Half Wild

by Robin MacArthur

  Like today, at the house of Alice Tucker. A two-hundred-year-old Cape with broken slates and rotten sills sitting on two hundred acres of prime land. She opened the door in a lilac-colored housedress, smiling, her false teeth loose in her mouth. I caught the scent of skin powder and cat litter and wood smoke. She didn’t invite me in, so I just stood out there in the driveway in the hard sunlight.

  “Alice. It’s me, Sally. You know, Calvin’s daughter. Sally McLean,” I said, catching the soft look of recognition in the impoverished old lady’s eyes.

  Keep business local, Ron and I say. Keep it in the family. Land isn’t something you can hold on to forever. There have always been real estate people, tax sales, down-and-out folks desperate enough to sell. And we give them cash, these old ladies and hard-luck farmers, cash like they’ve never seen before. Cash they go out and buy new pickups with or double-wides, cash they use to fly themselves to Florida or the Bahamas. I see the smiles on their faces.

  “You need help with the car insurance this month?” I shout toward my father. Because of three car accidents in the last two years, his insurance has reached astronomical highs. I don’t know why he hasn’t yet lost his license. I assume he knew the boy in the cop car who asked him to say the alphabet backward, who declined to smell his breath.

  “Nope.” My father is clearly embarrassed to be having this conversation here in front of silver-haired Rita, but we have no choice. “Should be fine.”

  “Well, you know where to call.”

  “Yep, I do,” he mumbles, staring at the bottles behind the bar.

  On winter nights when I was young our driveway was impassable, and so he would carry me up the hill on his back, and I have a clear memory of the sound and rhythm of his heavy breathing and regular steps through the snow, of the delirious and sleepy sensation of being transported safely through the dark and cold night. He’s the same man, I know, and I’m the same girl, but who is taking care of who has reversed direction.

  Terry Miner gets up from his seat and goes back to the jukebox. Again he pulls two quarters out of his front pocket and puts them in the slot. This time Waylon Jennings starts singing about honky-tonk angels in heavenly flight.

  “Hah!” My father grunts. “Heaven!”

  I smile. He was never one to believe in heaven. When I was eight my mother found religion and tried to change my father’s ways, but he refused to go to church. Sunday mornings we would come home, dressed and clean, to find him at the kitchen table or, in summer, in a chair at the edge of the woods, his blue eyes glistening. “How was God?” he would shout to us across the clearing, grinning. My mother would walk stiffly toward the house, refusing to look in his direction, the pressed cotton of her dress swishing against her thighs. My brother and I stood frozen in the clearing, unsure of which way to turn.

  When Terry Miner turns back around he catches me looking at him, and I am surprised to find him walking toward me, his hand stretched outward.

  “Dance this one?” he says.

  I feel my father’s and Rita’s eyes on me. My palms start to sweat, and I think for a moment of Ron, at home in front of the TV, waiting, but I say yes. Why not? I’m not in these heels, these jeans, this blouse, this bar, for nothing. I think back to a night when we were eighteen, a circle of friends drinking beers by Sunset Lake, of the way I had watched Terry that night, lighting off fireworks at the edge of the shore, of the way I had, some hours later, stripped my clothes off and slipped into that cool, dark water.

  We start to dance, and his grip is firm on my arm and lower back. He smells like beer and diesel fumes. Terry is married to Louise, a girl we also went to school with. They have three blond, beautiful children. I close my eyes and will the faces of those children to disappear. But Terry’s grip is tight on my arm.

  “Heard you went by Alice’s place today,” he says in my ear. His voice is not friendly.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “She’s my great-aunt.”

  “I know that, Terry.”

  “I grew up fishing on that land. My boys ride four-wheelers there.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I say.

  I look up then at his blue eyes ringed with lines, and he nods at me. “Just so you know,” he says, his eyes cold.

  I look back at him without blinking. “Now I know,” I say.

  We are quiet for the rest of the dance, our limbs awkwardly colliding, our heads swaying to the three-quarter rhythm. When the song ends he grins at me briefly, then gives my arm a hard pinch. “Always a pleasure,” he says, and I nod, and we go back to our places.

  My father has turned back toward the bar, though I know that he, like everyone else, was watching us. People don’t dance in bars around here. I take another sip of my Scotch.

  We’re not dumb, Ron and me. We saw early that if you’re going to survive in a place like this, it won’t be by milking heifers from dawn to dusk or burning your neck all summer trying to grow hay. Trees are what grow here: west of the Connecticut River valley, east of the Adirondacks, in the low, wooded hills of southern Vermont. They are what pay our dental bills, buy us our pickup trucks, secure the loans on our SUVs.

  “Tell you what, Sally,” my father says, turning. “You should come back with me tonight. Got something at home to show you.”

  I haven’t been to our old place in years, its half-sided walls, its clearing full of old tires and rusted chairs.

  I look down at my hands for an instant, then into the yellow eyes of that dead cat on the wall. I think of Terry Miner’s hands on my arms, of the weight I felt there. Of that near bruise humming under the skin. “Okay,” I say. “I’ll come.”

  “Rita, one more shot for the road,” my father shouts.

  Outside I walk toward my Lexus, but my father shakes his head. “Take a ride,” he says, so I climb instead into the passenger seat of his twenty-year-old GMC.

  He drives fast along the back roads, taking corners too quickly, spinning out on the gravel edge. He passes me a Miller from the well below my seat, and I pop it open, drink. It’s not far, I think to myself, watching the blurred trees and beyond them the deep blue fields, and it’s not. Soon he’s pulling up the dirt track, the truck lurching up the steep bank, and then we are parked in front of his cabin, the place I lived when I was young.

  I haven’t had this much to drink in I don’t know how long, and my head spins, but I feel strangely giddy as well. Ron will be wondering where I am, forehead furrowed, and the thought somehow thrills me. I’m back in the woods, Ron. The voice in my head is saucy, irreverent, unlike my own. Is it my husband or my dead mother I’m talking to? Back where I came from. Trash still.

  I think of Alice Tucker’s housedress. The paper-thin skin of her arms. I think of that cat’s amber eyes on the wall above the bar.

  My father opens the kitchen door, and I follow him inside. There are clothes thrown over the back of the couch, a chainsaw taken apart on the living room rug. He starts toward the back door to take a piss.

  “What did you want to show me?” I call out.

  “Oh. Yeah. Here. Look at this.” He points to a couple of photos tacked to the pine wall above the sink. “Found them in a box.”

  I’ve only seen a few photographs from my childhood. Never these. One is of our family sitting in front of this house when my brother and I were young, our dog Tuck by our side. The other is of my parents in a field, my mother’s red hair lit by sunlight. Her dress is the color of apricots or poppies; her eyes radiate joy. It’s a look I rarely saw there.

  “Is that your wedding day?” I call out, but my father’s still outside so I have nothing to do but look at her pretty, young face and the quiet hope that is spread out all over it.

  “Enough staring at the past,” my father shouts as he steps back inside. He buttons his pants and heads toward the refrigerator. “You can have those. Another?” he asks, handing me a Pabst.

  “Yes,” I say, feeling something weak overtake me.

  “Here then.”
>
  I follow my father outside to where he has a couple chairs set up next to each other under the trees. He hands me the can, and I pop the top and take a sip and listen to the robins chattering and the deep, spiraling song of the veery and to my father’s heavy breathing and to my own heart beating in my ears. He pulls his pack of Marlboros out of his front pocket and lights a cigarette.

  “I’d like one too,” I say. I haven’t smoked in years, and my father glances at me sideways, his eyebrow raised, then grins and hands me one.

  “You sure remind me of your mother,” he says, looking upward.

  “I do? Why?”

  “Never liked the woods.”

  “She didn’t. But I do.”

  “Hell, never liked anything about the woods at all.”

  My heart is all cat, squirrel.

  “No. But I do.”

  “You’d think a man could have figured that one out sooner. That woman sure knew what she wanted, didn’t she?”

  I look at my father and see then that tears have filled his eyes, a cloudy mess of salty grays and blues that look like riled ocean.

  “Yes,” I say. “She did.” My head is reeling with drink and the bright heat of the last spark of afternoon sun, and I see a single tear drip down his stubbled cheek and rest at the tip of his chin, not falling.

  Then he reaches for my hand and takes it in his, and it is as if for a moment I am that girl again—pretty Sally—on his back being carried in snow through the fields of winter. I take a deep breath and feel the last rays of afternoon light on my face and chest and chin, and then he lifts his hand and reaches it across my arm and rests it—and it is here I should stop him, but don’t—on my blouse atop my left breast, and for that moment I am overcome with the potent sweetness of his touch and with it, his love. I smell his familiar scent of chain oil and hemlock and smoke and think, in that moment, of those snow-lit fields, that lake water, and of my mother, and her joy, and how little I knew of it, and then he’s whispering my mother’s name—Mona—and that’s when I realize where I am, in my drunk father’s yard, and who I am, and pull away, not looking at him, and stand up, stumbling toward the edge of the clearing with my can of warm beer.

  “Oh shit,” I hear him mumble.

  In the woods it is already dark with evening shadows, and I’m grateful that I can’t make out his face clearly, nor he mine. I set my beer down on a log and make my way toward the driveway. “I’ll see you soon, Dad,” I shout through the dim light, though I wonder how, and where, and when. He doesn’t say anything back, and I’m glad.

  I walk the whole way back to the bar, three miles, slipping behind stone walls and trees when cars pass. My feet burn with blisters and my legs ache, and by the time I get to my car it is dark, the sky heavy with the absence of stars, and I am long sober enough to drive, but I don’t go home.

  Instead I drive around back roads—Fox, Stark, Sunset Lake, Butterfield—the roads I grew up on, past the houses where the people I grew up with lived and live. I pass Alice Tucker’s house, and look this time not only at its falling-in shape, silhouetted against the sky, one light on in the kitchen window, but also down toward Silver Creek, where Terry Miner learned to fish when he was a boy.

  One night after my mother and brother and I had moved into an apartment in Nelson, my father came by. He knocked at the door and stood out there in the dark calling our mother’s name up toward our windows. Lock the doors, my mother whispered. And pray for his soul. We did. We lay in bed listening to him out there calling her name—Mona!—and singing fragments of old love songs, once in a while simply howling.

  I roll down my window and keep driving, past moonlit trees and fields and open land, the land my husband wants to buy, the land I could help him buy, the trees that could become lumber, and feel the dangerous and frightening pull of some new, or old, kind of life—drunk, hopeless, pine-pitched—calling.

  And then, when it is late, past midnight, I drive north and a little east, and pull up my paved driveway, and turn off my car, and look up at the safe, bright lights of my home. I walk in the front door and close it behind me. Ron is there, rising from the couch and walking toward me, his brow furrowed, his eyes soft with worry.

  “Where were you?” he asks quietly.

  “Nowhere,” I say. “Just my dad’s. I was just at my dad’s.” And then Ron takes me in his pale, thin arms and holds me loosely, and just like that I slip back into the shape of my life. I smell his clean, washed body, and know I will go on buying land and helping cut up and clean up what is wild out there, and old, and unseemly. I close my eyes and know my father will die someday, and with him that wild and unsettling hunger to go deeper, and deeper yet into the heart of the woods.

  3

  WINGS, 1989

  That day in July my mom came out of the house, wiped her soapy hands on her thighs, and told me to get my lazy bum up off the grass and go weed the peas. She wore rolled-up blue jeans, a plaid cotton blouse, and a red bandana that tied her dark hair back from her face. Her toenails were caked with dirt and needed cutting.

  “Don’t want to,” I said. My dad had been gone on a job for a week, and it was just the two of us. In the sun the temperature read ninety; bugs swarmed around my skin and flies landed intermittently on my thighs and knees.

  “Katie, how’d you get to be so lazy?” she said, squinting off toward the hills that used to belong to my dad’s parents but had since been sold, and then started walking alone through the tall grass down to the garden. I watched her shoulder blades moving under her blouse and went back to the library book I was reading. It was about a girl who lived in a clean house in the suburbs with lots of rooms and windows. The girl wrote stories, and the book was about those stories she wrote and all those windows. I wanted to be like her: unencumbered, surrounded by light. In one story she wrote about girls who turned into birds: hawks and ravens and buzzards and crows. They could fly anywhere they wanted to go. You knew, reading, that the girl who wrote the stories was free, too. You could feel it in your bones. But I couldn’t concentrate anymore, with my tired mom walking down to the garden alone.

  I felt a trickle of sweat slip down my spine and thought about those weeds—tall, green, stringy—crowding out the tomatoes and peas and carrots and beans. I thought about our basement full of empty canning jars collecting dust and our Datsun with a busted starter. After a few minutes I got up and went down the hill too, knelt in front of the carrots and pigweed. My mom didn’t say a thing, just looked at me sideways for a moment and smiled, then went back to the peas.

  We lived in a house that didn’t have many windows, just a few small double-hungs in each room that we covered with plastic in winter. My dad had built the house when he was twenty: a pine-sided cabin with two bedrooms and a porch and a barn where he had hoped, someday, to keep goats or horses. Now that barn was just a place with no walls where we kept snow tires and broken lawn mowers and old chairs in need of caning.

  The weeds were thick and everywhere: pigweed and witchgrass and dandelion. It had rained all of June, and standing water pooled in between the rows and mosquito eggs floated around in the pools. But that day was all sun. My hair fell into my face and stuck to my cheeks, and the thin brown hairs on my legs shone. Wet dirt wedged under my fingernails and made them throb. The skin on my arms and legs burned. My mom’s arms were a nice freckled brown, and she didn’t sweat. Mine were my dad’s: pink and burnable.

  “Swing low, sweet chariot,” my mom sang, quietly and out of key. She had grown up in a big house in the suburbs, just like the girl in my book, and could have done anything with her life. Back in college she had wanted to be a poet. There were floppy books of poetry stored on a shelf in the corner of her bedroom, collecting dust. Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath. There were old lace bras in her underwear drawer that she never wore. I got up and moved to the grassy shade at the edge of the garden. I lay down and closed my eyes and thought about how a Coke or a blue Slush Puppie or a sip of my mom’s ice-cold wine w
ould feel on my tongue. I could hear her inching along through the rows. I picked a blade of grass and stuck it between my teeth and nibbled on it, let the bitter taste seep all over, and then I spit it out and just lay there, feeling the cool.

  I had the story of how they met like a movie in my mind. My dad had a job at the local college building storage sheds. It was hot and he worked with his shirt off and all the girls hung around, my mom told me, pretending to read near where he cut and hammered boards. But she was the only one to offer him a glass of ice water. He said he’d love one but that swimming was an even better way to cool down. Then he grinned. “You like to swim?”

  He took her to a place in the Silver Creek called Indian Love Call and told her it was named that because Indians would bring their girlfriends there. On one side of the river a ledge outcrop rose twenty feet above the water, and they carried their towels up to that rock and looked down. The water bristled with snowmelt, and the boulders flashed silver in the sun. He beat his fists against his chest and made a hooting call meant to imitate an Indian; his voice echoed back. Then he took off all his clothes and leapt into the water. My mom stood there in her jeans and blouse looking down at him. He crowed and hollered and splashed and looked up at her. She laughed. “What you waiting for?” he called out.

  “It looks cold!” she shouted above the sound of water hitting stone.

  “Fresh!” he yelled, so my mom took off all her clothes and jumped in too. She’d never been naked in front of a man or leapt off a cliff into ice water; she said she knew right then, in midair, that her life would be something entirely different from what she had imagined.

  “You all done?” My mom stood up, brushed her dark hair out of her face with the back of her hand, and looked down at me on the grass.

  “Yeah. Pooped,” I said, so we walked back up to the house together. The sun had settled below the trees, and the sky bloomed tangerine behind the leaves. She was quiet. In one of her not-talking moods. “Speak, woman,” my dad would say if he were here, poking her ribs, trying to get her to crack a smile. “We’re missing you down here.”