Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here

by Nancy Wayson Dinan

  This was a commune. Enough of them were in the Hill Country that Carla could recognize one when she saw it. What type of commune she could not say. As Austin had changed over the years—as the hippie culture of the sixties and seventies had been replaced by the eighties yuppie culture and the grunge culture and was now nearly subsumed by a money-driven hipster culture—the original Armadillo World Headquarters hippies had fled west, and you could still find them here, with long white beards and Magellan fishing shirts, growing their own marijuana in greenhouses, worshipping the sun. There were also family compounds, communes that happened more accidentally, when somebody with a piece of land hosted their relatives, keeping sons and daughters and sisters and brothers close. Carla, however, guessed that this was a religious commune, despite not seeing a chapel.

  The religious communes had been popping up more and more out here lately, though some had been well established for decades. She’d heard teachers—Isaac’s father, for one—talking about children who had been born on these communes and for whom no record existed—no birth certificate, no Social Security number, no nothing—who would never go to a public school or fly on a plane or have a driver’s license, credit card, or checkbook. Some of the religious groups out here—Mennonites and Quakers and their offshoots—practiced a faith that made a lot of sense to Carla. They respected their land, and they rejected material, capitalist lives. But some of these groups were more sinister to Carla, practicing a dangerous sort of patriarchy as a religion, and every once in a while, some shocking news would get out, such as the nearly four hundred women authorities removed from the compound near Eldorado in 2008, when underage girls were forced to marry much older men.

  She could still not say what made her guess that this was a religious commune, other than the general tidiness and that tall house in the middle, a house that seemed to Carla to be the main house on a plantation. Except for the Mennonites, Carla had a deep-seated distrust of those so religious as to sequester themselves; to her, these communities often seemed like little dictatorships in which one person controlled the lives of everybody else. She knew this wasn’t always true, but this was her view. However, she was hungry and didn’t want to sleep on the ground, so she tried to find the gate. At the very least, they might have a phone so she could call someone, maybe Lucy Maud. And then what? Go home for the night and come right back here in the morning?

  She didn’t know how to make it happen, but she wanted to spend the night in a bed and then wake up exactly here, still walking in this direction. She had no idea where she was headed but thought that she would eventually get there and would run into Boyd along the way. Carla felt led, an inexplicable pull west, and had the idea, ridiculous though it was, that the serpents wanted her to follow Boyd.

  It was not late, just dark, and though darkness was indeed coming later these days, she guessed it was still only around eight P.M., in these last days of spring. She would not be rousing people from sleep or getting them out of their beds. If she could only find a gate, she could make her way in and find somebody. Tell them she was lost, which was not untrue. Those purple blazes, though, they stopped her. Getting shot was a real possibility if she wasn’t careful. If this was a religious group, out here for privacy, for a lack of eyes, then they would want to get rid of her as quickly as possible.

  When she found the gate—a long cattle gate closed with a chain—it was locked. An intercom was on the fence next to it, a fence of spindly Ashe juniper with the bark still on. But the intercom looked ancient for an intercom—from the eighties, maybe—and when she tried to push the buttons, nothing happened. They just rattled around in their spaces as if they weren’t connected to anything. Meanwhile, it grew darker.

  She twisted her mouth to one side, wondering what to do. “Hello?” she yelled. It would be nothing to climb over this gate, but those purple blazes suggested that she should not. Wouldn’t it be something, she thought, to come this far and to get shot by a bunch of religious zealots. “Hello?” she yelled again, and at the closest house, the shingled one that looked as if it belonged on the seashore, a door opened, spreading a windowpane of yellow light upon the front porch. Music escaped, too, classical strings, and even from here, Carla thought she could place the melody—Dvořák’s “Humoresque.” She smelled somebody’s dinner, and a longing overtook her. What would it be like to live like this, among people who cared about you? But she also believed that most religions were a form of patriarchy, a means for men to control women and children. Here she was a woman, and she had once been a controlled child, but she would never be a man.

  The figure at the door was lanky in trousers and a tank top. In the figure’s hands, cutting obliquely across the body, the silhouette of a rifle. Carla could not tell what make, but it was a hunting rifle and not something more sinister. Still, she rocked back on her heels, unsure whether this was hospitality, unsure what she’d stumbled upon out here where the way to answer a visitor was with a gun.

  She could tell by the way the man walked—measured, light, and wincing—that he was barefoot, that she had taken him from his supper table. “Here,” she said, waving so she did not startle him so that he would not shoot her, and he stepped in her direction. When he was finally in front of her, he looked up from the ground. Carla was surprised to find herself looking not at a man but at a woman, neither old nor young, with a weathered face and dark hair cropped close to the skull. The woman’s build was indeed lanky, as Carla had noted, wiry and strong, nearly vibrating with a latent potential energy. Carla could not guess her age; the woman could be anywhere from thirty to fifty.

  “Yes?” The woman’s tone of voice made it seem as if it were not unusual for Carla to be standing at her gate. The woman’s stance, however, was wary.

  “Hi.” Carla reached a hand across the gate as if to shake, but the woman only looked at it and held fast to the rifle. Carla tried a different tack. “I’m lost. I was looking for someone and it’s been hours and I haven’t found the person and now I have no idea where I am.” She gestured around her. “And now it’s dark.” Another moment, then: “Can I use your phone?”

  The lanky woman glanced behind her, toward that square of light on the shingled house’s porch, toward the suddenly serious bridge of “Humoresque.” “Um,” she said, considering, then she cast a long look up and down Carla, her gaze stopping at last on Carla’s face. “What’s on your forehead?”

  Carla’s fingertips went to the space above and between her eyes that she called the third eye. “Oh, that.” She reluctantly wiped as much as she could off. “Just some ashes.” She realized how strange that sounded. “From earlier,” she added, as if that would be helpful.

  The woman just watched her. “You alone?”

  “Yes.” Carla felt the cumulative ridiculousness of the choices she’d made all through that long afternoon. If she showed up on her own doorstep like this, what would she do? “Look, I know how this sounds.”

  The woman nodded. “Are you armed? Before I let you in here, I want to know if you are armed.”

  Carla stepped back, shocked. “No,” she said, bewildered that someone could think she would carry a firearm. “I am not armed. I don’t even own a gun.”

  A smile from the woman, and the rifle was dropped to one side. “Well, come on, then.” She opened the gate, unwrapping the chain, and Carla saw that the padlock had not even been closed. “You can use our phone.”

  Carla walked through the gate, hearing her yoga slings—which she was surprised had made it this far—crunching the gravel. The woman stood to one side, not quite ready to turn her back on Carla, and now she finally put a hand forward. “Kim.”

  Carla shook the hand. “Carla. I live down toward Cottonwood Shores, down below the dam.”

  “Below the dam? You walked all that way?”

  “Yes. It’s a long story.”

  Kim took Carla into the shingled house, where three other women sat around a dinner table. A roast chicken was in the center, and while
it hadn’t quite been picked clean, not much was left. Beside the chicken was a sheet pan of vegetables: potatoes, red peppers, onions. Tortillas—to Carla’s eye homemade—on a dinner plate beside this. The women looked up at her when she came in: one had pushed back from the table and was knitting something with blue yarn, one had her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands, and the other swirled a glass of wine, the red liquid hypnotic to Carla in this yellow light.

  “Y’all,” Kim said, “this is Carla. She’s lost.” They raised a hand, a knitting needle, and a wineglass in her direction, their expressions curious and, Carla thought, welcoming. Kim turned and handed Carla a cell phone she’d produced from her pocket. “She needs to use the phone.” Kim pointed toward a living room to the right of the short entry and dining room. “You can go in there if you need privacy.”

  It was a flip phone, not a smartphone at all, and Carla did not know how to get a number for a taxi company. She did not even know if there was a taxi company out here. She tried to remember Lucy Maud’s number and couldn’t; she hadn’t dialed it since she’d programmed it into her phone. Carla felt acutely the small size of her world: she had a friend in Austin, Donna, who lived off Shoal Creek and with whom Carla drank margaritas on occasion. But, again, she had no idea what Donna’s number was. She had a brother in Oklahoma, Trevor, to whom she hadn’t spoken in months, not since his wife had had their fourth child in as many years. She should really go see him, Carla thought, and sat down on the couch, still holding the phone.

  Kim watched her from the doorway. “You okay?”

  Carla looked up at her, tears starting as she realized how lonely, how alone, she was. She closed her eyes so that Kim wouldn’t see them, swallowing hard. After a minute, she had control of herself. “I don’t have anybody’s number.”

  Kim’s lower back rested on the doorjamb, her body bent at the waist, that same latent energy that Carla had noticed before and that, she realized, was similar to Boyd’s. “Hey,” Kim said after a minute, “why don’t you eat something while we figure out who to call.”

  Carla, grateful, nodded.

  Kim led her back into the dining room, and the knitting woman looked up and gave up her chair for Carla, Kim fetching the woman a stool so that she could stay close to the table. The wine-drinking woman got Carla a glass, too, and the third woman got Carla a plate and tried to get some of the remaining meat off the chicken. Carla sat and let herself be served, and the tears came now again, slow but relentless. “I’m just tired,” she told the women, and then the one fixing a plate said, “Oh, you’re vegetarian,” as if that was what was wrong with Carla, and then she scraped the chicken back into the roasting pan.

  Carla shook her head. “No, no, it’s not that. I eat meat. I mean, still, for now, though I keep meaning to stop but I just never do.”

  They all looked at her, and she knew she hadn’t answered their question. “I just—I just don’t know what I’m doing out here, and I’m lost and tired and hungry. So thank you.”

  The woman hesitated, then scooped the chicken back up with a serving spoon. “Well, okay.” She moved on to the vegetables. “You can cry all you want, then.”

  The statement stopped Carla. It was so similar to what her stepdad would have said to her once, the exact same words but with a different tone. You can cry all you want, he’d said as he pulled the belt from his pants, the shhhh of the belt loops a chilling sound, as she’d braced her knuckles on the back of a chair for the blow. But this woman—her words were the same but the meaning was different. This woman’s words—an echo from another part of Carla’s life—meant something, the way the snakebite had meant something. “I’m sorry,” she said, though she didn’t think she needed to.

  “I’m Imogene,” the woman said, and put the plate down in front of Carla.

  Kim got her some silverware.

  The knitting woman, whose needles had paused while Kim had fetched the stool but who had otherwise kept steadily clicking, said, “Bess.”

  And the wine drinker: “Annie.”

  Carla picked up a chicken leg with her hands. She was ravenous and ate, she felt, like a maniac. Juice dripped down her arms. “Sorry,” she said again.

  “Nothing to be sorry for,” Kim said. They watched her eat for a moment, then got back to their own conversation.

  “There are two broken panes on the greenhouse,” Annie said. “We lost some of the aloe vera. But not much.”

  “Okay.” Kim took a minute to think. “We’ll get somebody out here to fix it. But all of those panes are the same size, right?”

  “I think so,” Anne said.

  “Well, I want you to watch how it gets fixed, and if we can buy extra panes and store them, let’s do that. Then we won’t have to call somebody next time.”

  They chatted like this for some time, pleasantly and productively, mostly about the stewardship of the property. Imogene talked about rabbits and Bess about sheep, while Kim nodded along and listened and responded. They talked about the care of an elderly woman, and Carla remembered the other houses on the property. More people were here, she realized with disappointment. She didn’t want there to be any more people than these four women who were feeding her, who had told her to go ahead and cry if she wanted.

  She tried to get a sense from the conversation how many others there were. There were children because Bess had mentioned knitting crib blankets, and Annie had talked about teaching junior master gardeners. Carla got the impression that maybe many more people were here, having similar dinners and conversations in the other houses.

  At last, after Carla’s plate had been refilled and Carla finally slowed down eating, Kim turned to her. “If you want, I can drive you home. You don’t need to call anybody.” Carla felt panic, thinking of her house, the polished concrete floors, the quiet. After a minute Kim continued, “Or you can just stay here for the night and we can get you home in the morning.”

  Hope—a flying, blooming thing—in Carla’s chest. Carla resisted the urge to reach for Kim, to touch her, to know with her own fingertips that Kim was real. “Yes. Yes.” When the other three looked up, nodding, Carla had some feeling that this was how they’d come here, too. Wanderers, lost and hungry, come to rest for a night, but the night had stretched out to something much longer.

  8:45 P.M.

  Lucy Maud was trying to find Nameless Road in the dark, while in the back seat, Aunt Fern was telling Lou a story about the time before the dam, only Aunt Fern was calling Lou Bea instead. “Albert cried that day we decided not to dig her up,” Aunt Fern said, talking to Lou as if Lou’s own grandfather were her husband, and Lucy Maud couldn’t figure out whom Fern was talking about. Fern took Lou’s hand and stroked it. “But it wasn’t because he was weak or bad, Bea. You know that better than anybody, don’t you? Albert was a good man—the best.” Albert was Fern’s brother, dead for fifty years, Homer and William’s father, though William, too, was long gone. Lou, patient, just nodded, and Lucy Maud wondered when Lou had stopped trying to explain that the world was not what Aunt Fern thought it was. It seemed a sad thing to give up that argument, as if acknowledging that Aunt Fern would never be in the real world again. Kevin, beside Lucy Maud in the front seat, flipped through the radio channels, finally stopping on some Fleetwood Mac and singing along under his breath: “ ‘If I could, baby, I’d give you my world …’ ” And Lucy Maud thought again that Kevin was looking at her in a different way, that maybe that grad student in Austin wasn’t so appealing right now.

  They had turned off the main road some time ago, and the GPS had led them to a dead end. They’d seen water off to the side of the road, water covering one of the approaches, and Lucy Maud had been glad they hadn’t come that way. But still, she couldn’t be sure she was on the right path now, and what would she do when she showed up wherever Ruben King was? It was getting late—it had to be around nine P.M.—and obviously neither Isaac nor Boyd was with Lucy Maud. Instead, she had her soon-to-be ex-husband, her twin sister,
and a great-aunt with midstage Alzheimer’s in the back seat. Fern said, “Shhhh,” with her finger to her lips, and they all listened to nothing but the radio, obedience to their aunt ingrained into them. “Did you hear that?” Fern whispered. They heard nothing, but then Fern started talking again. “Of course, she was buried in the same cemetery that William was, that long field under the Douglas firs. Homer was so little then. He didn’t even realize he’d lost his brother, but you did, didn’t you? You knew your baby had died.” Aunt Fern still thought Lou was Lou’s grandmother Bea. Lucy Maud imagined Douglas firs and cemeteries and half-level tombstones rising out of the mists.

  They passed several small roads, all nameless, but not, she didn’t think, Nameless. But for the lack of mailboxes at the turnoffs, she would have thought them to be driveways. At last, she could tell that they had skirted the hill and were about to come back out on the main road, and she knew that was not what she wanted. She stopped the car in the middle of the road, white limestone dust hanging in the headlight beams, and reached over and switched off the radio.

  “Hey,” Kevin said.

  In the back seat, Aunt Fern sat straight up. “Do you hear that?”

  They turned and she pointed out Lou’s window. When their gazes followed the direction of Fern’s index finger, she clicked off her seat belt and it slid across her lap. “Don’t you hear that man? I thought it sounded like Albert, but—” She didn’t say anything else, and Lucy Maud wondered if Fern realized that Albert was dead and had been for decades. While Lucy Maud and Lou were looking out the window, thinking about their dead grandfather, Aunt Fern opened the door and got out.

  “What?” Lou scrambled to get her seat belt off and go after Aunt Fern.

  When Lou got out, Lucy Maud stayed put, drumming the steering wheel lightly with loosely closed fists. “What do we do now?” she asked herself.