by Nancy Jensen
Mabel pretended to search her other pocket for her press identification. “Must have left it in the car, or pulled it out with something,” she muttered. “So sorry.” She shook out her hair so that it fell across one eye and now glanced quickly between Mrs. Kendall and the rubble around them. “My name’s Bertelle. I’m a photographer for the Indianapolis Star.”
“Indianapolis.”
“That’s right.” Mabel offered her hand, hoping the woman would look at that rather than at her face. It didn’t work.
“Bertelle,” said Mrs. Kendall. “Bertelle. What were you before that? Before you were married?”
“I’ve never married,” said Mabel. She didn’t know how she’d explain if Mrs. Kendall demanded to know who Daisy was.
“What’s your first name?”
A sudden wind kicked up the ash, forcing them all to cover their eyes for a moment. “I’m sorry,” Mabel said when the wind settled to a breeze, “I see we’re bothering you. What was this part of town before the fire?”
A look of doubt flashed through Mrs. Kendall’s eyes, and she answered the way she might have answered a true stranger. “Businesses and such,” she said. “That was my store over there.” She pointed, and Mabel looked toward the pile that had once been Kendall’s Dry Goods, hoping her eyes suggested curiosity and sympathy.
“Any idea how far the fire line goes?” The crisis has passed, Mabel thought. She was all journalist now, and Mrs. Kendall apparently had decided she’d been mistaken.
“Down by the river, about two miles out,” Mrs. Kendall said, pointing the way Mabel knew so well. “Didn’t get to the cemetery.”
“Sorry again to have troubled you,” Mabel said, turning and motioning for Daisy to follow. “Good luck to you.”
Behind her, Mrs. Kendall snorted at the ill-placed goodwill, but at least they’d gotten away from her.
Mabel walked quickly up the street, moving faster as she approached the corner. Behind her, Daisy called, “Slow down. Mama! Mama, stop!” Mabel didn’t stop until she’d reached the car. While stowing her camera in its bag, she felt Daisy pulling on her arm.
“Look at me, Mama.”
Mabel turned toward her daughter but couldn’t look at her. She leaned against the car, swept her hair out of her eyes, and stared at the fire-tortured cross propped against what was left of the church.
“That woman knew you,” Daisy said. “And I think you knew her, too.”
Mabel nodded.
Daisy’s voice strained between annoyance and compassion. “What are we doing here, Mama? You could have asked that woman if she knew anything about Bertie. Isn’t that what you want? To know something?”
Mabel lifted her eyes to her daughter’s pleading face and turned away. She felt Daisy’s warmth beside her, felt the girl’s slender arm slipping around her waist, drawing her close. Daisy was the taller one now, even without high heels.
“Tell me, Mama-bel. What do you want?”
Mabel pressed her head against Daisy’s, then eased out of the embrace. “I don’t know,” she said. “Really, I don’t.” She couldn’t bear Daisy’s look of exasperation and quickly raised a hand against whatever question she might ask next. “I want to drive some more. Down to the river.”
Year after year, so many years ago, sometimes braving the cold water as early as Easter, Mabel and every other kid who lived close enough to the Laurel River to make it on foot or on bicycle had splashed and swum and floated in the cove. Everyone except Bertie, who was afraid of the water. Mabel had coaxed every way she could think of, trying to get Bertie to tell her why she was afraid, but her little sister would twist away from her and run high onto the bank, crying, “I just am. Leave me alone!”
Wallace was nearly always there, clowning but careful. Even after all this time, Mabel could tick off five or six names of younger children Wallace had taught to swim. Once in a while some kid’s older brother or sister would try to show them a frog kick or how to swim just under the surface, but they always came back to Wallace and his legendary patience. Mabel herself had seen him at work—arms held steady under a little boy’s back, singing out words of encouragement for as long as it took for the boy to feel he could manage a backstroke. He, too, had tried to persuade seven-year-old Bertie, eight-year-old Bertie, nine-year-old Bertie to let him teach her, but Bertie always refused. He’d stay for a time on the bank with her, skipping rocks downstream from the swimmers, so she wouldn’t feel left out.
When Mabel steered the car around the final bend, she saw that Mrs. Kendall had been right. The fire had rolled right up to the river and died. On the fire side of the bank, everything was burned down to the water, and bits of trees bobbed in the current, but on the other bank, it was still spring. Looking west of the swimmer’s cove, squinting in the sunlight, Mabel could see where the jagged far edge of the fire had been, just this side of the bridge, not a hundred yards from the cemetery.
Without a word, she got out of the car and started on her way there. Daisy followed a few steps behind.
It was a well-kept cemetery. While she looked around to get her bearings, Mabel wondered idly who did the mowing and trimming—the Freemasons, perhaps. Then, as if she had been here only last week to refresh the flowers on her mother’s grave, she walked straight to the familiar plots. There was her father: Albert Fisher, 1889–1918. Beside him, because on her deathbed she’d demanded it and because Mabel had fought for it, calling on the doctor as witness to final wishes, was her mother: Imogene Fischer Butcher, 1890–1922. Though Jim Butcher had protested, there was another stone, shaped like a tiny pillow, next to Mama’s, etched with the words:
CHARLES
STILLBORN SON
1922
For the whole time Mama was pregnant, Butcher had bragged to everyone that he was going to name the boy James, after himself, but when Dr. Moseley came in and told Butcher the baby was dead and that his wife would likely die within the hour, Butcher made him write Charles on the certificate, saying, “Not going to waste my name on a dead son.”
“That’s my father,” Mabel said when Daisy stopped beside her. “And Mama and the baby.”
“I saw some pretty wildflowers down by the river,” Daisy said. “I’ll go pick some and bring them back for you.”
Mabel waited beside her parents’ graves until she saw Daisy dip out of sight; then she moved up and down the rows restlessly. There were names she recognized, people from church, a near neighbor and his wife. There was Naomi Linder, who had been three or four years ahead of her in school.
No sign of Bertie, even accounting for a married name. No Albertas at all that she could see, except the one for Alberta Gunther, one of the oldest graves in the cemetery, a small weather-pocked stone marked 1842. The idea that someone with her own name lay in the ground had troubled young Bertie, and she wouldn’t answer to Alberta after that, not for anything—not until Butcher gave her no choice.
Mabel found him at the northern edge, where the town had traditionally buried the ones unclaimed by family. The marker was a slate, sunk now into the ground and barely visible: James Butcher, d. 1927.
Under her feet he lay.
In a pine box, most likely, rotted by the damp ground.
Under her feet.
She stomped once. Twice.
And then her feet were pounding the ground. Pounding so hard she felt the strike through her whole body. Pounding as if her rage could drive the bastard deeper into Hell. Pounding. Pounding. Pounding. For her mother. For Bertie. For herself.
For all that he had cost them and for the price she would pay and pay and pay.
Mabel stopped, her strength spent. But for her wheezing breaths, there was no sound. The birds had flown. The unscathed leaves hung silently in the unmoving air. Waiting.
She scrubbed at her eyes with her palms, furious at the tears. The sun was lower now, and moving in its glare, she saw Daisy back at Mama’s grave, arms full of flowers. She started toward her daughter, wandering aimlessly thro
ugh the stones, seeing but not registering the names carved in them. There was a granite bench she didn’t remember. She dropped onto it, exhausted, grateful. She could rest here a moment, under the linden tree that stretched its limbs overhead. From the bench, she could see Daisy, nearer now but still further than Mabel could yet carry herself, looking every inch a devoted granddaughter, brushing dirt from the headstones with her fingertips, taking great care arranging the flowers.
Watching her daughter, Mabel stroked her fingers along the front edge of the bench. Something was carved there. A vine of roses? She leaned forward to get a better look, and when she did, she saw the back of the bench chiseled with three-inch-high letters: HANSFORD.
All around her lay Hansfords. The elders who had passed when she was a child. A four-year-old daughter, Wallace’s sister, from scarlet fever. His father, Gregory. His mother Margaret, just three years ago.
And there, between them, was his stone:
BELOVED SON
WALLACE ARTHUR HANSFORD
LOST IN THE LAUREL RIVER
1909–1927
Mabel stood up, but her legs gave way, as if they were nothing but pillars of sand. She was on her knees, arms clutching her ribs, near to shattering from the howl that rose from her, that unfurled like a rope to pull Daisy to her.
Then Daisy was beside her, holding her tightly, rocking her, cooing, “Mama, oh, Mama.”
She felt her daughter’s arms, heard her daughter’s voice, but their comfort was as the comfort of a cave, a protective hollow for one’s lonely terror.
She should have followed him. Should have followed him. All those years ago, hard as she had tried not to, she had known that Wallace would go nowhere but back to Juniper. She should have followed him. Should have faced with him whatever had to be faced.
Mabel stared past the stones, past the new grass and the wildflowers Daisy had let tumble. She stared past Daisy, past the present, into the past, and saw what she had never seen.
A frigid December day. Early-morning sleet. Wallace standing in his sodden coat at Union Station, scanning the passengers coming off the Louisville train, straining for a glimpse of Bertie. It was too much, not finding her, not finding her as he had not found her so many times before.
He pushed his hand in his pocket, counted the fare, and stepped onto the next train south. He heard nothing, would let himself hear nothing, until the conductor called “Louisville.” There, silently, he stepped onto another train, slid into a dirty corner, and leaned his head against the window to wait for Juniper.
He would have made it before Mabel finished work that day, would have stepped off the train, turned away from the town, passing the small farmhouses glowing with supper lights. He would have walked through the winter mud until he came to the river, just to the place where the current was fastest. He would have stood there until dusk became darkness, tossing stones he couldn’t see. Then, from the memory the body holds in itself, he would have climbed to the highest point on the bank and looked out over the river, trying to see into the darkness, calling Bertie’s name. And then he would have taken one last step. Into the air. Into the black water.
NINE
The Burger Chef
Summer and Fall 1956
Newman, Indiana
RAINEY
June
NO ONE WAS GOING TO stop her; she’d made up her mind about that. Rainey fastened the waistband on her skirt—a leafy-green check, just right, she thought, with her sleeveless white blouse. She couldn’t risk stepping out in the hall to the full-length mirror, so she tilted the one on her dresser as far as it would go and climbed on her desk chair to try to see how her flats looked with the skirt. High heels would have been better, but it was at least a two-mile walk to State Street, so these would have to do. The green scallop along the sock cuffs was a nice touch. Hopping down from the chair, she admired the way the skirt ballooned around her, and for a moment Rainey wished she were daring enough to wear it without the petticoat, like Sally sometimes did.
If not for Sally, she might have given up her plan weeks ago. “Do you want a life or not?” her friend demanded whenever Rainey said she didn’t know if she could go through with it. All spring before graduation, and during the two months since, she’d watched an eight-man crew knock down what was left of Carson’s Feed Store, clear the lot, lay a new foundation, and raise the pitched-roof shape of the new Burger Chef. Last week, the sign had gone up, and she’d taken a walk down there, specially, to smile up at the mustached chef rising like a chimney out of the red kite-frame border. A black crossbar declaring HAMBURGERS anchored the kite at the center and seemed to keep it and the happy chef hovering safely just above the ground. She hadn’t seen the sign lit up yet, but Sally, who had stopped at a Burger Chef on a trip to Indianapolis, had told her every part of it seemed to float in the night sky, glowing white, orange, green, red, and gold.
Rainey had stood for a long time on the other side of the street, studying the chef’s face, almost praying to him, really. A shiver of fear mingled with delight rushed up her spine as she thought of what her parents would say to that.
A job, she had mentally urged the chef. Please, a job.
A job meant money. Money meant she could enroll in September in the bookkeeping course at the junior college right along with Sally. And the course meant that soon, in just a year or two, she could have a nice job in an office in a city like Louisville or Indianapolis, a little apartment for herself or a bigger one to share with Sally, a closet full of beautiful clothes, a dresser drawer for nothing but gloves, and maybe even a car of her own.
She leaned over the dresser and looked in the mirror, seeing, instead of her own face, the familiar chef smiling back at her. Silently, she mouthed the words I’m counting on you. My only hope. It was the sort of corny thing people said to each other on Love of Life or The Secret Storm, which her mother—icy glass of cherry No-Cal in hand—devoted herself to every afternoon, but the words seemed appropriate at this moment. To get out of Newman, she needed to be able to wave her very own bankbook at Mother like a sword. Unlike Alma, she didn’t have a former local boy like Gordon Crisp coming back on schedule from his first year of practice in podiatry to marry her. Everybody knew Mother couldn’t abide the Crisps and didn’t much like Gordon, but that hadn’t stopped her from throwing Alma’s success in Rainey’s face. It had gotten worse when no one asked Rainey to her junior prom, unbearable when she again had no date for her senior prom. And then, when Alma showed up with Gordon a day early for Rainey’s graduation and announced she was expecting—that’s when Rainey had decided absolutely that she was going to listen to Sally.
Rainey had waited for nearly two weeks after her graduation to tell her parents her plans to take classes at the Anderson County Junior College come fall, just so it wouldn’t look like she was trying to steal Alma’s thunder, much as she wanted to get back at Alma for stealing hers. Resistance—even an outright battle—she expected from her mother, but it took her up short when even Daddy answered with a tight, almost practiced phrase that snapped, like closing a book: “That’s not for you.”
“Foolishness,” her mother had added before Rainey could ask Daddy what he meant. Mother had just plowed on with, “Are you forgetting how you had to repeat the third grade? And then it took that nice Miss Lewis all that extra work so you could pass your history class that one year.”
“But, Mother, I was sick…” Rainey began. Why was it that she was the only one who ever seemed to remember that? Chicken pox, mumps, German measles, and a polio scare all in the same year, and then those two months in bed with a broken leg her first year of high school.
But neither one of them was listening. Mother said, “Come mash these potatoes, now,” and Daddy was already doing the word jumble in the paper, and Rainey couldn’t find a way to bring the subject up again with him.
Close as they were, she couldn’t ever be quite sure where Daddy stood on anything, except that he loved her, but it was his manne
r of loving that confused her most. She knew he wanted the best for her, but what was that, and how did he know? Did it have anything to do with what she wanted for herself, with what she thought would make her happy? Did it even leave room for her to figure out what that was?
As for talking with her mother about it, well, she might as well have said she wanted to work her way to China on a fishing boat. Girls got married: That’s as far Mother’s imagination went, though she never suggested how Rainey might manage it. Apparently, she believed that if Rainey just stayed busy for a few years with housework, eventually a boy she knew from school or church would grow up enough to get a job selling insurance and buy her a house in town.
Well, she wasn’t going to wait around for some nameless, faceless boy who decided he wanted her just because he was ready to settle down and she was all that was left. One last look in the mirror, a flick of the comb to right a wispy brown curl above her ear, a swish of rosy lipstick, and she was ready.
The dining room clock chimed nine times. She’d planned everything well. It was a little warm for mid-June, but even with walking slowly to keep from raising a sweat, she could easily make it to the Burger Chef by ten o’clock. The manager wasn’t due with applications until 10:30, so if there weren’t many people in line outside, she could walk another half block down to the library to freshen up in the restroom and rinse her mouth with a sip of cold water from the fountain.
Taking a deep breath, and then another, Rainey tucked a fresh handkerchief, her comb, and lipstick into her clutch bag, opened her bedroom door, and stepped into the hallway as lightly as she could. The sweet smell of strawberries thickening into jam carried through the house on the steam drifting from the kitchen. Her mother had been determined to teach her the whole process, from cleaning and stemming the berries to labeling the jars, so Rainey had been forced last night to whine and act the brat a little to assure her chance this morning of slipping out of the house. A well-timed “Da-a-dy,” at the dinner table had led him to say, “Bertie, let her be for now.” And though her mother had tightened her lips and said, “It’s time she learned,” they all three knew the matter was settled. Her father had schooled his wife and daughters to understand that while family disputes at any time were never desirable, at the dinner table, they were intolerable. What they also knew, in spite of the family show of pride in Alma, was that Rainey was her father’s favorite and that, in small things anyway, he would give in to her. Once the job was in hand, she was sure she could bring her father around to her side about college. After all, if what he wanted was for her to find a nice man to take care of her, she could meet a better class of men working in some professional office. And Daddy’s support alone would silence Mother.