Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here

by Nancy Wayson Dinan

  Gone, too, the ancient animals, trundling around the countryside. The Camelops faded midstep, a giant glyptodont disintegrated into the heavy air. The eohippus, the antediluvian horse, disappeared as it trotted past a fence with purple blazes that surrounded a house in which a woman does not yet know her daughter is gone, gone in so many more ways than she could know, in a house that vines have ripped open to the sky. The vines also opening the stable, setting free a horse not ridden in years, but now the vines shrinking, retracting. A dire wolf, head slung low between shoulders, breached a compound of houses in the shape of a spiral, stalking a woman with short blond hair and mud boots. The dire wolf padded forward, teeth bared, but when the woman sensed something and turned, she saw only something that looked like a cloud of gnats. Strange. She turned back and continued to hang sheets on the wash line.

  And Boyd would never know this, because she had chosen peace, but if one child was lost on this morning, another child was found. A German-speaking child, lost for more than a century, still bearing a chill and ice in his eyelashes, still wearing a jacket given to him by a girl seeking her friend, found his parents, who had lived long after him and never stopped looking. They folded together, and then they were on their way, reunited, to whatever comes next, Boyd’s jacket fluttering, hollowed, to the ground.

  Lucy Maud shouted down into a hole, the sound coming back to her tinged with water. The end of the yellow rope dripped. Ruben King stood beside her, his expression blank.

  “Go get help,” she told him, and he did. They would return—the authorities, the real experts this time, phones and roads and the world restored—but they would not be able to reach Kevin for two months, for the storm continued to drain into the aquifer long after the surface dried. Kevin would be found at the end of July by a team that Lucy Maud would hire after the excitement of the storm had passed. An EMT, a day laborer, a National Guard soldier, and Isaac, down in the muddy chamber, would unball Kevin’s body and strap him to a board, lifting it to the surface where Lucy Maud and Boyd and Allen Potivar, oxygen whirring, would stand. In the soldier’s pocket, the silver ingot, secreted away, a souvenir more than a theft, the object’s value in the story. Allen Potivar would make Lucy Maud and Ruben promise not to tell why Kevin was down there, but the soldier would see the other body, pocket the ingot, and get an idea. One day he would return, but not for a very long time.

  On this day, however, Ruben King ran back to Allen Potivar’s, exhausted beyond measure, and Lucy Maud shouted into a textured darkness, a place where the film between this world and the next had rubbed thin, where someone had passed through.

  She thought of their garage apartment in Austin in the mid-nineties, and she remembered a day so hot she had lain in her underwear on the floor by a box fan. He had come to lie next to her, their bodies separate because of the heat, his feet next to her head, and he had poked the pointy part of her ankle bone with his finger. Even in the heat, he had needed to touch her. Sweat had beaded in the space between her breasts, and she had closed her eyes to everything. The world had once contained such possibilities.

  Sam handed the phone to Isaac and said, “You’re the one they were looking for. Since yesterday. Does anybody know that you’ve been found?”

  Isaac, with Boyd in his arms, looked at the man and blinked. Isaac sensed something between them, some competition that the soldier had decided to let go, and Isaac took the phone and dialed his father. No answer; then he remembered his father’s phone by the easy chair at home. Next he dialed Lucy Maud, and the phone rang for a moment before she answered.

  Lucy Maud rocked, her head thrown back to the sun, her throat exposed, mourning a loss she had already mourned for so long. Only now the loss was more acute, and she rode this sharp wave of pain the way she had the contractions when she delivered Boyd. It is not too much to bear, she told herself. It is only pain. In through the nose and out through the mouth.

  Her phone rang, a number she didn’t know. “Yes?” she said, after she almost didn’t answer.

  “Lucy Maud.” Isaac’s was maybe the last voice she expected to hear. She was looking for him, and he found her instead. “I’m with Boyd. She’s all right.”

  What a funny thing to say. There was something he was not saying, but she ignored this tiny doubt, lowered her head, and covered her eyes with the hand not holding the phone. “Thank God, thank God,” she said as the pain crested, and she rode the back side of the wave into the trough, able to gather strength once again.

  On Allen Potivar’s porch, Aunt Fern and Louisa May sat on a dusty old swing that creaked in protest if they moved too much, drinking coffee as if nothing whatsoever were wrong. Lou thought that she was better off not going anywhere, better off just sitting here with Aunt Fern, who was likely to wander away and cause a bigger problem. Lou knew that Aunt Fern would not be living at her house on the lake much longer, that she would need a level of care that Lou could not provide, and she took Fern by the hand, but Fern just stared out over the scrub. What was she thinking about? Lou could not guess. She could only imagine herself alone in the house on the lake, the wind in the sheer curtains her only companion, the hollow life that was coming for her.

  By the river, as a woman in wellies hung sheets on a clothesline in front of a low-slung shingled building, she heard footsteps behind her. She jumped—she was on edge, the world proven too strange. Just that morning, a soldier had arrived in a boat, then later she had imagined a huge beast, something like a wild dog, only impossibly large. She had felt its breath, even, but when she turned to see it, the figment of her imagination had disappeared, dissolving at the edges of her sight. Now she heard steps and was afraid to turn.

  But whatever it was would be there, even if she didn’t look; and if she did turn to look, perhaps it would melt away, as the dog creature had done. She breathed and pivoted, the clothespin in her mouth.

  It was a girl, a wild girl, naked. She wore the wind in her red hair, and in her face—there was something Kim couldn’t place: a fear, a roiling, almost as if another face were beneath it. Kim’s throat went dry with her own sharp fear, then the girl stumbled forward and fell at Kim’s feet next to the basket of wet sheets. The girl was soaking—she had just come from the river. Had the river taken her clothes?

  Kim yelled for help, and help came running: Annie dropping a hoe from the kitchen garden, Bess dropping a shovel from where she’d been turning compost. The three of them picked up the girl, whose eyes flew open as she was lifted. She didn’t speak, and Kim saw that she was not embarrassed by her nudity. The girl still said nothing, and Kim wondered if something was wrong about her. They carried her up to the main house and tucked her into bed, taking a washcloth to her limbs and face. They did not try to clothe her. They also could not place her age—somewhere between fourteen and thirty. They put her in her own room and closed the door behind her. What a strange time this was, this time after the storm.

  The bride and groom, Homer and Sylvia, sat at their kitchen table, putting together a jigsaw puzzle. It had rained for days, so they had stayed inside, making a pot of chili and watching old movies on Netflix, even watching My Man Godfrey twice because Sylvia had wanted something funny. She felt depressed somehow, despite being just married, the clothes she had worn still in a ball on the floor. Something was off, something in the way it rained. She rested her bare foot on Homer’s. He studied the puzzle and placed one of the few remaining pieces. She’d known him for decades, and what a history they’d had. His hands—the hands that had killed a man in the seventies—were knotted now and covered in spots. It had been in self-defense, and the story from another lifetime, a thing they hardly thought of these days. The world had moved on since then, and so many of the players in that original drama were dead. Only the two of them remained, in a house dry and warm while the rain fell outside. Soon she would rise from the table, maybe load the dishwasher. Soon Homer and Sylvia’s respite would be over; soon they would again be part of the world. Their long march to ma
rriage, the nuptials so far unconsummated after the ceremony, the companionship of half a century its own comfort. For a little bit longer, they would sit there.

  Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here

  The Story Becomes Something Else

  On the day I climbed out of a hole in the ground, my son fell out of a tree, and neither of us knew until later just how close we each had come to losing the other. Water had been involved in both cases, water the marker for that time, either too much or too little, flood and drought and flood and drought. In my hand I had held a silver ingot—I don’t know whose hand had held it last, other than the upside-down man’s. I should have put the ingot in my shirt, and maybe I would have gone into town to buy a shot of whiskey with it. I at least owed all of those treasure stories that small gesture, a nod to a way of living—to a place—that is gone. If I had tried to spend it—or just pretended to spend it, at the least—it would have been an act of remembrance, a hand raised in farewell at a funeral procession.

  Something had been in the cave, some feeling that I might be the one who found what had been lost for so long. I must remember this now, remember how thin the frontier is between this world and the other, remember how easily it might have been me who crossed. The man who did had not even been seeking anything, and this feels unfair, as if I have taken something that does not belong to me.

  Once, years ago, when Boyd was still in my class, I taught a short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” by Ursula K. Le Guin. In the story, there’s this glorious civilization, wanting for nothing. But the trick is that at some point everyone in the civilization learns that his or her happiness has been bought with the misery of a child. When the citizens learn about the child—when they see the child—many of them decide to leave, even though they can’t save anyone. I taught this story, and my son was in this class, and so was Boyd, and I remember that nearly all the students had said that they would leave, that they wouldn’t stay knowing what they knew. Then I asked them: What if the choice was not to walk away, but to trade places? Then what? I said that this was the only way you could save the child, though Le Guin doesn’t offer this option.

  Everybody had been silent then, until Boyd had said, “Bulldoze it.” Then Isaac—my own son—behind her, back before they became thick as thieves, said, “Yeah. Bulldoze it. Burn it down. Let the pain be in the open. Nothing less is real.” Nothing less was real.

  Let the sun in. Let the air in. Let the light snake into the corners and show the extent of the darkness. Let it be cleaned, regenerated through violence, purified, made new, sanctified, scorched, scrubbed, razed; let the world show its face. Let it show what we have done and continue to do and what we will not stop doing until the entire story is played out in the way that the course was set, and in the way from which it has never deviated, never wavered, not once, not even when we knew what was coming.

  Nothing less is real.

  Boyd did not yet know she had lost her father—what a strange feeling it would be when she knew only her own grief—did not know the world that awaited her. Isaac, brows knit together, both hands wrapped around one of hers, a man who would go through medical school, ministering to his oldest friend. Carla, watching Boyd’s chest rise and fall in shallow breaths, remembered the spiral on Boyd’s forehead, the snakes that had skated at her feet. Sam, manning the engine, heading back, already wondering why he had done this, why he’d gone after a girl who was, after all, only ordinary. Boyd—breathing, breathing, and Isaac turning the golden roses banded on her finger. The sunlight refracting into a rainbow over the back of the old woman, and the doves in the trees overhead.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to the teachers, the friends, the encouragers, the readers.

  Thank you to the Ohio State University MFA program, which first taught me what it looked like to be a writer; to Lee Martin, Michelle Herman, Erin McGraw, and the beautiful Lee K. Abbott, who changed my life forever. Thank you to the Texas Tech English Department; to Katie Cortese, Jill Patterson, Sara Spurgeon, and Marjean Purinton, for the lessons that you taught and for the examples that you set. Thank you, Katie, for the semester spent discussing domestic fabulism, a semester which shaped this book and any books that might follow. Thank you to Dennis Covington, and your lemon ice box pie, and thank you to Dennis Covington’s last graduate workshop, to Matt and Mary, and to the tapas and sangria.

  Thank you to friends and readers, and to LPG, which remains one of the most transformative experiences of my life. Thank you Jen Popa, Jessica Smith, Kate Simonian, Jasmine Bailey, Sarah Viren, Kathleen Blackburn, and Michael Palmer. I am beyond lucky to know you, and to read your writing, and to listen to your brilliant insights.

  Thank you to Kerry D’Agostino, who is possessed of both an incredible editing eye and a deep kindness, and I feel so so privileged to work with you. I’ve learned so much, and I am so grateful for everything: all of the emails, all of the revisions, all of the questions and answers and support just when I needed it most.

  Thank you to Lea Beresford and Grace McNamee, truly perceptive editors who asked tough questions and made the book so much better. Thank you, Laura Phillips, for your patience and expertise. Thank you, Bloomsbury, for giving this book a home.

  Finally, thank you to my family: to mother, Jeri; father, Gene; and stepfather, Neil; and to my aunts and uncles. Thank you to Ben, James, and Paul, for the life that we have built, for the adventures that we’ve had, and for all of our future possibilities.

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  NANCY WAYSON DINAN is the managing editor of Iron Horse Literary Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Texas Observer, Arts & Letters, Crab Orchard Review, the Cincinnati Review, and others. She earned her MFA from the Ohio State University in 2013 and is currently a PhD student in fiction at Texas Tech.

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  This electronic edition first published in the United States 2020

  Copyright © Nancy Wayson Dinan, 2020

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  ISBN: HB: 978-1-63557-443-2; eBook: 978-1-63557-444-9

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