Lucy Maud remembered the afternoon she’d followed her husband, already knowing what she would find. She had gone into Austin around three on a Tuesday. She was going to a doctor’s appointment first, a meeting with an allergist whose nurse had pricked a grid full of needles into her back. The nurse had said they would call with the results, but both of them could plainly see and Lucy Maud could plainly feel that she was allergic to ragweed and mold. Lucy Maud and her tender back headed to campus next, determined to see whatever was to be seen.
She bought a coffee at the union and sat outside his building, Batts Hall. She felt stupid. Did she expect him to walk out of Batts, arm around his grad student? But she had seen him, not quite like that, emerging from the building alone, walking quickly, body pitched forward over his toes, hurrying. He’d walked down the west mall, stopping in front of the fountain with the bronze horses, and he cast one look behind him. She’d ducked, sure he was going to see her, but he’d only looked back toward the tower. Then he stepped into the street, opened the door of a waiting car, and embraced the driver. Lucy Maud tried to see that driver but only got a glimpse of blond hair and slender forearms draped around Lucy Maud’s husband. Then the car was gone, and Lucy Maud supposed that she could have had more incontrovertible proof, but what was the point? She’d known as soon as Boyd told her. Boyd was never wrong.
Now she leaned against the headboard and tried not to cry. She assumed that the woman to whom Kevin was speaking was the woman in the car that day. It would be worse if she was not. Lucy Maud would rather Kevin have left her for the great love of his life than for a series of affairs or shallow connections.
He came out of the bathroom, sheepish, and lay down beside her, his face in the pillow, and she began to cry. He was planning a wedding. He put a hand on her knee, comforting. The air in the room seemed curdled.
Her phone rang and she let it. She did not want to move the hand from the knee. After a second, however, Kevin raised his head and crossed the room to her purse, reaching in as if he had the right, reading the screen. Good. Let him have the question.
She closed her eyes, unwilling to take the call. Then she thought: Boyd might be trying to reach her. She held out her hand, eyes still closed, and he put the phone into her palm. Finally, on the sixth ring, she answered, “Hello?”
“Lucy Maud,” Ruben said. They’d met a handful of times, a casual relationship, but one with mutual respect. “Can you go get Isaac from the water and tell him to call me?”
“I’m not at the water. And I doubt he came back last night. That was some storm.”
“Came back? Where’d he go?”
She shrugged as if he could see her. “He went home. Two days ago now.”
Silence. “Okay,” Ruben said after a minute. “I guess I’ll try him there.” A pause. “If you see him, tell him we found something. Tell him I was right.”
“About what?”
“Just tell him Maximilian. Tell him Pedro Yorba. He’ll know.”
She hung up, wondering if Boyd would know about Pedro Yorba, if Boyd knew where Isaac was. But no. Boyd had stayed with her aunt Lou, was probably even now sitting at Aunt Fern’s dining room table, doing the crossword puzzle.
“We should go see if Boyd’s at home,” she told Kevin, who stood beside her waiting to put the phone back in her purse.
“All right. We’ll go together.”
She looked up at him and started to cry again. Outside, thunder.
1:30 P.M.
Boyd, spiral on forehead, backpack on, marched in step behind the scarecrow (who knew how far), calculating distance: roughly a quarter mile to the dam, then up and over, then maybe five miles up the river, depending on where Isaac was. Crossing the dam would be hard; the field of boulders at its foot would be covered with water, water coursing over and through the spillway. The prints she followed veered right, and it took her a minute to see where they headed: the hanging tree was submerged, only the canopy visible and looking like a tuft of broccoli. The last Nike Swoosh was inches from the water, then the prints were gone. Reluctantly, she left the footprints, taking instead to the line of mesquite and juniper that skirted the dam. She could see the concrete structure through these trees, massive, making for the landscape a new horizon.
The first thing she passed: the little pioneer cemetery in its cast-iron fence. The earliest graves were only 150 years old, from the middle of the nineteenth century. These markers were hard to read; the elements had worn the engraving thin, rendering the limestone dark and smooth as adobe. The graves from the beginning of the twentieth century were marked with much larger stones, often made of local granite peppered with veins of iron flecking orange rust. So many small grave markers with lambs resting on top: the final places for infants and small children. She knew the story of one of these children because Ruben King had told her. Caleb Muller, age five, laid in a grave marked in German, had wandered into the scrub in the years before the First World War. The moon was ringed with ice that night, a rare late-November freeze. Caleb’s family searched for him, calling, and discovered his body the next morning not steps from where his mother had walked, in between rows in the kitchen garden, between the last row of hibiscus-like okra and the great perennial stand of dill, the child smiling and stiff. The smile, Ruben had suggested, was false, the boy’s lips pulled back in cold and fear. Now, Boyd knelt in front of Caleb’s grave, nearly heartbroken, and said, “I wish I could help you.” She thought of the boy, scared and alone, growing slowly colder.
At least two other graves had no name. INFANT SON one said, and showed a life span of six days at the end of 1893. Another was simply blank. Ruben had said that these children had not been named, that the mothers had known not to get attached. Sometimes Boyd walked the cemetery, and cemetery math was a peculiar thing, revealing, if not answers, clues. One of the women, Ella Hotz, died within a day of one of the lambs. A group of graves, including what looked like an entire family, were dated 1918. The last one in that family, the father, had outlived the rest by three days. Who had buried them, then, after the Spanish flu? Who had gathered the bodies and erected the stones?
The INFANT SON being mossed over on the marble made her think, briefly, of someone she hardly ever thought about: her great-uncle William, her grandfather Homer’s twin. He’d been buried as an infant in 1951, and then the dam had been built in 1953, and his grave had been covered for more than half a century. These last few years, the drought had exposed these old towns and all of their churches and windmills and houses and post offices, and, yes, sometimes even their dead. Last summer, Boyd and her mother and Aunt Lou had taken a johnboat to see the place exposed, and Boyd had not liked it. The place did not belong to the air but to the water, and when Lou had stood in front of a grave similar to this one, with even a similar lamb, Boyd had imagined that this was how she would feel if she were to ever visit Pompeii or Herculaneum or to board the Flying Dutchman: here was a place that did not belong to her.
Rain fell now on these graves in the pioneer cemetery, big drops splashing back up because the ground was saturated. Boyd paused only a second, leaning on the fence, the cast iron biting into her forearms. Roughly thirty people here, laid to rest in what still felt like the middle of nowhere, and in what must have felt then like the edge of the world. Lives so different from the ones people lived now, and wouldn’t these deceased have been surprised? But then, from this spot, they would have no idea: not much around here. Only the occasional car, once a week or so, traveled the dirt road Boyd now walked. The world had not yet reached them here, in the shadow of the dam.
She turned away and kept walking, knowing she had miles to go, still facing the obstacles ahead. Rain fell on her face and she pulled her hood up, marching, crunching the pink gravel, feet dry in boots. The soldier Sam had said, Children are missing. Old people in wheelchairs. Here, at the side of the lake, she was on high enough ground that this seemed impossible. But she knew that wherever Isaac was, there was another version of possi
bility.
She thought of him now, tried to see what he was seeing. She felt some vague panic but was not sure whether it was his or just her own projection, some vestige of feeling. Wherever he was, he’d settled in, no longer broadcasting that panicked edge.
As she walked, she startled things. Grasshoppers the size of her fist, jumping, in their confusion, toward her. White-tailed deer, families, tucked into the mesquite. Mice in the tall grass. Raccoons, though it was day, waddling a safe distance away and then stopping to peer at her. As she approached the dam, she heard stones skittering behind her, and when she turned, she thought that she could see that they were all there, the wet grass moving with a mass of hidden bodies. What did they want?
When she reached the foot of the dam, she knew she had to be careful. The view expanded; trees were unable to grow in the field of boulders. The floodgates to the right of the dam were open: brown water churned white rushed through and added to the water in the basin. A smooth, glassy sheet of water poured over the spillway. Above the dam, in the two towers, she knew, engineers would be overseeing. They would not let her pass, would tell her to go away, and they might even arrest her. She would have to avoid detection as well as water. She lay on her belly on a chunk of granite, wishing she’d brought binoculars, and decided to skirt the structure, climb the ridges of the canyon, come back to the river once clear of the dam.
She guessed it was now around one P.M., and the heaviest rain was letting up. A mist clung to everything, primordial but cold, and even as she watched, the two towers on the dam started to shimmer and recede. She slid off her belly and began the walk up and out of the valley, away from the dam.
Soon, the fog was so thick she was disoriented, and her only directional marker was uphill. She kept walking, as she was not in wilderness but was instead in settled country and would not get hopelessly lost. As she walked, she remembered one of her favorite Stephen King books, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, about a girl who stepped off a path in Maine and almost never made it home. Too, Boyd remembered an article she’d read in some magazine about a man, a finder man, who was called every time someone disappeared in the Appalachians. Some people he found, some he didn’t. Forests swallowed people sometimes. There was the woman who left the Appalachian Trail and whose body was found twenty years later, her diary revealing that she had survived for weeks, one of her last entries mentioning all the people she loved because she knew the diary would eventually be found. This was not that. This was central Texas, populated, trees low-slung and often sparse. Only the pecans and ancient live oaks were any kind of real trees. The mesquite was feathery and short; this species had only been here a century or so, brought up from Mexico by cattle during the cattle-drive years. The Ashe juniper was spindly and twisted and, she’d been told more than once, spectacularly unsuited for this landscape: rumor was each tree required as much as sixty-five gallons of water a day, and this in a country that knew drought. Ranchers told tales of clearing the juniper and, the next year, dry creeks running wet again. This group of trees was not the sort to get lost in.
But the fog increased, blooming, and eventually she’d gone as high as the land would let her. If she was at the top of the dam, at the top of the box canyon, then the terrain would level off and she would find herself close to the water again. But this was not the case; instead, she found herself at the peak of a hill, and she turned back to look around.
A young boy stood there. He was close enough that she could see details on his clothes: he wore no pants, and his shirt was rough spun and long. No shoes. His hair was long, too, curly and pale. Fingers of mist rose off him, as if he’d just arisen from a hot bath on a cold day. He was shivering.
Her first instinct: to care for the boy, to help him find his family. The only emotion she could get from him was fear, but it was blind fear, not nuanced: a single tone, like a television after programming has turned off for the evening, or when the station does a test of the emergency broadcast system. Something about that fear was dead, machinelike. “Are you lost?” she asked. “I might be lost, too.”
He turned and pointed back in the direction she thought he’d come from.
“Do you live around here?”
The boy looked at her, pale eyes big in a child’s face. He said something in German, and she didn’t understand it. His voice was high-pitched, childlike.
“I don’t speak German.” She knew why he did but would not admit it to herself. “I’m trying to remember. Sprechen Sie Englisch?”
At this, he cocked his head, listening as a dog would listen. Only his head, only that curious angle of the neck, the rest of his body mechanically still.
“I’m lost, too. I’m trying to get over the dam.” She pointed left, out into the gray, in the direction she imagined the dam might lie.
Now he cocked his head to the other side, his curly hair falling away. His bare feet were dirty, as if he’d been walking for some time. His toes curled underneath his feet. He was cold.
She had her hoodie, and now she dropped her backpack so that she could take it off. “Do you want my jacket?” She held it at arm’s length, resisting the urge to throw it. When he hesitated, she dropped the jacket and took a step back.
He approached the jacket gingerly, skittishly, as if he were some wild thing and she were offering food. He pulled the jacket on and it engulfed him, falling below his long shirt, swallowing his arms in their homespun sleeves. She remembered that in the pocket was the soldier’s number, but it was also in her phone. Children are missing.
She couldn’t stand here and stare at this kid all day. “Do you need help finding your family?” Could she leave a child out here?
Again he pointed behind him, but when he turned back, he pointed at her.
“Oh, I’m not your family.” But he knew that. That’s not what he was saying. “You mean you want to help me.”
She didn’t know if he understood her, but he nodded. His one-note fear had abated, and she wondered if he’d been scared of her. “I’m looking for the river.” She hesitated, grasping for the German word. “Der Fluss. The river.”
He nodded again, and in his eyes, the blue iris was nearly all pupil. “The river,” he said, with an accent. It was not his word for it, but he knew it.
She flinched when he took her hand, afraid he was coming in for a hug. But he didn’t. Instead, he pulled her forward, down the side of the hill, and she fully trusted that he could take her where she wanted to go, even if she didn’t particularly want to make the journey with him.
But then, she thought, as his cold hand let hers go and as she continued to follow, the dam was built in the fifties, long after the First World War. And this thought revealed her own mind to her, revealed how she had been hiding things from herself—suppressing them—and now she was forced to admit that the storm had changed something. The world had slipped from its track. She thought about this, too, for a moment, life as a train rail or a song on a record, but the metaphor wasn’t quite right. No, to Boyd the storm had been more like the part of an eye exam when the optometrist lowers the circular lenses and asks, Which is better? One—pause—or two? The storm was like this: a different lens had now snapped into place, and now some things were less visible, and some things—things that had been present all along—more. She followed the boy, hearing only her own footfalls.
2:45 P.M.
Carla sat cross-legged and draped with a blanket, looking for something in the smoke as the herbs smoldered on her floor. What am I? she thought. What do I believe?
Marriage-less, childless, nearly friendless. Only Lucy Maud and her family. Carla was out here to escape the rat race, the materialism of life, the grueling Austin commute. Her heart had pinched every time new concrete was poured, mired in nostalgia, gripped with the sense that progress, while it might once have been good, was now evil, a force of ruin and subversion, Shiva the destroyer of the beautiful world. She now made everything she could, had even acquired a spinning wheel in a plan to spin
wool, and she cut ties to the destructive force ruthlessly, ferociously. She was, she thought, a daughter of the earth.
She believed that the primordial ooze was amniotic. She believed that the earliest religions of the earth were woman centered. She believed that the nearly spherical figurines of women from prehistory were images of the Goddess. She believed that she, too, was a goddess, only with a lowercase g. Because she had never given birth, she believed her divinity was stunted, would never quite grow to fruition.
It was she who’d encouraged Boyd to garden, who had shared a copy of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle with Lucy Maud and Boyd as a sort of mandate: here is what we must do. She knew when Lucy Maud’s marriage ended long before there was any actual talk of divorce: she recognized the signs of betrayal on her friend, recognized the traces that shadowed Lucy Maud, knew the moments when her friend was occupied and forgot the betrayal, knew the moments when she remembered, saw her expression change. From Lucy Maud, Carla relearned the value of the moment, the heartbreak incurred when the present moment is lost, those times when Lucy Maud remembered her past and caught sight of her future. Carla found something with Lucy Maud: a mirror, a hope. Like Boyd, Carla was drawn to the pain of others, but for a different reason. Carla, as someone who had suffered trauma, looked for those who wore their pain visibly. Those who had been hurt would no longer hurt others, at least not on purpose. (There were exceptions to this, of course; some hurt people turned to hurting others even more, but Carla knew how to avoid these people.) Pain pried open a secret spot of empathy.
Lucy Maud’s daughter, too, was kind and would not hurt Carla. But Boyd was too naïve for Carla’s taste. Boyd’s empathy came not from any particular history but from some fine-tuning mistake made by the universe.
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here Page 9