Half Wild

by Robin MacArthur

  Now she stands and goes to her bookshelf where she keeps the letters Sparrow sends her. In the most recent one—received three months ago—he describes mountain caves and the bombed-out houses where they sleep in the mountains of Afghanistan; he describes fields of poppies and watermelon. He says they run into those fields, break the watermelon open, stick their faces inside, and devour the sweet fruit. The only fresh thing we’ve eaten in six fucking months, he writes. And then, Hey Apple—more socks? He never mentions guns or killing or fighting. Once a month Apple sends packages of clean white socks. There is no such thing as laundry, and they are on their feet in those leather boots fifteen, sometimes sixteen hours a day. Socks, Sparrow has told her, are the heroin of his brigade.

  Once every few months he calls. It is always early, three or four in the morning. The connection is never good, and he can never talk for more than a few minutes, but for Apple, shivering there in the dark of the trailer in her nightgown, bare feet on linoleum, Sparrow’s voice coming through that line is the most grace-filled thing she has ever known. He never mentions guns or killing or fighting, but it is all over the news.

  Apple puts the letter down and goes to the kitchen to start dinner. She pulls carrots and kale out of the refrigerator, pours brown rice and water into a pan. She works as a cashier at the health food store in Nelson and has always eaten well—rice and beans, vegetables and tofu, unrefined sugars. She has come a long way from the house outside Cleveland where she grew up: all that meat and potatoes, cake out of boxes, and Jell-O molds. A long way from her God- and husband-fearing mother. And yet, like her mother, she now lives and cooks alone. Which is why she finds herself, after all these years, calling her mother more often than she used to.

  They don’t talk about anything important, but Apple is surprised to find herself comforted by the sound of her mother’s thin voice across all that distance. The last time her mother visited was sixteen years ago; Apple was living in a converted chicken coop, and Sparrow was two. When her mother asked where the ladies’ room was and Apple pointed to the outhouse nestled between some pines, her mother said, “Oh dear,” and rented herself a motel room. The next day she told Apple she should get herself a mirror: “Don’t you care how you look?” Apple had looked down at her body then: her full hips and flat feet and small, pointy breasts under loose cotton. She has a picture of herself from back then tacked to the window frame above her sink, and every time she sees it she is surprised at the raw beauty of her young face. Yes, she hadn’t said: she cared.

  But that was a long time ago. Now her father is dead and her mother talks about food and her sick parents and her neighbors. “How is our boy?” she asks toward the end of the conversation, and Apple tells her about the most recent letter from Sparrow, or reports that she has heard nothing at all. “Well, God is with him,” her mother always says. “God knows best.” And every time Apple hangs up the phone, she cries.

  Apple peels the carrots. It is the strangest thing she has known, to have a son at war. For years she has hung a poster above her bed that says VISUALIZE WHIRLED PEAS. When Sparrow was a boy she taught him to leave spider webs undisturbed, to catch mice in Havahart traps and wasps in jars. The small bookshelf in the trailer holds every book Thich Naht Hanh has written. Taped to the wall above her kitchen sink is his reminder to Breathe peace; to the wall next to her bed she has tacked his lines: No birth, no death, no coming, no going. The long road turns to joy.

  Sparrow was a good teenager. He never did too many drugs or drank too much or went off any deep end like Apple had always feared. She wasn’t sure if he had any close friends, but he liked his teachers and his teachers liked him. He would be going to the state college in the fall. He took art classes and made Apple ceramic cups and bowls for Christmas and her birthday. On weekend nights he took Apple’s Subaru and went to parties but never got too messed up. If he drank, he spent the night; that was her rule. In the morning he would come home and they would sit in the trailer drinking coffee together and he would tell her about drinking games and skinny-dipping and other kids who did things that were stupid, and Apple thought then that she was in the clear, that she had done everything right, that all those years of teaching peace and love and simplicity had been the right way to raise a child, the right way to mother, that if the world only did it like she had done it, the world would be a better, more humane place: without hunger, without massacres, without war.

  He told her the day after graduation. Apple sat at the edge of the field waiting for him, the hardcover copy of Leaves of Grass gift-wrapped beside her. It was the book his English teacher had recommended. Sparrow pulled into the driveway in Apple’s rusted Subaru and came and sat down next to her. He picked a blade of timothy and stuck it between his lips. “Apple,” he said, not looking at her. He smelled like beer and looked like he’d slept in a field somewhere.

  “Yeah?”

  “I have something to tell you.”

  In that instant Apple had imagined all sorts of possible declarations: a girl knocked up, a one-way ticket to California, a drug felony or a speeding ticket or a night in jail. But never what came next. Apple had never imagined the cut of those words, the nausea that sliced through every vein in a heartbeat.

  Before she could say anything he gave her two reasons. One, he told her, his pale fingers shaking, was that a war was being fought in the name of freedom and justice and if people were going to die for it, he might as well too. He didn’t look at her as he said it; his voice caught in his throat, too loud. It sounded like something he had read in a pamphlet and memorized. And, he had said, this time glancing at Apple, his lower lip beginning to tremble, they were going to pay for his college. “How else were you going to do it?” In that instant Apple felt her life unearthing itself like a flock of starlings taking off from a field. Every one of those birds was her mistake. Hers.

  The light shifts in the trailer and Apple hears the door at the big house slam. She can’t help herself—she goes to the picture window and looks down the hill. The husband and wife are brushing the snow off each other’s pants and jackets with a straw broom. The man goes to the woodpile and fills his arms with a load of wood; the woman holds the door open for him, and they walk inside together. Lights come on in half a dozen windows. Apple goes back to her kitchen and throws the chopped carrots and kale into the pan.

  She likes cooking without lights on. It’s a new thing, not something she did with Sparrow in the house. When he was there she would turn on all the lights and cut vegetables at the table where he did his homework. Not that he needed her help—he always did well in school—but because she wanted to learn what he was learning and because she wanted to share his life with him. She often read his assigned English books so they could talk about them afterward. She read The Catcher in the Rye and Great Expectations and As I Lay Dying. “You can read your own books,” Sparrow said once, but Apple told him she liked reading with him; she had been high most of her high school years, or having sex in the backseats of cars. She secretly imagined herself starting over with Sparrow. His English teacher had told his class that As I Lay Dying was the greatest American poem of the twentieth century, and Apple read it a second time with that in mind, though she still isn’t sure she completely understands what it’s about.

  The rice water starts to boil and Apple turns it down to a simmer, stirs the vegetables. The clock on the stove and the stereo light create a pleasant glow. Outside, the sky looks like the worn navy on a velvet dress Apple once saw Cora wearing, mottled here and there with stars. It’s not even five, but in December it gets dark so early.

  In sixth grade Sparrow asked if they could move somewhere warmer, lighter, somewhere like Florida. “Why?” Apple asked, and he shrugged and said he didn’t like the cold. But Apple knew he did like the cold; he liked sledding and making snow angels, and he liked to spend time outside by himself. That week Sparrow’s teacher called to talk; she said the boys in Sparrow’s class were calling him “Birdie.” She asked,
“Does Sparrow like having his hair long, or would he prefer a haircut?” She said he often pulled his hair over his eyes and didn’t take off his winter parka when he came inside. When Apple asked Sparrow about his hair and about the jacket and about school he said he was fine. It was fine. He just wanted somewhere warmer, that’s all.

  Apple brings her bowl of food to the chair in front of the gas heater. It’s the only place in the trailer she likes to be now—a rocking chair draped with sheepskin—and when she sits there rocking she sometimes feels like an old woman and that feeling comforts her; the pressure to live a striking life recedes. Sometimes Apple looks down at her long, slender legs and is surprised that she is not even forty. Lots of women her age are just having babies.

  A car pulls into the driveway below, and Apple watches two people climb out. They are just shadows against the snow, but Apple can make out their shapes by the light that streams through the windows: both elegantly thin. The couple goes to the porch and another car pulls up. Apple remembers it is Saturday, almost Christmas: the time of year for parties. Two more shadows climb out of the second car and go toward the house. The front door opens to reveal the trapeze artist standing in the doorway in a red cocktail dress and black high-heeled shoes. She laughs and embraces the silhouettes and they embrace her and then they all step inside, the door closing behind them. Apple looks down at her own clothes: a favorite wool sweater full of holes and a pair of jeans. She wonders for a moment if she should turn a light on in the trailer so they won’t think she is sleeping or depressed or sitting in the dark, watching them. Her Subaru is parked outside her door, and if they see it there, they will know she is home, without lights on, but why on earth would they look up the hill and wonder? They are having a party! Sometimes she feels like a god up here, looking out and down, and thinks how lonely it must be to be a god.

  Sparrow used to tell her to go out. “You should go dancing. Or to a concert,” he would say. Once: “You’re still pretty, you know,” and Apple had thought, looking into those deep and serious eyes, how happy he was going to make some woman someday. She had slept with lots of men but had not loved one of them. “The best thing you can do for your children,” she had heard someone say at a wedding, “is love their mother.” But who had loved her? Apple had looked at Sparrow then and pulled him against her body in a long and awkward hug, which he pulled away from gently.

  Inside the house down the hill the dancer lights a candelabra, and the guests gather around the table and sit down. They pour wine and raise their glasses to toast something; they laugh and smile. A month ago Sparrow’s company slept for a week in a bombed-out house without food, only fresh water dropped by plane. Every day she went to the library and looked at pictures on CNN’s website: marines behind mud walls holding machine guns, marines playing with chickens, marines dashing across bullet-sprayed fields. One of the bodies in camouflage looked like Sparrow from the side, but Apple couldn’t tell for sure: an all-American-looking boy. When Apple thinks of her child holding a gun, she feels the world fall out from under her. She thinks of car accidents and police brutality and childhood leukemia and the seagulls dead from oil spills in Alaska or the Gulf of Mexico. She’s afraid, sometimes, to breathe. She hasn’t washed her hair for days.

  Apple finishes her food and puts her bowl in the sink. She’ll do the dishes in the morning. She won’t mind; she likes washing dishes. It’s what she will do after she washes the dishes that worries her. The now to contend with. Thich Nhat Hanh says our true home is the here and now. He says, Breathe! You are alive. Apple sits back down in her rocker and wishes, as she sometimes wishes at night now, that she still drank. Just a little. Not like her father, but just a little bit of wine. She says the words out loud: “Breathe, you are alive.” She repeats them in her head as she closes her eyes and practices her breathing.

  When she opens her eyes again there is motion in the big house below: people clearing plates, clearing glasses, carrying them through the door that leads to the kitchen. Then they are lifting the tablecloth off the table, moving chairs, moving the table itself. Apple can no longer see the table, and she is wondering at what kind of dinner party people disassemble the table, when the couples come back into the room and start dancing. They dance beautifully. The men wrap their right arms around the women; their left hands cup the women’s slender fingers. The trapeze artist twirls under her husband’s arm, and her red dress spins out around her like an inverted poppy. Another woman is wearing blue jeans and a top that looks like lingerie. She and her partner dance with their knees bent, shaking their elbows and hips and heads. The third couple holds each other so tight that from where Apple sits they look like one large person, spinning. The sky above the house is filled with stars, and it is a beautiful thing, all that stardust lighting up the snow, the people on earth dancing.

  She hasn’t been to a party in a long time. When Sparrow was five Apple got stoned and lost him. Or he lost her. All she remembers is a bonfire at the edge of Sunset Lake, people drumming, kids running loose, a woman singing Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” a joint being passed her way. She remembers thinking this is how it would be in other parts of the world—the Amazon, Africa, an earlier America—kids barefoot in the dark, their own tribe, their own wilderness. She remembers feeling happy and not-alone there at the fire, singing along, her body swaying, the warm night fragrant with pollen. She remembers a short and muscular and handsome man playing a fiddle; she remembers he had been the one to pass her the joint. After that was a blur: a child screaming somewhere in the woods. A woman calling out, “Where are the kids?” and people running this way and that. Then a man’s voice calling out “Got him! He’s fine,” and a wet boy, not hers, being dragged out of the water. His mother wrapped him in sweaters and jackets, and his father carried him to the fire. The mother started singing in the boy’s ear, and the father smiled, kissed him. Fine, baby, you’re fine, he sang, a mantra of comfort. But Apple couldn’t find Sparrow. “Sparrow?” she called into the woods, toward the water. “Sparrow? Where are you?” No one noticed her prowling around out there in the woods by the water’s edge, stoned. No one heard her calling. It wasn’t until what seemed much later, after the lake-wet child’s hair had dried and his limbs had stopped shaking, after people had finished celebrating his rescue, that Apple heard the whimpering. She followed the sound until she found Sparrow, crouched against the wall of an empty lake cabin, a long way from the fire. There was a long, thin scratch on his left shin, a trickle of blood. “Mama,” he had said, looking up at her, his face wet with tears. Apple sat down next to him and wiped the blood with her skirt, then reached for his hand and held it. She couldn’t find words to say. Her legs felt too long, her hands small as a child’s. She sat that way until her head felt steady, until her heart calmed, until he stopped making that awful sound. That was the last time she got stoned.

  A side door of the big house opens, letting light spill out onto the porch for a moment, then closes. A shadow floats across the lit yard, then disappears into darkness. Apple wonders if someone is a closet smoker, or is making a phone call in secret, but that kind of deception feels unfitting to these people and their happiness. Inside, all she can see is the couple wrapped together, tilting their heads back and away from each other, their bodies still entwined, still spinning, as if they are a plant growing outward.

  The last time she spoke to Sparrow was twenty-three days ago at three fifteen in the morning, a few days after they cleared the road and his company returned to food and water. She leapt out of bed and stumbled to the phone, picking it up with her breathless “hello,” and then there was the pause she wanted, the pause she is always hoping for, the pause that tells her someone is calling long, long distance. It always feels a little like communicating with the stars. But all she could hear was Sparrow’s voice saying a few muffled words she couldn’t understand, her name—Apple—rising like a question, and the crackling snap of the connection ending. Then it was just the dark trailer, and the ref
rigerator buzzing, and her cold feet on linoleum. Since then the fighting has escalated. It is all over the news: insurgent attacks; marines dying in helicopter crashes; marines dying from friendly fire. She is almost sure she saw him in a photo on a website a week ago: a company in the mountains, mud-spattered, in combat, and at the far edge of the frame a boy, Sparrow-like, too thin, running.

  Apple closes her eyes and does the breathing thing she has taught herself to do: long inhale through the nose, count to three, exhale through parted lips. She breathes, and as she does so she erases those pictures from her mind. Her heartbeat slows, her limbs relax.

  She learned a lot that year she took care of Cora as she was dying. The snow, Cora had said, her voice barely audible, her thin hand in Apple’s. Oh how I love the snow.

  Apple feels her toes on the heater, her long body in its chair. One, two, three, exhale. It is working. She is growing sleepy. She is almost asleep, and in her half dream she is floating across that open, snow-covered field, spinning like the dancers down the hill. The refrigerator comes on, rattles, goes off. The wind picks up outside. Her boy is a small thing, suckling on her breast, and she is sure-of-heart for him. They are there by that abandoned cabin near the lake, her arms wrapped around him, his blood drying on her skirt, and she is whispering, Fine, baby, you’re fine. He is flying back over the ocean, toward her. He meets her somewhere in that dull sky, up above the field.

  A knock at the door and Apple startles. She opens her eyes and feels a momentary jolt of excitement. Sparrow? It is an old instinct. But the knock comes again and she is suddenly fully awake. A knock at the door. Her stomach dips, acid swarming. Isn’t this how it happens? Two retired marines, parking at the bottom of the hill and walking up the snow-covered road. Or just a couple of kids in their Blue Dress uniforms, not much older than Sparrow, death already in their eyes. Either way, two bodies standing there in the dark and cold, eyes turned down.