That made her jump. She saw the tree with the green bird. Things like that would happen to her then, even though she quickly knew he meant a person had told him and it was Teresa.
That was early in rehab, when she first knew him. Even then, he didn’t say “was your favorite.” He put on certain songs and waited to see whether she liked them. Not whether she remembered them. Whether she liked them. “Sort of,” she said. “Sort of not.”
“You know something about you? You don’t pretend,” he told her, his first praise.
She finished telling him everything and then they just sat there listening. After a while he said she wouldn’t want to know how much beer he and his friends in PT school had put away to the tune of “Come As You Are.” But you didn’t have to like a song for it to take you back. Music she had once loved, he said, might make her want to go back to a time before he and she knew each other, let alone were married. She said no, it didn’t do that.
Tory was on the stairs. “Come S.U.R.,” he sang in his high voice.
“OK, man, come on down,” Nolan said, and he came into the kitchen in his Nemo pajamas and stood near Nolan’s chair. He put a hand on the leg Nolan was keeping time with. Finally he said, “Why did the man jump off the roof?”
“Well, my guess,” Nolan said, “would be it must have been Spiderman.” He looked at Mary Ann to see if she thought that was a lie.
Search Party
THE sun comes up, low beds of cloud pull apart, the shapes on the ground turn into cows. Very quickly the sun is round and hot. One cow after another picks up a foot and puts it down, pushing up gold bubbles in the mud they have all been making where the dirt is bare of clover. Their red sides steam, they chew, they stand in a half-circle looking at Susannah.
AT the age of three, Susannah Floyd wandered out of her yard in a northern county of Virginia and tumbled down the embankment of the railroad track that passed a hundred yards from the house. She found she could not climb back up through the blackberry vines, and began to walk. Scratched and whimpering, she walked a mile and a half in the rail bed, and when the banks fell away and the track ran into the open she veered off across a cattle guard, under a gate and into a field of Herefords.
Hours later a search began, but no one came upon her in the bowl of three hills on the Bayliss place where she stopped. She sat down where the tractor had repeatedly dropped its back tire off a shelf of fieldstone into a groundhog hole, making a dirt hollow screened by clumps of burdock. There she remained to rock and cry and suck her scratched arms until she slept.
The next day was a Sunday, and the largest search party ever assembled in that part of the state fanned out to look for her: the rescue squad, the Eagle Scouts, all the members of the VFW who could hike, the Lions, state troopers, police from four towns, and neighbors on foot and horseback. Several churches sent their youth groups; a hermit widow who kept dogs and shot at hunters showed up with a bloodhound. This proof that the widow listened to the radio caused opinion to shift in her favor afterward, even though the bloodhound did not find Susannah. Emotion in the search party was at such a pitch—hands being wordlessly shaken and held and eyes locked across all boundaries of age and rank, among dogs wandering with slowly wagging tails—that from a distance it could have resembled the springing up of the Peaceable Kingdom, except for the people holding up cardboard signs saying NORTH & CASE’S WOODS and EAST TO DUMP.
It was midsummer, when the days were long. Most of the searchers headed in the wrong direction, down the long gravel drive from the house out to the road, or straight across the two big unmowed clover fields to the woods. A few took the railroad track but went toward town or did not go far enough the other way. All day in the heat, they were assembling in the Floyds’ yard to compare routes while they drank jugs of tea the neighbors kept filled, and setting out and straggling back and going again.
The sun went down around nine, leaving fiery pink trails that painted the glasses and tear-streaks of people taking leave of those intending to search through until morning, and after that, the moths came out and a dozen flashlight beams went bowing across the Floyds’ clover field into the woods. The night grew unusually cool.
In the early part of the day, when they started up again, there was fog and the clover heads were loaded with wet. They sopped the pant legs, people recalled, or if you had on shorts your bare legs were washed as if you had gone into a sluice. You could write on the pale, wet film on a leaf of burdock and leave a dark green word. By ten the fog had lifted, the fields steamed. Black shade under the locust trees in the fencerows pulled the cows in and closed over them, leaving the grass blank and bright.
That morning, Susannah’s mother, who had been taken to the hospital the night before, seven weeks early, gave birth to a miniature, flaccid girl, who was passed from hand to hand into the incubator, and given the name Mary Jo, to tie her, however briefly, to the life everyone was worried the mother too might try to leave behind.
The mother of two children dying or dead might do anything, especially a woman whose nerves might be excitable. It was not clear. The stories said yes and they said no: if she seemed a little off-center, she had not grown up there and no one could say what behavior in the present crisis would be in keeping with her nature, or just what her nature had been at all up to that time. Nobody had been taken into her confidence. If you went over with a pie, this woman gave you back the pie plate at church. She did not seem to bake. But Tom Floyd’s attachment, by all reports, did not require pies and cakes. Everybody knew Tom, and this spoke something in her favor, that he had married late and married her. On the other hand he had met her in a lodge in the Smoky Mountains, at a dairymen’s convention. She might have been a secretary for the association; she might have been working in the lodge, even as a maid. No family was heard of; she was alone. There might have been past difficulties of some kind. It was not clear.
As the sun climbed outside her hospital window and no news came, however, she did not throw herself out of bed to wrench the window open and jump the three floors. Women who were not searching were clustered around her bed holding her to life with murmurs and touches. They did not have to be on close terms with her to fall into talk of husbands and visitors and vegetable gardens. No one spoke of children.
Some of the time they were lingering before the wide glass on the same floor to look at the unfinished newborn, motionless except for the tiny rib cage flaring and closing like a bird’s mouth. They studied the eyes of the masked nurse and the doctor coming and going all morning shaking his head. They were in agreement about the baby’s hands, minute and dusky, with a poise everybody was accustomed to in animals on the verge of death.
Outside in the heat the pastures and roads of a five-mile-wide strip of the upper county were swarming with people, dogs, horses and inching cars, looking for Susannah.
It was July, so dry and hot the tomatoes were banded like pumpkins. The troopers agreed that it looked bad: two nights, one of them freakishly cool, the third hot day coming, the soil conservation map showing ponds curled in every basin and little creeks, though the heat had narrowed and slowed them, still running heartlessly everywhere. The railroad tracks themselves, with culverts, cinder rail beds strewn with glass, and bridges. Copperheads sunning. Yellow jackets in the fences. Old wells. Bulls, certain dairy bulls in particular. The rescue squad brought out ropes and a grappling hook.
Later that day, the Monday after her disappearance on Saturday, Susannah was found.
IN later years the sisters often heard the story of how each of them escaped alive, to everyone’s surprise, from the fate that had seemed to await her. For Jo the story’s interest was soon worn out; she did not care for stories of birth, or fate, or what family one fell into. About herself she cared only for what came later, after the meager fingers the women were pitying in the incubator had flexed and taken hold.
Jo’s friends in art school spoke in grim or offhand ways about their own families. Susannah heard them on
her visit to Chicago, girls and women going on about themselves as nobody, man or woman, ever would at home. These women were not even really Jo’s friends—Jo steered clear of women—but only her classmates, talking on the steps.
This was Susannah’s first trip away from home, and she was examining the art students, their uncut hair, and their outfits not unlike her father’s milking clothes. It was 1969, in the spring. Most of them were older than Jo, older than Susannah. Jo was drawing them; her newsprint pads were full of their bodies, looking somehow frail and old-fashioned in the nude, Susannah thought, regardless of how big and firm they were there on the steps of the art gallery, or how confident. She sat with her baby son; she had left her two-year-old with her husband Larry’s mother. She had just buttoned her blouse from nursing for the first time in public. She wondered if her milk would be affected by the marijuana smoked in Jo’s apartment and the unpleasant stories everybody who came in, everybody Jo knew, was always telling.
One of the classmates on the steps had an older brother who had tried to murder his high school girlfriend. This heavy woman, steadily smiling, was relating the details to Jo, who turned her back to the wind and tied up her portfolio. A dark girl with braids, and that stamp of the un-included Susannah recognized from grade school, kept saying, “Oh my God. Oh God. Oh my God.”
“He was sick, and they just didn’t realize,” the woman said. “He’s been on a supervised farm for six years.”
“Farm life,” said Jo gruffly as she turned away. “Come on,” she said to Susannah.
“We were not close. I feel badly about that. If I’m smoking good stuff I’ll tune into him, I’ll have dreams where I go and get him,” the heavy woman persisted, looking off toward the lake. “I’ll just go and take hold of his arm and pull on him to come, like I did when we were kids.”
“Does he come with you?” Susannah said, hanging back.
“It’s like he’s in mud or something. No. No, he doesn’t.” The woman had a meek, peaceful smile. It was a hippie expression that was appearing on young women all over the country, which Susannah had not seen before this time, but remembered later. Jo didn’t have it, then or ever.
“That’s probably a birth dream,” said the one with braids, the one they all ignored. “Or it is if you try to pull someone out of water.” She made a face, and added in a schoolyard singsong that went with her braids, “It’s not my idea.”
No one answered her, and to break the silence Susannah said, “Well, I used to have a dream, for years I had it, about pulling the bull out of the creek. Jo? Remember?” Jo snorted. “Our father had to winch the bull out of the creek when he broke his leg. He was a big Holstein bull,” Susannah went on. She saw that none of them knew what “big” meant in this case. They had turned to look at her politely. She gave a little laugh. “Well, so I wonder what that would mean.”
“You’d have had to dream about it before it happened,” Jo said scathingly, “for it to mean anything. And I’d hate to think what it would mean. Anyway, we have to go.”
Susannah gathered her things off the steps with one hand, trying not to jostle the baby, who was not a good sleeper. The heavy woman was still smiling. “I’m interested in babies,” she said doubtfully, as the baby’s eyebrows reddened in preparation for a howl. “I think I might like to draw them.”
“Babies!” said Jo from the sidewalk. “They don’t even have faces.”
The baby cried shrilly as they began to walk, interspersing choked hiccups with his cries. “God, is he going to explode?” Jo said.
A man who had stopped directly in front of them on the sidewalk spread out his arms, blocking their way. “Hey, don’t I know you from AA?” He had a red face that was too alive and interested, and too large. Shaking his big head like a calf, he fixed bloodshot eyes on Jo.
“Alan, this is my sister. She knows you don’t know me from AA.”
“Come on, Jo,” the man said in a strangled voice. “Just listen.”
“Alan, just leave me alone. I’ve told you. Go home,” Jo said, and she pushed past him. Susannah followed her. When she looked back the man had sat down in the middle of the sidewalk.
“Babies!” Jo resumed. “How would she draw them? If she could draw in the first place. I mean they have expressions but no face. What exactly is a baby anyway? What is it?”
“I don’t know, Jo,” Susannah said to pacify her. She held her son against her chest, looking surreptitiously at his flushed face, which was just smoothing out and losing its distress. The baby eyes met hers. This was not like looking at anybody else in the world. There was a force in this face that grasped you like a fist, a force from which it seemed some people, like Jo, might have to be protected.
“No offense, Susie,” Jo said, contrite. “Your kids are beautiful, both of them. Are you worried about that guy? That’s just Alan. He’s in AA. I don’t even drink. I can’t, just like Dad. It makes me sick.”
“He was awfully unhappy. He’s still sitting back there, Jo.”
“He’s going to have to straighten it out for himself. I can’t do it for him.”
Jo’s early photographs were of farm machinery. Later she expanded to livestock trailers and veal feeder-cages and slaughterhouses. She photographed them empty, washed down. She photographed quarries and dams, and strip-mining dredges in West Virginia. In time, galleries showed these photographs and art museums bought them. This surprised Susannah. Machines and parts of machines were what it all added up to. Probably no one who did not work with such things would be able to identify the bars, prongs, saw-edges. Strong light with no feel of sunshine to it, metal dripping water, corners of bleached landscape out windows or behind tires: these were not the light and shade or the tools or products of any identifiable enterprise.
But this opinion—Susannah was not as backward when it came to art as Jo seemed to think—did not keep her from seeing the property in the photographs that was Jo’s, and that made people want to look at them. Her angle. Jo’s pictures showed this thing of hers the way you might hold up a root that had got into the plumbing and been skewered out. Or this part of it had been skewered out, and anybody looking would know worse remained. At the same time Jo did not exactly disapprove of it, whatever it was. She was guarding it, possibly, as a dog will guard something inedible it has found.
When Jo visited, she would wave the children’s questions aside angrily. “These aren’t magazine pictures!” she would snap, to their bewilderment. Susannah’s boys were afraid of their aunt, of her harsh teasing when they made any claim on their mother’s attention, but the girl, Stephanie, intended to be an artist herself. It was she who hung over the back of the couch when Jo sorted proof sheets, and who was a slave for years to Jo’s stories of ugly episodes in the lives of artists and poets and people considered the agents of beauty.
All this was exasperating to Susannah, though less so than the stories of their own past, as they were still circulated at home, were to Jo.
For Susannah, the stories had a music that was sweet no matter how many times she heard them, and she heard them with some frequency, from teachers, from nurses while she waited for her births, from people in church and women in stores. Jo asleep in her incubator, feeble and veined but actually unsubdued by the smallness of her welcome, signaling with her thin, unchanging rhythms if not a bid to live, at least not a readiness to fade from life, “just lying there, so we all thought, we’d say . . . she doesn’t know she’s been born.” And she, Susannah, living those days as secreted away, as potentially nonexistent, as if she too were not born. But she was sought: all the fields of the county were alive with searchers.
The stir being made, over two children who barely existed! The searchers were lifting the moldy sides of the collapsed chicken house, parting rows of corn with their arms, calling from hilltops, leaning into pole barns. They were trolling the big creek with branches, by tree roots where the current had dug out pools, and getting down on their hands and knees to see under balers. Twent
y grade-school children, led by the minister’s wife, could be heard singing the loud songs of Vacation Bible School, where Susannah would have been in the nursery on that Monday morning if she were not lost. Susannah heard all of this, when the story was told. She heard the panting and slobbering bloodhound, dragging the hermit widow on a path of her own that no one else took.
There were whistles blown in the woods and homemade gongs banged by some of the older women. They had been on the phone the first night conjuring up past toddlers, children who would have sat up at the language of spoon and pie tin, and replied to it, before they would answer to the sound of their names. But there is an age of not answering, they said.
All the activity got the cattle bawling in the fields. In later life Susannah told her children that she could distinguish claims and threats and simple explanations in the voices of cattle. This was a disputed talent of hers. She had it only partly because of growing up on a dairy farm, where her father’s Holsteins, though he had given each one a name, remained strangers. She thought of them as indoor cows, forever being driven into their stanchions like huge children into their cribs. Most of them would not hesitate to throw a haunch into you, or pick you up on a bony head and pitch you into Fauquier County. So her father said. He controlled them with shoves and a flat voice, but the lead cow’s ball eyes took in the approach of anyone who lacked his authority. She would roll out her gray tongue and jolt her full udder with her hock. “She’s not sure about you,” he would tell Susannah, setting her on a ledge. “You’re near about the size of a dog.” They had no farm dog, and could not expect to have one; their mother feared dogs. “And here”—he would put Jo up—“here comes the puppy.”
Search Party Page 19