Night Town

by Cathi Bond

  “Will you get the pie plates?”

  I pulled two out of the cupboard on top of the refrigerator. The last time I’d helped make pies I had to stand on tiptoe. Now I reached the pie plates easily. When I turned around Aunt Anne was staring at me. She had eyes like Mom.

  “You remember where everything is.”

  How could I forget? I might have been gone for a while, but that didn’t mean I’d forgotten the rest of my life.

  “Fetch the lard.”

  I got it from the butter keeper. The moment I handed it to her, Aunt Anne seized it as if she was possessed, vigorously greasing the pie plates.

  “I don’t need to know where you’ve been, what you’ve done, that business with your arms. But I want to know what you’re going to do now.”

  She slammed the pie plate down and started greasing another. The word flood flowed.

  “You’re young. You can make different choices. You don’t have to keep making the same mistakes over and over again.” Her skin was flushed, her eyes bright and focused. “Get me the board and the rolling pin. Oh, and the flour. Don’t forget the flour.”

  I retrieved the baking board and pin from their spot behind the knives and the flour from its bin beside the fridge. When I turned back, Aunt Anne had stopped.

  “Your mother made a mistake.”

  “What?” I sat down, setting the flour in front of her. Mom never did anything wrong.

  “Mind you, she didn’t mean it.”

  I’d never seen Aunt Anne so upset.

  “You’ve got to believe me, Maddy. She didn’t mean you children any harm.”

  Then she resumed kneading the dough in the bowl. Plop went the dough onto the board. She ran over it with the rolling pin as if she was trying to kill something.

  “But she had no business doing that. She had no business keeping the cancer from you. You were old enough. You needed to be told. I kept saying, ‘Laura, she’s a young woman. She needs to know. She needs to spend this time with you. It’s the only time she’ll have.’ But she just wouldn’t hear of it. Your mother wouldn’t hear a word. Not one word. Did you know that?”

  Then Aunt Anne started to cry, and Aunt Anne never cried because crying was weak. “She forced your father. She forced me. ‘Not one word to the children, Anne. Not one word.’”

  “Please don’t cry.”

  She rubbed the tears across her cheek, mixing with a dusting of flour.

  “She refused to believe it. Right up until the end, she refused to believe she could die. She had other things to do.”

  So Mom didn’t hide it on purpose. She just didn’t believe it could happen, that she could actually die. Maybe Mom and I were the same after all. I thought God wouldn’t kill me because he wanted to torture me, because I was so bad. Mom thought God wouldn’t kill her because she’d spent her whole life being so good. That was the deal. If you lived a decent life, God would take care of you. But then He broke it. What a shock that must have been. “No Laura, you’re dead. Sorry about that.” Then a thought flew in like a plane hitting a mountain. If that was true, then Mom’s death wasn’t my fault. It was God’s.

  “You’ve got to forgive your father. It was your mother’s choice. I’ve never seen a person as shattered as your father after your mother died.”

  “I was there too.”

  She looked at me and took a breath. She looked out the window and then back at me.

  “What happened to you is everybody’s fault. You’re our cross to bear.”

  I touched the marks on my arms and felt the tears in my eyes when the back door opened. Hugh stood there while the rain poured down all around him like Noah’s Ark.

  “She’s in labour.”

  The stall was gloomy. The heifer was on her side. Hugh was at the rear. I cradled the heifer’s head in my lap. Her thick tongue lolled out, hitting my hand. It was warm. Her eyes were black and full of fear. Aunt Anne reached into the vagina, up past her elbows. Her hands and arms had disappeared. A coiled chain lay on the floor of the pen.

  “The calf is turned around,” Aunt Anne said. “I can’t get the head.”

  The heifer mooed and kicked, striking Hugh in the side. He fell back in the straw, holding his gut and breathing hard. Had he broken a rib?

  “Are you all right?” Aunt Anne asked.

  Hugh nodded grimly, holding down the heifer’s legs. Aunt Anne pulled her arms out. They were covered up to the armpits, soaked in blood and mucus. There was a metallic smell to it that mixed with the earth and manure. The heifer lowed again, her head jerking in my lap. Aunt Anne picked up the chain. They were going to have to pull the calf out. Aunt Anne’s arms and the chain disappeared into the heifer again.

  “Pull!” Aunt Anne yelled. She held down the heifer’s legs as Hugh tugged.

  The heifer mooed as Hugh strained, trying to keep his foothold. The chain, the bloody chain, was taut. I held the heifer’s head as tightly as I could. Her kicks were getting weaker. Hugh grunted, pulling as hard as he could, his boots digging for a toehold as he slid through the blood.

  “It’s coming!” Aunt Anne cried.

  I stroked the heifer’s head. “You’re a good girl,” I whispered. “You’re strong.”

  “Once more, Hugh!”

  As he pulled, the chain shifted and then an enormous mass of blood and mucus followed. The calf had been born. The heifer’s sides heaved in and out, empty of her burden. Aunt Anne rapidly cleaned out the calf’s mouth and nose so the little creature could breathe. Slowly, the calf rose to its feet and tottered around in the straw, moving towards its mother for some milk, but the heifer just lay on her side. It wasn’t unusual for a heifer to have problems with her first birth, but if she didn’t get up and move around, she ran the risk of turning toxic.

  “Come on,” I said, gently pulling the heifer behind the ears. “You’ve got to get up.”

  “Up!” Aunt Anne commanded. Locks of her red hair had spilled free from the kerchief and her overalls were soaked in blood. “Up!”

  Hugh even wrapped the chain around the heifer’s neck, but no matter what we did, the heifer just lay there. She had no interest in mash or water. When I ladled some into her mouth, it just drained out the other side.

  “Is she going to be okay?” I asked.

  I didn’t want to cry. I wouldn’t cry. There was no point in it. Aunt Anne swiped the hair out of her eyes, patting the heifer’s side.

  “We’ll have to wait for the vet.”

  The heifer died before he arrived. Aunt Anne and I sat in the kitchen drinking tea.

  “Your grandfather is going to be upset.”

  As selfish as it was, I didn’t care about Granddad’s feelings. I wanted to talk about my mother. This was the first time anyone had talked about what happened, and I wanted to learn everything I could before the door slammed shut again.

  “You should have made me go.”

  I clenched my fists, wanting to hammer her with questions and make her cry. I wanted everybody else to cry –to pay. Aunt Anne set the teacup down, as if she was anticipating a punch, and for a second I wanted to. But it wasn’t her fault. It was my mother’s. Why didn’t she tell me? I would have gone to the hospital if I’d known. I could have helped.

  Then I remembered the call. The time Betsy and Sandy were in the basement and Aunt Anne phoned. She wanted to come and get me. I knew in my heart, deep down, even then, what was going on, but I’d just pushed it away. I was as scared as Mom. And just as certain that nothing bad could possibly happen. I wanted to drive my fists down on the table and scream louder than the storm, but I just stuffed it down, forced the feelings back where they belonged. Get down, get down! You’re not safe to let out. Leave me alone! Go away!

  Then the little voice in the well called up to me, the voice that sent me to the dispensary, “But she was your mother. She was your mother, and you loved her more than anything else in the world.”

  Aunt Anne just stared into her teacup.

  “It was
never about love, Maddy. She just couldn’t face goodbye.”

  The rain was letting up and I needed some air. Mud sucked at my boots, trying to root me as I trudged across the yard, up the hill towards the hay mow. When I yanked back the big wooden doors a flock of pigeons swooped down through the dark air out into the night. My hands shot up to protect my face, remembering the crows, but now it was only pigeons and doves, cooing as they blew past. The mow air was humid and heavy, closed in by tall towering walls of hay, grain to fatten the cattle that lowed in the pens below. I reached into the gloom for the switch. A ladder leaned against the wall. The same ladder Dad ran up that night I was out on the beam. It could have tipped and he could have fallen, but he went up to save me anyway. That was then.

  I climbed the ladder, walking through the scattered straw and twists of twine, toward the edge where the mow met the beam, and glanced down. My stomach lurched, it was so high. If I had fallen I would have been dead or crippled, my back or neck snapped. No wonder Mom and Dad had been so terrified. Seeing their daughter up on that beam in a nightgown, holding a rifle, and then jumping, tumbling through the air, falling into her grandfather’s outstretched arms. I’d done it for the thrill, to make a point to Granddad that I was as good as any boy, but now I realized the seriousness of the game. The bar had been set. After Mom died, I’d started jumping all the time. I jumped into the dispensary, then into Rochdale and finally into a world with Hermann, guns, cops and drugs. Like Dad stepping off the edge of the bathtub, I’d just kept jumping and eventually I was going to die.

  “Now that’s a moment that went down in family history.”

  Hugh was down below with his hands on his hips, legs spread wide and head tipped back.

  “The spectacle’s first appearance,” I replied.

  “Oh, I don’t know if it was the first. You want to see the calf?”

  We leaned over the rail, watching the calf sucking at the teat of a surrogate cow.

  “Do you think she even knows that isn’t her mother?”

  “As long as she’s getting milk, she’s fine.”

  “So they just forget.”

  Hugh nodded. “A dog will wait a while, but then they forget too.”

  “What happened to Buster?”

  “Granddad had to shoot him. He started killing chickens.”

  “That must have been hard on him. He loved him.”

  Hugh spat. He loved Buster too, but he’d never admit it.

  “Did he get a new one?”

  “New what?”

  “Dog.”

  “Lots of cats, but no dogs. Claims he lost the appetite.”

  The little calf stopped sucking and began to wander around, checking out the pen. Its steps were no longer as tentative. Hugh hopped in and made a bed of straw.

  “How long you staying?” he asked.

  “A day or two.”

  “You going home then?”

  What home? I sloshed a bucket of fresh water into the cattle trough.

  “Isabel brings Frank and Tedder out to visit.”

  Why was she doing that? “Is she still putting on airs?”

  “Not so much. I think we made her nervous at first.”

  It was hard to imagine Isabel scared. Hugh climbed out of the pen and leaned the pitchfork against the wall.

  “It’s late,” he said.

  It was. We walked out of the barn, across the yard and into the house. The rain had finally stopped. Hugh opened the screen door.

  “You might want to give her another chance. She’s not as bad as you think.”

  The next morning I took the final antibiotic. Aunt Anne and I were standing in the hall foyer looking at Granny Gillespie’s prized crystal chandelier. Light bounced around the oak-paneled walls and up the stairwell. Every spring Mom and I used to wash the prisms in big buckets of soapy water and then polish them until they were brilliant. The lights still danced, but they didn’t seem quite as bright. I ran up the staircase to the top and leaned over the banister as far as I could. A thick layer of dust had settled on the prisms.

  I called down to Aunt Anne, “Mom used to say, ‘If they gather dust, they don’t sparkle.’”

  “I remember.”

  Hanging onto the banister I blew as hard as I could, watching the dust motes twirl and spin in the sunlight until they finally disappeared.

  Aunt Anne and I sat cross-legged on the foyer floor in our work pants surrounded by the prisms, plunging the crystals into soapy water, then cleaning and polishing them. I’d stripped the chandelier bare, being careful not to drop any on the way back down the ladder. Hugh was out in the distance on a bright green and yellow John Deere tractor, pulling the fertilizer behind him. White mist sprayed out of the fertilizer’s long tubes, fanning like confetti and settling on the bean crop to prevent it from getting the blight. I dunked another prism into the suds.

  “Hugh said Isabel brings the boys out here.”

  Aunt Anne nodded, rinsing a prism in the clear water.

  “She wants them to keep ties to your mother’s people.”

  “Why?”

  “She understands the importance of family. She always wanted one.”

  “Then why did she wait so long to get married?”

  Aunt Anne polished another prism, gingerly setting it down on one of the white towels we’d spread out over the oak floor.

  “She was. To a fellow she met at university.”

  “Did he die?” Maybe that’s what she and Dad had in common.

  “No. He divorced her. She couldn’t have children and he wanted a family.”

  I plunged another prism into the bucket. “So…so he just threw her out?”

  “That’s a bit simplistic, but it’s pretty much what happened.”

  What a horrible thing to do. I remembered the girls in Mom’s bridge club talking about how a barren woman was a useless thing. Apparently it was shameful and meant you had no worth. That seemed stupid to me then and even more so now. Everyone had worth. Isabel must have felt terrible being thrown away like that.

  A car horn honked in the yard. There was the sound of voices. Then somebody started banging at the kitchen door.

  “Anne!”

  It was Isabel. I jumped up. She’d let herself into the house and was coming down the hall.

  “Don’t go,” Aunt Anne said, but I was already on my feet and halfway up the staircase.

  “Who are you talking to?” Isabel called.

  Fiercely, I shook my head.

  “Just myself,” Aunt Anne replied, still cross-legged on the floor.

  I could see Isabel from the top of the stairs, but she couldn’t see me. She was wearing a red tweed suit and carrying a large shopping bag. There was no mistaking it. Isabel McAllister was radiating happiness. She dangled the bag in front of Aunt Anne.

  “You silly goose. The boys and I would have helped you with the chandelier. But we can’t today. I’ve got Teddy’s birthday present and I need you to hide it.”

  She set the bag on the floor. Aunt Anne removed a cardboard box. A Royal Doulton figurine of a doctor rested on a bedding of white tissue. The doctor held a little bottle of pills.

  “Teddy will love it. Where is he?”

  “He’s out in the car with the boys. I need you to keep it until the party because he’ll just snoop around until he finds it.”

  I crept down the hall towards the tall window at the end that overlooked the front yard. Granny Gillespie’s giant spruces still stood guard. Dad was leaning against the Oldsmobile, his fedora pushed back on his head, reading the paper while the boys played baseball on the grass. A little black and tan dog ran back and forth between them. Frank popped a fly. Tedder’s mitt went up in the air as he ran backwards to catch it. The dog followed. I hadn’t seen Frank in nearly a year and he was getting tall. Blond bangs flopped in his eyes. Tedder jumped, catching the ball in midair and then rolled onto the grass. When he came up the ball was still in the glove. The dog licked his face.

  �
�Dad!” he yelled, throwing the ball towards the car. “Catch!” Soon Tedder’s little boy voice would crack.

  Dad looked up and caught the ball just in time.

  “Come on!” Tedder called.

  Dad tossed the newspaper into the back of the car, took off his suit jacket, rolled up his sleeves and walked out onto the grass, telling Tedder to play outfield and he’d pitch. Frank wiggled his hips, taunting Dad, teasing that he threw like a girl.

  “Your father does not throw like a girl!” Isabel called as she came out. She grabbed Frank’s mitt, kicked off her shoes and ran out on the lawn. “Let’s show him what you’ve got!”

  Dad spit in the palm of his hand, did a ridiculous windup and threw. Frank swung as hard as he could, but the ball flew past him and bounced off the grass. The dog caught it, giving the ball a shake. Isabel cheered and Dad’s laugh rang up through the trees, flew around the barn and across the fields. It was long and true. Aunt Anne’s hand touched my shoulder.

  “Let’s tell them you’re here.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Because my father was happy, the family was whole and there was absolutely no room on that team for a speed freak dyke like me.

  “Once they’re gone, I want to take the next train back to the city.”

  Stone parapets stabbed a bank of clouds in the distance –the place where Dad had graduated high school. He’d been the top of his class, valedictorian and voted the most likely to leave the farm forever. Dad’s graduation certificate had hung on the wall in the office in Sterling, right beside his medical license. It was hanging in Leaside now.

  “You can still stay.”

  No I couldn’t. Aunt Anne and I sat on a bench at the station waiting for the train. An enormous white-faced clock with sweeping black arms indicated it was nearly seven. A garbage bag of clean clothes rested on the platform between my feet. Aunt Anne wanted to lend me a suitcase but I’d refused. A whistle sounded in the distance, the seven p.m. to the city.

  I stood up. “That’s my train.”

  “Here,” she said, thrusting some cash into my hand.

  “Thank you.”

  I felt like a beggar again and wouldn’t have taken her money if I hadn’t needed it so badly. As I shoved the bills into my pocket the train pulled into the station, throwing up clouds of spark and steam. A man lit a cigarette. The purser hopped down from the middle car, and travelers began lining up to hand him their tickets. When I picked up my bag Aunt Anne snatched my hands.