by Jeffrey Lent
While he no longer understood anything at all.
He’d known she’d be leaving. And feared and dreaded it but also welcomed it. After all, that was what she was supposed to do. Just not in this way. And he was responsible. What to make of that?
Ruth had told him everything, long ago. He didn’t blame her. He didn’t blame Brian Potter, mostly. No. He didn’t blame Brian Potter. He didn’t blame the girl, the first one, Brigitte, offering what she had to offer. So many of the women, girls even, during those days, weeks, and months after the war ended had offered what they had. Many with a great fervor and sense of delight. Welcoming back life. They’d all heard stories of the Russians and these women, these girls, for many of them were little better than children, knew they were lucky. Even with the Brigittes and the gas-siphoning boy among them, knew they were delivered into kinder hands, more gentle hands, even if those hands could slap or find a sudden rip of malice, for this was a release of tension. Those Americans with their chocolate bars and tinned meat, cigarettes. They had no Stalingrad. These women knew they were fortunate. And their own war was ended. Fires raining from the sky. They offered what they had and mostly what they had was themselves. Certainly there was calculation involved but then, there always is. Just more deeply cloaked. When you have nothing, a cloak is a luxury ill-afforded.
And after Brigitte, there had been young women that he tried to help best he could. Small things can be very large. But, because of Ruth, he held himself. He wasn’t alone doing so but mostly. Until the afternoon with Emilie up in the hills, in the vineyards, late summer, where they’d walked at her suggestion, hand in hand. She was nineteen she told him. They coupled in vine-spattered shade and then lay back, both smoking his cigarettes, watching the clouds overhead and he thought of Ruth and then also came the image of the blood-soaked blouse of the little girl and he was curling into himself without moving until Emilie caressed him with her hand and then her lips moving down his body and he stiffened and held his breath and gazed at the foreign German sky before he rolled over and fucked her very hard and long, as if he’d drive her into the earth under both of them, all the time seeing Brigitte beneath him. She cried out, her mouth against his shoulder. As Brigitte never would, with anyone.
A year after that he came home. Someone who resembled some version of himself long ago projected came home and everything around him was too loud and moving too fast and senseless to the true cost of being alive. And he walked through that the best he could.
Then the Bienceneaus’ fiftieth wedding anniversary which he’d had no intention of attending but needed to, suddenly. For Brian, he thought. Until the girl who was Brigitte, hair braided and curled up, blonde hair so almost white, not deep honey like some French-Canadian girls, had come running up to him and speaking French not German, such a clever disguise that he knew she meant for him to see through, “Oh! There you are. I’ve heard about you, you fiddle player you. Tell me. Will you play for me?”
* * *
Or perhaps she was Brigitte as Katey, waiting a way to come through, back into this world.
He did not know. He was a sad thoughtful man who owned a great despair over the turbulent engine of life. Which he felt tethered to. And knew that it was the knowing this that tethered him.
And he was lonely, and loved. The love bestowed upon him was also a mystery to him, one he accepted as the grand mystery of life. For he also knew that for all the years behind him, and all that lay ahead he would remain lonely. That he stood, feet planted upon the earth but separate and apart. Alone. A bird in this world.
And Katey out there somewhere. His Katey girl.
Nine
Katey
She made the mistake of taking I-95 from southern Connecticut and on through New York City, New Jersey, all the way through Washington, D.C. The truck kept speed but she was taut and hunched over the wheel the entire way, through multiple lanes of traffic, all it seemed with drivers who knew what they were doing, and were doing it very quickly. She hit Richmond a little after noon then, and got off for more than gas. She ate a sandwich at a Howard Johnson’s, then stalled before the counter in a gas station before swiftly and without thinking further bought a pack of Old Golds, asked for a book of matches and then asked to buy a map of Virginia, which, as she’d guessed, was free. Somehow it made the purchase of the cigarettes easier. She then drove on to Petersburg, and got off the interstate for good, taking a state highway that led west and then south. She was headed to South Hill and, from the map, her best bet was that from there, on country roads and highways it wasn’t more than a couple of hours to Cranston. Or less. She was still struggling with scale, even more so after this wild clenched flight down the eastern seaboard.
She had the windows down and the radio loud and the air that came through the truck was a heat that flowed over her thick and snug, a humid caul. She drove with one arm slung over the top of the wheel and smoked a cigarette and watched around her. It was a different country, yet someways reminded her of home. The roll of hills, woods and fields interspersed. The hills were much smaller, more slow rolls of the spread of land. Some barns of a size and pastures of cattle, all this time of day clumped around the big trees left to stand in the pastures for shade. But also the smaller barns of squared logs, chinked with mud and unpainted, the timbers the color of river-drained driftwood. Fields of corn unnaturally high this early in the summer and also fields of crops she could not name. Low bushy rows, or slightly higher even fields of some sort of grass. Not hay, or at least not any she knew. And fields with rows of plants of mid-height with broad leaves among which crews of people moved along the rows and she saw the people were all black, and were not only men but women and children. Several times she came up behind slow-moving old cars or trucks and these she recognized; older people moving along the roads of home. She passed through a crossroad with a white cinderblock store with ragged worn tin signs for Cheerwine and Pepsi-Cola, a handmade sign of plywood with black lettering that offered boiled peanuts, fish bait. A pair of old black men sat on the porch in ruined kitchen chairs, tipped back, watching the road but not seeming to see her pass by.
In South Hill she found a motor court. It was four in the afternoon and she was done for the day. Twelve hours of driving. The woman in the office was watching As the World Turns on a rabbit-eared television and was irritated to be interrupted, then looked at the card Katey had filled out and said, “Vermont,” with the accent on the first syllable as well as some judgment being passed but of an unknowable kind.
She carried her suitcase to the small unit. Inside was stifling hot and she pulled a string for an overhead fan that swirled slowly and began pressing waves of heat down against her. She pulled down the pilled bedspread that had once been white and regarded the sheets. They seemed clean and she ran her hand over them and they were soft and crisp at once. She thought Perhaps it will cool down come dark, then considered the sort of heat outside and inside and doubted it would cool to what she was used to. She didn’t want to open windows here but, looking at them she saw the metal box fitted into one of the windows, with louvered metal slats on the front. A cord ran from the air conditioner to a wall outlet and she bent down to study it. She’d never seen one before, outside of advertisements. There was an ON button and beside that a knob with settings for LO, MED, HI. She turned it on and turned the knob to LO. The machine ground to life and a faintly acrid smell came through the slats, a smell that gradually turned to a cooler temperature than the room was. She turned the knob to MED and the air came a bit faster, perhaps a shade cooler. She tried HI but either the knob was broken or someone had jammed it against this final setting. She thought perhaps an hour or so and the room might be bearable.
She locked the door, stuck the key on its metal diamond tag in her back pocket and got in the truck and drove out, turning away from how she’d come, toward the downtown.
It did not strike her as a prosperous place. She passed ranks of one- and two-story buildings, storefronts. A
hardware, a ladies apparel store of some size, a barbershop and then a beauty shop. A small department store. A record store with a Ferlin Husky poster in the window. Then, set back to make a good-sized parking lot, busy with cars, was a Piggly-Wiggly, clearly a grocery store. She found herself scoffing at the name, and then caught herself and decided the name was sort of interesting. Better than the Acme store in Randolph. She’d never even thought of that before—the everyday boring sound of it. She went on and passed a long large tin shed that covered most of a block, the sign on this almost missed but over a small door that led into one end of the building that read: BRIGHTLEAF BEST OF THE SOUTH. After that she bumped over railroad tracks and glancing back saw that the rear of the tin shed abutted the tracks, with loading docks and some pickup trucks also parked there.
Then she was in a different place altogether. There were a few stores, all small and rough compared to what she’d just come through. The pavement gave way to packed red dirt and houses cramped back on rough yards between what stores there were—small groceries or automobile garages, another beauty parlor which she only guessed because Aunt Peal offered Straightening, Wigs, and Cuts & Rinses. There were people on the street, people on porches, children on bikes weaving threads around and past her. All of them watching her and all of them ignoring her and all of them black. A bit of cramp of fear struck within her belly and she almost leaned to lock the passenger door when she realized it was too hot to roll the window up and then wondered why she’d felt that need. Beyond that, though, was a deeper sense she was where she shouldn’t be. That she was bringing as much discomfort as she felt, perhaps more. As if to answer this a young black man in bell-bottoms and with an Afro had turned at the sound of the truck and spying her in it stood watching her, his eyes offering a challenge of some kind she could not read but also then saw the lifted eyes of the older men, the women especially on the sidewalks and porches, as if to ask What’s your business here, strange white girl?
She pulled into an empty lot of withered grass studded with cans and shattered glass and punched the radio on and spun the dial against the static and found a raw keening electric music she didn’t know but was already backing around, not wanting to do anything but head back the way she’d come. So she drove back through those streets with delicately scrawling electric guitars alongside the voice of a man who she guessed was also black, that man asking not just her but anyone within sound of her passing truck: Baby, what you want me to do? Fervent and pleading, with an edge of anger. She kept her eyes dead ahead and her hands locked on the wheel.
Back over the railroad crossing she slowed by a restaurant she’d passed earlier, Peanuts, with signs for fried fish, shrimp, sides. There was a pool of cars in the lot and she found a place and parked and locked the truck and paused again, remembering her seafood gluttony in Maine and here again it was clear that America ate fish. As she paused, two couples of indeterminate age came out through the door and all glanced at her, the men running eyes as men did but there was also again the sense that she presented an immediate strangeness. Perhaps it was her jeans. Perhaps it was simply being a young woman alone. Or perhaps it was that those quick eyes had registered all of her in some way she couldn’t know. Then they were gone and she blew past her hesitation and pulled open the door and went in.
The walls were a gold foil with embossed bronze fleurs-de-lis and there were four-and six-top tables, with booths along the sides. She was put in a booth but felt all right—the restaurant was about half full. Her waitress was a middle-aged woman with a luxuriant auburn beehive and violent red lips that would deeply stain the filters of the cigarettes she smoked behind her station between working with customers. She handed Katey a one-sided plastic menu. She ordered a shrimp basket because the idea of catfish was daunting. The waitress asked if she wanted sweet tea and she had a vision of bone china, a tea cozy, sugar cubes from tongs, memories of her grandmother. She was deeply tired and said, “Yes, please.”
The tea came in a tall amber plastic glass tinkling with ice cubes. And so sweet her one cavity ached from it.
The shrimp were battered and flaky and delicious dipped in the red sauce hot with horseradish. The great revelation was the hushpuppies. She’d had no idea what to expect and almost ignored them as the french fries latticed over them. Then lifted one of the round brown misshapen balls and bit into it. Some kind of corn bread but both sweet and savory all unto itself. An edge of onion, one also of honey or sugar, and the fried crust was delightful in the way a baked johnnycake never would be. Unless you were starving. Of course, she thought, the ham and cheese at Howard Johnson’s now was a lifetime ago and perhaps she truly was close to starving. She ate another shrimp and the tail slid off in her fingers and she realized she’d been missing the last good bite of each of the shrimp. So she dug back through the basket and drank more cold sweet tea and thought All right. This place is good, too. See what the morning brings.
She woke cold in the night and pulled the spread up over her and curled up tight and slept until well after the sun was up.
She got a cup of acrid coffee from a machine in the office and sipped that as she studied her gas-station map. She was too antsy to eat. Best she could tell she was an hour from Cranston. By back roads, some red lines with numbers for state highways, some roads thinner black lines which she guessed would be more of the red dirt. So longer or shorter than an hour. And there loomed the question of how, once in Cranston, she’d find Brian Potter. The Trask farm, perhaps. She really didn’t know. Perhaps a phone book in a booth in Cranston. Or just asking around. She’d know when she got there.
Once again she was out in the country, rolling along past wide fields and folds in the land where she’d drop down and pass through woods and often there then clattering over a bridge that showed a deep narrow dull brown stream. Not the clear brooks and rivers of home but the boil of red dust that rose behind the truck and the red soil of the fields explained those muddy waters. Again, there were crews of Negroes working in what she now realized were tobacco fields. Brightleaf, she guessed. She passed a white man on a tractor cultivating a field of the long, low-clumped rows and realized, whatever the crop was, it was a job not given over to the Negroes. She had no idea if this was expediency on the farmer’s part or if there was a judgment of capability involved. All she knew was the past few years it had often been dangerous to be an outsider-white person in the south, along with great bravery and determination from the black people. And that much violence had occurred in all sorts of ways. As, she knew, violence had occurred without much notice by anyone outside the south for many, many years before that. Those little girls in Alabama. She knew about that. And wondered how many other little girls had perished without her ever knowing of it. And told herself, But that’s not why I’m here.
Which was true. Even as at the same time she knew she would be looking and listening and trying her best to understand this place. For all kinds of reasons.
She turned the radio back on, still tuned to the station she’d found the afternoon before. This time there was no music but a man was preaching. She wasn’t interested in Jesus on this day, or sin, or being a sinner, or glory and redemption. Though she admired the cadence of his voice enough to not change stations and merely turned the volume down so he was an undertone to her travels. And this felt somehow right and fulfilling. Comforting, or better, calming.
Then she was back on a state highway, blacktop, and the land spread wide around her before of a sudden large trees flanked the roadside and she passed a black-on-white metal sign that indicated the Cranston City Limits.
It wasn’t a crossroads but more like two. Not a full village either. There were a few houses leading in and a hardware and farm supply store. The houses were larger homes with well-kept yards, trees along the road throwing a canopy of shade. She passed a newer sprawling two-story brick building with a football field and playgrounds and a sign that read CRANSTON CONSOLIDATED SCHOOL, with another sign, the sort that churches used, blac
k letters on a white field that could be changed, that announced CLASS OF 1967 GRADUATION, MAY 27. Near a month ago.
Then she was among houses again and realized she would shortly be beyond the town and thought, then turned around in someone’s driveway and headed back. The farm supply store was what she needed, the best bet.
She was back among big spreading fields and stands of woods when she saw the modest sign and turned into the driveway. She passed along the berm of a pond and there, flanked by large trees, was the house. Some smaller barns and outbuildings clumped along the extended dirt driveway beyond. The house was white with a roofed full porch running the front, center steps rising to the porch and first floor. Three windows behind the porch railing and three more across the second story. A brick chimney ran up one end and the roofs of both the porch and the house itself were covered with aged cedar shakes. It struck her as oddly simple and yet with a settled grandeur about it. To her practiced New England eye, it was clear the house was very old and well kept up. There were wooden rocking chairs on the porch with small tables between and geraniums on the tables and the chairs all matched. There were narrow flower gardens before the porch and taut crisscrossed strings running up to the railings along which slender vines tendriled and bright flowers like small trumpets depended. Below that the beds held other blooming plants and she recognized none except the far edges of the porch both offered the pruned canes of roses, old-fashioned with yellow and white blossoms. The shade trees either side of the house were tall and had thick, dense waxy leaves and held large globes of white flowers, most near the size of her open hand. Some spread wide and the edges of the white flowers turning a shade of rust. She pulled up in the drive across from the steps and got out of the truck. There were no other vehicles in sight, save for down by one of the small barns an old Massey Ferguson tractor. And from beyond there, out of sight, came the clamor of baying dogs. She stood by her open door a moment but whatever dogs they were, they were penned or shut in someway. She turned from that peering and walked along a pea-stone path and started to climb the steps. As she did the door opened and a Negro woman of middle age, wearing an apron over her floral-print dress stepped out and said, “Help you?”