, Little Holly to my Big Holly. This was his time, this was his only chance.
He was right to worry. Communications were down, it was snowing hard, and men were falling right and left of me. A buddy of mine from Aberdeen, Charlie O’Malley, lost one side of his head and kept on for ten paces, like a chicken after the ax. When he went down, I followed the trail of blood to where he lay, already partly covered in snow. I pulled the letter he’d written to his folks back home from his shirt, the way I’d promised. I had two letters in my shirt, one to my parents and one to Olivia. I’d spent a lot of time on the letter to her, saying I was sorry that I was dead because I’d wanted to come home and have a whole houseful of kids with her. We would have been so happy. We would have danced our way through life. That last sentence had taken me a long time to think up.
When we dug into our foxholes at dusk, I took Olivia’s picture out of the inside pocket of my shirt, brushed the snow off, looked deep into her eyes. Then I turned the picture over and fitted my mouth to the place her lips had been. I could feel her breath, coming on slow at first, then faster, warming me deep in my belly where my boy was, and I stopped shivering and fell asleep.
In the end, the Germans turned south. We’d stopped them, a miracle really, but enough to turn the tide on the western front.
Somewhere in it all, though, the boy in my belly said he’d had enough, he had a bad feeling. My hands began to shake, my finger twitched at the trigger.