Secret of Lies

by Barbara Forte Abate

  “The war?” I’d had no idea he was a veteran. But then, actually, I knew very little about him; a regrettable fact that may have proven otherwise had I not been so consistently caustic toward him over the entire term of our acquaintance.

  “Korean war.”

  I wondered fleetingly if I was making a mistake by encouraging him to talk, but just as quickly concluded I was far more terrified of the silence and what it meant should his voice fall away and not come back.

  “How’d it happen?”

  “The war?”

  “No, today. What happened?”

  “I ...”

  “What made the tractor flip?”

  “I ... can’t remember ... it was in Korea ... the war.”

  “Ash, the tractor, what happened with the tractor?”

  “Slipping backwards ... gunfire ... enemy everywhere ... hole. Must’ve been a woodchuck–” His head tipped sideways as his eyes closed.

  And all at once it was there—rising up ahead like the hand-delivered answer to a prayer–the enormous white lettered sign assuring that we’d reached the Promised Land–COUNTY HOSPITAL. Heaven be blessed, we’d arrived.

  “Certainly he’s lost a good deal of blood and that in itself is always a concern. And you’re already aware that his arm was badly fractured, but he’s also suffered a concussion and broken three ribs. Nevertheless, as bad as that all must sound to you right now, he’s healthy and strong and there’s no reason why he won’t be fine. The important thing at this point is proper care during the healing process.”

  My mother nodded as the doctor laid out the sobering details of Ash’s condition while I said nothing; my senses dull and transfixed as I absorbed the inventory of his injuries and silently questioned the possibility of Ash’s ever being truly fine again.

  “I assume you’re his family?” the doctor asked then.

  “Yes,” Mom answered without hesitation.

  “Good. He’s going to need some help getting around for a while. I’ll let him go home in a few days if everything continues to look good and then you can take it from there.”

  “Fine.”

  “I see this sort of accident all the time around here. Farming isn’t an easy life. Believe me when I tell you that Mr Waterman was more than a little lucky.”

  Lucky? It was a difficult word to consider given the situation, though he undoubtedly was.

  Driving home under a moonless sky, we rode most of the way in silence. There was so much to think about–details to be separated, studied, and thoughtfully absorbed from the drama of the past several hours.

  “It was nice of Malcolm to drive you out to the hospital,” I said at length.

  “Yes, he’s a treasure. Always comes through in a pinch. Did I mention he offered to lend us one of his hired men for the harvest?”

  “That’ll be a load off our minds,” I said, although the furthest thing from my thoughts was the harvest, my predominant consideration resting on the all too sobering fact that a man had almost died. A man I’d consistently ignored and insulted for no justifiable reason.

  “I’m going to insist he stay with us while he recovers. It’s the least we can do. He nearly lost his life in our field,” Mom said, the hurried pace of her words suggesting she expected and was bracing for an argument over her announcement.

  “You’re right. I agree. He shouldn’t be on his own,” I said, staring straight ahead, careful to keep my eyes locked on the highway in deliberate avoidance of my mother’s gaze.

  “We can set something up for him in the den,” she continued as though I hadn’t spoken. And for the first time that day I paused to consider how difficult all of this must have been for her. Because up until that point I’d been far too preoccupied with deflecting the blows to my own damaged conscience to notice.

  “Dear Lord, when I think of how easily he could’ve died out there,” she said quietly, wrapping her arms around her narrow shoulders in a self-soothing embrace.

  We fell back to our respective silences, my mind replaying the desperate race of the previous hours, a collage of images tightly strung together by the lingering odor of blood dried into my blouse–a permanent stain of the cruelly sobering promise that there is no door effectively closed against fate should it decide to reach out its hand and turn the knob.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Ash came home six days later. I watched him as he walked stiffly into the bright sunlight, wavering slightly, pale beneath his suntan.

  I said nothing when he protested (as I’d somehow expected he would) over my mother’s intentions to nurse him back to health, knowing that her determinate insistence would have him forced to concede by the time we’d reached the farm.

  Those first days back Ash was strangely subdued. I pretended not to notice his struggles to read the newspaper–a task he seemed perpetually unable to master minus the cooperation of his plastered arm–or his attempts to eat a meal using only one hand.

  Gathered for supper on Ash’s first night returned to us, my mother instinctively reached to cut the meat on his plate, her thoughtful deed bringing an immediate tint of embarrassment spilling over his face.

  “She’s insisted on doing the same for me for twenty-one years,” I smiled. “It’s so nice to see someone else have the pleasure.”

  “You think you would’ve learned by now,” Mom chuckled.

  “Well, for the next few weeks Ash can be your baby boy and I’ll do my best to fend for myself.”

  “Baby boy? That’s a fairly apt description,” Ash smiled, and I didn’t look away until I felt a certain warmth stealing its way under my skin.

  As twilight lingered I sat on the porch with Ash, plodding through self-conscious conversation, thinking how much easier it had been to talk to him when he’d been delirious and barely conscious. As far as I could determine he didn’t remember a thing I’d said that day, but even so, he couldn’t have failed to notice how my attitude toward him had thawed considerably.

  A mosquito landed on my bent knee and I smashed it against my skin with a sharp slap. The descent of evening had stirred a host of hungry insects lulled from daytime hibernation and I swatted at yet another as it alighted on my forearm.

  “I meant to thank you for driving me to the hospital.”

  “You don’t have to, it’s what anyone would’ve done.”

  “Well even so, I’m grateful you learned to drive in spite of everything.”

  “You mean in spite of my pigheadedness,” I said without looking at him. Did he at least remember my apology?

  “No,” he grinned. “But it was nice of you to apologize anyway.”

  “I thought you were bleeding to death.”

  “I figured you did.”

  “I still meant it though.”

  “You’re a hard person to understand, Stephanie.”

  I liked the way he said my name, sliding out in a smooth drawl that sounded like warm liquid as it left his mouth. Funny how I’d never noticed it before.

  “I don’t know, isn’t everyone?”

  To my relief he didn’t reply. I much preferred to leave my personality and its various flaws undiscussed. I pulled myself up from the swing, moving toward the porch rail. It was nearly dark now and I stood listening to the familiar aggregation of sounds that close the day.

  Mom appeared at the screen door. “Anyone like some peach ice cream?”

  “No, thanks. I think I’ll go for a walk and stretch my legs.” Ash stood and moved toward the porch steps.

  “I’m still full from supper,” I said distractedly, watching Ash disappear around the corner of the house and out of sight.

  The letter from Aunt Smyrna had been the first in over a year, a notably disjointed collection of pages detailing how insanely busy she was; listing an impossible trove of exotic and distant sites she claimed to have visited, describing the glamorous and exciting characters she’d met in her travels. Her missive remarkably sad in the way it didn’t ring true, clearly more of a mira
ge she’d created to cloak what was really a lonely, desperate existence. And nowhere did she mention Cal.

  “Something just doesn’t feel right with her–really hasn’t felt right for a long time,” Mom said, thoughtfully folding the letter back into its envelope. “I should be doing something to help her, but I don’t know what. She hasn’t even mentioned a word here about Calvin.”

  Whether deliberate or merely negligent, in none of her sporadic correspondences did Aunt Smyrna ever tell us where she currently was. And it was solely due to the series of cloudy postmarks stamped at the corner of a letter or postcard that we were occasionally able to decipher when and where it was they’d been sent from, thus partially enabling us to trace her eccentric course across the country.

  But even more, it was witnessing Aunt Smyrna’s gradual emotional collapse delivered by mail that brought the deep shadows of the past whirring back like a returning boomerang, forceful in a way I could neither erase nor ignore the all-consuming need I all at once felt to return to the place where it had all come undone–the huge old house overlooking the ocean–the evil specter in my dreams, always hungry, never satisfied. The ugliest place I’d ever known.

  The injuries to Ash’s face were nearly healed, but it would be several more weeks before the cast would come off his arm. Despite the ineludible physical restraints as his body healed, it was seldom that I caught him sitting idle. Rather, he was forever attending to some minor repair, sketching out plans and ideas for spring planting, or feeding and watering the livestock. On some level I envied his constant state of industry and purpose, possibly might’ve even admired it if not for the routine exasperation of having my mother forever chasing me out after him because of it.

  “For heaven’s sake, Stephanie, go out there and help him. He shouldn’t be doing so much this soon.” At which point I would obediently grab my coat and follow after him only to be greeted with a raised eyebrow and knowing grin.

  “She sent you out here again? What does she think I’m doing, chopping down trees?”

  “Well the doctor did say–”

  “You, too?” he grinned, shaking his head.

  “Look at it this way, the better you are at following doctor’s orders the quicker you recuperate, which means the sooner you can check out of the nagging ladies recovery ward,” I smiled, scooping dry feed into the empty trough as he picked up the hose and began filling a bucket with water.

  “I never said anything about nagging.”

  “You didn’t have to. Your expressions give you away.”

  “Is that so? You sound like my wife,” he said, tossing hay into Gertrude’s stall–thoroughly oblivious to the fact that he’d not only pitched an enormous molten chunk of earth shattering information, but landed it right between my eyes.

  “Your wife?” I repeated, not having intended for the words to come out sounding quite as horrified as they did.

  “Apparently you find it hard to believe someone would’ve married me.”

  “I didn’t say that. It’s just that you … well, you certainly never mentioned being married before.”

  “Didn’t seem any point. We’ve been divorced longer than we were married,” he said, reaching for the corn broom leaning up against the stall, bracing it inside the elbow of his uninjured arm, holding it awkwardly against his side as he swept scattered bits of hay and grain into a careful pile.

  “That seems rather sad.”

  “Sad? No, not sad really. We were only kids. She sent me a letter while I was in Korea saying she’d met someone else,” he shrugged, as if thoroughly disinterested with the subject.

  “Oh my, God, that’s awful. What if you’d been killed or something?”

  “The original quickie divorce.”

  “How can you be so indifferent? Didn’t you love her?” I persisted.

  He lifted his head, his expression unclear; studying my face for a silent moment before answering. “Sometimes you just have to let things go … especially when they’re the wrong things.”

  He paused, then patiently continued as if explaining something to a rather dense child. “It’s like a dog chasing its tail. He’ll knock himself out running around in circles trying to get his teeth into it, and when he does it hurts like hell because it’s only a tail–his own tail.”

  I stared at him quizzically, his meaning not altogether clear.

  “Just be sure of what it is you’re chasing after ... you might find out it’s only your tail.”

  “What makes you think I’m chasing my tail–or chasing anything?” I bristled.

  “I never said I did.”

  For a long while after he’d gone back up to the house I stayed there secreted within the barn, the comfort of darkness permeated with the sweetly familiar scent of hay, thinking of all that Ash had said. Not quite convinced of the rationale within his explanation, but nevertheless searching for myself, and my tail, in his words.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  “Well you had two years of journalism in college. Isn’t that the type of work you should be looking for?” my mother said when I finally got around to sharing my conviction that it was high time I found a job; specifically, genuine employment with the promise of an actual salary.

  “Have you forgotten that we live in Callicoon, Mom? The only thing published here is one crummy newspaper and I’m willing to bet there’s probably only a handful of people who even read it–and that’s on a good day when there’s been a car accident or a cow’s given birth.”

  “Don’t be so cynical, Stevie. Maybe no one buys it now, but with a new writer–”

  “You forget I didn’t graduate. I seriously doubt they’d even consider hiring me. And besides, I don’t have the right qualifications–ninety years old and dull as dirt.”

  “Maybe Malcolm could–”

  “Cripes, Mom, I don’t need Malcolm selling me all over town. It was one thing when I was in high school, but I’m a bit old for that now.”

  “Well I don’t know how many jobs of any type you expect to find around here on your own merits.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “I’m just saying Malcolm has connections.”

  “Connections aren’t everything. Maybe someone will die. It worked for Ash.”

  It was a horrible thing to have said. I’d known it as soon as the words tumbled from my lips and landed on my ears. Worse even than the vast majority of humorless and sarcastic statements I’d long had the tendency to utter without thinking.

  My mother’s face instantly crashed–a runaway car slamming hard into a wall of disbelieving shock–and I offered an immediate apology before the damaging blade of my words managed to sink the wound any deeper.

  “I’m sorry, Mom. Honestly. I don’t know … it was just … I’m really sorry.”

  She didn’t reply. The terrible expression still in place as she deliberately returned her attentions to the stack of outdated magazines she’d been sorting in search of interesting recipes.

  And for all my insensitive ignorance, I at least knew well enough to gather up my disgrace and promptly slink upstairs to my room.

  After inquiring unsuccessfully for work at every business in Callicoon, the only place left to turn me down was the very publication I’d insultingly snickered over the day before.

  “I’m sure you realize, Miss Burke, that we have a very small operation here. We’ve had the same three writers on our staff for nearly seventeen years and they’ve proven themselves more than efficient at covering all of Callicoon’s news stories.”

  Mr Saxon, owner and publisher of the Callicoon Gazette, removed his thick tortoiseshell eyeglasses, briefly rubbing his eyes with wide fingertips. He resettled the glasses onto the permanent groove creasing the bridge of his nose; tugged at one thick earlobe; picked up a pencil from his desk–tapped it over the knuckles on his opposite hand like a practiced finger plucking notes from a row of piano keys. His mechanized fidgeting alerting me to what was surely coming next–the ever so polite brush-
off.

  “Mr Saxon,” I interrupted before he could finalize the dismissal. “Your paper–if you’ll pardon my honesty–is certainly a wonderful little publication, but it could be even better if you were to consider adding something new. Something that would attract new readers.”

  “Oh well, I don’t think–”

  “In college I participated in a study involving various newspapers and those items or regular columns which interested the majority of readers,” I said, making it up as I went along.

  As I’d hoped, the rhythm of the tapping pen slowed as his interest piqued, if only subtly, and I continued, working quickly to secure the noose and rope him in.

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes, sir. Of course there’s always the draw of the front page story, but unfortunately none of us has any real assurance of a headline report until it arrives, so there are obviously no guarantees there. What we can control, however, is the fact that readers are definitely drawn to continuing features. A comic strip for instance, or a cooking section, advice columns, pet or gardening features–something that will entertain as well as informatively answer their questions from week to week. It helps readers feel as if they have a personal connection with–”

  “Yes, well, that could be something for me to consider,” he interrupted; now running the pencil back and forth between his chunky fingers–from piano to trombone. “Let me talk it over with some people. I’ll get back to you either way.”

  “All right, fine,” I said, standing. “Thank you, Mr Saxon. I appreciate your taking the time to–”

  “Very good. I’ll be in touch.”

  Yep. No question about it, I’d gotten the brush-off.

  “An advice column,” I repeated in disbelief as I all but dropped the telephone receiver back onto its cradle. “Mr Saxon’s decided to try out an advice column. He wants me to write as Aunt Phoebe.”