Cloven Hooves

by Megan Lindholm

  The raging heat of July burns past me in a sort of dream. There is the noisy orgasm of fireworks spattering against the night sky, but they are quickly forgotten in the high heat of summer, in browning grasses and ripening berries. He brings buckets of berries to me, handfuls of mushrooms, pinches of watercress and mint. One evening I am gifted with a tiny boat fashioned of a curl of bark with a leaf for a sail. Pan and I used to make these, I think fondly to myself. I smile over the memory as the dish suds slide down my forearms into the steamy sink, and Tom’s grousing about a late parts shipment and water in someone’s hydraulics are like a radio in a different room.

  Tom and his family have retreated. No. They are where they always were, quarreling, boasting, dealing, figuring, and scheming. But I have a distance around me now that they cannot broach. When Mother Maurie clucks over how the sun and wind have ruined my hair, I can shrug it off. When one day Houdini is surreptitiously moved into the cow pasture, I can take it with equanimity, as I do the new red saddle that delights Teddy from his grandfather’s hands. Now that Tom’s father takes pride in his grandson’s riding ability, the pony is accepted and necessary. When Steffie carries Teddy off to an evening 4-H meeting, to later bring Teddy home and then leave again with the young man who oversees his group, I can smile to myself and even take a vicarious pleasure in her interest in him. All of it, somehow, is tolerable now. They cannot hurt me now, I think.

  I will never be so wrong again.

  FIFTEEN

  * * *

  The Farm

  July 1976

  It starts on Ellie’s birthday.

  Ellie’s birthday is no big deal. All it means is all of us having dinner together at the big house. Ellie cleans up the house, puts a cloth on the table, makes a nice meal of roast beef and mashed potatoes and green beans, and lots of coffee. She bakes herself a nice cake, chocolate cake with white frosting. We sing “Happy Birthday” and she blows out the candles. She opens presents. Nice presents. An apron with a big white goose appliqued on it from Steffie. A cookbook from Mother Maurie. A dozen little canning jars, with special decorated labels that say, “From the Kitchen of Ellie Bishop,” from Bix. I wonder if the labels are to help her remember her last name is the same as his. From Tom’s father, a bottle of special spray solvent. “New kinda stuff,” he tells us when Ellie unwraps it. “Guy at the store says it’ll cut through the crud on range hood fans, barbecue grills, oven spills, baked-on greasy stuff, just like lightning! Gotta wear rubber gloves to use it, though. Should make things a lot easier for Ellie.”

  He is obviously proud of his gift, of his practicality and thoughtfulness. Ellie beams at him. “Thanks, Daddy. I didn’t think anyone had noticed what a time I have with that of range hood.”

  The last present is from Tom. He has picked it up in town that afternoon. I have no idea what it is. Ellie opens a white box, unwraps tissue paper endlessly. A ship in a bottle. She holds it up and we all look at it. Then we all look at Tom. Except Ellie. She looks at the ship inside the bottle.

  “What the hell?” says Tom’s father.

  “Remember,” Tom says, his voice ineffectual in the quiet. “When Steffie and I had measles, and Ellie read Treasure Island to us? We’d never heard anything like that before. And remember, Ellie said that when she grew up, she was going to get a pirate ship of her own. So, well, I saw that in Ardinger’s window, and I got it for her.” He tries a laugh. No one joins in. “Her own pirate ship,” he explains. He laughs again. Alone.

  “Oh, yeah,” Steffie says belatedly. I can almost see the light bulb go on over her head. “I remember that. Long John Silver and Tom Hawkins, or something. Yeah, the kid in the book was named Tom, like you, wasn’t he?”

  “Jim,” I mutter, but no one notices. Tom is getting pink around the ears. His father looks confused.

  “Ellie can always keep it on her dresser,” Mother Maurie announces brightly. “It’s amazing how one unusual thing can liven up a room’s decor.”

  I giggle into my coffee, turn it into a choking fit, which everyone politely ignores. This room couldn’t get much livelier, then, I want to say, but I don’t.

  Tom’s father is still miffed, offended somehow by a gift he cannot understand. “Well, that’s a peculiar thing to give your sister for her birthday, but I guess it’s some family joke I’m left out of,” he concludes. I am so glad he has explained it for us all. Steffie looks uneasy, as if Teddy has asked her to explain incest or the hickey that peeks over the collar of her shirt. She shifts uncomfortably. Ellie is still looking at her ship in the bottle, but for once her angular face does not look gaunt to me. Her eyes are dark and sharp, I notice, and those planes and lines could have framed a scholar’s mind, that large skull beneath her severe hair could have housed the brain of an archaeologist or historian. For a moment I imagine her weathered hands sweeping dust from artifacts instead of knickknacks, see her pulling the lines of a sailboat instead of a clothesline. Could have been. Lucky she married a big dumb farm kid and settled down to housecleaning before she ruined her life.

  “The brown man can make those, only real,” Teddy says. He shovels more cake into his mouth.

  “What?” Tom’s father asks sharply. I have an uneasy feeling he is grateful for this diversion.

  “Brown man,” Teddy explains, a few cake crumbs flying with the words. “Makes those out of wood and stuff.”

  “What brown man? Makes what?”

  Teddy swallows like an ostrich. “I said,” he says with an effort. “That my brown man can make boats like those. With sails and strings and stuff. But his really float. Until I bomb ’em. Then he gets mad and throws water at me!” Teddy giggles and shovels more cake in. I feel suddenly cold.

  “What ‘brown man’?” Tom’s father demands indignantly. “Ain’t no niggers live around here that I know of.”

  I sip my coffee, my lower teeth tapping twice against the rim of the mug before I can get it to my mouth. Stop shaking. Be calm. Think of something else. I hope that somehow the subject will die. But they are all waiting for Teddy to finish chewing. Instead, he flushes the mouthful down with a glog of milk.

  “The brown man in the woods,” he explains patiently. “Back there.” He waves a laden fork in the general direction of the chicken yard. Cake goes flying.

  “Teddy,” I warn maternally. “Better clean that up, honey, and stop telling stories.”

  “Okay,” he says noncommittally, and I start to breathe out.

  “Ain’t no one living back there. That’s the govamint land back there,” Tom’s father explains.

  “Teddy, you been playing with someone back there in the woods?” Tom asks his son, while Steffie asks, in general, “He goes back in those woods alone?”

  “Only the brown man,” Teddy says to the floor. He is gobbing up the cake with a paper napkin. “And only sometimes. He’s got real hairy legs, you know,” he adds, as if that should explain it all to us.

  “Teddy, you listen to Grandpa,” Tom’s dad announces grandly. “You stay away from strangers, you hear me? There’s no house back there, so if there’s someone in the woods, it means he’s up to no good. Next time you see anyone, you come and tell me right away, all right? I’ll go have a little ‘talk’ with whoever it is!”

  “You don’t think someone would harm the boy, do you?” Mother Maurie whispers in awe.

  “I don’t know.” Grandpa is manifestly annoyed with his womenfolk’s naivete. “Who knows? He’s got no business back there. Teddy, you remember what I said. You hear me, Teddy?”

  “Yes, Grandpa.” He finishes wiping up the cake and scratches a mosquito bite on his ankle. Then he climbs back up to the table. I try to catch his eyes, but he is concentrating on a second piece of cake that Aunt Steffie is dishing up. I have an eerie feeling that he doesn’t hear his grandpa at all. No more than I do. The evening becomes more congenial now. Uncomfortable topics, like Ellie’s birthday and ships in bottles, have been forgotten, and the conversation escalates into predator-str
anger stories. Everyone gets into it, with each story more lurid than the last. I can sense the family drawing closer around their shared values. Better than ghost stories around a campfire are these depraved stories, only I cannot seem to keep my ears tuned to them. The voices and words fade in and out like distant radio stations on a piece of winding road. Sort of like the day the pony rolled in the azalea bushes. I try to pay attention, only to realize I have been concentrating so hard on forcing myself to listen that I have forgotten to make sense of the words. “You remember what Grandpa told you, now,” is Grandpa’s good night to us, and perhaps no one but me notices the uncharacteristic hug that Ellie inflicts on Tom.

  Later that night, as I tuck Teddy in, he asks me, “What’s a nigger?” I realize it is a word he has not heard from Tom and me. It is a word, oddly, that I have never heard Tom use, not even in jest. I don’t want to tell Teddy it’s a rude word for a black person. The stories are too vivid and recent, and Teddy will innocently carry my definition back to Grandpa. So I shrug. “Never met one,” I tell him.

  “Then the brown man’s not one, ’cause he knows you.”

  Teddy rolls over and goes to sleep.

  I do not sleep. I lie awake and try not to worry. What has the brown man told Teddy about his mother? What will Teddy tell everyone else? I dare not ask him not to tell. Secrets are too large a burden for his little shoulders. Especially secrets that make me feel guilty. Not that I have any reason to feel guilty. I have done nothing amiss. A single kiss? What’s that, between old friends? Nothing. And everything. I do not realize Tom is awake beside me until he says, “Honey, it’s normal for kids to have imaginary playmates. Teddy will forget this ‘brown man’ thing as soon as he starts kindergarten.”

  I am surprised that he has even known I am awake. As surprised as Ellie was by the boat. “I guess so,” I answer. The immensity of the things I could confide in him swell within me, but I swallow the words, hoard the knowledge. It’s nothing he’d want to know, anyway. “Teddy will be fine,” I finally say. This seems to satisfy him, and I do not resist when he reaches over and drags me under him. In fact, I hardly notice.

  Later, while he sleeps, I try to figure out where we are these days. If I don’t care about him, I could leave, right? Just take Teddy and go? But I cannot say I do not love him. I cannot even bring myself to try the traitorous words on my tongue. It is so much easier to whisper, “I love you, Tom,” to the unhealing night. I try to feel that, but it is buried inside me, a thing put into storage, a bright summer dress set aside in mothballs until the long winter passes. I know it was true once. I have the feeling that if I can last this out, there will be a someday when we live on our own again, and I will be in love with him again. I will want him again, I will wake him up in the middle of the night and lead him by the hand to the grove of birches behind the cabin and make love to him on the deep moss with the night wind against our skins.

  It is too much like a fairy tale.

  The next morning Teddy is up early. He gallops Houdini around in the cow pasture while I am doing dishes, dusting and waxing and other fascinating chores. Now that Teddy’s riding is a thing for Grandpa to brag about, he is allowed to ride in the pasture. I go to the window and check on them every ten or fifteen minutes. Even so, Houdini is unsaddled and grazing the next time I look, and Teddy is nowhere in sight. I sigh a little, knowing where he is, and wishing I were there. Hoping, too, that the brown man will say nothing of me to my son, and that my son will say no more of the brown man.

  Such hopes dare the fates. I know when Teddy returns. I hear him long before I see him. He announces his arrival with shrill tooding on a three-note willow whistle. I do not need to ask him who carved it for him. I do not even get the chance, for Grandpa intercepts him as he comes across the yard. Seemingly, he does not have to ask Teddy, either, for his words come clear to me inside the house. “Young man, what did I tell you yesterday?”

  I see the sunshine fade from Teddy’s face as he squints up at his grandfather. I do not hear his words, his child’s voice is too soft. I turn away from the sink and the window and go to sit on Teddy’s bed/sofa. It is a terrible feeling to not be able to protect one’s child. A gutless feeling to wait while he weathers the storm of his grandfather’s disapproval. But I know if I went out there, anything I said would only make it worse. Better to wait, to be ready.

  He comes in, after years of waiting that last about twenty minutes. He sits solemnly beside me. He is bereft of his whistle. From some distant past, I hear my own grandmother’s hiss in my ear, “Wash that fruit before you eat it. A black person might have touched it.”

  “Hello,” I say noncommittaly.

  “Grandpa says if someone’s brown, I can’t play with them,” he explains to me.

  “Oh,” I say. Inadequate.

  “I really like the brown man.”

  I nod my agreement. I could give him a lecture about brown people and tell him he doesn’t need to fear or avoid them. I could expound at length on race relations and brotherhood. But he already knows it all. He has met one brown man on his own, and he will never buy into his grandfather’s myths now. Too late, Grandpa.

  “Let’s make cookies,” I say instead.

  The brownies are baking in the oven before Teddy remembers to dig in the pocket of his shorts. “The brown man made one for you, too,” he explains as he shows me the willow whistle.

  Somehow I cannot touch it, cannot take it from his innocent hands. It would be admitting something. Whenever Teddy speaks of the brown man knowing me, a coldness shivers inside me, like a hidden guilt roiling through my stomach. I want him to know his brown man. I do not want him to know of the brown man and I knowing each other. So I say, “You keep it for me. And play it. To make up for the one Grandpa took.”

  He looks at me gravely, then nods slowly. “I’ll only play it back in the woods,” he tells me. I wonder if I am teaching him deception, if I am doing untold damage to his tender psyche, poisoning his relationship with his grandfather. Then the oven timer goes off, and the brownies are done, and I have an excuse not to think about that anymore.

  Tom comes in late that night. We have finished our dinner, and I have already done the dishes. Usually when he is that late, it means he has already eaten dinner at his parents’ house. But tonight he comes in and vultures through the refrigerator, poking disconsolately at the meager leftovers until I get up and concoct something resembling a dinner for him. I make him a pot of coffee to go with it. I have been sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea and reading one of Steffie’s romances while Teddy plays Lego on the living-room floor. There is no graceful way to get up and move while Tom eats. So I resume my place there, and as he eats, he talks.

  “Time to make hay,” he tells me between mouthfuls. “Me and Bix are gonna help out the Clemmonses this year. We always did when we were kids, so it’s kind of, you know.”

  I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter, as long as I glance up and nod.

  “Bix’s shoulder is a lot better now,” he adds belatedly.

  I look up at him, wondering why he sounds abashed. Oh. Now I remember. We were supposed to stay here because Bix’s shoulder was hurt and he couldn’t work. So Tom could help his family out. Somehow it seems long ago. Having lost that battle in those ancient days of caring, it is hard to find anything to feel about it now. Does he really think I am so stupid that I haven’t noticed Bix has gone back to his regular routine? I shrug, and try to remember where on the page I was.

  “Dad thought Teddy might like to go with us this year. See how it’s done, ride on the hay truck, maybe even ride on the tractor?” He pitches this to include Teddy in the conversation. Teddy gets up and wanders over to the table, Lego in hand.

  “All day?” he asks.

  “Probably.” Tom eats another bite. “Usually we hit it early, after the dew’s burned off but before it gets too hot. Mom can pack you some sandwiches, and Bix and I will make sure there’s some root beer in the cooler. Okay?”r />
  “Grandpa doesn’t want me to play with the brown man,” Teddy explains for anyone who might have missed it. “Is Steffie gonna help?”

  Tom glances at me, shifts, shrugs. “She might. She might drive the hay truck. Dougie asked her to come.” Tom eats another mouthful, glances at me. “Hey, listen, Cowboy, you want to make hay with us, you can. You don’t want to, that’s fine, too. Uh.” He fishes in his shirt pocket. He lays the willow whistle on the table. “I think this is yours.”

  “Yeah.” Teddy pockets it matter-of-factly.

  “That’s a pretty neat whistle. You make that yourself?”

  Teddy just looks at him.

  “When I was little,” Tom says slowly. “I had a friend named Georgie. Georgie could fly.” Teddy’s eyes get big. “Because Georgie was pretend,” Tom says laboriously. “But he was still my friend, and I still liked playing with him. Even if Grandpa told me to quit telling lies. Georgie was still my friend, and my only friend until I went to school. Pretty soon you’re going to go to school, and you’ll meet all the other kids from up and down the highway, and you’ll go to their houses and they’ll come to visit us. And your mom will be friends with their moms, and she’ll go to PTA, and oh, there’ll be all kinds of real fun to have. Field trips with your class, and birthday parties to go to, and spending the night. All kinds of things. You’ll like it. But until then, I don’t mind if you play with the brown man. Only, let’s not get Grandpa all upset about it, okay? Because I don’t think he ever had friends like that, you understand?”