There he is, at a table in the window, coffee in hand, a pile of papers in front of him. When she steps onto the sidewalk, he looks up and smiles. That same smile—innocuous enough, but shining at her almost daily for the past several months.
“Hey,” she says lightly. Settling on the other side of the booth, she is acutely aware of her sloppy jeans and shirt, her drab face. At least he can never accuse her of trying to encourage anything.
“Hey, yourself. You look tired. Sure you’re up to this?”
“Oh, yeah. Once the weekend gets here, I feel obligated to try to catch up on everything at home. You’d think I’d learn.” She offers a smile.
“I hate to see you so tired all the time. I feel guilty for asking your help on this.”
“Oh, this’ll be fun. Something different.”
He looks at her a bit too long, just as he’s been doing for weeks, allowing his eyes to remain on hers just a second past what would be normal for acquaintances. She knows he is waiting for her to decide one day to not disconnect their gaze. She shifts hers now to the papers. “Grading, I see.”
“I never finish.”
“Like my housework.”
“Mine too, if I gave a rip about housework.” He laughs. Those eyes. Marble green.
“What plan do you have so far, about the tours?”
“Nothing official. First we need to set them up with each museum, get a tentative schedule, then get that approved. Shouldn’t be hard.”
“I know they’ve cut way back on school trips.”
“We’ve got no budget. But Pepperdell will scrounge up the gas money if he sees the value of the trip.”
“What do you need me to do? These are just field trips.”
“I’d like another adult along, especially with the eighth-graders. I’m convinced that half of them will be incarcerated within five years.”
She laughs and sees immediately how much that pleases him.
“Anyway, a parent volunteer is always welcome on field trips.”
“But I don’t have an eighth-grader.”
“You have connections to the museums.”
“One museum, the one six blocks away, that you can all walk to.”
He slumps over his coffee and leans closer, speaking softly. “Maybe I just want the company.”
She does it finally, looks right at him and keeps looking. He doesn’t blink but warms to her gaze, and somewhere an invisible door swings open.
“If you want company, you should talk to someone who’s eligible,” she says.
“You’re not eligible for friendship?”
She closes her eyes, then turns and opens them to Main Street.
“I think you need a friend too, Jodie.” His voice is still low, although the three other customers are at the snack bar, yards away.
“Well, I need a lot of things, but it’s not so simple.”
“I’m just offering a day or two away, chaperoning some kids and nosing around some history.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Then why are you here?”
She trains her gaze on the tip of the grain elevator two streets over. She wants to do this, and they both know it. She makes a little shrug. “Sounded like an interesting idea.”
“How’s Mack?”
This startles her enough to look at him. His gaze doesn’t flicker.
“He’s okay.”
“I heard he’s moved out.”
She tries to hide the surprise at his bluntness. “He’s home, just not at the house. We see him every day.”
“And you’re still exhausted.” He shifts, and she can tell he wants to reach across and grasp her hand. She’s never been sure of that, during other incidental discussions between them. But now he appears to clutch the coffee cup with both hands to keep from reaching for her. “I just hate to see you hang on to something that can’t work.”
She leans toward him, pretending to sip her coffee. “You shouldn’t be saying these things to me.”
“Okay.” He seems alarmed at the tone she’s taken. “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to insult you.”
“I know.”
They both lean back, for a deeper breath.
“I care about you, Jodie.”
These are the words her imaginary lovers have said over and over again. It is the one thing she has hungered to hear. And now someone has said it aloud, and it is the wrong person at the worst time.
Terry goes on, not realizing what he’s just accomplished. Now he sounds almost nonchalant. “Why don’t you forget this field trip stuff. It’s a bad idea.”
She feels the backs of her eyes heating up. The prospect of letting go entirely of this small possibility makes her throat hurt. She blinks so that he won’t see her tears. “No. I want to help. If you really want this to work, then I should go to each museum and work out with them a real schedule, you know, make sure they pull out the stuff that’s interesting to junior high kids instead of parading them past twenty quilt patterns.”
His face fills with relief. For now at least, they have some days ahead, during the long winter, to help each other through its loneliness.
She feels much better, driving home. For one thing, the sun isn’t in her eyes, and she’s run a couple of errands between her talk with Terry and the drive back to the farm. But mainly, she feels so much at home with herself after just an hour of conversation with this man. Chatting with him for a minute or two when he goes by in the lunch-room line makes her feel that she is indeed her former, okay self. He brings her health. She knows this. She struggles with this fact. This is wrong, even this comfort without sex, without a handhold or a kiss. But she senses that each small exchange of words, no matter how inane, brings them closer to a real embrace.
“I’m a grown woman. I know how these things happen.” She listens to herself argue as the truck bounces through potholes in the orange-tinted evening. “But the minute we’re in the same room, I am so comforted. Lord, it’s the only comfort I know.”
It is something like a prayer, but not really. For a long time now her only prayers have been asides to herself, in closed-up places like a locked bathroom or a pickup truck. She will throw in “Lord” just in case God is happening through her world at that moment.
Which is about as likely as Harvey Keitel ringing her doorbell.
Mack
When Mack told George about his move out to the stone house, the man displayed no surprise or worry, but merely asked Mack what he did with his hours out there. Mack tried to explain about sitting and doing nothing, about the methodical work of clearing branches, and George’s eyes gleamed a little, but he simply said, “You may be right. Sometimes a person needs stillness that can’t be found in a house with other people. Are you deeply sad out there?”
“No. A little lonely is all. Mostly I feel like I’m just soaking in everything—the trees and the creek. Time slows down, but it doesn’t feel bad.”
“We’ll just wait and see then.” That was that. No dire instructions about checking in with his family, or reminders about the warning signs of depression. George is becoming a person, in Mack’s mind at least, with whom a man can be honest. George trusts him more than his family does, a sad commentary but reassuring anyway. During the workday, Mack takes refuge at Hendrikson’s, another place where people have faith in him.
But talk of any kind stirs up a person’s mind and heart. Mack has been dreaming a lot since moving to the stone house. His dreams have become more real than his real life. They steal him in the quiet hours and take him to places full of color and promise. Upon waking, he wonders how, in the midst of his life falling apart, his dreams have taken a beautiful turn.
He is ten years old on a day in early May. His morning chores are done, and he has a few hours all his, enough time to walk to the pond and swim and feel the sun. He is on that path through the pasture that leads to the pond on the western end of the farm.
The air is filled with sun, but because it i
s early in the day, the dust under his bare feet is cool as velvet. At one point, the path breaks through a clump of chokecherry trees and lilacs; the giant bushes drip deep lavender blossoms by the score, their sweetness heavy as a grandma’s bosom.
Lilacs remind Mack of Grandma, but she died when he was four, and his memory of her is a vapor in which floats a happy face behind spectacles and the smell of lavender blooms near a back door. When Mack’s parents added on the family room decades ago, the bushes had to go. But in this dream he is at the house of Aunt Delores, the place just down the road where she lived until her death in ’84. There were lilacs there too, and they bloomed every spring. They called her Aunt Lorie. Her husband had died of a brain aneurysm before they could have babies together. She was young when it happened, and everyone thought she’d marry again, but she liked to say, “Don was the only guy ornery enough to put up with me. I’ll see him soon enough, I suppose; it makes me not so afraid to die.” She raised vegetables and planted peach, apple, cherry, and plum trees, making a bit of money off the fruit and the jams she made from it. She was tall and angular and had a lopsided face that seemed always to be grinning at you and measuring your worth all at once. Nothing like her sister Rita, Lorie liked to stir up trouble and ask preachers all the wrong questions and make home brew and cook anything the men brought back from the hunt. When other women in the family turned up their noses at mangled squirrels, too many doves, or yet another mess of fish, Lorie plunged in with a laugh and informed everyone else that the meal would be ready by seven, and they’d better come early because she was flat-out hungry herself.
Mack awakes, and though it is October and the cabin is cold and full of tired light, his memory catches a whiff of lilac, and he smells Aunt Lorie’s fried perch. He cries for the lane that went to the pond. The pasture and pond belong to other people now, and even though that family has children, Mack has never seen them naked and muddy and happy the way he was, so many years ago. His heart catches with a special pain when he recalls the bulldozer taking down Aunt Lorie’s small frame house. She died of lung cancer when not that old, and she left her little place to a nephew of her husband’s, a young businessman in Cedar Rapids. He had no use for a few acres and a decrepit house. He sold it all to one of Mack’s neighbors, who cleared off the house, fruit trees, and lilac bushes, turned all of it under with the grass, and by the next planting season had driven it through with even rows of corn. Not a trace was left of what used to be.
Late Saturday morning, Mack is sitting on one of the chairs outside the stone house when Ed comes by, just to chew the fat. Mack pulls the other chair out, and they sit in little patches of light while the cold seeps through their jackets. In a pause of conversation, several rifle shots report from the west.
“Lord, they’re all over the place,” says Ed. “Saw a license plate this morning from Delaware.”
“They don’t have pheasants up there anymore?”
Ed shrugs. “I guess there’s more here. Heard that pesticides have thinned ’em out other places.”
“You gonna hunt this year?”
“My brother-in-law’ll be here next weekend. Come along if you want.”
“Maybe.” Mack has seen the pickups parked here and there, just off the roadsides, empty dog crates in the back. The Lunch Hour fills up these days with neighbors and visitors alike, orange caps resting beside coffee cups. “Couple years ago I took Young Taylor. He’s not much interested now.”
Ed clears his throat. “Maybe I’m just getting older and dumber, but the birds sure as hell seem smarter every year.”
Mack laughs and tips his can of cola. In a bit, Ed puts out his third cigarette, stretches, groans a little, and climbs into his truck. “Holler if you need somethin’, okay?”
Mack waves his reply. He walks around the stone house, zipping up his jacket. He has begun to enjoy moving slowly. During all those years of farming, life was a practice of waiting and then hurrying. When the time was right, the planting had to be done. When the moisture and temperature met where they must, the corn or the beans had to be harvested, now. If something wasn’t happening now, then waiting put everything else on hold. And in the waiting there were always bits and pieces of the place to be repaired or replaced. The only way to get ahead was to work always, even while waiting.
He tries to pinpoint the day, or the time of year, when he finally saw the truth, when he understood that working harder for more hours didn’t make any difference. By then he was working full-time for the school district, maintaining and driving buses, then farming at night and through the weekend. Even so, the money coming in fell far short of the money needing to go out. In spite of knowing how the numbers added up, Dad and Alex and Mack had, for a long time, done all they knew to do: worked more hours and got busier still. The constant motion of mind and body broke each of them eventually. Dad lost his concentration. Alex drank himself into a cold death. And Mack went crazy and had to be put away.
All of that feels long ago as Mack sits in the stone house or gathers wood from the quiet spaces around it. Now time feels different. Mack goes to his job during the day, working regular hours, although for not much pay. He finishes at five and stops at Mom’s, stops at the grocery if he needs to, stops to say hi to Jodie and the kids. Twice he has eaten dinner with them before going on to the stone house, to silence and more stopping. It seems that all he does now is come to a halt many times a day. And in the stone house time itself waits. Mack sits and observes time, and it observes him. He can’t help but think that it is time that waits to reveal its final fate for him. One of these days time will sweep over him with an awareness of some crucial task he has left undone. That one neglected work will spell the final destruction of his family. Mack is certain that this fear has tangible foundations; he just can’t get them to come clear yet.
In the woods life has a different demeanor. Mack can’t tell if it’s hostile or not. For all he knows, the final destruction will happen out here in the midst of trees. But he isn’t so scared anymore. A deep patience has taken him over, and he can sit on the step of the cabin and gaze into the web of branches and vines and dead grasses and stay that way a long time. The panic about what might be next drifts low in his gut and doesn’t seem to interfere with anything else. Finally, no racing heart, no desperate thoughts.
Mack hopes that this is some form of getting well. He feels different, but none of the facts of his life have changed. Maybe he has simply stopped caring too much. The more you care about things, the more power they have to hurt you and make you crazy.
Kenzie
She has been working all morning, on a dreary Saturday, while Mom is running errands and Young Taylor is hogging the sound system in the living room. Her bedroom door is shut, but still all the screeching and gory verse filters into her atmosphere. She has two Bibles open on the bed before her, one the Living Bible and the other the New International Version. Pastor Williamson uses the NIV for study purposes, but the Living Bible says things in more down-to-earth language.
There are index cards in three different colors scattered around her. And on several she has written favorite verses in her best possible handwriting. On her dresser are several small bunches of silk flowers, the best she can do in October. Little daisies and pansies mainly. She found thin purple ribbon in Mom’s wrapping paper drawer, and she has gathered the silk flowers and tied them up as artistically as she can. She’s taken a hole punch to the corner of each index card and tied two or three cards together into as many bunches as she has flowers. There are five sets of cards and flowers, one for each day of the coming week.
If Dad is going to stay to himself in the stone house, Kenzie will leave encouragement in little gifts. One bunch of flowers and set of Scripture verse cards every day. He drops her at school in the mornings, and she will leave the gifts on the seat when she gets out. She won’t make a big production of it, just give him a good-bye kiss and leave flowers and verses.
The difficult part is choosing fr
om so many wonderful Bible passages. So far she’s used about an equal number from Psalms, the Gospels, and other New Testament books—all very encouraging stuff. Much of the Old Testament beyond the Psalms is rather harsh, and she doesn’t think that Dad needs to hear so much about judgment just now. She holds one of her favorite cards up so the weak light from the window shines on it:
Now you don’t need to be afraid of the dark any more, nor fear the dangers of the day; nor dread the plagues of darkness, nor disasters in the morning.
Though a thousand fall at my side, though ten thousand are dying around me, the evil will not touch me.
—Psalm 91:5–7
She has thought about leaving the encouragement gifts out at the stone house, but it feels creepy out there, and she doesn’t want to bother Dad, who obviously wants to be away from all of them. She couldn’t bear it if he were to catch her leaving him Bible verses and if the look on his face were anger. She just couldn’t handle that. She’s gotten used to Mom’s anger, which is mainly irritation about everyday hassles. But Dad has never been an angry person at all, and on the rare occasions when he has been, it has hurt so much to be around him.
Dear Jesus,
It’s really hard, helping a person who doesn’t want you around. I wish Dad could see how much I do to support him during these dark days. I want to tell him how many times I fasted and prayed while he was in the hospital. Or that I gave up television, and stayed up nights praying through whole chapters of the Scriptures, just to keep him safe. I want him to know so he’ll be encouraged, but if I told him this stuff he might just feel guilty for causing concern. Grandma Rita said that he didn’t want to be a burden and that’s why he wanted to die. So I can’t say or do anything that might make him feel that way again.
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