On the first warm, flashing day of spring, he began to walk. He didn’t consider distance or direction, just plodded off with Isa in his arms, her bottle in his pocket so that he could pause on a park bench or the steps of some municipal building and feed her. He’d grown a beard and hadn’t cut his hair. On the street, people paused to see him. Day after week he walked, always surprised to see the sun fall so quickly through the sky. Soon he sat her on his shoulders, these moments cast into her first memories, fingers in the red hair that she wore on her legs like a blanket or buried her arms in against the wind, avenues of sloping lights, city dusks and far off the skyscrapers of New York like a basket of jewels. He walked with a boxer’s hunch and held her feet so that even when she slept, she stayed on his head. It was like some story from the curé’s book, the wandering, the year passing into summer, autumn, ice crystals at dawn on the windows. He bundled her in clothes and scarves, carried her like a pod in his arms so that she blinked at snowflakes. Spring again and they went farther, crossed on bridges beneath metal girders, through interlaced sunlight and into Manhattan. He gazed at pretty clerks through shop windows, his looming reflection scary, the small girl laughing, her hair a halo of curly brass, a rein of his own in each of her fists. Into Brooklyn and Queens where black folk looked at him with silent respect for his ugliness and strength, for the simple joy on his face. Back out, Palisades Boulevard, Englewood Cliffs and Fort Lee, Edgewater, and home again at some lost hour, their empty house. To sleep briefly and leave. Unable to exhaust himself, he followed the river, kept the heaped city at the corner of his eye, the traffic across the water on Henry Hudson Parkway. Guttenberg or Weehawken, passenger ferries and again the ranked city. The branches of Central Park against those high, glittering buildings. Street lamps ran on. City dusks lit the river. Isa wore a sun hat, a mysterious thing she would still have years later.
Then one afternoon a police car followed slowly for ten minutes before it sped away. He realized through some fog of motion what a sight they were. He thought of the woman at the daycare who’d helped him from time to time. It was a miracle he hadn’t been caught. He feared loss, heard doors close at night, prowling motors. He went to the window, then looked back to where Isa slept in the blankets. To lose this love, this simple silent world and all that streaked within him was too much now, again.
In the bathroom that night, he stood before his inexpressive features. The face held so much violence, and he wished he could ask it what he was doing here or could do, but he’d reached the point within failure when it is no longer possible to ask. He’d failed with Isa-Marie and boxing and Louise and even here, in the place his people had sought. All that remained was the tenderness of his child.
The next day, before dawn, he packed the car and fled. He travelled south through New Jersey, into Maryland, Virginia, three days stopping in small towns, reading local papers for some idea of what next until he found a job on a horse farm. There, he was given an apartment above the carriage house and an allowance, and he could sit Isa in the sun while he worked. He saw that it was possible to be content in these quiet hills, mucking out stalls, watching evening long on the pastures and thinking, when he could, nothing, absolutely nothing at all.
Virginia
1970–1988
His name was Jude again, Jude White. He dressed in work clothes much like those of his youth, and the manure he shovelled was no different. It amazed him how easy it was to be absorbed by the country. Occasionally he heard people mention Ali or Frazier, and he thought of all he might have had. He never spoke of boxing, never set foot again in a gym. He hid behind his beard and gave his attention to the horses and his daughter. About daughters he didn’t know much, but about horses he’d learned a fair amount from his grandfather.
Though Isa had been born into an America in the throes of Vietnam, she sensed not war but the eclipsing presence of a strength that cast its shadow, like, she mused as a child with her dinosaur cards, a pterodactyl. As she grew, Jude became more a mystery with his blazing hair and eyebrows criss-crossed with scars, his twisted and swollen hand keeping him up on cold nights. He was mostly silent, speaking French and English distantly so that she learned to mumble, I’ve gone English in the head, or to say, câlice, ciboire and tabernac, words interchangeable with fuck and shit and goddam, all of which she later used working with horses.
With time she came to sense her father’s moods, the way the sky exerted its weight and slowed the world, a storm beyond the horizon. He’d be sitting, brooding, then go to the woodpile, upend a piece and swing the splitter until the raw fissures of his old wound cracked, uneven chunks tipping, wobbling where he stood them, making the maul ineffective, jarring his grip, blood now streaming. Winter was the worst. She couldn’t imagine what he was thinking, couldn’t see his tears or the hand bleeding onto the frozen earth as he crouched among scattered pieces, wanting to disappear.
Jude himself hardly understood his moods. He feared them and loved Isa fiercely. The first time she was sick, seeing her cough in bed he stood over her, trembling, trying not to yell. Glancing up, she saw this fear as anger, not just the part of it that was. He cranked the thermostat, brought a space heater and heaped her with blankets until after a day-long sweat she got better. Eventually she learned to make herself small, and this worried him—this girl with all the threats of weakness. Shying away, she didn’t understand what else he might want. But love lingered, a memory of something that wasn’t quite either of them, those city walks, the way she’d held on to his red hair, or these fields, the sun through the stall door when he put her in empty feed troughs as he worked, and the soft, fragrant muzzles of curious horses brushed against her.
With time he left her to herself. He cooked a steak each night to ensure health—steak being among her first words. Steak, he said when he set it before her, a peppered, bloody chunk of meat. It had been a rough transition from formula, but she’d done all right. When things got complicated he deferred to the farm’s owner, Barbara, who did what she called precision work, grinding aspirin before mixing it with orange juice, removing ticks or splinters. A rawboned woman, she’d come to Virginia from Scotland as a girl and had taken the farm over from her father. She hadn’t married but seemed content and still spoke with a lilt. Isa had spied her in the house with men, more often with women, doing what she knew to resemble Breeding. When Isa asked why she’d never married, Barbara told her, I love horses—men would just get in the way.
Once in the slatted light of a stall Barbara removed her shirt for Isa, revealing two flat breasts and on her back, when she turned, the print from a horse’s kick like the mark of a secret society, the skin there papery and strangely hollowed.
It’s beautiful, Isa told her.
I know, Barbara said and put her hand on Isa’s head, reaching her nails through the thick curls to scratch her scalp. Isa closed her eyes and purred.
Years passed with the speed of sameness, but at the first signs of Isa’s puberty Jude withdrew. He got up to wiggle the coat hanger on the television when she spoke, or went straight outside. Barbara answered her questions about these changes by comparing her to a horse, which made it all seem not so bad. But Jude saw these new sunny looks, the way Isa stood at the mirror and brushed her curls or chattered with the men who boarded horses. He wanted to clobber everything, the horses she petted, the men who breathed on her, the women whose hair she practised braiding. Isa-Marie was there, the colour of frost, alone in school, alone on the road where the young boy had brought the poems. Jude walked away. Isa had survived this far. He recalled his grandfather’s drinking against the pain of loss. He bought a dozen bottles from the discount rack, drank by will until it became habit, intent on incapacitating Isa’s greatest threat.
Days fell from haze into oblivion, Jude never quite awake until his first drink, then working in that window of clarity. Occasionally he recognized a presence in Isa, as if her mother were looking through those intelligent eyes, seeing what a fool he was. But
with his drunken midnight rages Isa’s innate wisdom gave way to fear. Over the years some reel of logic told him he’d done what he’d failed with Isa-Marie, even as he blinded himself to Isa’s inevitable loss. In his sleep he heard names in the harsh voice of his grandfather: Gaspé, Cap-Chat, Les Méchins, Ste-Anne-des-Monts, Rivière-à-Claude. He no longer had nightmares of lost bones and Louise’s anger. He dreamed northern air, the St. Lawrence like bedrock, wide, wind-scarred water that decided the bend of trees, the sinuous road. He woke, gasping in stillness.
As Isa grew she went through elaborate rituals at the mirror that involved not makeup or admiration but the careful construction of a face that might have been her mother’s. Her pale lips were a mystery, as were strange marks on one hip. She had Jude’s lashes but more than this a scar on her nose seemed of her father, from a time when, four years old, she’d bothered him while he was splitting wood. Wanting to be fed, she’d stood too close, and a piece of wood struck from the block had glanced off her face. She’d cried, and he’d mumbled, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. She’d been afraid, seeing his look, that the cut was serious. He’d painted her nose with iodine from the veterinary box. Barbara had said she looked like a clown, but that had failed to make Isa smile.
Once, in the school library, she found a book on cannibals, and of everything she’d read this stuck with her, the information that—beyond rites of passage and manhood—they ate others to absorb power. She pictured looking into a cannibal’s eyes after he’d eaten her and seeing a flickering light. What had happened to her mother’s power when she’d died? Had it billowed like a sheet on a clothesline and drifted off, red dust behind a passing car? If she’d eaten her mother, would she be smarter and stronger and know whom she would be someday with more certainty than the school aptitude tests offered: librarian, secretary or technical assistant?
A few times, Isa had heard Jude mutter about uncles and siblings, a grandfather’s strength, wharf fights and work in the fields. She’d heard French enough to understand it, even to speak it. Before holidays, when classmates talked about family reunions, she was jealous. What had happened to the relatives Jude described? Now when he drank, she learned to time her questions so that he’d talk. She listened inexhaustibly: fights, blizzards, men who, because of Jude’s mumbled delivery, seemed like vagabonds. What he told her was at times so outrageous—siblings given to neighbours, uncles who became old men overnight—that she doubted him. Characters appeared like titans, grotesque within the singularity of their power. But gradually she saw the workings of a better world, where everyone belonged. She felt even a vague pride, that she’d descended from hardier stock. She signed out an atlas and showed Jude the map of Canada. He pointed to Québec. But where? she asked, and he banged his blunt finger on the province, the village not marked and, in his memory, only a name, wind and fields and water.
But the question she asked most often was that which had haunted her the longest.
Who was my mother?
He grumbled and waved her away.
Autre chose, he said once, nothing more.
_________
By her senior year Isa was the tallest girl in school—taller even than most of the boys. She was sturdy and tanned from work, but popularity had a lot to do with clothes and attitude, and not only size but dreaminess and farm attire set her apart. She believed that in the place where Jude came from everyone was like her and that she would have to go there if she hoped to marry. Though she announced her plans to attend university, and her teachers encouraged her, she dreamed mostly of writing in a journal late into the night, of suffering like Jane Eyre. She loved the way the voices of women characters spoke into silence.
She didn’t apply to university. Jude was in an accident. The tractor hit a hole and, drunk, he was thrown off, his legs run over. She stayed to take care of him and even when he was limping around, she couldn’t picture him cooking his lousy meals. Barbara, who, by mere presence, had seemed a parent, also required help. Once able to punch a stallion to make it go weak in the knees, she’d had her own itinerary of heavy drinking and was in a similar state of dependency.
I might have fired your father, she told Isa, but he did his work well enough and fast, and I figured he had the right to get back to the ugly business of drinking himself to death. In fact he may have inspired me.
Jude had been convalescing, mixing whisky and pills, asleep or incoherent days on end.
He’s useless now, Barbara said, but he’s part of the farm, and anyway we’ve got you.
Isa let this sink in. The horses were her responsibility, the money once paid to Jude now given in an anonymous envelope. Her life was spartan, her room nearly empty, one photo on the desk—a girl dressed in Jude’s farm clothes, leather boots to her knees, sleeves like wings. She couldn’t recall the occasion, only that Barbara had taken it.
Summer chores eased into autumn, winter. Then the busy spring. She did her work, took the farm truck to the store, to the pharmacy, ate lunch with Barbara as they watched the few milky channels on the house TV. She told herself that horses were the love of her life. Alone in her room, done with the day, she perused Time Life books about ghosts and mysteries.
After his accident Jude aged terribly. He was haggard. Hulking bones showed in his frame, shoulders like knobs in his undershirt. His head moved as if on a spring. He recalled Hervé Hervé walking through the blustery sunlight to the wharves and the work that was the mechanism at the centre of their lives. On an August day Isa came in from the heat for a drink. He woke on the couch and saw her at the window.
Isa-Marie, he said. He stood in the unlit apartment. He hobbled towards her.
Sunlight through the window made the room seem dark. She backed away.
Isa-Marie, he repeated, je m’excuse. He hugged her and pressed his hands along her back with such an ancient strength she could barely breathe.
After that she avoided him. She locked her door at night. She hated the gassy scent of liquor and couldn’t understand why one day he’d started drinking. She was twenty and didn’t know whom to confide in, and she considered prayer. What little she knew about God she’d heard at school. She imagined Him as a voice like the weatherman’s. She knelt in a stall where she’d replaced the straw. Dust motes hung like sparks in bands of sunlight, the summery odour all around her. She wanted freedom. But closing her eyes, trying to word the terms of her release, she felt herself verging on an act as real as violence, as if she might be capable of wishing Jude dead, and she stopped.
Afterwards she walked through fields and the dumb wheels of daisies, trying to forget her chores, to hold just the sky, pale and wide and empty.
A week later Isa saw a Jaguar parked at the barn. The driver was a thin elderly man, slightly effeminate, with sad, drooping lips that he nervously touched. He had faded brown skin and almond eyes and particularly black lashes. His hair curled loosely.
Excuse me, young lady, I’m looking to buy a horse, he said in a voice that she couldn’t quite place, Southern though and stiff.
What kind of horse? she asked, thinking she’d have to get Barbara up.
I don’t know. I thought maybe a Tennessee walker.
Oh, she said, you’ll have to talk to Barbara.
He stared, his eyes big, his smile like on a toothpaste box. His teeth were square and perfect despite his age. Do you work here?
I live here, she said. He narrowed his eyes and lifted his chin. On the farm with this aging man in lapels she found it hard to believe that it was the late eighties.
Is this your dream? he asked. Horses? Many girls love horses.
No. I don’t know.
He tilted his head. No, or I don’t know?
I don’t know, she said.
She told him a little about herself, that she liked to read but not what, and that she loved horses though she hardly thought about them when her work was finished. Suddenly wary of revealing how paper-thin her thoughts were, she agreed to show him the horses that were for sal
e. He confessed breed wasn’t as important as beauty and that he could return when Barbara was more disposed.
What’s the horse for? Isa asked.
He hesitated, then told her, Aesthetics. He described his farm, how he thought a gentleman’s farm always looked good with a fine horse, maybe two so one didn’t get lonely.
What about shelter and food and exercise? she asked, impressed by his concern with aesthetics.
Maybe I would hire a girl to come take care of them.
Because he was old, she wasn’t worried. Though he barely reached the height of her shoulder, she felt like a girl and talked like one. His name was Levon Willis, Pronounced Live On, he told her, and in the course of that day, walking the pasture, she learned about his farm and big house and his hobbies: reading and contemplation and self-cultivation.
I used to want, he said. Now I think.
She so enjoyed the conversation that she looked forward to his next visit. She never mentioned him to Barbara, and he never asked about buying horses again. He was a harmless old man, she decided, kind and intelligent, and surely from someplace far away, where a person could look with trepidation at a grazing horse, extend a hand and say, I would like to pet it.
Vandal Love Page 6