I step closer and quickly he’s confused. He’s been expecting an old woman.
–That’s right.
He’s wearing a hat that shades his eyes, but I can see his jaw. It tightens, sees some of his handsomeness undone.
–I’m Olivia Wyde’s son.
Father; his chest broad and taut as a drum.
His eyelids heavy and creasing. Speaking short bursting sentences while there was still speech inside him.
–You’re sick, Ada.
On his side, his shoulders slumping and his hips weighting themselves toward the floor. In the half-light, in my confusion, I thought they were melting.
–I won’t be without him.
–Sick is sick.
–There’ll be no one else, you know that. No other Cure would—
–It has to fetch up somewhere.
This boy looking at me like he wants to come inside.
–My mother died a few days ago.
–I see.
–She said I should visit you.
–That so.
–She said I might talk to you about my father.
His long arms and his long legs and the freckles that frame his eyes.
What is Olivia out to do, tucked safely inside her grave?
–I’ve come a long way to see you.
–Come in, I say, and he opens the door himself, makes the hallway feel small. We walk through to the kitchen; I sit at the table and he shakes his head when I suggest that he do the same. He leans instead on the back of a chair, both hands gripping it, the knuckles blanching.
–I didn’t hear your car.
–I parked a little ways away. Legs needed stretching.
I put a hand on my collar and rub at the divot there.
–Your mother was still young.
He makes an easy gesture, letting me know he’s had his fill of grief. His hands have her quickness.
–What age was she? Fifty-two?
Slow, careful look he gives me.
–That’s right, fifty-two.
I should have said fifty. Fifty-five.
He looks around the cupboards. All of them long empty.
–I wasn’t sure you’d be here.
He’s giving off something like Samson’s scent.
–I saw you, in your mother, before you were born.
Like my tongue is unravelling down my chest. Years of quiet taking their toll. But he only says
–She told me a little about it. Said you and your father used to heal people who lived in the town.
–Yes, we saw to them … fixed them when we could.
–Mother said you fixed her twice, when she was having me.
I look at the window, look back at the table.
–A few days ago she told me she was always afraid to have more, once you stopped healing.
He coughs without covering his mouth and looks down at an angle to the floor.
–Or not taking on patients, rather. And anyway. We moved away.
–Father died, and I lost my gift.
–There’s a jar belonging to this house in our kitchen. She kept it next to the tiled part of the wall.
Dark-eyed, watchful Olivia.
–I hope you don’t think me cruel, but you seem to be coping well.
He laughs at this and moves one hand, closed in a fist, behind his back. Begins kneading at some tension there.
–We weren’t particularly close. My mother was always busy.
He shifts the hair on his forehead to reveal the skin beneath. Not yet cooled, still lined with its saltwater beads.
–I don’t think the town knew what to do with a single mother.
–Can’t tell you how small our home seemed, even as a boy. But yes. She was a single mother.
And now: a child no longer. A young man looking down at me with anger lining his insides.
–You never saw my mother again?
I let out a breath and lean back in my chair.
–No. I don’t leave the house.
–Why’s that?
–I’m sick.
With loneliness. With waiting.
–I’m very sick.
–You wear it well.
He means to be cruel or to bring to the air some trace of sex.
He’s too like him. They’re too alike. Though Samson would have no taste for this nonsense back and forth. He’s gotten that from her.
–Am I very different than you expected?
He straightens then and gathers the front of his vest in his fist, smiling and rubbing it over his stomach, stretching it toward his sternum.
–I’m sorry Miss Ada, but I’ve been hearing about you since I was a child – and mixed things at that. I hardly know what to think.
–Cures like to talk.
–What’s that now?
–People … often speak nonsense. It strikes them as odd that I live here alone.
–My mother said to be wary of you.
I pick up the lap of my dress and rub my face in it, forgetting myself. When I look at him again his stubble is glinting like a brand-new coin.
–What’s that?
–My mother. She said you were a little bit a witch.
My turn to laugh. I look into the garden. It must be almost time. All these years alone, and now I’m rich with company.
To get up to the attic you need to crawl on all fours. Your face comes very close to the splinters in the boards. The sound you make is like an animal with calloused feet. It’s not a place where you can softly tread. No matter how small the movement or sound it comes shaking down through the whole house. So loud you expect the walls to shudder and the ceiling to shake.
Those first months alone I went into the attic often. In the summer evenings its window lets in a wedge of light that follows the sharp angle of the roof.
I’d stand and sniff at the air, getting beyond the smell of the heap of blankets I’d nested in as a child. I felt their scratching wool catch the thin hair of my thin feet.
This was where he’d taken me when I was learning to taste, to touch and hear and see, while my skin came away in layers to leave a more weathered coating behind. The floorboards coated in a dense sweep of loam, Father making noises to teach me the rhythms of speech.
What did I look like before I looked like myself?
A huddled creature in the ground. Carried up here and permitted to grow, sleeping through the too-harsh day with Father coming up every evening. I remember his hands on me; the base of his palm a blunt instrument of measure between my legs and on the small of my back, his thumb’s incremental progression along the length of my spine a means of testing each inch for cracks.
We came back to where we started, these last few years. The two of us in the attic, and one of us wondering what we’d done.
I’d slide down the walls and sit beside him. Study his bruised lips and his tongue limp between them.
The wound taking him over and turning him back to soil. An untended flowerbed that spat up its seeds.
Tucked into the corner of the floor and the harsh slope of the wall he lay wilting – he wilted quite softly, in fact, as certain flowers do in our forsaken summer heat. His skin was the heaving droplet hang of their saddened petals.
Until the very end, a sound came out of him.
A chord from a song I didn’t recognise.
Just the one chord; over and over.
For a time I thought he wanted to tell me something, to scold me, hurt me, to follow me through the house and remind me of what I’d done.
But now I don’t think that he could help it, or that he even felt it happening. Now, I think song was lodged so deep inside him , that the whole of him, his length and breadth, was threaded through and through with so much song, that his flesh carried on producing it.
For years, the sound of it.
And then silence.
Until today, and this knocking at the door.
Tall, fair boy. Looking down at me with a cautious kind of pity. I pull at my hem.
–So it’s not true?
–What?
–You’re not a witch.
–Do I look like a witch?
–No, but it’s what my mother said and she didn’t often lie.
Before I can stop myself, I laugh. Quick, dry sound. An alien feeling in my throat. It offends him and he stands a little straighter.
–When I was little she said you were a monster I’d one day have to kill. She said you murdered my daddy.
–Someone murdered your daddy but it wasn’t me.
Thinking of Olivia leaning over Harry with a pillow, mixing into his coffee some vial of poison. But he ignores me, says
–I couldn’t sleep most nights, when I was little, thinking of you. She said you murdered him so you could eat him, and that I had to kill you. That if I killed you he’d jump right out of your stomach.
And now he looks at my stomach, the slight bulge where my dress is sticking.
–But look at you. A girl.
A contempt for females. That, too, he’s gotten from her.
–The real Miss Ada. The first one. She was your sister? Your mother?
My breath is sore, now, in my chest. I haven’t spoken this much in so long.
–Your mother was under a lot of strain, with Harry dying, and then her brother—
–Who’s Harry?
Mist-like, evening light. Denying the storm and its promise of rain. I am afraid that if I look away for too long he’ll come up and simply walk away, that The Ground will have leeched his memory and he won’t know I’m here, waiting.
–Your father. Your mother’s husband.
He creases his eyes and his nose follows.
–My father’s name was Samson.
He seems to be getting larger, blocking the door to the hall.
–And my mother had no brother.
There’s something wrong with me. I wish you’d look inside.
And Olivia’s hand flaring across her stomach and the unborn baby inside.
Flared large and white like a sheet caught on the line.
There was a stain on one of the blankets; its pale yellow corner seemed to have been dipped in a red and purple dye, and I recalled then, as I hadn’t for a time, how Father had once spooned mulch into my soundless mouth. A little jar he’d bring up with him, and sit next to me with a silver spoon seeming twig-like in his hand.
–Eat, Ada, and you’ll soon be strong.
There’d been an evening when he had left me to feed myself, and unable to use the spoon I’d dipped the blanket’s bunched corner into the jar and held it there till it was full and sopping, and then I suckled from it. The coarse cloth slow to give up its heady brew. I’d a name for it, I remember, the first words I ever strung: Blueberry sediment crush, because Father had said it would nestle inside me and if ever anyone saw inside me all they’d see would blueberry after blueberry, wet and purple and red. Sitting with the blanket tugged into my lap I marvelled at how well the colour kept: bright, bold stain I hadn’t been able to lift with the small pocket of my mouth.
Later, when he came back, he sat down with his back against the wall and said that he himself had never cared for the unseemly shape of spoons.
–I’m here to ask you where my father is. She said you’d know.
–Why didn’t she come herself?
Now he shrugs. I’m asking him things he’s asked himself.
–She said it wasn’t the right time.
–Seems a funny thing to wait on.
–Where is he?
He tried to tell me. Over and over he tried to tell me.
Sick is sick. It has to go somewhere. And now here is this boy with his china cup cheekbones and his almond eyes.
No wonder The Ground is churning.
–I think you should go, now. Maybe come back another time.
–She said to come soon as she died, and now she’s dead.
–There’s nothing I can do for you.
Something I’d seen but wouldn’t look at.
That short-tailed animal with its bloodied snout.
Hands in his back pockets, vaulting his chest. He might try to hit me. He’s picturing it, at least.
–Why would she lie?
–I can’t answer for your mother.
Shifting his weight like the floor is hot. Looking over my head, teeth grating.
–I’ve been in town a few days, you know. Asking around about you, and … Why didn’t you say you had company?
He is looking behind me, where the garden holds the evening’s fading light.
–You should go.
–He …
Because of course, even at this distance, he can see the resemblance between them. Not so changed, then. Not on the outside. I watch his face, his temples crowding. Turning to creases the soft skin between his eyes.
–Come back another time.
–Who is he?
Headed for the back door, his face open as a child’s. The sadness he must’ve felt as a boy in want of a father, all flooding back now and making bright pools of his eyes.
–Don’t. Don’t go outside.
Olivia sent me their son, to let me know he lied to me.
Thinking she’d change my mind.
Probably she’s thought the two of us have been living together all these years, taking our supper at the same time every evening, and couldn’t help herself. Probably scrawled a map to the house right as she died.
But I should be thankful. Must be this boy who’s pulled him up. The closeness of this poor, ignorant boy.
And, besides.
Olivia forgot: I’m no Cure.
There’s little I can’t abide.
His feet are heavy in his boots as he walks past me.
The rain is coming. I know already the patterned indentations it’ll leave on the lawn.
He will be much changed, I know, after all these years in The Ground.
In the garden, his son’s voice cracking:
–Who are you?
In the garden, his legs all tremble.
–What’s your name?
Much changed.
The door swinging shut. Wind coming in. Lamp set to squeak.
You’ll get hurt, I might say. I might say, Run home and stay there.
Who knows what he’s been stewing in.
Who knows what I’ve made.
–I said what’s your name?
All that matters: he’ll be more like me.
–Tell me—
Father said over and over it wouldn’t work.
Said over and over it wouldn’t sit right.
He thought he’d plant regret in me and I’d try to bring him up myself, maim or kill him with him half out The Ground.
But I’ve only grown more certain.
Have only grown more sure.
Nothing is too much for the scratch of hair on his chest and the gleam of his cheeks when he turns his face toward flat, hard sunshine.
No matter if he’s strange. No matter if he’s been birthed with a flicker he hadn’t before. No matter if he’s cruel or governed by a hungry fever. No matter, because I’ll no longer be sat here with my heart unseeded and my insides crackling dry.
So long, too long, in the desert.
Acknowledgements
This book has received countless kinds of support over the years, but especial, enormous thanks to Dan Bolger and everybody at New Island Books, to Megan Mayhew Bergman and the entirety of my Bennington family, to Dave and Jonelle, for keeping my head and heart in such good shape, to my Dublin women, without whom I would be very much alone, to my parents and my sister for their tireless, matter of fact support, and to my partner for reading – with enthusiasm – every single draft.
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Follow Me to Ground Page 11