by T. Greenwood
It is dark here, in the woods. Now the moon casts only an orange glow, distant and strangled by trees.
The sound of the man’s body hitting the ground makes Ray jump, dropping the cigarette in his lap. And then there is only the antiseptic scent of the pines, the smell of burnt denim, and the stink of flesh.
F IVE
Home Brew
M y father was sitting at the kitchen table when Betsy and I entered the house in Cambridge. It was hot in the kitchen, the windows all closed tight despite the warm spring day. The table was strewn with copies of the Freedom Press , most of them torn, all of them wet, the ink running onto his hands. My father looked deflated, a withered balloon sunken in on itself. His eyes drooped behind his glasses, which were also smudged with ink.
When he stood up from his chair, Betsy rushed to him, throwing her arms around him. She cried into his chest, and he awkwardly stroked her hair. Watching him in his clumsy attempts to comfort her made me feel embarrassed, as if I were witnessing a private moment I wasn’t meant to see. Betsy must have sensed my discomfort, because she pulled away after only a few moments.
“Well,” she said, wiping at her tears.
“Well,” my father said, forcing a smile. “You must be hungry after the drive? Thirsty? Would you two like some root beer?” He gestured toward a crate sitting in the corner by the refrigerator. “It’s been brewing for nearly a month. The first batch was a disaster. Blew up and ruined a whole batch of your mother’s papers.”
“These?” I asked, pointing to the pile on the table.
“What?” he asked, looking confused. “Oh, no.” He sat back down at the table, looking sadly at the bleeding newspapers. He rubbed the top of his head, smoothing his hair down nervously. “These were all over the street.” He sat down and picked up one paper, futilely pressing it flat. “I went there, to Roxbury, to get the car. To see where it happened. To try to figure out…and the whole street was littered with them. It was like there had been a parade.”
Betsy’s hand flew to her mouth when a startled gasp escaped.
“Every month since we came here. Every single month, she drove to that neighborhood and dropped off the papers. She knew the names of every shop owner, every clerk, every person who lived on that street.”
“Who was it?” I asked.
My father shook his head.
Betsy sat down next to him at the table. “What have they said? The people she knew there? Has anyone called?”
My father shook his head first and then nodded, reaching for a Boston Globe , which was sitting on top of one of the piles of paper. He thumbed through the pages until he got to what he was looking for. “‘The community leaders of Roxbury express their disappointment and remorse for the damage incurred to property during the riots,’” he read.
“Who was it?” I repeated. I wanted a name. I wanted to give features to the dark shadow faces I saw every time I closed my eyes. I wanted eyes, flecked with yellow. I wanted noses and lips, hair and teeth. I wanted the sounds of their voices and the smell of their breath.
“I’m sorry, did you say you did or didn’t want a root beer?” my father asked again, standing up and grabbing two bottles from the box on the floor. He set them down on the table and then sat down again. When neither one of us accepted, my father looked at us, defeated. Sunlight streamed through the window, catching in the brown glass of the two unopened bottles on the table.
I was hot.
Betsy reached for his hands and took them in hers. “Maybe they don’t know all of what happened. I’m sure if they knew, someone would do something.”
My father looked down then and studied Betsy’s hands. He turned them over and over in his own, examining them—the same way I’d seen him study a circuit board, the insides of a clock.
“She hated to drive,” he said. He looked up at me. “Remember that, Harper?”
I nodded, though I was still imagining those strange, dark faces pressed against the windshield of the station wagon.
“When I met her,” he said. “The very first time I met her, she was walking along Route 125, walking from campus all the way into town. There was a blizzard. I pulled up next to her and offered her a ride. It must have been thirty degrees below zero with the windchill.”
I’d never heard this story before. At least I couldn’t remember hearing it before. Something about that, about the fact that I’d rarely considered the moment that my parents met, made me feel tremendously sad. I’d somehow assumed that they had always known each other. I’d never had the slightest notion of them as anything but the two people who lived inside the walls of our home. Their separate histories had never really occurred, or mattered, to me before.
“She was giving piano lessons then, to help pay for school, and one of her students—a little boy, maybe six, seven—his father lost his job, couldn’t afford to send him anymore. But he had a great deal of talent you see—she could always see that, the potential in people. But his father wouldn’t accept charity. Told him that he had to quit. And so once a week she walked into town and met him, in secret, at his elementary school, where she gave him lessons.”
“Did she accept the ride?” Betsy asked.
He smiled sadly. “No.” He laughed. “Said she needed fresh air.”
I was suddenly so hot I felt like I might burst into flames. I ripped off my sweater and unbuttoned the top button of my shirt. I reached for the bottle of root beer and popped the lid. It bubbled and ran down onto my hands. I held it to my lips and tipped the bottle back, but instead of refreshment, the warm bitter liquid burned my throat.
“When are the services?” Betsy asked my father softly.
“She didn’t want anything like that,” he said. “She wanted to be cremated. No funeral.”
“Maybe we could invite people to come here. I could make hors d’oeuvres. Sandwiches. Punch. Just something small. For her friends.”
“Good idea.” My father nodded.
My whole body felt like it was about to ignite. “Sandwiches?” I said. “Fucking punch? Jesus Christ. She didn’t die in her sleep. She was murdered . By those people . Those ungrateful bastards.”
Betsy stood up and reached for my elbow. I yanked my arm away, and she shrunk away from me as if she’d been burned.
“Somebody has to do something.” I looked at the bottle in my hand, at the brown glass. I watched my grip tighten around the bottle, the veins on the back of my hand rising to the surface. My father stood, bewildered, running his hands through his hair over and over.
“Goddamn it, Dad, why don’t you do something?” I yelled, and threw the bottle at the refrigerator. It shattered against the door, shards scattered across the linoleum. I stared hard at my father’s sad face. “For once?”
Samurai
A t work I couldn’t concentrate on anything. In the freight office, the one place where I had always been able to focus, I felt suddenly scatterbrained. I had always thrived on the order of numbers, their predictability and reason, but suddenly the numbers seemed to mock me: so tidy and certain, while my own life was in su
ch utter disarray. On top of my own inability to concentrate, the representative from the railroad had left, and Lenny was at my door every five minutes with a new question.
“You filed that report on the Bloom family?” he asked, his boorish frame filling my doorway.
I looked up from a sea of paperwork. “What?”
“The Bloom fam-i-ly,” he said, enunciating every syllable as if he were speaking to a child.
“Yes,” I said, irritated.
“You had lunch yet?” he asked ten minutes later.
I had made the mistake of joining him for lunch one day early on in his tenure, and ever since he considered me his lunch buddy. Most days I brought my own lunch to avoid having to sit across from him at Rosco’s as he chewed with his mouth open and gossiped about everyone who came in and out of the diner. He was a transplant, but he still had dirt on just about everyone in Two Rivers.
“No,” I said. “I need to get these orders processed.”
“Come on, Montgomery. Everybody’s got to eat.”
“I said, I’m busy.”
“Fine,” he said, gruff and pissed off.
While he was gone, I struggled to focus long enough to complete even the smallest tasks. I couldn’t stop thinking about Maggie, the sweet earnestness of her face. Her awful naiveté. My own. I hadn’t been able to look her in the eyes since we’d had the conversation about the baby.
I looked through the phone book for adoption agencies. The closest one was in Burlington. I scratched the number on a piece of paper and then crossed it out. She was a minor. I was pretty certain that this small detail would likely be accompanied by some fairly enormous legal ramifications. I had no power of attorney, no custody. Besides, she claimed she was here because she didn’t want to give the baby up for adoption. I flipped through the worn phonebook and looked for a list of teen counselors. Again, the closest was in Burlington. I scribbled a couple of names and numbers and then crumpled the piece of paper up. I couldn’t imagine a counselor making any headway with Maggie. Or vice versa. Frustrated, I chucked the whole book in the trash can.
When Lenny came back an hour later smelling of meat and a lunch hour cocktail, I couldn’t take it anymore.
“You got the number for Bellows Falls?” he asked, picking at his teeth with his pinky nail.
“Jesus Christ, Lenny,” I said. “I’m trying to get some work done here.”
“Well, excuuuuse me,” he said. This was the fifth time he’d performed this nails-on-a-chalkboard impersonation today.
I stood up from my desk and waited for him to leave. When he didn’t budge from the doorway, I went to where he was standing and started to close the door.
He put his foot in the way and said, “People over to Rosco’s are saying you got yourself a new girl.” His breath stunk of onions. Liver. Vodka.
“Get out of my office,” I said.
Lenny lifted one meaty finger then and pointed into my chest, pushing me back into the room. “Little half-breed with a nice sweet apple of an ass,” he hissed.
“I said get the fuck out of my office,” I said, catching my breath.
“Hear she’s only fifteen years old too. Not much older than your own girl. A guy could go to jail for that. Especially if you’re that baby’s daddy.”
My fist made contact with Lenny’s face before I knew what I was doing. The sound the blow made was loud enough to send a few people running down the hallway toward my office. And the broken bones in my thumb that had healed so many years ago were suddenly shattered again. Just like that.
Lilacs
W e got married at the Unitarian Universalist Church the day after graduation. I didn’t invite my father, but I told Betsy she should ask her own to come. She just shook her head and sighed. “I hate that whole daddy giving away his daughter thing,” she said. “Please .”
“Are you sure?” I asked, because I could see she didn’t believe it even as she said it.
“Yeah, no need for all that mushy crap.”
“What about Hanna and Paul?”
“Let’s keep it small,” she said.
Here is Betsy on our wedding day: pale dress, black hair, lilacs. We held hands throughout the ten-minute ceremony. She looked me directly in the eyes, barely blinking, during both the sermon and the vows. It was as if she wanted me to know that she was certain of this. And that she had no regrets. I was grateful for her clear-eyed tenacity. For the scent of lilacs.
I had told my father about the baby after the guests at my mother’s makeshift memorial had all left, and we were cleaning up the dirty plates from the living room. Betsy was resting in my parents’ room. I had barely spoken to my father since I’d smashed his root beer against the refrigerator. I wasn’t ready to apologize.
“Betsy’s pregnant,” I said.
My father was clutching a balled up napkin, staring at a serving tray of sandwich meats. I studied his face, looking for something that might reveal his disappointment or anger or joy. And just as the waiting became almost intolerable, he asked, his voice cracking a bit, “A baby?”
I nodded.
My father opened his mouth, as if he were going to say something, and then closed it again. Changed his mind. “Betsy’s a good egg,” he said finally. Then he thrust out his hand, and it took me a moment to realize that he was trying to shake it. My father and I had never shaken hands. “She’s a lot like your mother,” he said.
I was still angry with him, though when I accepted the handshake, my anger quickly gave way to pity. I was embarrassed by the lack of strength in his grip. In that terrible moment, I felt his passivity, his weakness. And I realized that it would take so very little to crush him, to shatter the small bones of his hands. In an instant, I became aware that my father’s life meant nothing now that my mother was gone. It made me pity him, and it made me despise him. I didn’t want to wind up like him.
Betsy padded down the stairs, still rubbing her eyes. “Did you tell him?” she asked.
I proposed in the car on the way home, after we stopped to get some gas.
“Betsy?” I said. She was unwrapping a candy bar. Her nausea had abated in the last couple of weeks and had been replaced with an insatiable sweet tooth. The glove box was filled with candy bars.
“Uh-huh?” she asked, tearing at the wrapper with her teeth.
“I should have done this earlier…I know, but I didn’t know how…and now, with everything with Mom…I’m sorry…” Heart pounding in my chest, I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out the ring. There was some pocket lint clinging to the solitary diamond. I felt embarrassed as I held it out to her.
She looked at the ring and then up at me, chewing slowly on her Three Musketeers. And I waited.
“You have to ask me,” she whispered.
“Oh.” I nodded. “Right. Betsy, will you marry me?”
She took the ring and blew on it, the little piece of lint disappearing with her breath, and then she put the ring on her finger. “Yes,” she said.
Yes . The only word that mattered in the world anymore.
When she kissed me, she tasted like chocolate.
We picked lilacs from
the bushes behind the church before the ceremony. Betsy wound them through her hair, the pale purple in striking contrast to her dark tresses. Though she didn’t come to the ceremony, Hanna had made the dress. The skinny straps were a little too long, and the chest a bit roomy, but it had ample room for the belly that was starting to swell underneath even the loosest clothes.
“Ready?” she’d asked as we walked into the church, squeezing my hand.
I wanted to tell her I’d been ready for this moment my whole life. Instead I said, “Why not?”
Miss Katy prepared finger sandwiches, cake and ice tea, and my friends from school and some of the girls Betsy had gotten to know from the girls’ dorm joined us on the back lawn of Battell.
“Look at you, Montgomery, all grown up,” Freddy said, rubbing his hand across the top of my head in a way reserved for playground bullies and older brothers.
“When do you take off?” I asked.
Freddy’s father had arranged for Freddy to spend a couple of days in New York with his family before he shipped off to Vietnam.
“Tomorrow I’m going to New York. Maybe catch a show. See the city.” He flailed his arms out dramatically. “Then I’m off to exotic Saigon. I hear the weather is quite nice this time of year.”
“Are you worried?” I asked.
“Hell, not as worried as you should be. Vietnam ain’t got nothin’ on fatherhood.”
As we were leaving, Freddy kissed Betsy’s hand, bowing to her. She played along, batting her eyelashes and blushing. Then, her eyes filled with tears, and she threw her arms around him, pressing her face into his chest. I was suddenly overwhelmed with the possibility that we might never see Freddy again.