Vandal Love

by D. Y. Bechard

  Only when she asked how he became rich did she feel briefly unsafe, as if he’d admitted to being an ex-con. He told her the story of his farm, passed down for generations through his family, and how for years he’d barely been able to pay the taxes but couldn’t bring himself to leave it, not knowing where else he might go. At fifty he’d come to hate the meaningless work. He reduced taxes by putting most of the farm into scenic easement. He sold his livestock and machinery, and he began charging locals to use his land as a dump for construction materials. He burned what he could in the fireplace and sold scrap to salvage yards. Those years he progressed from reading the encyclopedia—Something I always meant to do, he confided—to books on investing, which, with patience, he was soon attempting. One winter a local demolition company was hired to dismantle and ship away the beams of a defunct water mill whose foundation had washed out. Local legend had it that the young George Washington had kept an office in the basement of the original structure when he was surveying the picturesque town, which was a short drive from the capital and also bore his name. The beams went to a rich man’s weekend house in Middleburg, but the trash and shattered wood, everything that had fallen from floor to floor, lodged there for centuries, ended up at Levon’s. The crew cleaned to the stone foundation and brought frozen mounds of dust and splintered wood, nails and glass. Levon hadn’t wanted this sort of trash, but in the spring, raking it out, he found his first coin, an 1802 Draped Bust. Within the week he had several more, all of that same period. He purchased a metal detector and discovered coins in value from forty dollars, such as the 1943 Steel Penny, to others —he could list them —1853 Liberty Gold Coin, 1917 Mercury Dime, 1877 Indian Head, 1839 Coronet Head, 1808 Half Cent, and many more, among them a dozen other Draped Busts, minted in the first decade of the eighteenth century, each worth thousands. The demolition, he supposed, must have knocked them from their hiding place. He read up on numismatics and eventually sold them to collectors. He invested in a spree and not long after a few of his stocks soared. His years were numbered, and he was fashioning the life that remained as he thought it should be.

  Isa listened in awe. She, too, she told him, had felt she was different. She explained that her father was French, that she’d never known her mother and that she’d been an outsider at school.

  Ah, he said, it’s that dark French blood you have. I had wondered.

  It must be, she said, considering that this might be the autre chose, the other thing—Dark French. She repeated it softly, testing it for suitability.

  On his third visit Levon seemed nervous. He always came at the same time, and it occurred to her that no one else was ever out then. She’d been telling him about her frustration, her feeling of being trapped. She was surprised to hear herself use the word.

  It’s a prison. I must have been meant for more than this, she said.

  Levon hesitated, then told her he had a proposition in mind. He cleared his throat and brushed fingers against moist lashes. His tone was businesslike.

  You are unhappy, he said in his over-articulated English. You would like to see the world. Now this might sound odd. I am also a lonely man. I have been so for years, and what I have with you may be my first true friendship. I have thought about this. It is possible only because you are too young to have presuppositions. You accept me. What I would like to propose is a business marriage though not really business. I feel a great love for you, but I know I must repulse you. I am very old. So what I offer—what I propose—is that we marry. There will be no consummation. No sex, he added, looking away, as if unsure whether she understood. You can travel, go to university. I will pay for it. I will even buy you horses. It’s as you like. But it would be a friendship to carry me through my last days. Will you say yes?

  Isa felt as she had with Jude when she’d decided not to go to university, that she had the power to save, only now there was the possibility of escape. She liked Levon, nothing more. He was short, skinny, and dressed like a very old man. He had a silk flower in a buttonhole.

  All right, she said. But we have to go now and do it. His eyes widened. I mean, soon, and I don’t ever want to come back. I don’t want anyone to know.

  She tried not to think of Barbara asleep with her scotch and water, Jude watching TV in a daze. People would be angry. The farm needed her. Jude and Barbara needed her. She would be fine if she could forget what she’d done and never see them again.

  As planned it was an escape in the dark. She packed, wrote a note, then snuck from the apartment and walked out the gravel driveway. She tried not to think of Jude deciphering her words, his big, flickering eyes rolling back over sentences. This farm was the only place she’d known, and she feared now that every familiar scent or sound would remember this. Jude’s drinking would be worse. He’d have accidents. She paused and looked about her, not sure she had enough courage. The lights of an airplane moved above a dead oak, its branches like nerves against the starlit sky. She expected a sign, that some aspect of the world around her would indicate what she should do.

  At midnight Levon met her in the Jaguar. He looked tired.

  I don’t normally stay up so late, he confided.

  A few days later they were married. This, too, was businesslike, though she refused to change her name, having read that women no longer did and thinking it would break Jude’s heart. Levon appeared annoyed. She moved into her room, the farm far enough away that no one would know where she’d gone. He kept true to his promises and bought what she asked. But soon she had the feeling, when he began bringing home Southern-belle dresses and insisted that they sit on the porch or walk in the evening, that she, like the sleek horse in the pasture, was for appearances.

  God was frequently the topic of conversation. I often contemplate God, Levon said. Sometimes I think of spaceships and extraterrestrials, and this all seems important in the question of God. One of the pleasures of being married is sharing my thoughts. There was nothing worse than thinking about God alone. It was very lonely.

  He could talk for days. This was difficult for Isa after so many years of silence. His age showed more, and he often wandered the house in a terrycloth bathrobe like a short, emaciated Hugh Hefner. They would lie on his bed, and he’d talk, a wise and ancient child. Then he’d doze, and she’d go about her day until she heard him calling.

  There’s a story I have been wanting to tell you, he said. I just wanted to make sure you understood me. Otherwise you might think it silly.

  It was evening, and they were on the porch with their books. He had introduced her to many startling and philosophical works, his favourite on how the Bible was a record of extraterrestrials, how all holy scripture encoded a war in heaven fought by gods, really our superhuman predecessors who genetically engineered us. It was fascinating, she agreed. It made her want something to happen, aliens to arrive or a comet to crash into the earth. But as often was the case, he’d interrupted her reading to tell another story.

  You see those woods? He pointed beyond his acreage, down a slope to a collapsed stone wall.

  Those woods, he said, have been there since I was a boy. The government owns them, I guess. No one really knows. There’s a creek there, and across a ways a rather busy road, so if you go too far you see the trash people have left. But the trees are old and it’s dark, quite scary.

  The story he wanted to share regarded an evening when he’d been sorting his scraps and had taken a bucket of nails down, figuring they’d rust faster in water. He’d gotten only a bit into the forest when he saw the man and the girl. The stream was running high and loud, so there was no way they could have heard his approach. The man was tall and wearing a black suit.

  He was incredibly pale, Levon said, the whitest man I have ever seen. The girl looked a bit younger than you. She had on a thin dress even though it was cold. She was lovely, and I couldn’t help feeling for her. But it was late and the man was scary, very, very pale. They just stood there, minutes at least. His face was against her throat, and
her head lay on his shoulder. He was so tall it didn’t look natural. I watched them for as long as I could bear it. The girl appeared to be falling asleep, the way her hands started slipping down his back. I got frightened and returned to the house. I locked the doors that night.

  Now I do believe in God and Jesus and the truthfulness of the Holy Bible. There, in the woods, I saw great philosophical questions for the asking. If pure evil could exist, then so could God. I went out every night after that to look for the man, thinking if I could find him, then I could believe in the deepest of ways. I’ve stopped going since I have married you. I did not feel it safe, and I did not want to leave you alone. But I think I should go again. It took all of my courage, and I believe it takes all one’s courage to look for God. One risks finding nothing, and one is always face to face with death.

  The following evening Levon resumed his nightly vigil, standing in the cool air off the stream, watching the shadows. The story had unnerved Isa, and she’d asked if he’d read the papers after what he’d seen. He had, but no young girls had gone missing. Evil, he’d told her, might not be so simple. She’d thought of everything that had eluded her about her life, of the way she’d chosen to save herself and run away, and of what Jude must feel alone.

  Isa had been living there several months when she heard about Levon’s nickname. She was at the general store, and the clerk asked if she was the one who lived with the Mexican.

  The Mexican? she repeated.

  Oh, I guess they just call him that, he said. I’ve outright forgot his real name—

  Levon Willis.

  Yes, that’s it. The clerk chuckled. He’s been called the Mexican for so long I forgot.

  From this conversation and from what Levon had told her about himself, Isa was later able to make sense of the nickname. Levon’s forefathers had been mixed, and he’d come out of the muddle relatively pale. The last of his relatives had died or moved away to become white, and he’d considered himself too black to marry white and too white to marry black. His entire life he’d stayed on the land rumoured to have been a slave’s forty acres. He’d turned into something of a hermit, alone in a house built by an ancestor who’d done well, and which, in the years that Levon ran his dump, began to lean. Later he’d had a new one built and hired landscapers to beautify the farm. He’d dressed expensively, drove a Jaguar and kept to himself. It seemed only natural to give a man as inexplicable as this a nickname. Thinking of it, Isa wasn’t sure whether she should pity him or be ashamed.

  That fall, Levon bought her a Honda so she could attend university. She was old for a freshman, and she had no sense of what was popular or what other young people liked. Instead, she took an interest in her heritage. But when she tried to research the White family name, she discovered nothing like it in French Québec. She didn’t know how it could belong to any family not English. Regardless, she practised her French and decided she would do a degree in that language. But even in this her frustrations grew, her professors not sure why she was interested in Québec’s dowdy past, why she didn’t want to study abroad in Paris.

  Over this year and through the next, Levon changed little. His body was resilient, his mind active. He walked and read and talked until she began to hate him. The only questions he asked regarded her ancestry. Her ignorance about her mother concerned him. You could be anything, he said and looked at her carefully. Then one day he startled her.

  Do you think it is right for us not to have consummated our matrimony?

  Though she tried to appear calm, her sudden pallor was answer enough. He got up and walked away.

  All that week he stayed withdrawn. They no longer talked in his bed. He dressed formally, with a gold watch and cufflinks and tie clip. He had gold rings on his fingers. Only when tired days caught him off guard did he shuffle about in his robe. Those weeks he appeared shrunken. He’d met with a lawyer, she knew, most likely about a will. Then gradually he came to treat her pretty much as before, though with a sort of watchful propriety.

  Each month they saw one another less. When not reading, Isa walked the steep pastures. She cultivated an obsession with the past, sensing how, when she mentioned origins or repeated the stories Jude had told her, she became distinct. Through her unaimed tenderness she divined a lost family, the pleasure of winter nights when snow hushed the world and nothing could be done but wait. What of the mother he’d erased within his silence? How had he come here and fallen in love?

  Sleep wasn’t easy. She woke confused, thinking she was back in the room she’d known most of her life. With her eyes closed she had actual vertigo, a sense of falling or floating. She practised French until dawn, occupying insomnia with cassettes and films that left her with a feeling of sophistication and a Parisian accent of the 1960s.

  Part Two

  Virginia

  April 1993

  Isa turned twenty-five at the end of a sopping April. The frostbitten grass had washed to raw earth, and what flowers bloomed along the fence were few and small. Five years now she’d lived there, reading or making excursions to the university on the long, twisted beanstalk of the highway. She brought back books with a ritual sense, carried them into her home like the fruit of a day’s labours. An upstairs room had become her study, and she cluttered it, knew every volume crowding walls floor to ceiling. Though she’d taken a degree in French, minors in history and literature, she wasn’t interested in teaching. She liked old words, immortal ideas. She had no love for money or the young.

  With time she and Levon had learned to coexist, and while he rambled—extraterrestrial civilizations, theories of Atlantis and invisible planets—she put on silence like an armour. These, what she was reading, were the real books, and she knew him to be a dabbler. But he possessed the longevity of a fool, and though each year he thinned, withered, hardened, he stayed true to the phonetics of his name: (lĭv) (ôn). He might become some stiff, scary looking thing from an import shop, bought on a whim, propped in a corner, but he would never stop talking. And while he diminished towards that far line of horizon, Isa crowded the foreground, and the unsketched space around her she filled first with words and history, then food. Soon Levon’s savings went as much to annotated additions as to jars of marinated artichoke hearts, caviar, fancy breads and cardboard boxes loaded with pastries, chocolate-filled croissants. Her horses sighed under her weight and stood spraddle legged, sad eyed and mugging about like old dogs. She rarely rode them though occasionally took them on walks.

  But evenings she spent in regret, looking out at the dark landscape, the seismic shift of night. Downstairs Levon watched TV and reviewed his stocks. The economy was bustle and freight, and he was doing well, laughing at sitcoms. Only her size loosened his grip. She was no longer the proud possession, the showpiece, and though occasionally he still sat next to her, he appeared to consider her less as a romance than as a frontier he might someday brave. But well after he’d put away his lunar charts and star maps and gone to bed, or on those evenings when he stood by the stream, waiting to be killed—when he’d come up the pasture and nodded his still-living head in her door before retiring—she sat in her study and, quite simply, wished. She read her favourite poems as if casting spells, testing how she might sound in another place or age. She put her books on the floor, cleaned dust from the shelves, alphabetized. She cried. One night she saw a bud of firelight on a nearby pasture.

  The next morning, as she was leaving the house, she noticed a few ratty camping tents on the adjoining property. They’d been pitched between the trampled bull’s-eye of a bonfire and a brown van, a trail of crushed grass behind it, JESUS painted in bulky white letters on its sides. And that afternoon, as she was leaving the grocery store in town, she saw the van again, parked at the far end of the plaza, near the Blockbuster Video. A small crowd had formed and a man dressed in black like a Plymouth pilgrim and wearing a dark, wide-brimmed hat was preaching. She opened the hatch of her Honda and put her groceries inside, then crossed the parking lot. The man gest
iculated. His white, uneven hair bristled at the brim of his hat. Because she stood a head taller than the crowd, she had an easy view. He looked at her, then again, his glance tangible, like a spark from a wire. She thought she had imagined it, yet, in the moment, she was certain he’d recognized her. He watched her even as he spoke.

  And Jesus will walk among you, he was saying, as he himself began to walk into the crowd, … and touch you one by one on the shoulder …, which he did just then with a gentleness unlike the strength in his voice, … and you will kneel and take his name into your heart.

  Soon so many were on their knees that those still standing looked conspicuous and crept away. Though Isa had missed the sermon, she knelt, caring nothing for religion but curious.

  We are men of God, he said. We are carrying God’s message to a country that is losing its values, to the children of a country polluted with sex and drugs. But we depend on you to want us, to tell us to continue our mission saving souls.

  He gestured towards the van, to where a man sat on the asphalt with a boy on either side. Then she realized that the boys were in fact young men, that the man between them was enormous.

  The message of the Gospel can go deep, the preacher said as the giant stood.

  With a grabbing sense in her gut Isa felt his size. It was a bodily motion like gravity. He appeared even larger because everyone was kneeling. He wore jeans and a sweat-stained oxford, his face broad as a shovel, dark, uneven sideburns halfway down his jaw. His chest and throat and even the backs of his hands were matted with hair. He ducked his head and glanced about at the crowd.

  Barthélemy, the man said, is an orphan from the far north. As a boy, he was found wandering in a blizzard. His parents had frozen to death, and only because of his sheer size and strength, and truly because of the will of God, did he not perish. For years no foster home would take him. He terrified people. Nor could he speak. The doctors believed that the cold had destroyed his vocal cords or that perhaps the sheer terror of seeing his parents die shocked him to silence. When I met him he was still illiterate. I took him with me, and it was with the Bible, the true Gospels of our Saviour Lord Jesus Christ, that he learned to read. This child had been seeking a home, and as a man he has found it in the word of God.