by Jeffrey Lent
Katey said, “Mom’s upset because I didn’t make her famous spaghetti. But I got dinner ready anyhow. Liver with onions and bacon too. From the Dot. And baked potatoes ready to go. I know you like all that. I needed a break from spaghetti. You ready to eat? Daddy?”
He again looked back and forth at the two of them and drew a deep breath and it seemed he sucked a certain level of air, of tension, from the room. He said, “I could eat.”
They sat around the table. Candles lighted, although the small light over the range was still burning. Ruth had candlelight always for meals after dark and all of them liked this softening of the day just passed. The meal was almost over and had been delicious—Denny was a great cook and the liver was browned crisp but pink and rich inside, the onions cooked to a caramel sweetness, the big potatoes flaky white richness with butter and salt. Even the salad added a pleasing crunch and vinegar tang. And during the meal they had talked of ordinary things even within the compressed sense of caution that almost grew to seem an unnecessary precaution. Ruth speaking with candor about the difficulty with the new first-grade teacher, the candor a treasured thing that Katey had long ago understood was a trust to be held and even savored, an entry into the world of adults. Oliver leaned over his plate, sawing apart the emptied potato skin, forking up the folds of rich goodness while somehow keeping his eyes on his wife and nodding at the right places, a small noise of understanding issuing forth. And Katey, Katey only eating and happy to do so, feeling they were all again solid and at ease under this one small roof, a girl who understood the value of such things. And reaching over to pluck the last piece of bacon from her father’s plate, because she knew she could.
Then she’d stood to clear the plates as her mother stood also to open the carton of rainbow sherbet removed from the freezer just before they sat to their meal, softened now to be served into the small white china bowls shaped like hollowed-out tulips and Katey was back in her chair as her mother served the bowls out before them and, smoothing her dress beneath her as she sat, said, “By the by, Katherine. Have you made an appointment with Evelyn? You’re past due.”
So there it was. They were not done. Her mother determined to prevail.
Katey took a bite of the bright lime stripe for time and comfort but the sherbet tasted metallic and slowly she set her spoon down and, raising her head, glanced at her father as she turned to face her mother. “No,” she said. “I haven’t.”
“You need to.”
“Oh, I think it’s fine. I like it.”
“It’s not fine. And you know it.”
“I’m growing it out, Mother.”
“You’re doing no such thing. Call her tomorrow.”
“No.”
“What? What did you say?”
Katey was aware her father was watching this exchange and she did not look at him, trusting that he’d understand and come to her aid when this was clear.
“I’m growing my hair. I want it long. I can trim it myself as I need to. Until it’s all even.”
Ruth now had tilted her chin toward her, both her eyes firmly upon Katey. She said, “Nonsense. You’re doing no such thing, I said.”
Then Katey pushed back her chair and stood. She said, “I am.”
Ruth sat straight, pushed back her chair but resisted her desire to also rise. She said, “I’m not raising some tatterdemalion. Do you understand me?”
“Oh. A big word. You’re not raising anyone. I’m myself and will always be myself. I want my hair long and it will be that way.”
Ruth came out of her chair and for the briefest of seconds appeared to raise an arm as if to strike. Then the arm was dropped, hands clasped before her. But she said, “One. You will not speak to me like that. Two. You will do as I say under this roof and outside of it, for that matter. What’s wrong with you?” Her voice rose to a pitch near fit. “Are you taking drugs? Are you strung out, as you kids say? Why do you argue with everything? You’re not reasonable anymore, at all. There’s something wrong with you. What is it?”
Katey said, “Jesus Christ. I don’t believe this. I don’t believe you. What is this crap? Who are you to talk to me like this? You’re crazy! Are you even my mother? What, was I adopted or something?”
Ruth was crying and the candles were guttering as Oliver then slowly stood up and became a presence in the room again and Katey thought There, he’ll calm her down. Meaning and knowing also that he’d calm her down, as well as her mother. The two of them, daughter and father, had stepped along this path, never spoken of, a few times before. Ruth became overwrought, was unreasonable. Then settled again to her old self. So she stood there, hearing the sputters of burning wax. And waited as he righted himself into the scene between the two women.
Then, his face turned downward to the dying light, he said, “Adopted? I guess, you want to put it that way. Sort of.”
In that silence he turned from the table and walked to the door, paused to pull on his red-and-black wool shirt, opened the door and looked back.
“Oh, Katey,” he said.
And stepped out into the night and closed the door upon them.
Katey looked from the door that appeared to shimmer, shut so tight, to her mother. Whose face had collapsed upon itself. An old crumpled woman stood in her place. Katey was working her way toward words, a question of some sort, when her mother leaned down and held her palms over the sputtering candles and sucked breath, then lifted those same hands and held her cheeks. Turned to look at Katey, her eyes dark holes in the dimness of the room. She spoke, her voice at a strained level.
“He’s not angry. Certainly not at you and, despite what he said, I don’t believe he’s angry at me. Or perhaps he is angry at me but I know your father and he doesn’t hide things like that. I made a mistake years ago but it was an honest one. I can’t explain this now. You said you are almost all grown up. Well. This is how it can be to be almost all grown up. Now. I’m going upstairs to take a bath. We will talk about this another time.”
She turned and Katey said, “Mom?”
Ruth halted, hesitated and then turned. “What is it, Katherine?”
Katey’s heart was hammering, her lungs not up to their expected job. She said, “What just happened? What did he mean, adopted?”
“That’s how it is. Being grown up. You think you know where you stand, but the damned land seems to keep sliding under your feet. Sometimes, the best you can hope for is to not land on your ass.”
She turned again and walked from the room into the hall and Katey stood listening to her footsteps up the stairs, then moments later the swoosh of water into the tub, the wallpipes clanking. Stood even worse than moments before; the word ass and her mother were not even remotely aligned with each other and this, then, was the moment when Katey understood the enormity of what had just occurred.
She was not a sneaky girl but one wandering through the vast and vague mysteries of childhood, her parents the primary owners of those mysteries. How they’d possibly existed before she had. So, many years before that evening, she’d found the packet of Christmas cards in a shoebox at the back of her mother’s closet. Under the tissue that was under the pair of heels that her mother had never, in Katey’s memory, worn. And hidden so and discovered so, signaled to the child that found them, a deep, mysterious and profoundly romantic array of scenarios attached to the cards. All of which were wrong, and, as she learned, none of them as central to her own life as the truth. And she kept her knowledge of the cards secret. At least, until the night she stole them. To have them with her.
There was a lightening over the low-slumped hills before her from where she sat in the cab of the truck. This time of year this meant it was about four in the morning, possibly not quite. No birdsong, yet. And abruptly and almost savagely she knew she didn’t want to stay where she was. Another day with the sisters and the little boy. Well-meaning and kind people but really only strangers that kept her connected to the incident of the night before. She was tired but not terribly
so, given her long sleep through the day yesterday. And she also felt a lurch of resolve, to see through what she’d started upon, and with that the recognition she was, within herself, close to tossing the whole business, the seeking, out the window and returning home. Which she could not do.
Her mother, she realized now, had not been raped. There was nothing in the story she’d been told that even hinted at such a thing. Most everything else about the story she found difficult if not impossible to believe, of her mother, of the man she thought of as her father. Which was the point: to stand before the man who was her father, her other father, and simply see how that felt. And how he might respond to her. Her mother had told her Brian Potter had no knowledge of her existence. But then, she would say that, wouldn’t she? Those Christmas cards. Had there been other correspondence, from her mother to him? This, much else, she would learn. Even if the learning was a negative, a void.
So, to press onward. Her suitcase was back in the house. She let herself out of the truck and crossed the yard. The first tentative pipes of birds, a call and then a response. In the kitchen only the same light was on over the stove. Luna was snoring gently on the couch. She went into the study and knelt in the dim light from the window and closed her suitcase, then stood and went back into the kitchen.
Laurie stood in a robe at the stove. She looked Katey up and down, nodded. She whispered, “You’re taking off?”
“It’s the right time. But thanks for everything.”
“I can have coffee in fifteen minutes.”
“I’m good. Really.”
“Sure,” Laurie said. Then stepped and kissed Katey’s forehead, pulled back and said, “Not all men are dicks. But you take care out there, you hear?”
“I will. I’ll do my best.”
Laurie then just stood watching as she hitched her suitcase out the door, into the pale morning. With nothing more to say.
Katey laced on her sneakers in the cab of the truck and then drove out, vaguely the way she’d come in. She’d find a place to stop and study her maps and find some more, have food and coffee and figure out what was reasonable to expect from the day. She had the heater on low and the windows open for the birds singing and the radio pulsing music to beat her onward as she came fully into this new day. She glanced at herself in the rearview and her hair was a fright and somehow just right and she grinned at herself and then drove on.
Eight
Oliver
The snow began during the night, fine flakes that streamed from a low mantle of opaque sky, without cease throughout the muffled day and so when he went to put the chains on the truck in the last light of the afternoon he already knew they weren’t going anywhere soon but wasn’t terribly concerned; Ruth wasn’t expected at Mary Hitchcock Hospital until the end of the week. It was Monday of the second week of March. He shoveled snow away from the doors of the ell shed, backed the truck up there and loaded the bed level with split cordwood, for weight. He did so feeling it was a gesture but then much of life these past strange months had seemed one gesture piled upon another upon others endlessly. And he didn’t even know if he was right about that. As he felt about almost everything, his very self most of all. The snow swirled about him as he worked.
Even as he’d sat shocked and silent as she’d told him that August evening that she was having Brian Potter’s baby and would wait for his answer if it was immediate or days, he’d admired her courage. And wondered but did not ask, did not need or want to ask, if she’d have told him about Potter if there was not this question now lying before them. Or before him. He’d stood from the table and left the house for his shop where he did not work but perched on his stool, knowing his answer but not willing to tell her so quickly and wondering if this revealed more about himself than it did his wife. Or if that even mattered. When he finally told her they’d have the baby as if it were their own he’d been unsure of his own courage and, secretly he believed, shamed by his doubt.
It was still snowing when the power went out and he filled the furnace and old kitchen range by flashlight and carried one of the old brass lanterns up for bedside come morning but the Baby Ben clock showed quarter to four when she woke him with the quiet news that her contractions had started and when he stepped outside the fine snow was a veil in the beam of the flashlight. The snow in the driveway topped his rubber boots up to his knees. He used an old broom from the woodshed to clear the snow off the cab of the truck and went back inside to tell Ruth the hospital was out of the question and he’d make it to the village to fetch Doc Durgan.
She was perspiring and working hard to keep her breathing even, caught out by sudden clutches. “Do you think,” she asked, “you can make it up for my mother?”
“I can sure try.”
She opened her mouth, lifted her hand to signal wait. After a moment she said, “No. Don’t. I know that hill. If you made it up, you’d never get back down. I can’t take the risk.”
“Maybe later,” he said. “The snow stops.”
“Bring your mother.” Her eyes steady upon him.
“You sure?” Out there, between them, both of them knowing it.
She nodded. “I want the doctor. I want a woman. I want you.”
“I’m not sure I’ll be much help.”
“Oliver.”
“I’m going. I’ll be back.”
“Be careful.”
“I will be.”
He had to sweep the truck again. Then, headlights pale in the snow, he drove with a slow steady precision, a greatly heightened caution, a state of mind he’d almost forgotten as he made way down the hill, slipping, wheels churning, the streetlights out, some few windows lit pale as his own. He woke his mother first, left her to dress and ready herself and went on to the doctor’s house. That man was already up, drinking coffee made on a parlor stove, unsurprised to see Oliver in his door. The return was easier, following his own tracks, the truck working hard going up Beacon Hill but not slipping, sliding. The doctor and Jennie in their heavy overcoats, the doctor with his oversized case on his lap, Jennie with a small suitcase of her own. It was thin daylight behind the snow.
Ed showed up with one of the road crews, plowing. But for footsteps overhead it was quiet where they stood in the kitchen. Oliver asked his father if he thought he should try up West Hill for Jo Hale. Ed peered out the window and said, “This could be hours.” It was unclear if he meant the continuing snow or the arrival of the baby. Both, Oliver guessed and took these words in silence. They were men easy with silence. Ed poured himself coffee and Oliver began a measured pace of the room. The plow truck did not return and the road filled again with snow. A wind had sprung, swirling the snow in white sheets, skimming rills off the drifting tops of the snowbanks. Times, Oliver couldn’t see the apple trees from the window over the sink. Jennie came down and filled the canning kettle and put it on the stove to heat. She looked at her son and said, “She’ll be all right. Not just now, but soon enough.” Out of deference for his father, who disliked tobacco, Oliver stepped out into the woodshed to smoke, careful with his ashes, the butts going into an empty Black Label beer can. The second time he did so, he returned to find his father making grilled cheese-and-egg sandwiches for them both. Oliver was halfway through his when her first scream, a long rising plaint of pain, filled the house, cut off with an abrupt suck.
“They say,” Ed said, “If a woman could remember childbirth she’d never have more than one.” Then added, “Or even try.”
Oliver looked at his father with the unspoken question and his father leaned to open the firebox on the range and add more wood. The water in the kettle was boiling and he pushed it to the back of the stove, to simmer.
It was still snowing when Oliver laced tight his rubber boots and pulled on his red-and-black wool coat and snap-brimmed black wool cap, midafternoon, to leave the house. His father sat at the table reading last week’s newspaper. Oliver couldn’t bear to remain in the house. From upstairs now came long mounting cries that edged into s
creams or were cut off in gulps, drained into whimpering moans. He let himself out, aware his father was watching him but unable to meet his eye. In the shed he eyed the shovel but left it be and plunged into the snow and slogged his way across the drive to his shop. The road was unplowed, a mock of effort. He kicked and tramped down the snow from the door of his workshop and let himself in. There he built a fire in the small chunk stove and set upon his stool at the bench, the open frame of a fiddle set up in clamps, tender thin strips of wood glued to the interior, as if the delicate structure was being prayed into place. He sat with his hands caught tight, balled in his trousers above his knees. This past Christmas a card had arrived from Brian Potter and Oliver had no idea if it was still anywhere in the house but guessed it might be. Or maybe not. In any event, he swore in silence that if Ruth died he’d travel to Maine and find the man and slaughter him in some slow and gruesome fashion. And then knew he would not and gazed into the streaming whorls of snow beyond the windowglass.
Darkness fell early with the snow and it was years ago that he lay on his back and put chains on his useless truck, so certain the gesture was empty, which it certainly was, but also sure the gesture was a small halt against bad luck, against misfortune. After a time he dug in his pocket and lighted the dented barn lantern that sat on the bench and sat in the flickering soot-hazed light. The window darkened and threw back a flickering reflection of the bench, himself a vague presence behind the twice-seen lantern. Where he was when some unknown time later his father kicked at the door and then hauled it open and stood, coatless and bareheaded, sprinkled with snow, and said, “You’re wanted to the house.” Then turned and left, not waiting for him and Oliver did not wait, did not bother with his coat or hat but plunged out, paused and blinked and went quickly back into the shed to shut the flue and damper on the stove and plucked up the lantern to make his way across the yard. The snow still falling heavy as ever, the rough track of his father already filling, edges softening with new-fallen snow.