Vandal Love

by D. Y. Bechard

  Come in, she hollered. Come in. I’d get up to give you a kiss but they had to go one of these days, my legs, that is.

  Isa went over and offered her cheek.

  I mean, Barbara said and kissed it wetly, I can walk. I just don’t like to. It’s too much work. My feet get all confused. Something to do with drinking, permanent, you know. She looked Isa over and commented that she wasn’t a little girl anymore. She talked a bit about the farm—Hard to keep it going, she said, and you so close, married to that black man? Her damp eyes focused briefly through her plastic glasses. You’ll be staying, won’t you?

  Isa hesitated. How did he die?

  Hell if I know. I didn’t see him around for a week. I sent someone over. I suspect he starved or drank himself there. I mean, it wasn’t anything violent. But who knows? Who knows? He couldn’t hardly have been fifty and drank like a … like a … Anyway, after a week you can’t always tell.

  I understand.

  But you ought to take a look around. It’s been hard getting good help. I keep thinking about selling it. She wet her lips. But dear, I am sorry about your father. He was a good man. When he went, the police dealt with it. Then I called Mindy. Remember Mindy, the trainer? Right, well, we drove down to get his ashes. She liked Jude and used to think there was something sad about him, that he was probably in love. We went and picked up the box. It was terrible. I got the giggles. I don’t know why. Mindy had bought these roses. Pink roses, I think. She said it guarantees a safe journey for the soul. I don’t know. We got back to the barn, and then Mindy started laughing too. We were both laughing something terrible. She said how heavy the ashes were, what a big boy Jude was, and we decided to weigh them. We went into the feed room and used the scale.

  Isa listened as long as she could. Where is … are they? Barbara had become quite red in the face, her front lip lifted like a rabbit’s as if to breathe through her nose. She was clearly trying not to laugh. He’s on the shelf in my room. I figured he could keep me company.

  Thank you, Isa said and went to get him. There was also a box with boots and folded clothes, the old farm rifle and some papers. In it she found several identity cards: Jude at eighteen, shaped like a gladiator. A driver’s licence: Jude White.

  May gave onto a windy, mild June. Honeysuckle sweetened on the fences. Now there wasn’t even small talk at the gas station or country store. She was the Mexican’s widow. A suspect, too. They studied her aloneness, surely eager to know what she would do, or else wondering why she didn’t also disappear.

  Unreal weeks gathered into months. The house became a roomy extension of the sky. There was something else she’d been thinking. She’d never paid her body much mind and gave herself fewer ministrations than she did the horses.

  She forced herself to change clothes and drive to the pharmacy. She bought a pregnancy test. Home, she locked the doors and used it. She sat. Nausea radiated in her like a sun, though this was just fear. She tried to picture herself transformed. But she felt cut off, insubstantial, her entire life something she’d heard from another, about someone else.

  Isa thought of Bart more and more. What she’d felt for him was gradually coming back to life within her. Perhaps she’d made peace with the possibility of his guilt so that she could reconcile her own. Or simply, she didn’t want a child with a missing parent. She recalled how, as a girl, she’d imagined the family she’d never had. She’d reread the part of Jane Eyre when Jane leaves Rochester and wanders through the woods to find her true family. Bart’s appearance had something of that magic to it. Perhaps desire was a form of prayer, and through Bart, the divine had economized, a two-in-one ploy, murder and love.

  Though the police still stopped in every now and then, they no longer seemed terribly interested, and similarly, Levon’s death had ceased to matter for her. But even in death he kept her. He completed her isolation. She sensed his piddling ghost browsing bookshelves, threading phantasmal arms through bathrobes. She read late to reclaim the night, but he hovered at her door, bereft of the gold he hadn’t been able to take to the next world. She tried to banish him with fantasies of a new life, but only that immense shadow drove him off—Jude and all that had gone before, eclipsed even her feelings.

  She told herself she needed to plan. She opened a bank account. She began putting aside modest amounts that she withdrew from Levon’s account with a card he’d given her. She would meet Bart. She reminded herself of details, wondering when he would call. He’s very religious, she said, not sure if she was trying to be convinced of his existence or his innocence.

  Alone in her room for hours, she closed her eyes. An inaccessible region of her brain was constantly turning, thoughts dissolving into images as she verged on sleep. She tried to see herself as self-sufficient. What was she lacking? Philosophers had written that there was no unrealized essence waiting to emerge, that identity was actual and had to be cultivated. There would always be temptation to exist when another turned his eyes on you, to live for love or against tyranny, to find meaning as a victim. All this had appeared simple when her fight was to stand against Levon’s rule, read eat write all night, think up something like poetry in the mountains. But with Levon and Jude gone, freedom was absence, and nothing, not even freedom, had meaning in itself. Bart still hadn’t called.

  July and August passed, mercifully temperate, hardly summer, it seemed, the rains still occasional. By September the evenings were cold. The answering machine received a few calls from professors wondering what had happened to her, mentioning seminars or asking if she was still considering graduate school. She never listened to them through. Her belly had grown, though she carried the weight easily. She hadn’t been to a doctor. She gave all this little or no consideration. A few times she’d felt movements within her but somehow couldn’t think that this would be a child. Familiar silence occupied the house, the fields encroached upon the windows, the verandas were hung with a cloth of mountains.

  Levon’s lawyer had called a few times. He explained there were laws regarding disappearances but that by now death could be assumed. Isa met with him in the kitchen. It was a sunny late-October afternoon. He gave her a summary of accounts and assets.

  Wow, she said without inflection.

  But there’s a stipulation. He was a middle-aged man in the preserve of impersonality, lines on either side of his mouth, black frame glasses, a Clark Kent without softness. It seems, he said, that your husband loved you very much. He unfolded a letter. It began as she might have expected … If you are reading this now … but then startled her: Here is my vision for your life after my death. Fashion yourself as a Southern lady. I have always admired them though they have all but disappeared. Sit on the porch and read. Join a literary discussion group. Cultivate distinction, not eccentricity but conscious distance so all will know the depth of our love. Though, my dear Isabelle, I cannot enforce these things, I can make a few demands. My holdings have been placed in trust. You will be granted an allowance, but if you remarry, you will cease to receive this. You will lose everything. I hope only that this measure does not matter and that you cherish my memory of your own free will. Yours, Levon J.

  She lowered the letter to her lap. Clearly it had been composed years ago.

  And if I remarry?

  His legacy, the lawyer said, will go to the creation of the Levon J. Willis Municipal Parks.

  Parks?

  Yes, he has planned for one, each with a bronze bust, in all of the nearby townships within reason of funding. If you decide to marry at seventy, there might be just one.

  He smiled. When she didn’t, he explained her allowance and excused himself.

  Beyond the windows the sun set in a sky the colour of struck ice.

  She was suddenly awake within this anger: Levon’s future, her corseted, a frou-frou of lace beneath her chin. As if this were all of life she had a right to.

  She went into the yard barefoot. That year’s rains had worked nails and glass shards free of the earth. The wind
blew and lulled, dark clouds shuttling past a slight moon. The heads of wild grass clicked along the fence. Slowly she crossed to the stables.

  In the aisle between the stalls she listened to the soft shift of hoofs in straw, all three horses come out to watch, nodding and tipping ears. They’d always been in her life, so present in disposition that riding lessons had never been necessary. She’d simply climbed on and observed herself at harmony. Had she chosen anything? Years had passed in attachment, not love.

  On a bench lay the rifle that Barbara had given Jude. He’d used it on stray tomcats, on groundhogs or rabbits in the garden. She found the box of shells and worked in the glow of houselights through the window.

  Nearby the stallion gazed at her. He was a silver Arab that Levon had bought and pastured near the road. She touched his neck. She stepped back. She put the stock to her shoulder as he lowered his nose, his ear above the rifle’s muzzle. She tried to recall the kick from when Jude had taken her to the field and had let her shoot into the trees. A bat darted in through a stall door and up to the rafters. The horse didn’t spook but continued to watch. She felt for the trigger, wondering how subtle the movement would be, recalling her only jerky shot, the drab sky resonating above an ocean of leaves. She’d thought that the force of the bullet needed something strong in the hand. The stallion shifted closer to the barrel.

  She let the gun down, then took out the bullet. She put her hand on the stallion’s warm neck and brought up dust with her fingers. Slowly she returned to the tack room. She wanted Bart, to lie against his chest until whatever seed of destruction, hurt or loneliness went away.

  She pulled a horse blanket from the shelf, then unfolded the couch into a bed. In sounds and smells and memories, everything was here, the hours she’d spent with Bart, her youth watching Jude work. She just breathed, lying still until her mind was half coaxed by sleep. Once Jude had come in with the rifle. She’d been watching I Dream of Jeannie, and she wanted to show him how much she could be like this. She tied her shirt at her waist. He was sitting at the table and she put a red plastic bead in her navel and turned, her dress spinning out. Her spontaneous smile and confidence were strange to both of them, the brightness that she felt in her own eyes. He stood, all at once kicking his chair away, and she jumped back, arms crossed before her. He went out and through the grass, leapt the fence into the field and strode to where, in the evening, it disappeared towards forest. He shot three times at the sky. Then he swung the rifle, long turning arcs, distant and strangely silent, steady as his ragged form dissolved into the dark.

  The last fitful and evocative days of autumn had come, shaking the trees. On a cold afternoon, the officer stopped by to see how she was doing. He asked how far along she was, though she hadn’t thought it obvious.

  At least your husband has one on the way, he said. Nothing worse than leaving this world without a child to carry your name.

  She imagined people in town saying, The Mexican’s child. Oh, yes, that one’s a Mexican, too.

  She saw then what it would mean to stay. Levon had been going to the stream for years and, in the week that Bart was there, had disappeared, and she accepted this. Murder no longer seemed so savage. There had been too many absences and unknowns. Her child was going to need a father.

  She went into the kitchen. She ate more than she had in weeks. Then she listed materials for sale on pieces of cardboard and paper, the prices ridiculously cheap. She drove to the post office and the country store. She pasted the signs anywhere she could.

  The next day her property was crowded. She sold it all: the Jaguar, horses, every relic and piece of electronics. She let locals strip the house of furniture and counters, pine cabinets and oak flooring. All that week she watched the fences go, the stables, the entire building given up for eight hundred dollars, dismantled and removed. She hired an investigator to find out who her mother was and gave him copies of Jude’s cards. She was almost pleased at the extravagant cost, as if being married had had a purpose after all. She told him she would be out of town and would contact him. Bart had never called. She slept in the only room that she’d left intact. She kept some clothes and books and Jude’s ashes as well as an old Polaroid camera. She imagined a trip to Québec with Bart, spreading the ashes, starting her life, not over but at last.

  The evening before she left, she filled trash bags with what remained of Levon’s possessions, his suits, collector’s editions on UFOs and geometric studies of crop circles. The window glass flashed with the electric blooms of a far-off storm. Finished, she undressed and scrubbed her face with her damp shirt. Her belly was large, and she felt its hardness as she pulled a sweater on. She went out and carried the bags down the pasture to the stone wall. The flowing pools held rusty nails, from the mill, she supposed. Trip after trip she threw in books and documents until the stream was a roiling mud of paper and old clothes. She stood in the chill silent dark, not knowing what to expect or whether to be afraid. She didn’t need proof, not of God nor gods nor evil.

  Maine-Québec

  December 1993–January 1994

  Isa arrived two days before Christmas. She stayed in a hotel in Lewiston and told the clerk she was looking for an old friend. He suggested she ask at a few popular bars, and though she was doubtful, everyone at the first place knew Bart. When she’d entered, the talk had fallen to an uncomfortable silence. It was a sparse afternoon crowd, mostly older men, but between them they were able to tell her exactly where he lived. She wasn’t sure if the silence had been because of her belly or her height. She considered that if she wasn’t pregnant they might have told her more.

  The apartment was on the edge of town, one of two above an abandoned convenience store. December had been temperate, warm enough for her to wait on the stairs. She’d had no reason to be certain Bart would be in Lewiston, but she hadn’t been able to imagine where else he might have gone. And if he wasn’t here, she’d told herself, or if she couldn’t find him, there would be his family, and even then she could simply continue north.

  He arrived in the afternoon, driving a rusted-out Ford Bronco with new tires. His clothes were muddy, and he walked halfway to the stairs before he saw her. Already she could smell the alcohol. He simply stopped.

  You’re working, she said. For the first time she truly grasped how long it had been. His face looked heavier, older, his eyes bloodshot.

  How did you … get here?

  I asked at the bar.

  He hesitated. I thought it might be dangerous to call.

  She shrugged. Maybe. Anyway, I’m here.

  He looked at her, then up at the apartment. I can show you where I live.

  She was relieved not to have to speak. She watched his hunched back as he climbed the stairs. The ceilings were low for them. There was a mattress on the floor, a table with two chairs. The fluted dish of the ceiling light had filled with dead flies, and the only wall decoration was a dusty dead clock in a laminated slice of wood. Dirty boot prints made the yellow rug look strangely like leopard skin.

  He stared past her and shifted from foot to foot, the floor creaking like a ship at sea.

  Were you still thinking of me? she asked.

  Yeah. I’ve been working. I’ve just been staying here and mostly working. The money got stolen. I … I bought the truck and what was left of the money got stolen here. But I have a job.

  She was silent. That’s okay. I have money, too.

  With the deliberate motions she’d become used to, she sat. She felt oddly detached, like a monk. I’m tired, she said, and then, after a moment, when he didn’t speak, I’m pregnant. I think it’s been almost eight months.

  Later, to ease the tension, she asked that he show her the town. The calm between them felt like a lull. Clouds rafted against a sky the colour of aluminum. They walked aimlessly. She’d brought her Polaroid but felt ridiculous now for having done so. She noticed that people, usually men, paused to stare.

  How’s your family? she asked.

  He d
idn’t respond immediately. I’ve been working with my cousin Zy. He operates and repairs log skidders. He was doing helicopter repair for the army in Korea and just came home last year. He’s the one who got me my job.

  What do you do?

  Just stuff for the logging company. I’m working my way up.

  She was about to ask if he’d seen his grandparents, but he pointed out the railroad station.

  The French-Canadians all arrived through here. I remember … my grandmother told me that they came after a spur was built to the Portland–Montreal line. All this area from here to the river was called Little Canada, I think.

  She glanced at a sign: Lisbon Street.

  He had a pained look on his face. You said you have money?

  Enough … to get by. She’d intended to say, For us. To say, To have the child and get started. She wondered if he would continue working if she were to give him what she had.

  We should buy groceries for dinner, she told him. To celebrate.

  He’d stopped and looked away. He turned back. Let me take a picture of you, he said.

  She stood by a lamppost. She tried to look calmly at the camera. The sky was almost dark. He snapped the picture.

  They waited for the photo to develop, shoulder to shoulder in the last flare of light.

  I was wondering, he said. Was your … was he found?

  Levon?

  Did they find him?

  He wasn’t really my husband, she said. Just legally. And no, he wasn’t found.

  He hitched his thumbs. The photo’s probably ready. Why don’t you peel it?

  She did and turned to show him.

  It’s perfect, he said. It’s really good.

  They went home without groceries. She was suddenly too tired. This had been happening more and more, bouts of exhaustion that had her asleep almost before she could lie down. She took off her shoes, the floorboards cold from the abandoned convenience store below. She stretched on the bed and thought of those first days when she and Bart had lain together in the dark stables. She wanted to speak now like they had. Her throat hurt.