by Deni Béchard
I tried to picture him wild and victorious, the way he’d been when I was little, always laughing, always playing a new trick, but suddenly I was angry again.
The gray dawn reached us as we crossed the mountains east, scars of snow on the roadsides, blue ice on the rocks. The moon was still out above the far, fading lights of distant towns. This wasn’t the journey he’d told me about, the one from which we’d return and start over. And yet I felt the freedom of movement, of newness, the thrill that moves from the heart along the limbs, the desire never to stop, never to be held again in one place.
part II
GHOSTS OF THE CIVIL WAR
Early in their relationship, my father wouldn’t let my mother drive. He didn’t believe women should. Though my brother could walk to the valley’s five-grade, two-room schoolhouse, she insisted on a better school thirty minutes away. My father, having discovered the demands of driving children, gave her an ancient box truck he’d used to sell fish at intersections before he opened his stores. Its panels were leprous with rust, and the only seat was the driver’s. My sister sat on a wooden stool next to my mother, but my brother and I were happy on the floor because of a rusty hole.
“Get away from it,” my mother told us. Each day, I collected lumps of chewing gum from the playground to see how they thwacked against the asphalt. Even when she yelled, we remained on our hands and knees, studying the blurred, passing grain of the road, pleased when we changed lanes and the broken yellow line flickered past.
In 1980, my father brought home our first new vehicle. The GMC Vandura was earth brown, a three-quarter-ton, and, to my five-year-old eyes, a mountain. It had a cream corduroy interior with four swiveling captain’s chairs, a shag rug, two tables on posts, small ceiling lights like those in airplanes, and a couch that opened into a bed, lit by lamps in plastic shades. Between the front seats, a cover unlatched to reveal the glistening engine, and on the back, a chrome ladder joined a roof rack printed with maple leaves. That first day, I practiced climbing around the van, looking for fingerholds, counting laps without falling, until I grabbed the antenna and that was it for FM radio.
My father found the van difficult to navigate through traffic, so he let my mother use it and bought himself a Ford Bronco, which, a few years later, he exchanged for a minivan newly on the market, one stripped for hauling cargo. But she fell in love with the brown conversion van, its V8 capable of pulling a horse trailer with ease. She said she wanted it and stood her ground until he signed it over and let her make payments.
She drove us kids, as well as our German shepherd, everywhere. High above the road, offering a vantage on the traffic, the van swayed, sailing on its shocks so that we had all, including the dog, vomited on the rug in the days before we got our sea legs. She used it to haul hay and goats, and we took it on road trips, parking on gravel washouts in the mountains where we fished, or to Barkerville to see gold panned by bearded men who my father referred to as winos. She hated these trips, her van back under his control, and while he fished, she packed, unpacked, cleaned and readied the food, demoted from captain to stevedore.
But eventually she completed her mutiny. She drove us across the border and headed east, rushing through that first night.
I slept on the floor, lulled to sleep by the engine’s vibrations, but at dawn, I woke and sat next to her. She studied each passing car, glancing in the side-view mirror often.
“Why are you so afraid?” I asked.
She sighed, the first rays of sunlight in our eyes.
“He’s angry,” she said in a measured tone. “I don’t know what he’ll do. He didn’t want me to leave, and . . .” She hesitated, searching for words, then finished her thought all at once, as if she couldn’t hold it in any longer—“I don’t trust him. He’s dangerous.”
As the sun rose, I also glanced behind us, at the dim faces that became visible when a car pulled close. Why should we be so afraid? How bad was he? He’d talked about nothing worse than driving fast and getting in fights. But then I recalled the night at the ferry, the blood on his face and hands, the knowledge that two people lay unconscious on the gravel driveway. Could he do this to us, too?
At a rest stop, as she walked us to the bathrooms, she looked at every vehicle, at the shadows behind misted windows.
“Stay close to the van,” she told us. “Watch out for strange people. He might have sent someone after us. The van sticks out like a sore thumb.”
But those January days in the mountains, the van was the only comfort we had.
After we crossed Washington, she bought us plane tickets east, sending us to our aunt. There, we waited, often sitting on the porch, afraid that he’d caught up. A few days later, we were ecstatic to see our mobile mountain pull into the driveway, glittering with dust.
At our aunt’s, we slept on spare mattresses and foldout beds. The phone rang often, and if my mother answered, he shouted so loudly that I could hear the crickety jabbering from across the house.
Days, I roamed the woods, catching crayfish in streams banked with red clay, or I read whatever I found—novels about voodoo and murder. But though the future seemed more exciting than ever, sometimes I began to cry for no reason. Deep sobs that I couldn’t fathom took over, and I wept until my aunt grabbed fistfuls of her blond hair and pulled it so taut that the dark roots looked like a strip of paint.
I didn’t understand why we’d come so far. I’d felt I was the most like my father, and yet I hadn’t cried when we’d left. At night, the phone jangled down the hall, and I awoke, staring at the dark window. The couch creaked in the living room as my mother got up to unplug the phone. Where was he? What was he doing now that we were gone?
Everyone in the family got an unlisted number, but an air of tension remained, as if at any moment he might arrive and hurt my mother and take us away.
We enrolled in school, and he called there and spoke to my brother, who, under the scrutiny of the secretaries, couldn’t answer his questions and had to hang up in tears.
At the new school, the principal, a former drill sergeant, strode the halls with his chest puffed up, his hips so wide that his pants looked like jodhpurs. The cafeteria had a traffic light (green for talk, yellow for whisper, and red for silence), and in my fifth-grade class, two white boys with incipient beards got in a fight with two big black boys.
My peers, the white ones, called themselves Rebs. We were studying the Civil War, and they wrote “The South will rise again!” on their folders. Our teacher praised the merits of Robert E. Lee and lowered her voice to confide that the war hadn’t been about slavery.
When the yellow bus finally took me home, I read, hunched low, knees against the seat in front. The ruckus of shouting kids kept distracting me from Taran Wanderer, which I’d found in the library. I would read three lines, Taran setting out on his journey, and then I’d begin thinking about what my father was doing and why everyone was so afraid.
“I fingered her,” a sixth-grader behind me was telling another kid, practically shouting. “That’s right. She let me. She was so tight I could only git my little finger in . . .”
I narrowed my eyes, trying to stay with Taran. But what in the hell was he talking about? Was fingering like thumb wrestling or mercy? Either way, it sounded like the girl had won.
The bus creaked to a stop and the door flapped open. My brother and sister and I and our oldest cousin, a tall girl with wavy brown hair, climbed down the high rubber-coated steps to the sunlit blacktop. The gravel driveway rose through a corridor of trees, and by the time we reached the carport, we were panting.
Behind the house stretched sunburned yard, sparse woods between it and the green, sprinkled lawn of the neighbor boys, both blond, the elder athletic and protective of his brother. He’d just come through the trees, a red rubber ball under his arm, and was calling. We dropped our backpacks and joined them for kickball, tawny dust puffing around our feet.
My uncle’s silver truck rolled in, and I ran to see him. M
y mother referred to him as a local boy, and he towered over me, with a scruffy beard, a receding hairline, and a beer belly that pressed his overalls, outlining the carpentry pencil in the front pocket. He worked in aluminum siding and once showed me a copperhead he’d killed with a piece of firewood. This time, the bed of his truck held two dinosaurian snapping turtles that he’d hooked in a forest pond and brought home to stew.
“They’ll bite your finger clean off,” he drawled as I climbed onto the back bumper.
I definitely wasn’t going to finger these turtles. Both were bigger than hubcaps, their stout heads moving side to side as their clawed feet feebly paddled the puddle of dirty, sunbaked blood. I prodded one with a stick, but it took no interest.
“Can we go fishing sometime?” I asked and jumped down, but he’d turned away as if busy. He often took my cousins fishing, and I didn’t see why I couldn’t go, too.
“Here, catch!” he said and tossed a small brown ball. I jumped for it just as I realized it was the soft lump of his chewing tobacco. The slimy wad hit my palm before I could pull my hand away. It broke apart on the concrete. He guffawed and went inside.
The younger neighbor boy ran over and asked, “Aren’t you going to play?”
I gave him a shove, and his legs wobbled like those of a newborn goat as he grabbed for a carport pillar. Instantly, his brother had left the kickball game and was there, fist lifted, eyes shining. “Leave him alone,” he told me.
It reminded me of a G.I. Joe episode that ended with a heroic younger version of a character giving a lesson about not bullying. I just looked away, into the forest, as if this were the most boring thing in the world.
I took my backpack and sat on the front porch that nobody used, since everyone went in and out the carport door. I opened Taran Wanderer. I’d read Lloyd Alexander’s books at my old school and had liked this one, young Taran questing to learn who his parents were so he could marry Princess Eilonwy. Journey, discovery, the fear of violence—all had kept me riveted. But now I couldn’t focus. I read each page twice. Why had I just been so mean? Maybe I was like my father, and I’d grow up to scare everyone. I didn’t feel very scary. My head felt like the pinball in the machine my father had once taught me to play in a restaurant lobby.
Now it was my mother who pulled in, the tires of her van grinding the gravel. She worked at the stables where she boarded her horses, and she got out wearing a button-down shirt with rolled sleeves, and jeans, dirt rubbed into the denim on the fronts of her thighs.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Come on. I’m going to look at some places to rent. I just have to change fast.”
I climbed into the van, the hot interior smelling of oats and hay, of dog hair and dust. She came back, wearing a brown skirt and a blouse. We raced along the road, my window down, gusts slapping me in the face as I held my eyes closed. When I opened them, pastures rolled on toward the low, sloping line of distant mountains. A small farmhouse waited at the end of a winding driveway, and I sat up. This was the place. I was certain.
The sun seemed to be setting earlier here, shadows like capes on the backs of hills, and the wind felt particularly cool. I could see myself walking a path that threaded over the pastures. There would be shallow streams, and if I wanted, I could go all the way to the foot of the mountains, where the haze of distance resembled a faint line of mist.
But my mother had already finished talking to the owner. She walked back to the van, her chin lowered, her taut expression indicating she wanted to leave in a hurry.
She cranked the engine, and we jostled over the driveway’s potholes to the paved road. I decided that if I explained how much I liked the place, she’d be happy, but instead she told me that the owner had flat out said he didn’t rent to single mothers.
“Are you a single mother?”
“Yes. I am.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“People think we can’t pay the rent.”
“Oh,” I said. “Can you?”
“Yes, I can. But this place is a bit expensive. It’s not right for us.”
She was driving fast, and I felt nauseous from the van’s soaring motion over the hilly road. I went back to letting the air from the window buffet my face.
This time we turned into a trailer park off a four-lane highway, a honeycomb of staggered mobile homes. I was getting that pinball feeling again. I knew from school that the mean kids lived here, and we passed a pack of them, slouching in jean jackets as they looked about with narrowed eyes, trying to find something to destroy. They saw me and stared as if I were a fish in an aquarium. Then they all laughed, showing their teeth like barking dogs. I glanced at my mother, and she said, “Your hair.”
I touched my head and realized that the wind had made my hair stand up straight, as if I’d spiked it with gel like a rock star. I was going to pay for this tomorrow.
At the very back of the trailer park, where a forest began, she pulled up to a drab, white mobile home with gray trim, some of it missing.
A tubby man in a dress shirt and a Redskins cap came out, his eyes wedged up in the shadow of his visor. His mouth opened and stayed that way.
“I thought y’all’r Colombian,” he said with the same ruminating motion as my uncle. He adjusted his visor with a meaty hand like a big, hairy pancake.
“British Columbia,” my mother told him.
“Where’s that?”
“Canada.”
“Well, I was expecting dark little fellers like Mexicans. Come on in.”
Water-stained fleurs-de-lis papered the walls, and in the back bedroom, a yellow cricket perched near a hole in the linoleum, twitching antennae as long as spider legs. I stomped, but not before it dove into its foxhole. My mother had been discussing the price, and they paused when my shoe banged down. I heard her say she’d take it. My head ached, the nausea stronger than ever.
As we were returning to my aunt’s, I blurted, “I wish he’d die.”
“What?” she asked. “Who?”
“André. Everything would be easier if he were dead. We could have stayed.”
She swerved off the road and grabbed my arm.
“Don’t ever say that again.” She shook me, but I pulled free. The words had just bubbled up out of me. I had no idea where they’d come from.
“Why are you so afraid of him?” I asked. It was the only question that made sense.
She shut the van off and looked away, then back. She’d had her hair cut so that it framed her face, and her eyes seemed bigger, their blue crystalline. Though she met my gaze, I didn’t believe she’d tell me why we needed to go so far away, or what about my father kept her up at night or caused her and my aunt to shut the bedroom door and talk in hushed voices.
“There are things I can’t explain until you’re older,” she told me. “I promise I will someday.”
I glared off as if still angry, but in truth, she’d said enough. Her words, few as they were, created a sense of expectation better than in any book. They were the proof I’d been right all along to have suspicions about my father. There was a reason for everything that had happened.
While my mother worked on the horse farm and as a secretary at IBM, my brother, sister, and I lived off ramen. We tried every sort, discussing whether beef, chicken, or seafood, with its packets of salty shrimp powder, was better. If we discovered a new flavor at the supermarket, we gathered like rock ’n’ roll groupies around an album.
“Pork! This one’s pork!” or “Hot and Spicy! There’re only three! They’re mine!”
School lunches consisted of flavorless rectangular pizzas marked with what looked like tire tread, as well as chocolate milk, fries, and the indispensable ketchup that, in Virginia, was considered a vegetable so as to complete our nutritional requirements.
Meals like this sent a pang of disappointment through my gut. Hunger stalked me like a school bully. Hunger slept on my belly like a hot cat. Hunger b
arked me into a panic like a vicious neighbor’s dog when I walked the road. I craved our meals in the valley, heaped spaghetti or large bowls of meaty soup.
Good books were increasingly scarce. At the school library, I scoured the shelves. I’d reread Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Lloyd Alexander, and Madeleine L’Engle, so I started in on mythology, hoping for relief. The Greeks evoked the beginning of civilization so clearly I pictured the first, brilliant dawn above the glimmering new earth and wished I’d been there to see how it was before things got bad, which didn’t take long. The Norse liked the end, Ragnarok, doomsday, the sun swallowed by a wolf, the darkness of winter.
The square of bisected morning sunlight made its way across the wall as I lay with the only mythology book I had yet to finish. The metal roof of the trailer popped and ticked as if the sun were tapping fingers on it, and the room was getting muggy. My mother had gone to see her horses, my sister had spent the night at a friend’s house, and my brother sat cross-legged before the TV, his Commodore VIC-20 plugged into it while he learned to program BASIC 2.0 from a dog-eared manual.
I went out the side door and stood in the sun, stretching my arms above my head.
A classmate’s older brother, a stooped young man named Earl Darwin, walked down the street with a metal detector.
“Hey!” I called, and he turned, moving as if carved from wood. He spoke with strained vocal cords, invisible hands strangling him.
“What?” he squawked.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m prospecting for Civil War artifacts.”
I asked what he meant, and he explained that he explored pastures with the metal detector. He showed me a green army shovel with a folding blade.