Half Wild

by Robin MacArthur

  “Goddamn snow,” Tub said, looking out the window, and I thought about how when we died no doubt someone would tear down our collection of rooms and build a nice big house, like all the other ones going up around these hills. But I didn’t care. If you learn one thing working with trees and woods and animals your whole life, it’s that something’s got to die in order for something new to grow. I thought of a couple of old stumps out in the woods, rotting and turning to dirt and making fertile ground.

  “Goddamn winter,” I said. We grinned at each other. And then Tub’s grin turned into something different, some kind of grimace, and a look of terror flew across his eyes, and I thought again of those love birds up in the hemlock trees above his dead folks’ stones, and I thought of them taking off, black against that blue-gray sky, and then Tub reached out toward me grasping for my hand, and I gave it to him, and that’s when I realized Tub was dying. It was the quickest death I’d ever seen, quicker than any of the animals I’d seen die, and I’d seen plenty. I dragged him over to the rug on the floor—not easy, you know, Tub was big, and I’m small—and I curled up next to him as he heaved his last breaths, and then as his blood cooled, and I spent the night like that, with my Tub, there in our house, holding on tight, watching it snow. And now it’s just me. And the horses. And the winter. And we’re getting by. And everything I thought that night about stumps and forever is true. Did you write that part down?

  11

  THE WOMEN WHERE I’M FROM

  My mother calls to tell me the farm is falling apart: fields overgrown with sumac, barn windows broken, the kitchen roof leaking water. She tells me her truck hasn’t started for a month, the veggie garden is standing water, and the one remaining goat is too old to milk and too sweet to kill. She laughs, takes a drag on her cigarette. “And Hannah baby,” she says. “I’ve got cancer. Breast.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I say. I’m at the kitchen sink in my apartment in Seattle, overlooking a Chinese restaurant and a biker café. She says it’s no big deal—the fixable kind—but that there are buckets of water scattered around the kitchen floor she just can’t keep up with. So like that I buy a plane ticket home.

  My rental car passes fields, trees, double-wides, barns. Ten years ago I left Vicksburg for art school, and I’ve only been back a few times since. I live with Matthew, a photographer with a trust fund, in a little apartment overlooking the bay. I work as a receptionist at a graphic design firm; late nights I drink too much Maker’s Mark alongside him and watch movies set in rural places like this one. Now I turn left onto Stark Road, right onto Fox, past Silver Creek, past a barn with a slipping roof-tin, a field full of abandoned cars, a farmhouse surrounded by rust-pocked pastel trailers.

  “What are the women where you’re from like?” Matthew asked last night as I sat on our bed stuffing clothes into a bag. He took off his Clark Kent glasses and gleaned me with his clear, dark eyes. “You don’t say much about your mother.” He is gentle, soft-fingered, in love.

  “I don’t know. Stubborn. Why?”

  He smiled. Kissed my bare foot. “Still trying to figure you out.”

  I laughed. Shifted my foot away.

  At dusk I pull into my mother’s driveway. Five years and the house looks the same: the large gray frame, slipping clapboards, sagging roof, a ghost surrounded by various outbuildings and barns. Her flower gardens are, as always, wild and bright and unkempt: William Baffin roses climbing up the porch rungs, daylily and Echinacea and phlox spilling out into the yard. But I take a deep breath when I see my mother. She stands barefoot in the wash of evening porch light in blue jeans and a gray silk dress peppered with holes. Her silver hair falls limp to her waist, her collarbones jut beneath her skin, her eyes are ringed by sockets of blue. At the edge of the porch we reach toward each other for a hug and her smell is overwhelmingly familiar—goat and the nutty tang of sweat and the rosewater she mists her face with—but there is another smell too: of sickness, or medicine, or both.

  “Hi, Joan,” I whisper into the crook of her neck.

  “Hi, baby,” she says, squeezing the skin of my arm, and I think, I’m home, and Sweet Jesus. I’d rather be anywhere else but here.

  We eat dinner on the porch: bowls of pasta, Mason jars of red wine.

  “Doctor’s orders?” I say, nodding toward the wine.

  My mother laughs. Shrugs her shoulders. The porch, like the rest of the house, is a mess: newspapers and books and cast-off sweaters coating every surface. She sits in a vinyl-covered glider; I sit in the lemon-colored two-hundred-year-old rocker she nursed me in until I was five.

  My mother puts her bowl down and picks up a pack of American Spirits. “Mind?”

  “Of course.”

  “Too bad,” she says, winking at me. “My evening ritual.” She lights a cigarette, closes her eyes, leans back into her chair, and starts talking. She says she’s been ripped off twice this year. Two months ago, she tells me, a young man wandered up the driveway looking for a place to stay, so she gave him a sleeping bag and offered him the hayloft; in the morning she discovered the sleeping bag and the cash from her wallet were gone. “Asshole,” she says, then tips her head back and laughs.

  I’m not surprised—it’s the story of her life. “Where’d you leave the wallet?”

  I don’t ask if she slept with him. The air is humid and smells of cut grass. I think of running across these fields when I was nine, trying to avoid the sound of my mother’s boyfriend-at-the-time Kenny’s guitar strumming incessant Steely Dan tunes. I think of how I had hoped then she would follow after me, throw her arms around me, ask about my sadness, and how she did not.

  “What? Oh. It was in the car.”

  “And the second time?”

  “Tools from the barn.”

  She tells another story: two weeks ago her Saab broke down on her way home from skinny-dipping at Sunset Lake. She had nothing on but a wet, see-through cotton dress. She giggles, snorts a little. “I had to stand by the side of the road like that with my thumb out until Joe Maise’s young son—you know, the cute farmer who lives up the road—came by and picked me up.” Again she laughs, tosses her thinning hair over her shoulder.

  I don’t laugh. I picture her thin body under translucent cotton by the side of the road, gray hair plastered to her scalp, and wonder what the young farmer thought as my mother climbed into his truck. I imagine him turning away, kindly.

  She takes a drag of her cigarette and looks toward the pale sky that hovers above the dark field and the even darker line of trees, then reaches over and takes my hand in hers and squeezes it. She’s lived here for forty years, the last ten of those more or less alone. “So. Hannah baby. You’re home.”

  “Yes.”

  She turns toward me and smiles. “Pertier than ever.”

  “Thank you,” I say, returning her gaze, but really in this light it’s my mother who suddenly appears more beautiful than ever: as if this thinning is paring her down to her essential features, which have always been more classic than mine: Katharine Hepburn amidst the falling-in house and overgrown fields. Grey Gardens amidst the pines. The light in her eyes is dim, the rings around them dark as river stones.

  “I’m glad you’re back,” she says, closing her eyes. Mosquitoes swarm the porch light; she slips a sweatshirt over her head that says RODEO BAR in pink faded letters.

  “Me too,” I say, looking down at my hands, down at my boots. “Me too.”

  The Stonewall Tavern sits tucked between trees at the edge of Route 100. I push the door open, and a cloud of music and smoke drifts past me. “No way! I can’t believe you’re back in town for real! This is so goddamn cool,” my oldest friend, Kristy, calls out from behind the bar, her arms raised toward me.

  “Yes it is,” I say, smiling and leaning across the counter for a hug. She smells like jasmine and roses, and her smile is a beam of sunlight amidst the dark paneled walls of the room.

  “So. What’s the Wild West like?” she asks. She has changed little on the
outside since we were eighteen: radiant dark skin, an electric smile, a tattoo of a swallow on her left arm, a twining rose on her right. I glance up at the taxidermied bobcat strung to the wall, its yellow eyes boring holes through the room.

  “It’s good. Badass and good.”

  “I can’t wait to hear all about it.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Sometime.” Though I wonder how I’ll sum it up to this friend who has never lived anywhere but here: the vegan strip clubs popping up in my neighborhood, Matthew’s unpeopled and pristine landscapes—full of romanticism and yearning. When we were twelve Kristy’s dad, Trevor, killed himself by jumping off an interstate bridge into the shallow waters of Silver Creek. I spent that night on the floor next to her bed; our lives were once as entwined as fence post and honeysuckle. Now she still lives with her mom, Annie, down the hill from my mother’s farm in a blue double-wide and tends bar and has never left this town, a stone’s throw from Boston, or New York, or numerous other places she could have fled to, for any substantial amount of time. What is it, this tether?

  “Nice to see your radiant face, Kristy,” I say, placing my hand on her silver-ring-studded fingers atop the well-loved wood of the bar. She squeezes my hand and grins and hands me a shot of Maker’s Mark.

  I take a sip and glance around at the other people in the bar: Jason Dewey and Brian Cole, boys I knew in high school who are no longer boys. Jason was in Iraq for a while with the National Guard, I’ve been told. I’m glad he came back alive. I nod to them and they nod back. Goat woman, they, and others, called my mother. Stinking rich, they said loud enough for me to hear. They all knew she was a surgeon’s daughter from elsewhere. “Jason,” Kristy whispers to me over the counter, “is married to Tammy Bates now, and Brian has a kid with Liz Clay.” I nod. When I left home it was breathing easy for the first time.

  I finish my drink and order another and watch the dance Kristy puts on there behind the counter: all swivels and hips and flicks of the wrist. She leans her elbows on the bar and puts her head close to mine. “I heard about Joan. Being sick.”

  I nod. “I think she’ll be okay.”

  “I know she will,” she says, and squeezes my hand. I squeeze hers back and think of my mother’s collapsing house and thinning body, of how she has made her mistakes—loser men, loneliness, drink—with such unfaltering surety, it shakes my mind. I think of Kristy’s mom, Annie, in her blue double-wide, addicted to opiates and her occasional bouts with heroin.

  “Hey, Han,” Kristy says.

  “Yeah?”

  “Let’s be hippies this summer.”

  I laugh. It’s an old joke. We spent whole summers in my mother’s dresses.

  “Yes, let’s,” I say, smiling.

  She squeezes my elbow. “Man, we are going to have a ball.”

  “Yes, we are,” I say quietly. “We sure as hell are.”

  My mother sits at the upright piano playing one-handed Bach; in her other hand she holds a jar of wine. She tips her head back toward me as I approach and kisses my cheek. Her lips are stained; her breath, like mine, is all fermentation. Photos hang on the wall above the piano: my mother naked with a hoe in the garden; my mother pressing apples in front of the barn; twenty hippies square dancing in the south-facing field. For a while ten or more people lived here, and their parties were infamous. Friends of friends came, driving north from Boston and New York to press apples and pitch hay and shovel shit. My father was one of them. Which one, I don’t know. There are pictures of me, too: long-haired and half naked, running through grass; flying through the air on a swing hung from the rafters of the barn; clutching an Araucana bantam to my breast and laughing. The commune was over by then; it was just me and her. Still: the girl in the photos looks too impossibly uninhibited and at home in these fields to be me. My legs streaks of muscle, my hair: sunlight. When did I change?

  My mother stops playing and looks up. “Hey, Hannah,” she says. Candlelight flickers across her face.

  “Yeah.”

  “You remember that cat I saw? The catamount?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think it’s around again.”

  When I was twelve she swore she saw a catamount. She was standing at the far end of the field fixing a spot in the electric fence when she felt the presence of something and turned. There it was at the edge of the woods, twenty feet away amidst the blackberries and pin cherries, standing stock-still, looking right at her. Big as a Saint Bernard, quivering brown fur and electric brown eyes, she told me that day when I got off the bus, the thin bones in her hands liquid with excitement.

  It was the age when I began to fall out of love with her. Twelve: I so desperately wanted something other.

  “There are sightings, you know,” she says now. Her eyes have that same glint of light from seventeen years ago. “Those assholes at Fish and Game don’t believe it, but people are seeing them.”

  The officials said it must have been something else—a large bobcat or a Canadian lynx, that catamounts hadn’t populated these woods since the 1880s, but she got a book out of the library and showed me pictures of the Eastern catamount. That’s what it was, she said. That and none other. She tore out the picture of the puma concolor and tacked it to our kitchen door. Eastern catamount. Puma. Cougar. Mountain lion.

  “That would be cool, if it’s back around,” I say, unbelieving.

  “Yes,” she says, returning to her one-handed Bach. I climb the stairs to my old room: west-facing drafty windows, low eaves, ancient wallpaper covered in little blue ships sailing across a choppy sea. A few of my old things are here: piles of artwork, boxes of journals, books. I slip between the thin flannel sheets and think of that fantastical cat prowling, of my mother downstairs, drunk at the piano. On the wall above my bed are posters of Joan Jett, Patti Smith, and Nina Simone. This, I would say to Matthew, were he to ask me now. My head spins; the wallpaper blurs; the little ships take flight into air. This is what the women are like where I am from.

  I wake early, make coffee, and start cleaning the house. I clear clothes and books and newspapers off the kitchen table, run dust rags over the counters, load empty wine bottles from the pantry into the back of my mother’s Saab.

  At ten she comes in from the screen porch where she sleeps during the summer. She brushes her hair away from her face and looks around. “My God!” she yelps. “An angel descended on me.” She puts her arms around my shoulders and kisses me on the cheek, her breath stale and her lips still stained with wine. “Ay,” she says. “And I need coffee.”

  I make her coffee and eggs and think of telling her that she should shower—I can smell her from where I stand—but don’t. I sit down opposite her. “Tell me,” I say.

  “What?” She sips her coffee, her eyes darting from surface to surface.

  “You’re sick.”

  “No. Not sick. Not sick yet. Hannah baby . . .”

  “Yes?”

  She looks at me now, her eyes steady. “You don’t have to take care of me. That isn’t why I wanted you to come back.”

  “I know.”

  She sips her coffee and stares out the window toward the barn. “I just wanted you to come back.”

  “I know,” I say. “I know.”

  “So long as you know. Because life is still all honey. All honey.”

  “Okay,” I say. I don’t meet her eyes.

  I walk across the field and into the woods to the old Stark cemetery. In grade school Kristy and I used to come here to trace the names of women and children etched into the stones: Zipporah, Constance, Faith, Desire—her relatives, distantly, from two hundred years ago. Later, in middle school, we would come to the same spot and pretend we were making out with boys: lay our bodies on the rotting leaves and wet moss, close our eyes, and imagine doe-eyed, sweet, and handsome boys leaning over our faces, touching our limbs, saying our names out loud. Kristy. Hannah. Kristy. Hannah.

  Today trillium blooms amidst the twisted, toothlike stones that heave out of the leaves an
d dirt. I lie down like Kristy and I used to do, close my eyes, and feel the sun on my face. Constance, Faith, Desire? Matthew wants me to bring him here, wants to meet my mother, wants to know and draw the shape of these fields. Matthew: a kind-hearted boy from the suburbs of Minneapolis. “You’re slippery,” he said before I left, rubbing his thumb down my spine, his eyes cloaked in sadness.

  I said, “There are two worlds I won’t ever belong to. Home or any other.”

  He smiled, blinked: utterly confused.

  The next day I follow my mother out to the barn to feed Stella, the twenty-year-old goat with phosphorescent green eyes, a long beard, and splayed bottom teeth. “Ugly, huh?” my mother says, grinning.

  Blaaat, Stella replies.

  My mother scratches the fur beneath Stella’s chin, feeds her raisins from her palm. “I want to leave this world like you,” she half mutters to the goat, so quiet I can barely hear. “Not in a fucking white gown. Not with my tits cut off. Stella baby,” she says, scratching the goat’s chin again, and Stella butts her head into my mother’s breast, and I think how this goat has taken the place of love and friendship and family. “You know how to go, don’t you,” she whispers into the floppy, mottled ear. “You know how to go.”

  She turns to me. “Know what the Kennedy Center’s motto is?”

  “No.”

  “I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace or beauty. JFK said that. Isn’t that lovely?”

  “Yes,” I say, trailing, as always, the roller coaster of her mind. “Yes, it is.” But really what I want to know is how long I am here for, and how to fix her roof, and her body, and her mind.

  “What about the roof?” I ask.

  My mother turns from me and walks out the door. “Oh, that,” she calls out behind her. “Can wait.”

  A man leans against the bar next to me and orders an Otter Creek. His arms are tan below the sleeve of his T-shirt; thinning brown hair dips into his eyes. He pays Kristy for the drink, then turns to me. “Hannah, right?”