“You won’t.”
“Not now, or not ever?”
“Never.”
“Then it will always be there between us?”
“Let it go, Nell.”
“I can’t.”
“Look. I have to swim against that current every day of my life. Or it will carry me away.”
“Billy, too?”
“All of us.”
Shrapnel keeps making its way to the surface, bursting through the skin, interior knives waiting to ambush his sleep. Billy wakes, massages his arm. Feels the nausea rising and the pain moving through his hand, arm, and shoulder, up his neck into his head, lodging behind his eyes. Piling images into him with each flicker of an eyelid, jumbled, out of sequence, but no less horrifying.
He presses the heels of his hands over his eyes, concentrates on his breathing. Waits. Breaks into a cold sweat as the nausea recedes. It’s almost an hour before he can get up. He takes a long hot shower, dresses in jeans and an old flannel shirt. Feels almost human again.
Flanagan follows him up the rutted road to the Alsops’ farm. It’s steeper than he remembers. He stops halfway, the ringing in his ears amplified by his ragged breathing. The VA doctors tell him this is a typical complaint of returning soldiers. It might get better. It might not. Some days are almost tolerable, other days the internal buzz and hiss takes on a life of their own. The worst is when an intense spell of tinnitus overlaps with a headache, constricting his world to a tight, sick circle.
He fantasizes about being deaf, imagines a blessed silence.
Then he hears an ovenbird, its middle notes at least. Tea-cher, Tea-cher, Tea-cher. The high notes can’t penetrate the ringing in his ears. The low notes, shit, he’s starting to think the low notes might be gone forever. He lets the sound wash over him. Waits for more. The trill of a towhee: Drink your teeee . . .
Maybe it’s getting better. If he can just be patient. Not his strong suit. Still.
Asa waits for him by the barn, the tractor idling. A cloud of exhaust hangs heavy in the air. Without preamble, he leads Billy into the feed room, shows him the bins of grain for the chickens and the goats, the rakes and shovels; then outside to the water pump, the wheelbarrow, the manure pile. He uses his hands with as little regard as if they were old iron tools. Billy envies him.
“Straw and hay are in the loft. Can you manage that or should I throw them down?”
“We’ll find out.”
“I’ll throw them down until you tell me different.”
“Sounds good,” Billy says.
“Can I count on you? Every morning?”
“Yes.”
“You’re no use to me if I can’t count on you.”
“I’ll be here. Juniper still the big boss?”
“He’s getting old.”
“How many kids this year?”
“Six. Two sets of twins. Can you drive the eggs into town? Schuyler wants them Tuesdays and Thursdays. You can take the truck.”
“I’m a one-handed driver at the moment.”
“I can’t pay you much.”
“I’m not worth much.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Only a friend would hire a one-armed man.”
“You’ve still got both arms, far as I can see. Luckier than some.”
“Some days I don’t feel so lucky. But I take your point.”
“Your mother did some worrying over you.”
“I’m sorry about Megan.”
“Not a subject I can talk about.”
“Understood.”
“I’ll leave you to it.”
Asa swings up onto the tractor and drives up the hill, the harrow rattling behind him.
Walking past the stalls, Billy sees Megan’s green sweater hanging on a hook in the tack room. Reaches for it. Brings it to his face. Inhales. No trace of her. It’s like a kick in the gut.
He knows he’s a fool holding that sweater in his hands, wishing things could be different, wishing, really, for anything at all.
By week’s end, Billy has started to solve the puzzle of how to use tools one-handed. He asks for Asa’s help with the wheelbarrow. He brings two sets of straps to attach to the handles: one to go over his neck, the other around his waist. They set it up only to discover it’s impossible to balance a wheelbarrow with one hand.
His frustration erupts in combinations of profanity Asa has never heard before.
“You bring that one back from Vietnam?”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. I get a kick out of it.”
The next morning Billy drags a beat-up toboggan up the hill. He figures if he can’t push a wheelbarrow, he can pull a sled with a simple chest harness. Asa helps him rig the straps.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Asa says when it works.
Using his good hand to brace a snow shovel against his hip, Billy pushes dirty straw and bedding onto the sled, which he then pulls out to the manure pile. It’s not a perfect system, but if he makes a mess the chickens don’t care.
He takes a child’s pleasure in finding eggs, warm in their nesting boxes. More than once he falls asleep in the loft. Punch-drunk with exhaustion, he surrenders to the warm sweet hay. The kids climb the ramp and nibble his fingers as if each one were a milk-filled teat. They cry at him, pure as woodwinds. He starts to name them. The littlest one, Lucy, will come when he calls.
He finds a Carolina wren’s nest in an old wooden box nailed inside the barn door. The box had been used by one of Asa’s broody hens and is full of straw. In one corner, the wren has made a cavity to receive her nest, built with grasses, feathers, moss, and pieces of dried snakeskin. Her eggs are whitish, marked with spots and speckles of reddish brown.
The animals calm him, the work itself. This world that harbors good earth and apples and bees and birds. The sweep of the fields up to the woods, Asa’s hay and timothy greening, the cultivated and the untamed side by side.
He sits against the haymow, sheltered from the wind, the strengthening sun promising warmth. Looks down the long sweep of the hill to the lake. Clouds like elephants are reflected in the water, a piercing blue.
Flanagan barks furiously; she’s treed something in the woods behind him. Overhead a flock of geese appears, landing on the far side of the lake.
He thinks of Megan, remembers waking up in the loft to find her beside him. How fearless they were.
He has to shut his mind to her or risk a rage he knows he can’t contain.
After helping Asa in the early mornings, Billy hitchhikes into town to pump gas at Harlow Murphy’s station.
Hiring Billy frees Harlow to spend his afternoons in the garage, which, if he’s not outside tracking, trapping, or hunting, is where he likes to be. He understands the insides of cars the way some men understand women. He has an ear for hearing what ails an engine, and a fine-fingered touch.
Harlow’s boyish good looks have hardened but haven’t disappeared. With Billy on board, even their workmen’s coveralls can’t hide their appeal. High school and college girls find them, their friends, and friends of friends.
He installs a soda machine to take advantage, get them to hang around long enough to buy a Coke and a pack of smokes. The girls pull in, one after another, driving daddy’s car, a couple bucks in their pocket, drawn by the allure of good-looking men, the staying power of hurting boys.
It’s almost too easy to be interesting.
Harlow thought he was doing Billy a favor by taking him on. Now that his gas business has doubled, he’s grateful. He knows enough to leave Billy alone as he learns to do his job one-handed.
Billy struggles with the work, but after two weeks it no longer takes him twice as long to do every single thing: popping hoods, checking oil, washing windows, unscrewing the always too tight gas caps, making change. He all
owed himself to drink away his first week’s pay. Now he gives his paycheck to his mother. A drop in the bucket for his hospital bills.
Biking downtown one day, Nell sees Billy standing alone against the plate-glass window, smoking a cigarette, his hurt hand shoved deep in the pocket of his filthy coveralls. The scars along his jaw and neck are still vivid and angry looking. Joe Cocker blares from the transistor radio in the office. With a little help, with a little help, with a little help from my . . .
She stops at the far corner, in shadow. He looks trapped and miserable, enduring the asphalt, the stink of oil and gasoline. Two college girls drive up in a flashy Camaro. Billy grinds out his cigarette and walks over to the driver’s side. He puts both hands on the roof of the car, leans in the window, flirting.
Playing a part.
The girls wear ragged denim and gauzy peasant blouses you can see through. Marion would say you have to have a lot of money to dress like that.
Harlow walks out of the garage, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. He feeds quarters into the soda machine for two bottles of Coke, hands one to Billy.
Billy finishes with the Camaro, the college girls suddenly invisible, and leans against the plate glass, talking with Harlow. And laughing.
Something lifts in Nell, hearing her brother laugh like that.
She looks at Harlow’s hands. They’re square and strong; the Coke bottle almost disappears in them. Thinks of picking apples in the Alsop orchard. The boys thought ladders were for sissies. Determined to keep up with them, she tried to find a handhold and a foothold to get into the tree. Harlow reached down, grabbed her forearm, and pulled her up beside him.
That sudden wash of closeness as she found her footing and her balance. The smell of his skin, touching him. The sun low in the sky, the trees heavy with fruit. Hidden from the others. Light-headed. Vibrating with a feeling she didn’t know how to describe. Twelve years old. How she had wanted to kiss him.
Still does. But it doesn’t look like that’s ever gonna happen again.
The Methodist church bells chime the hour: four o’clock. Damn, she’s late for work. She turns up Hamilton Street, hightailing it to Bob and Dave’s. As she passes Maeve Alsop’s apartment, tucked over the garage behind a larger house, Asa’s truck pulls out, heading north. She stops, curious. The forsythia by Maeve’s front door is in full bloom. A basket of eggs and the yellow cups from the farmhouse sit on the porch.
How often does Asa stop here, she wonders, leaving offerings for Maeve and Evan, maybe glancing in the windows to see what their lives look like without him.
Billy leaves the garage, needing to clear his head. He keeps trying to come to terms with Megan being gone, accept it somehow, believe it. His resistance to the facts is wearing thin. Every glimpse of red hair is her, suddenly her. He turns, follows, heart banging, hope fizzing, until he gets closer and sees that this girl toes out, not in as Megan does, or she is taller, shorter, older, younger, nothing like her really, nothing at all like Megan, and the vertigo of the word “missing” swamps him again and again.
He takes the jog on Exchange to follow Castle Street into the center of town, the head of the lake just beyond. Passes Saint Joe’s. Father O’Rourke and half a dozen men and women stand on the sidewalk in front of the church holding peace signs, passing out pamphlets to indifferent shoppers walking by. He knows he should join them.
Coming into town as a kid for a Saturday afternoon movie was a big deal when Billy was a boy. Jack Flynn met his brother Trevor at the Empire for a drink, dropped Marion at the library. The big girls, Sheila and Rosie, loped off to the shops, when Geneva still had some nice shops. His brother Brendan off on a team bus somewhere, to the green, rock-free playing fields of wealthier towns.
Summers Marion bought Nell and Billy hot dogs on the pier before heading home. They watched the boats, the people fishing. Jack crossing the road to meet them, a hand on Trevor’s shoulder, that bright spot of color in his cheeks when he’d had a few.
Billy feels the wind on his face, the lake smell in his head, faint but recognizable. He’s a boy again, or wishes it. Wishes for another chance, another go. Wishes for Megan.
A flock of ducks lands near the shore, in the lee of the pier. And then another and another, until there are hundreds of them: mallards, mergansers, buffleheads, blacks. He wades into the water, his boots instantly sinking into the soft mud of the lake bottom, barely registering the cold, knee-deep, thigh, hip, chest. The birds eddy around him, groups form and re-form, moving in concert like schools of fish. But they do not startle or fly away. He trails his fingers through the water, his hands. And he is among them, as close as he has ever been. Green-capped heads, black bills, the bold blue patch on the mallards’ wings, the red-billed, white-bodied mergansers. He wants to scoop them up in his hands, hug them to his chest, fly with them.
He sinks beneath the surface, hangs weightless, eyes open, looking up through the green water to the blue dome of the sky, sculls slowly with both hands. If only he had gills, he’d stay forever.
MAY
May breaks open in Geneva with a string of perfect days. The scent of apple blossom carries impossible distances, mixing with the smell of ploughed earth. Spent blooms litter the ground; the air is loud with bees and birds. The fields on East Lake Road take on their spring colors: pale green oats, bright yellow timothy.
Nixon, after promising to draw down troops in Vietnam, stuns the nation by announcing the invasion of Cambodia. When he loses his place halfway through his televised speech, his eyes darting down the pages, viewers think: He’s made a mistake. He’ll reverse what he’s said. Others realize: He’s lost, and so are we.
The war’s escalation ignites a cascade of sit-ins, marches, and demonstrations. Nixon labels students “bums blowing up campuses” and calls out the National Guard.
The shootings and shocking deaths at Kent State in Ohio and Jackson State in Mississippi erupt in nationwide protests and the closing of more than five hundred campuses across the country. For some people, struggling to find work and feed their families, the rallies are a distant problem. Long-haired college students shutting down campuses are spoiled kids grabbing a few more weeks of vacation.
When students bomb the ROTC center at Hobart, the protests come home to Geneva. Even then, the pristine world of the college is as distant as the moon to most people living in town.
First Rosie, then Sheila and Brendan call home to check up on Billy. Marion reassures them: We’re fine, Billy’s fine; he’s getting better. When pressed, she will admit that he’s struggling, says to each one: Come home, see for yourself.
Sleep is over. Billy shifts, can find no comfortable position, his arm on fire. He’s been pushing it at the Y. Upping the number of laps. The ringing in his ears is silenced in the water. There are moments when he almost feels whole again.
Flanagan follows him out to the sleeping porch. He sits down on the cot next to Nell’s.
“I want you to read to me,” he hands her a flashlight.
She looks at her watch. “It’s 2:30!”
“I thought maybe if you read to me, I could fall asleep.” He hands her a battered paperback. “I found this under your bed.”
“Valley of the Dolls? You have to be kidding.”
“Where’d you get it?” he asks.
“One of your nurses.”
“That little Lizzie girl was reading Valley of the Dolls?”
“Looks like they all read it. It’s crap.”
“Titillating, page-turning crap.”
“Too embarrassing to read out loud.”
“Well, The French Lieutenant’s Woman is too highbrow for me,” he says
“How about The Godfather?”
“Gore versus soap opera? No contest.”
“How about a comic like Brendan read to us when we were little?”
“You’re stalling.�
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“Mom brought us all those Newberry Medal winners from the library and Brendan read us the comics instead. The three of us crowded into the hammock. You always teased me about my underpants. I was three maybe, so you must’ve been six. Brendan rigged up a string so you could make the hammock swing back and forth and you got us going so high I fell out and split my lip. You have to remember that. There was blood everywhere. Mom and Dad were down by the lake and the two of you tried to take care of me by yourselves. We all thought if you could get the bleeding to stop and I could quit crying, then no one would know.”
“I remember getting whacked for that one.”
“No. Brendan said it was his fault.”
“You actually believe Brendan would take the fall for me?”
“He did.”
“You’re nuts.”
“I remember because I had to keep the secret, the first time you trusted me,” she says.
“Or coerced you.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Everybody knows Brendan is not the fuckup. So even if Brendan said he did it, they all knew it was me. And Brendan being so honorable only made him look better and me look worse. As usual.”
Billy stretches out on the cot; the springs protest.
“If you have kids, Nell, don’t hit them.”
“Dad hit you?”
“Are you kidding me?”
“He never hit me.”
“He hated it. Probably why I worked so hard to provoke him. He about wore out his belt the year I wouldn’t quit stealing.”
“I can still see Mom marching you into Munroe’s Variety.”
“And the five and dime. And Nelson’s.”
“Why’d you stop?”
“It wasn’t fun anymore. You gonna have kids?”
“How should I know? I’m seventeen!”
“Almost eighteen.”
“I’m not thinking about kids. I’m worrying about college and if I can measure up.”
“You’re gonna do fine.”
A Catalog of Birds Page 14