by Devon, Gary;
Leona raised her eyes just enough to see the others. How grateful she felt to be here among these good country people. How lucky, how fortunate. The silver she had polished sparkled. The old china shone. The water glasses seemed so bright. She and the children sat near the end of the table, Patsy and Walter next to her, heads bowed, hands folded. How small they seemed now among the others. How innocent and lovely. Mark had taken his place across the table from her, and next to him sat Mamie, who had lifted her face, her eyes quivering with tears.
“We’re thankful for the fellowship of such good company …”
The tears broke down Mamie’s cheeks, but she sat very still. At last, she slipped sideways from her chair, hurried down the length of chairbacks, and ran upstairs. Heads swiveled at the noise. The blessing was quickly concluded. “Amen,” the neighbors murmured, clearing their throats, and the friendly weave of conversation resumed while hands passed the serving dishes and plates.
“Mark,” Leona said quietly, “would you help these two if they need anything?” He nodded. She pushed her chair back and stood. “I’ll look after her,” she said to Aunt Vee. “Don’t wait for us.”
Before she reached the top of the stairs, she could hear Mamie moving about, whimpering. The sunlight had nearly withdrawn from the long room; an eerie shine illuminated the two opposing end windows. In that delicate but steely light, Mamie was little more than an outline. She saw Leona coming. “Don’t come up here,” she warned. “You better not.”
Leona stepped into the warp of cold evening light. Flushed and wild-looking, Mamie glared at her. She had taken off the party dress and thrown it down. In her slip and her Buster Brown shoes, she stood utterly defiant. Her eyes still shimmered with tears. How hard it must be for you, Leona thought, how terribly hard. And on this day meant to be spent at home. “Mamie …”
“Go ’way!” Mamie shouted.
“Mamie, what is it? Please. We have to stop this.” Leona reached for her, but Mamie twisted away.
“Who says I do?”
“Surely nothing can be this bad.” For a moment, Leona remembered a wretched little girl abandoned in the hospital, alone and frightened, and she thought, Lord, I’d do it again. I know what it’s like to feel so alone. “Please,” she said, “tell me what it is you want.”
Again Mamie cried, “Go ’way!” and stamped her foot. “This is my room. Go to your room.” Her voice was filled with rage, her words punctuated with hard sobs. “Get out! I hate you! I hate you! Doncha see straight?”
“I know it hurts,” Leona told her, “to miss them so much.” If she let herself, she would enter Mamie’s mood. She thought of Emma, lying alone in some bleak white room. The anguish tore inside her as it tore at Mamie—the torment and desolation. She swallowed and found her voice. “Those women downstairs, Mamie, they’ve worked very hard to make this a nice Thanksgiving for you. Don’t be unhappy. Come with me. I’ll show you. You looked so pretty in your new dress.”
“Liar!” Mamie cried. “You liar!”
“Oh, Mamie …” Her voice flagged.
With a restless clenching of her small fists, Mamie’s body shuddered in hard spasms; spittle formed at the corners of her mouth. “You lied to me!” Her face contorted, her voice heaved out. “You lied! You just lied! You don’t like us any more. You don’t like me! I watched! You like him! You don’t like me!” It was terrible to see, pitiful and unapproachable.
You’re jealous! Leona thought. She felt flooded with light, with understanding. In that instant, every other consideration swept from her mind. While she had been regaining herself, Mamie had been left behind.
“Mamie, I didn’t ever mean to neglect you,” she said. It was as if she had gone through all the torment for this one joyous moment. My God, Mamie, you’re jealous! Don’t you know what that means? Mamie took a step forward, still demanding that Leona go. Now that her feelings had been exposed, it was as if she had to vent all her anger; passionate intensity was crammed into every word, every step.
Leona said, “Don’t you see, Mamie,”—leaning down for her—“you’re jealous of him.” Mamie flew at her, screaming, “I hate you! I hate you!” flailing with her knobby fists and those boxy schoolgirl shoes. “You lied to me! You lied to me!”
Leona lifted her up, but Mamie struck out, fists flying, teeth sinking and tearing at Leona’s hair. They wrestled up close until Mamie’s face dissolved to tears. “You promised,” she said, sobbing. “You promised you’d like me. I don’t want you to like him.”
“Oh, Mamie, I do like him,” Leona said earnestly, “that’s true, but not the way I care about you.”
“No!” Mamie gasped, squirming again, dragging for breath. “You don’t like us like before.”
“Of course I like you. Surely you know I do. God knows I’d do anything for you, Mamie. I’ve lied for you. I’ve cheated. All for you.”
The door down on the stairs opened and Vee called out, “Leona. Is everything okay? Are you two comin’ down?”
“Not right now,” Leona answered. “Vee, we’re all right. It’s all right.”
The strangled tears spilled from Mamie, falling onto both of them. “I don’t want you to like anybody else. I want it back … like it was.” She was making herself sick with it; Leona could taste her sour little breath.
“Please,” she said. “Mamie, you have to stop.”
All at once, Mamie slumped against her. And with a sudden compulsive flutter as if something had struck her in the spine, her small arms flew up and around Leona. Heaving for breath, Mamie clung to her then in a way neither of them had expected—so hard and tight Leona could feel the tiny bones of her wrists on the back of her neck. “I want to be somebody’s girl.”
Chasms of feeling opened in Leona. “Well, you’re my girl. I know you miss them,” she told her, “miss being home so much.” And then she heard herself saying, “But I love you, Mamie, don’t think I don’t. You’re my girl,” all the time fighting against the tears accumulating in her own eyes. “Nothing that happens, nothing you do will ever make me not love you. I don’t know why these things happen, Mamie. I don’t know. I wish we could go back and change things, but we can’t. We can’t ever go back there. You know that, don’t you? You know it now.” She lost track of time, holding Mamie to her, talking quietly. The sunset had dwindled to moonlight.
A long time later, Leona went downstairs. She stepped into the dark kitchen as if entering life on a different plane. She felt changed, effervescent, disoriented. The supper was over, the dishes washed and put away, the long impromptu table disassembled and gone. The door to the living room had been blocked open with a crochet-covered brick. Like figures around a campfire, the string band played informally: music drifted in the air like her reawakened dreams, whirling around in a happy, glittering brew. She turned, looking through the window, and saw dark movements out by the fence: men smoking, she realized, taking the night air. Aunt Vee came to the doorway, stepped through it, and became shadow. “I saved you a plate,” she said. “Let me get the light.”
“Oh, please,” Leona said. “Please don’t. You’ve done so much already. I’d rather not have a light right now. I don’t think I want anything at all.”
“Shoot, it’s Thanksgiving. You should have your supper. We kept it warm.” Vee removed a brimming plate from the oven and put it at the old oak table. As she took out dinnerware from a drawer and arranged it by Leona’s plate, Hardesty crossed the porch outside and opened the door. “Come on, now,” Vee said. “It’s still warm. I’ll have to go sit in for my mama in a minute. She’s playin’ the piano but she wears out pretty fast.” Then to Hardesty, she said, “Where’ve you been? Out stargazin’?” And they laughed.
Leona did as she was told. She went to the table and sat down; Vivian paused a moment longer. “You’ve got the strangest look. Is Mamie all right?”
“Oh, yes,” Leona said, unable to hide the flood of emotion. “Yes, she’s fine. She’s asleep. I wanted her to come back
down, but she wouldn’t.” She felt disconnected from her own voice. The words seemed to originate elsewhere in the room. “I hope we didn’t disturb your dinner.”
“Don’t worry about us,” Vivian said. “Nothing puts a damper on these folks. If Mamie changes her mind, there’s another plate in the stove.” She went back into the living room. Leona nibbled at the chicken, the dressing, the fresh-cooked cranberries. I don’t want this, she thought as she tried to eat.
“We missed you,” Hardesty said, and when Leona heard his voice, she knew that Mamie was right. Her feelings for him were larger than she could grasp. She started to gather the silver and get up, but he came toward her. “I’ve got something for you,” he said. From his shirt pocket he took a folded paper and opened it. “I meant to give it to you earlier,” he said, “but I just got around to it.” It was a map, a page from an atlas. He showed her what he had done, reading the names of roads and telling her where to turn, his fingernail following the line he had drawn across the state of Kentucky until it ended at Brandenburg Station. He folded the map. “Take it,” he said. “Put it somewhere safe.”
“I’ll put it with the carving you gave me,” she told him, and smiled. Leona edged around the neighbors in rocking chairs, slipped the map into her purse, and returned to the kitchen. She touched her brow; her fingers were damp. When Hardesty took her hands, she was so pleased he could have done anything with her. After a moment she said, “Do you know how to dance?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied. “Or at least I used to.”
“Would you dance with me, then … just here in the kitchen?”
There was a moment’s breathlessness between them like the inhalation of fresh, vibrant air. He tilted his head and smiled, and the space dividing them closed. His courtliness touched her. She lowered her cheek to his shoulder, and slowly they began to move to the easy drifting rhythm and the voice singing in the other room. She closed her eyes and gave herself over to it. “A picture from the past comes slowly stealin’… Then suddenly I get that old-time feelin’. I can’t help it if I’m still in love with you.…”
As long as she let her thoughts dissolve, she could follow him effortlessly, but when she grew too aware of their closeness and the faint sinking sensation it caused in her, she faltered. She asked him where he had learned to dance. High school, he said, a long time ago, but she was listening to his voice, not the words. I’m making a fool of myself, she thought. The music was drawing to an end; Leona started to break from him. “Come with me,” he said into her hair. “I’ll show you my cabin.” She looked at him carefully. “I shouldn’t,” she said. “The children …”
“You know Vee’ll look after them,” he said. “You couldn’t leave them in better hands. It’s not far. Come with me just this once before you leave.” The band was playing again. One of the women started to sing in a high, quavery church voice, “Many a night while you lay sleepin’, dreamin’ of your amber skies … was a poor boy broken-hearted, listenin’ to the winds that sigh.”
“I know you feel it, too,” Hardesty said, standing behind her. “Sometimes at night I miss you so bad. Look at me and tell me you don’t want to come.” She was gripped by anxiety, torn with her refusal.
“Many a day with you I rambled, happiest hours with you I’ve spent … Thought I had your heart forever, now I find it’s only lent.”
It reminded Leona so much of the country dances of her youth, the muggy summer nights, the katydids, paper lanterns strung among trees, excursion-boat dances. Emma was already married and pregnant, riding along beside her in what Frank called his “enclosed car”—and then afterward, gone from Emma, in Alfred’s arms. The longing stirred like a narcotic memory. She had a sense of losing herself, of drowning in this world of charm and music and desire. “Let me put Patsy and Walter to bed,” she told him. It was nearly nine-thirty.
She waited for the song to end to summon the children. The woman she remembered only as Grudge’s wife was still singing, her immense happy hips swaying ever so lightly from the wiggle of her foot. “My little darlin’, oh how I love you, how I love you none can tell … In your heart you love another, little darlin’, pal of mine.”
Two other women lifted their heads and joined in the chorus, the music romping along toward a final crescendo. But the song didn’t end with a flourish as Leona expected. Grudge’s wife sat down, and one by one the players stopped until only the piano strummed away and Funny Grandma was playing a kind of daft solo, bits of a sonata, then raking the keys in a long, tinkling run. Vee stood up from the bench and faced the small audience. “’Scuse us, everybody,” she said, “while my mama shows off.” The musicians looked at each other and laughed.
In the attic, Leona stayed with the children until they were sound asleep; then, bending over Mamie, she pulled the covers up around her, whispered good night, and kissed her warm cheek. Then she drew away. The music still rippled from the living room, and, beneath it, the slow churn of voices. In the dark kitchen, she slipped into the coat Hardesty held for her. “My purse,” she said.
“You don’t need it,” he said, “and nobody’ll bother it. Why give them something else to talk about?”
She smiled and glanced toward the light in the doorway. “I should at least say something to Vee.”
“She’ll know,” he said, and after a moment Leona nodded and went out ahead of him. A mist was falling as they went through the gate. The night sky was mottled with wispy clouds, and ahead of them the barn and outbuildings stood black against the sleight-of-hand moonlight. They turned, following the path around the fence. Music leaked from the side of the house like an impudent melody sprung to life in a packed-away music box. In the rays of window light, the threads of falling mist satinized the ensemble inside. Leona glimpsed their shapes arranged around the country band, saw the high-spired neck of the bass fiddle, and immediately felt younger—as if she had slipped backward through time.
The path meandered at the edge of an orchard, then joined the lane marked off by taller trees. Icy twigs snapped underfoot. The air tasted as clean as rain, a fresh and tinny fragrance. They reached the high mound in the road and she saw Hardesty’s ice-shrouded cabin in a grove of trees below.
Again the soft whisking noise of the knife being sharpened subsided in the toolshed. Twice earlier that night, Sherman had thought he heard stray footsteps, not the sounds of the men outside by their trucks but footsteps walking in the snow, and each time he had gone to the window to look and listen.
Now he heard the same noise, like steps, and held the knife still. Quiet as a shadow, he rose to the small, flyspecked window and gazed toward the pickup trucks and a horse-drawn wagon tethered to the fence. But no one was there. In the high-gabled farmhouse, shafts of light poured from the downstairs windows. Dim music swam to him through the night. When the clouds parted, an enormous moon loomed over the black chimneys, exposing a jagged half of his boy’s face. It was like granite, lips drawn almost white with purpose. His stark blue eyes moved so quickly they seemed to twitch in him. Unable to do anything but wait, Sherman stepped out of the moonlight. With his bandaged hand, he stroked the Chinaman’s broad forehead. “They’re here,” he said. “I know they are.” The Chinaman began to whine softly but Sherman scolded him. “Don’t do that,” he whispered. “It won’t be much longer.” He spit on the stone, and in the toolshed, out by the barn, the soft abrasive grating resumed, the steel knife blade winking blue and silver in the dark.
When they reached his cabin and went in, she was still full of her remembered self, still full of a delighted irrational excitement. It was intoxicating—like stepping to the edge of a very high diving board, apprehensive and exhilarated. Through the small-paned window she saw the way they had come, the snowy hills and the long night laid out before them, and then she looked around the room itself, this cabin in the woods with the firelight brandishing softly around her while their voices, his and hers, drifted back and forth.
“So this is where you
live?” she said; her eyes, a little embarrassed now, restless, searched the rustic walls, the spaces set apart by furniture and screens. The main room was very much like him—ordered and confident, arranged for work. Next to the stone fireplace, a large window overlooked a ravine and there he had a worktable.
He was watching her. She looked at the clutter of his work—he was in the midst of carving several ducks from wood. She lifted an elaborate mallard, fully painted in shades of green and gold and red. “You’re very good at this, aren’t you?”
“I just do it for my own fun,” he said. “Winter’s a slow time around here.”
Unable to concentrate, her eyes came to rest on the patch of black hair in the collar of his shirt. If she could open that shirt and put her hand there, touch him there and feel … and press her head to him … then he would cover her like the night. “You know,” she said, “don’t you, I really shouldn’t have come here.” She glanced at him. “I should go back. I didn’t tell them where I was going. Why don’t you come back with me?”
“Why don’t you stay?” he said. “Linger a while.” It sounded so unlikely, so odd and quaint, like a voice from a more chivalrous age.
“What did you say?” The light from the fireplace quivered like wingbeats across her pale face. She gathered herself to go, but suddenly turned back, awkward for a moment in his arms, leaning into him while he sought and found her mouth. With a little trembling spasm, her lips parted. She wanted the kiss to last a long time. Without any trace of clumsiness, his hands touched her hair and lifted it tenderly from her face, touched the delicate curve of her cheek, her throat. Through her drowning senses, she said, “You look so pleased with yourself. You’ve been expecting this.”
“You knew what was happening,” he said. He straightened up and looked at her. “You can’t get away with this, you know.”