“Yes. Babies. Wouldn’t I make a good mother? We’re twenty-eight.”
I look down at my grass- and dirt-stained hands. “Yes,” I say to Kristy. “You would.”
A stick snaps in the woods to our left, and I look into the dark rim of trees. A ripple of fear crosses my skin. “Don’t you want kids?” Kristy asks.
“No,” I say. A breeze, scented of river, shoots across the field, and I burrow deeper into my sweater. I can hear Kristy breathing. “You’ll be a wonderful mom,” I say, at last, my voice lost in my throat. “The best.”
“I hope so,” she says. “I hope.”
I’m ten, maybe. I have a baby goat I’ve called my own—Penny—and three bantam hens who follow me everywhere I go. I put Penny in old cotton dresses I find in the attic; I put Penny in the cradle I find in the barn and rock her to sleep, singing. She sucks the bottle I give her. She looks into my eyes with devotion and love. She sucks my finger until it is tender and sore.
I walk down to the Maise farm. It’s noon and I don’t know why I’m walking that way; my feet lead me there. Jesse lives in a self-built house up the road, but he’s at the farm all day; he greets me at the doorway of the barn and smiles. “Done here,” he says, nodding toward the milk room. “Go somewhere?”
He drives the truck along the edge of a field to a place where the land slopes down to the creek, then rises up into a quilt of blue hills. It’s hot in the truck. A drop of sweat runs down my side. “I have something to tell you,” he says, cheeks reddening.
“Oh yeah?” I look out the window at the well-kept hillside, its lines straight, its fields clear with purpose. I imagine the story of a girl drowning, of where he was, or was not, at the time.
He wipes his upper lip on his sleeve, looks down at his hands. “Clem and I used to watch you and Kristy swimming down there.” He nods toward the Silver Creek, where Kristy and I used to skinny-dip all summer, sure no one could see us. “Thought we’d died and gone to heaven.”
I laugh, thinking of my gawky adolescent legs and tender, swelling breasts.
His cheeks explode in apple-colored splotches.
“I guess none of us grow up on an island,” I say. Neither of us moves. Another drop of sweat glides down my spine.
Jesse takes his hat off, rubs his forehead, puts the hat back on. I reach across the truck seat and touch his hand. His palm is dry, callused, not sweaty like mine.
“Hey, Jesse.” I look into his right eye, the one that looks like it is here, with me, not lost on other things.
“Yeah?”
“You ever seen a catamount around here?”
He smiles. “No. But I’ve heard them.”
“So they’re here.”
“I’ve seen tracks. I’ve heard them.”
I smile. I can’t help it. “That will make Joan very happy. I’m going to tell her you’re a believer.”
“I’ve heard them, for sure,” he says.
“Good,” I say, and he smiles and starts the truck and drives me home.
I call Matthew that night from the top of the field, the only place my cell phone gets reception. He asks when I’m coming home, and I tell him I don’t know; I tell him my mother still needs me. He asks again if he can come here, and I tell him no. He is silent. I think of his intelligent bookshelves, of how he prefers to make love in daylight, of how I always close my eyes.
I wake to a scream. It’s a terrible sound, the music of nightmares. I run downstairs to the screen porch, but my mother’s bed is empty, the covers tossed aside. I go to the door and am about to call out when I see her standing at the edge of the field, a lean silhouette bracing itself against the sky. I go closer; she is smiling, her eyes bright. “Cat,” she whispers. “Bobcat. Or maybe my friend the catamount. The most horrible sound in the world, the sound of a woman being raped, or dying.”
We stand there listening but the woods are silent. My heart is erratic, my cheeks hot with adrenaline.
“Why that scream?” I ask.
“Just their mating song,” my mother says. “It sounds like they’re dying, when in fact they’re in love.” She smiles then and we stand there in the dark for a while longer, waiting, the scent of cut hay coming from the field, the end of my mother’s cigarette aglow, but the woods are quiet. A minute passes before I realize she is shaking.
“Joan. You’re cold.”
“No, not cold.”
I put my arm around her. Her limbs are erratic, uncontainable.
“It’s out there,” she says, grinning. “Hannah baby, it’s out there.”
“I know, Joan. I know. I believe you.”
“It’s here. I can’t believe it’s fucking here.”
“I know,” I say. “I know.” I put my arms around her. She is all bone and skin. The withered body of a girl. “I believe you,” I say. “I believe.”
I crawl into bed with her; I don’t want to sleep alone. I reach for her hand under the sheets and hold it: thin, birdlike, a pocket of dry warmth.
“Hannah,” she whispers.
“Yes.”
“I’m happy here.”
“Yes.”
“Totally fucking happy here.”
“I know.”
“Grace and beauty.”
“I know.”
She sits up and lights a cigarette; the tip dances in the dark, streaking the way the lights of sparklers do. “Hannah,” she says.
“Yes.”
“I’m dying.”
“No you’re not.”
“Yes. It’s everywhere.”
“No.” I put my head in her lap and start to silently cry.
“Yes,” she says, “but it’s okay.” She strokes my hair back from my face. “It’s okay, baby-girl. Grace and beauty and life and love. It’s okay.”
“No,” I say, sobs raking through my chest now, her thighs like the wooden carcass of a boat, taking me out to some farther water.
“It’s okay,” she whispers, my snot and tears all over the warm skin of her legs. “It’s okay, baby. Okay.”
My mother turns fifty-four the last week of August and wants a party. I invite Kristy and her mom, Annie, and Jesse: there is no one else. My mother opens up her closet and pulls out an old dress I haven’t seen in twenty years—blue and green calico—and slips it over my shoulders. She slips a cream-colored one, dotted with holes, on herself, and hangs large turquoise-and-silver pendants from her ears. Her fingers brush my hair back away from my face. “Dashing,” she says. “So lovable.”
I shake my head and smile. We go out onto the porch, light candles, and wait.
At nine Kristy pulls up and leaps out of her truck. Her mom climbs out after her. This is rare: Annie leaving the house. Depression and medication and addiction, Kristy tells me, are fucking blue streaks through her family.
But Kristy’s all light. “Hippies!” she calls out. “Am I dreaming?” She pulls out a bag of liquor and ice. “Juleps?”
I get a pitcher and jars from the kitchen and grab a handful of mint from where it grows wild at the edge of the porch.
Kristy pours; I pound. My mother takes a sip, coos with delight. “Ah! Taste of heaven.”
“Thank you,” Annie says, taking hers and seating herself in a rocker. She says it like she means it, but also like she is five feet under, the cool flame of her heart near drowning.
Jesse arrives, his hands tucked deep into the pockets of his jeans. Kristy pours him a glass, and my mother pats the seat next to her on the glider. “What I want,” she says, smiling up at him, “is for you to sit next to me.”
Jesse smiles. “Okay,” he says, and sits in her chosen spot. He’s shaved and brushed his hair back from his face with water and is wearing a button-down shirt made of soft cotton. My mother leans against his shoulder. She puts her nose against his arm and breathes in. “Ah,” she says. “Goodness.”
I think I can see his cheeks redden, but he stays there, kindly. Kristy tells us about her day at the Stonewall: ketchup on white sh
irts, Calvin McLean asleep on the bar, the details of her boss, Rita’s, sex life. My mother giggles, laughs, coos. “Too much!” she calls out every few minutes. We get more drinks and listen to the crickets and the refrigerator buzzing and the distant growl of jake brakes on the highway. Annie’s eyes settle on the field and stay there.
“Jesse,” my mother says, “Hannah tells me you’ve heard the catamount.”
“Yes, I think so. I’ve heard it. Seen tracks in the mud near the pond.” My mother squeezes his arm, laughs. “Pour him another drink,” she calls out, and I do.
Jesse takes a sip of his drink and turns to my mother. “You know, when I was a kid, I used to think you were some kind of witch.”
My mother smiles, her body a carcass of blazing light. “Oh but I am. Reckless. Powerful. All-knowing.” Her body curves and twines in the seat; she is back to her old dazzling ways.
But she’s tired. She sets her drink down and closes her eyes. Annie finishes her drink, then excuses herself and steps off the porch into the dark. She’s beautiful still, like Kristy, under those shadows where she lingers. She climbs back into her truck, and Kristy watches her body turning, those headlights.
I go into the living room and put on Emmylou Harris’s Pieces of the Sky. We sit there facing the field listening to Emmylou’s voice and pedal steel spilling out over the hillside, twining around the trees. A candle flickers, burns out. My mother falls asleep on Jesse’s shoulder. Her body shudders. “You okay there?” I ask him.
He nods. “Fine.”
“I haven’t heard Joan’s music in fifteen years,” Kristy whispers. “Brings me back.”
“Me too,” I say. Bats flit in and out of the rafters, clouds lift, stars explode.
Jesse finishes his drink. “I should go,” he says.
I prop a few pillows under my mother’s head and help him slip out from under her. I walk with him to the door of his truck. He pauses for a moment and I touch his arm. “Thank you.”
Jesse smiles. “Hillside of catamounts and beautiful women. Can’t complain.”
“No,” I say, smiling. “Can’t complain.”
Later my mother rolls over and opens her eyes. “Girls,” she says. “What time does Jesse drive down the hill from his place to the farm?”
“Four thirty.”
“What time is it now?”
Kristy looks at her phone. “Midnight.”
“Wake me at four fifteen?”
Kristy and I look at each other. “Yes.”
We crouch in the weeds by the edge of the road. Kristy giggles; my mother burps. We are still part drunk; our knees and feet are soaked with dew. We hear a low rumble and see headlights streak across the trees and come down the road toward us.
“Now!” my mother calls out. We leap out of the ditch and start twirling in the road, our arms spinning above our heads.
“Hooo-hooo-hooo-hooo!” Kristy calls.
“Aaayeee!” my mother screeches. “Hee hee hee hee!”
“Creeaaww!” I say.
We are a cacophony of movement and wild sounds: cat, owl, coyote, crow. The truck rolls to a stop in front of us, its headlights ablaze across our twirling hair and spinning limbs. We throw our arms and thrust our hips; we shake our legs and toss our heads. My mother is laughing so hard she can no longer call out; her howls transform into sobs; Kristy’s have turned to hiccups. We are ridiculous, without music, dancing to our own desperate, uncensored rhythm. Then my mother straightens and slips her dress down off her shoulders. It falls to her waist and she bares her small breasts there in those headlights. Tears stream down her face, her neck, her chin.
I can just barely make out Jesse’s face through the glass of the windshield: eyebrows raised, mouth half open: grief, astonishment, wonder.
“Now go!” my mother calls. We leap across the ditch and stumble out into the field. My mother collapses into the grass. Jesse flips his lights off, honks once, then rolls the truck down the road toward the farm.
“Joan,” I say, turning her over onto my lap. I wipe her face with the sleeve of my dress. “Joan.”
“Oh my God,” she says, opening her eyes and spreading her arms. She looks up into our searching eyes. “Oh my good God,” she says, smiling.
We lay my mother on her cot and sit facing the field. Kristy reaches over and squeezes my hand, and I squeeze hers back. The field turns blue with mist, and I think of that catamount, panther, mountain lion at the edge of the field and want, more than anything right now, to see it streak across the grass, to feel its defiant energy and impossibility and light, but the woods are quiet except for the buzz of crickets and the snapping of the electric fence where it touches grass.
“Wild,” I say.
Kristy glances toward me. “Damn right,” she says, grinning and closing her eyes.
The women where I’m from, that is. I’m telling Matthew in my mind. They’re wild. Ridiculous. Alone in these houses. A cool breeze blows under the calico of my dress, licking my thighs. And me: in which house or field do I belong? The crickets are loud and everywhere. That same old, same old, same old love song.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ROBIN MACARTHUR earned her B.A. from Brown University and an M.F.A. in fiction writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in Hunger Mountain, Orion, Shenandoah, and Alaska Quarterly Review as well as on NPR. MacArthur is also the editor of Contemporary Vermont Fiction: An Anthology and is one-half of the indie folk duo Red Heart the Ticker, which has been featured on A Prairie Home Companion and NPR’s Morning Edition. She lives on the hillside where she was born in Marlboro, Vermont.
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CREDITS
Cover design and hand lettering by Sara Wood
Cover photographs © Shutterstock
Title page photograph by PlusONE/Shutterstock, Inc.
COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
HALF WILD. Copyright © 2016 by Robin MacArthur. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-244439-4
EPub Edition AUGUST 2016 ISBN 9780062444417
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