“Funny,” the woman said again. “She would come into town and stand at the market door to watch people going in and out. And when Nick Wallis complained, she folded her arms and asked him what he thought she should do about it.”
“Esther is strong-headed, certainly.”
“She wasn’t like any other girl I’ve known.” The woman stepped to my side, squinting as if to match the drawings to some likeness in her head. How similar she was to her sister—that hair a frizz around her ears and her cheeks fat, her eyes only slits, though this sister had blue instead of brown. “Don’t you think those pictures are strange?” she started. “Aren’t the girls a good year older now, at the very least?”
I drove another nail. “My sister Agnes did her best from a photograph. It was the most recent we had.”
“When my girls were that age, they changed every month. My daughter’s hair turned black and she was thin as a reed in less than a year. But that’s the way with daughters.”
“They aren’t my daughters.”
“That’s right, your mother, poor thing . . .”
I headed off, determined to hang all the posters I could. “It was nice seeing you, Mrs. Clark.”
She came after me in little bird steps. “No, no. Mrs. Meyers. You’ve gotten me and my sister confused. Of course, she is your neighbor.” The woman looked at me blankly. That’s what I remembered of the sister, then—she was a bit off in the head. Mrs. Clark, she was right as rain. “All I was trying to say,” she went on, “is, what good will it do? With that picture so old?”
“It’s only a year.”
“You don’t understand. Why, my own brother went off like that. He was a grown man. Thirty-two years old. I can’t imagine seeing him now.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
She waved the words away. “All I’m saying is, sometimes it’s best to let things lie. I don’t know what I would do if I discovered Eddie on my porch today. Scare me to death.”
I stopped and Mrs. Meyers came up short beside me. “You wouldn’t be happy to see him?”
“Oh no, certainly not. It’d feel like a ghost knocking on my door. Like the dead. Nothing good could come of it. I think once people have gone strange, they aren’t relations anymore, and you don’t want any of those fists to come hammering. I wouldn’t invite my own twin in after that.”
If the brother was anything like the sisters, I pictured Mrs. Meyers opening the door to her very own image and shutting it at once. Behind me, she made her farewells and walked off. In the wind, the poster I’d hung had ripped at the corner, a tear that crossed Esther’s forehead. I tacked it together. Myrle peered out from the other side, her chin longer than I thought right. Agnes with her pencil, sketching one face after another—but over the weeks, her drawings had grown careless and my sisters seemed little but strangers. If we ever had a chance to open that door, how much would they have changed?
“You shouldn’t listen to her.”
“Excuse me?” I turned. Carl McNulty stood watching me, and I stepped back. He raised a hand in surrender and only then did I realize the hammer was still in my grip, cocked as if I might strike.
“I said you shouldn’t listen to her.” He reached for my arm, pressing his thumb against the underside of my wrist. With a slow sweep of his hand, he lowered it. How well I knew the smell of him, sour like milking—and underneath, that warm cedar. Something of your own, Dora had said. I closed my eyes and saw instead a fence with four sides and an easy spot of land in between, the fence painted blue. I had dreamed of such a place ever since Mother went. When I looked up again, Carl had released my wrist. My skin felt terribly cold and I drew down my sleeve.
“Hello, Nan,” he said.
“Carl,” I said at last.
“I was wondering where you’d gone.”
“I haven’t gone anywhere.”
“Neither have I,” he said. “At least not for a while.”
“Carl, look at you. I’m afraid we couldn’t stop the other day. We were . . .”
“Not much, am I?”
“I was sorry to hear about your mother.”
“And yours.” He paused, seeing the poster above my head. When his eyes fell to me again, his grin had its old mischievous twist, though now he seemed as slow and even-tempered as his name.
“You must be alone in that house,” I said. “You must be all by yourself.”
“I’ve grown used to it.”
“You have?”
He drew his hand through his hair, looking at the poster again and off down the street. The whole of Main appeared abandoned. How often I’d imagined that farm all his own, the quiet of this man and the house to ourselves, blue fence or no.
“I guess not.” He caught my eye. “I should make you a visit.”
“That would be all right.”
He took the hammer from me. Wrenching the lowest nail from the poster, he fixed Esther’s face, the way she must have looked those many months ago, when he might have seen her himself. He smiled at me then, slid the rest of the posters from under my arm, and carried them down the street until he’d hung them. At last, he turned back to me and slipped the hammer in my bag.
“It’s cold as a brass button, don’t you think?” He took my hand and I let him, leading me down a narrow alley, one I had never dared walk through by myself. Behind the low row of buildings, he knocked on a door. When it opened, an old man in an undershirt stood on the other side, the white crown of his hair twisted from sleep. The man’s face colored, and he reached for a jacket. “Give me some warning with company, mind you,” he said. “Come in, come in, before you freeze yourselves.”
In a circle of lamplight, he sat us at a small wooden table and brought cups of hot milk with cinnamon. Canvas sacks lined the walls, the stink of meat. It was the back room of the traders, I guessed, and the man himself, he seemed to live there—a simple cot pushed up against the wall, a small stove, and a shelf of dry and canned foods. I hadn’t recognized him when he opened the door, not in that state of dress.
“Nan, is it?” he said.
“I didn’t know you at first.”
“The eldest Hess girl. Yes, I remember you. But never so tall. How’s the family? Your father?” He caught himself and dropped both elbows on the table.
“It’s all right, Dennis,” Carl said.
But Dennis squeezed his knuckles. “Such an awful thing. I’m sorry, I am. I heard about the girls. But for a minute I didn’t. Do you have minutes like that? Sometimes I wish they’d last.”
I felt the cup warm between my fingers and thought back to both my sisters’ faces, posted high on wooden planks. “Why do you wish that?”
“Sometimes it’s not so bad to forget a thing.”
I let myself smile. “I’d never have known you were here. In town, I mean. Your windows are dark.”
“Dennis likes to keep to himself,” Carl said.
“Until this man here interrupts. But I suppose I can take interruptions from someone like him.” Dennis eyed Carl’s limp sleeve. “His mother was a good woman. Awfully good. And Carl, he’s a hero to us. Any more of that, miss?”
My cup was empty. I wondered how long we had sat together in this room, and why I didn’t mind, with so much to do at home. I licked the cinnamon from my lips.
“I better get her home, Dennis. Don’t want to stay past staying time.”
“I suppose it is after staying time, isn’t it? Whatever time that is. Not that it’s a bother. The two of you can come in for a warm-up whenever you like.”
I stood, my head heavy, the taste of milk on my tongue. Carl carried the cups to the sink, the fit of his coat tight across his shoulders, and the pale hair at the back of his neck clean and soft—like it had always been.
“Remember your bag here, miss,” Dennis said. Carl picked it up himself.
In the cold, I pulled my scarf to my chin. Carl carried my bag over his shoulder. With a smile, he tugged at the sleeve of my coat. “A good friend,” he said. “Since the war, at least.”
“I never knew him. Not really.”
“You’ve grown up here same as me.”
“But I’m different.”
“What’s so different?” He opened his hand between us, as if together we might find an answer in his empty palm. I felt the warmth of that room still, and the words of a stranger easy in my presence. Not for years had I heard so many words at once from a person outside my own family, none that were kind. Now because of Carl, I had. There had always been a lightness to this man, no matter that pinned sleeve, as if nothing in the past mattered and never truly would. He stared down at his feet, the wind pulling at the hems of his coat. “You’ll be needing a ride then, won’t you?”
I kicked the toe of his boot.
The way home was slow and clear. We rode together in his wagon, not a word more. It felt fine sitting there on the steerage, the wagon rocking, and the wool of Carl’s trousers against my hip. The turn of our road appeared up ahead. Carl led the horses easily and I leaned into him around the bend. Soon the road straightened. Little changed, I thought, leaning away again. The lane stretched through the fields. The trees and hillocks were the same, every hill of grass so clearly set in my mind, every fence—and the sound of the river against the rocks, though we were some distance from the house. How could I ever imagine anything different?
“You can leave me here,” I said.
“Here?”
“Please.”
He stopped the horses short and I stepped out. The slope of our roof rose dully ahead, a run of smoke from the chimney. “I had been hoping to see you, Nan,” Carl called after me.
I turned.
“I’d been hoping for a while,” he said.
“So why didn’t you?”
“I wasn’t sure if you’d changed your mind. About what I’d asked.”
“Mother died.”
“I know it.”
“I had to stay home for the girls.”
He sighed. “And do you have to stay home now?”
“Now?” My eyes teared. “I haven’t been much good, have I? My sisters must have hated me to do what they did.”
“You don’t know what they did, do you?”
I couldn’t answer that. Carl looked over the fields. There wasn’t anything to see on the horizon, not anything that might be called living, and the sound of the river was a maddening thing.
“If I made another visit to you,” he asked, “would that be all right?”
“I don’t think . . .”
He snapped the reins.
“Yes,” I answered. “Yes, it would.”
He smiled and tipped his hat. “All right.” I waited until he was well out of sight, listening as the break of his wheels faded. At the bank, I watched the water and its muddy track. What trees there were had fallen, stripped of their bark. The ground underfoot was spongy and soft. The river cut the land in two, on one side our neighbors’ acres and on the other our own, stretching so far at either end I had never found its source. A run of blackened leaves and twigs clung to the surface. They would drown soon enough. The keys were still in my pocket. When I fished them out, they glinted in my palm. With a shout, I threw them into the river, where I hoped the water would take them, as it did everything else.
III
It snowed. At first only a fine powder, but by the beginning of December, we had two feet or more. The animals stayed in their stalls. At the troughs, the cows kept their heads to their chests. We should have known from the coats on our horses that winter would be a trial, how the ears hung from the corn even before harvest. Now the air had turned to ice. Our layers offered little to protect us. Soon the snow grew high as the windowsills. Farther off in the fields, the fence posts jutted from the drifts, the only sign of our summer work. We tied a rope from the front porch to our outbuildings in case of storm.
We had known difficult winters in years past. During the war, we couldn’t say they weren’t a relief. The road to town became no more than a track, our sleigh old, kept only for sickness or accidents, and the wagon near to worthless. We planned our food stores well enough to carry us for months. Otherwise, we stayed to ourselves, eager to imagine that the town and our neighbors had forgotten us. With the few hours of daylight, there were only the animals to look after and the work in the barn.
But now with Esther and Myrle gone, I let myself sleep late in the mornings and did my mending by the fire in the dark afternoons, Agnes and Patricia at my side. The parlor smelled of wool, the walls seeming to thicken. When the wind was up, we felt ourselves drifting. Two girls, I imagined, their dresses no match for such weather, their judgment even the worse. If not for some terrible company, they surely couldn’t make it through the winter alone.
“Nan, you’re doing it again.” Agnes sat in the corner with her book. “Stop picking.” I looked down at my fingers—the small bloody tears—and took up my stitching again.
“Those poor girls,” Patricia said. “What would their mother think?”
“You didn’t know our mother,” Agnes said.
“I heard about her plenty from Ray. Never seen a man so miss his mother.”
Agnes gave me a look. I shook my head to keep her quiet.
“Except that Carl McNulty,” Patricia went on. “The way his mother went, while he was over there fighting. Fancy seeing him again. So changed.”
“Patricia, can you please hush?” Agnes asked.
“He brought me home,” I said.
Patricia caught her breath. “When?”
“Just the other week.”
Agnes stared. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I didn’t think it worth telling.”
“My, my, isn’t life strange.” Patricia shifted in her chair, and the clock on the mantel skipped ahead. Agnes went back to her book, the skin of her throat flushed. Patricia hummed to herself. “That boy, out there all alone on his place. I sure do think he loved you, Nan. But I suppose a woman’s feelings change.”
My thread caught. “They didn’t change. Carl left for the war and I stayed where I was needed.”
“I suppose,” Patricia said.
Agnes rifled through her pages. Now and again I caught her stare, but I dropped my head.
“When I met Ray,” Patricia went on. “I thought I’d never seen a boy so handsome. Right out of the magazines. I’m sure I never told you.”
“Yes, you did,” Agnes said.
“A lonely boy. So much expected of him. He explained how your father counted on him and him alone. Of course, that’s why he never could marry, he said. Until your poor mother . . .” She clicked her tongue. “Then it was a different story, wasn’t it? She was always one of my favorites, your mother. A terrible time.”
Agnes sighed. “How terrible was it, Patricia?”
“Oh, that war. If only she could have lasted until it was over.” She shook her head. “I’m just saying when a boy loses his mother, he needs a woman by him. Boys like that, they’re no good at doing for themselves. With Ray, I had to wait him out. Maybe if you gave your Carl another chance.”
Agnes slammed the cover of her book. “Agnes,” I said. Those fingers of mine pulsed as if my heart beat in them.
“Another chance,” I repeated, as if such a thing were easy. “With the girls gone?”
The kitchen door banged, a rush of wind. Ray stomped his boots on the mat and found us in the parlor. He held up his hands to the fire. His cheeks glowed as if feverish, his bad hand gnarled in the light of the flame. Without a word, he dropped another piece of wood on the pile.
“Ray, did you see to the stockyard fence?” I asked. “I thought I saw a post down.”
Ray
grunted and swiped at a lock of hair on his forehead. He put on his cap.
“Aren’t you staying?” Patricia asked.
“Can’t,” he said. He brushed by her hand and went out. Past the windows again, my brother stumbled through the drifts, a blur of darkness.
“He misses them too,” Patricia said. “I know you don’t believe me, but that man is just as sorry as the rest of us.”
It was late the next morning when I spied Ray far off in the pasture, kicking at the snow. It was a blustery day, ice in my collar. In such weather as this, we feared for storm. Ray kneaded at the back of his neck. As I walked closer, the hindquarters of our brood cow showed by the barbed fence, her legs twisted and bloodied where she must have fallen. Ray took the animal’s head in his hands and tried to move it, tried to place his fingers beneath her stomach, but she was frozen in the snowmelt. He stood, the wind hard against him.
I touched his shoulder.
“Nan.” He wiped his eyes before he turned.
“Is she gone?”
He nodded.
“What was it?”
“Caught her foot on the barbs. I don’t know why she would have wandered so far. Went off by instinct and got into trouble. Probably didn’t see the wire until it was too late.” He lifted her hoof with the wire wound tight, the skin bloody and bitten through to the bone. Her mouth was bloody too. “She tried to free herself.”
I touched the cow’s flank. “What should we do?”
“I can’t carry her myself. She’s well frozen.”
“What about the horses?”
“We’d have to clear a path for them all the way from the corrals.”
I sighed. “She couldn’t have been out more than one night. Agnes told me she heard her calf crying only this morning.”
Ray nodded.
“We’ll have to leave her.”
“I thought of that. But it could be May before we’d have her out. The dogs might get her. Wolves, too.”
“Then the wolves will get her.”
“This close to the barn, those wolves might think there’s more.” Ray went quiet, looking into the white of the fields. “Get the knives.”
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