by Lynne Hugo
“You sure look pretty. Haven’t changed in forty years. You been keeping busy?” Gus said.
This was just too easy. “Oh my, bless your heart. Well, I have my girlfriends and activities. Actually, I’ve been thinking about doing some volunteer tutoring back at the school. Those farm boys still need to learn to read.” I put on my ultra-sincere face, and brushed the hair CarolSue had taught me to leave loose on my forehead to the side as I pretended to worry what to say. “I didn’t work over Christmas at the Toys! Store. Too hard to go back there after, you know, getting the call about Cody. Hard on the legs, too, all that standing, too far to drive to Elmont. Not that my friends don’t keep me running. But I need a solid focus.”
“Seems like a fine idea.”
“So, how have you been? What’s been going on? I know you’ve got a big job on your hands. Practically a one-man force. I haven’t really seen you since . . .” Believe me, I didn’t care how he was. This was to divert him into talking about himself so he’d think he’d learned all about me. And if the slant reference to Harold’s funeral made him uncomfortable, so much the better.
“Oh now, I do have a deputy, and some part-time help. But you know, we have more DUIs than we used to, and you’d be surprised, I don’t know what we’ll do exactly to manage, more drugs coming in. People don’t realize. Even our own, you know, couple smart alecks growing . . . Hey, you don’t want to hear this stuff. Would you mind if I use your bathroom?”
“Not at all. Down the hall, first door on the right.” So he felt he needed to check the rest of the house to see if I was keeping the zoo—or maybe growing pot—back there. I know I can’t grow pot, though. Not without buying grow lights first. I wonder if they’re difficult to install?
After a ridiculous amount of time, the toilet flushed and the bathroom door opened with unnecessary loudness. I wondered for just a few seconds if Gus had really peed, and if his was like my Harold’s had been, damn prostate pee, he called it. I used to lie in bed and listen: a tiny stream, then silence, then a little more. Fits and stops. Sometimes I’d fall back to sleep before Harold even made it back to bed. If I was awake, he’d take my hand and apologize. He didn’t need to. After that bad fall he took in the dark making his way to the bathroom, I’d made him start to put on his glasses and turn on the bedside light when he had to get up in the night.
Gus’s coffee was cooling on the kitchen table.
“See everything you wanted?” I said as he re-entered the kitchen, my tone innocent.
“Oh sure. Nice bathroom. Real nice.” Blocks of sunlight rested on the table then as the earth turned toward noon. That morning they looked almost solid, like something I could use to smash him, this man who’d come to spy on me, doing my son’s bidding. But it had been our Cody and my Harold who were smashed. Wishful thinking didn’t do a thing to Gus.
“Miss Louisa, perhaps you would go to dinner with me sometime at the Lodge? The hunting club has a dinner, you know, the second Friday of the month, and we bring the ladies to that.” Luckily for me, I don’t have a partial plate like Harold did, because I’d surely have swallowed it when Gus invited me out in the middle of my murderous thoughts. Some men have an astounding inability to read women, don’t they? Thank goodness.
“That’s a . . . lovely, Gus. That you bring the ladies, I mean . . . I’m sure they are very . . . honored.”
“For sure. They love it. So, what do you say?”
“Thank you for asking me, but it just wouldn’t be right so soon after Harold died. It wouldn’t be respectful, Gus. It’s hardly a year.” And it would take me a hundred years to want to go out with you, I added to myself. Make that a thousand.
“I can wait,” he said with a chuckle, and wiped a faint sweat sheen off his forehead with a chubby ringless hand. “You just call me when you’re ready,” he said with the great confidence of the clueless.
I changed the subject and we discussed the riveting topic of his arthritis (he has a bit of it in his knees that worries him). Then I had to be fascinated by his speculation about whether the county would patch or repave the rural route leading to the bridge that’s out again before he went on to guessing how long the bridge will be out this time. Later, when he’d finished his coffee and left, Glitter Jesus stuffed behind the couch, I was tickled knowing Gus was burning up the phone line to Gary. He had to be secretly thinking Gary the least credible eye witness who’d ever asked for an unofficial official investigation in the twenty-seven years since Gus had first been elected sheriff of Dwayne Township. Miss Louisa was not only normal, she was kind of hot. Maybe CarolSue’s remedial lessons in hairstyle and makeup for the harried woman who lived on a farm and taught fifth grade hadn’t been entirely wasted.
There was one true thing I’d said to Gus, though. It was about needing a solid focus. After a year at a standstill, something about having to rev my engine to put one over on him gave me an idea. Something I could do for my Harold, in Cody’s name. Sometimes you finally see something down the strangest, most out-of-the-way back road and you know it’s time to take that route. So while Gus was trying to find a smooth way to tell voter Gary that maybe he was the crazy one because his mother is just as fine and normal as pot roast, I got on the phone to CarolSue to say, “I need your help because it’s time to pick up Harold’s cause and get revenge on Cody’s killer. Only difference is we’re going to do it right. We’re going to have a Plan. None of that haphazard crap that didn’t work.”
And CarolSue said to me, “Well, of course we will. And I’ve been bored to tears lately. Charlie’s always out in the garage, not that I want him underfoot, and I’ve already got the garden mulched. Annuals go in so early down here.”
“Thank you, sister. I knew I could count on you.”
“You have nothing to thank me for. You and I have to take care of each other, don’t we? I’ll be there. Haven’t I been saying you’ve got to find something to take hold of? And maybe there’s a little spark between you and Gus—”
“Have you lost your mind? That just pisses me off, I mean—I am Harold’s wi—”
“Okay, okay. I just thought . . .”
“Well, don’t think about anything but a Plan.”
* * *
It was the middle of the night, too late to call CarolSue again, when a different thought came to me.
After Gary’s visit, I’d reassured the girls that everything he said about getting them out of our house was nonsense and they absolutely shouldn’t trouble their minds. We laughed and drank a toast to what good company we are. And you know how the next morning went with Gus. I’d taken care of everything. I didn’t replay what Gary had said until my eyes opened in the blackness of my bedroom and The Thought was there, like one of those insights that you get with total clarity before sleep, but it fades in daylight and then you forget it until it’s too late. Months later I’d remember how Marvelle’s yellow eyes glinted at me from Harold’s side of the bed and The Thought had been sudden, strong. Gary wants me out.
I lay there with The Thought. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I’d paid more attention to my instincts. Too late, I’d remember that I hadn’t been able to sleep for fretting. This is my farm, my land. Harold and I made it sing out its good heart year after year. Our sweat has been its best rain. Corn was its song and it sang and sang, through seasons of planting and harvesting. It fed our mouths, and through years of sunsets and dawns, it fed our souls. The animals we raised and loved are buried here. My Harold’s ashes are in this ground, with some of Cody’s that his mother was kind to give us. The land sings the only notes I still hear. And I hear, I still hear.
3
What took my Harold’s life, or made him give it up, was that our only grandson was stolen from us. Cody had been walking home from football practice when a driver “saw a deer in the road and swerved to avoid it.” That driver saw a deer, but somehow never saw a boy almost six feet tall with reflector strips on his backpack? It was Harold who’d stuck on those shi
ny silver reflectors, worried about Cody walking the state highway at twilight. There are poor shoulders, and trucks speed as they head for the landfill over in Okeana. The part about the deer was the driver’s story, and he stuck to it like Gorilla Glue. Do you suppose the fact that he was drunk makes that deer in the road more than a little iffy?
Harold used to pick Cody up after practice whenever he could. He’d do it behind Gary’s back; Gary was always fighting with the boy about something, and walking the distance home was one of Cody’s punishments. Gary didn’t have the knack for parenting that his ex-wife, Nicole, did, or maybe the way Cody looked like his mother kept Gary’s shame high. Gary was always one to do anger way better than I’m sorry. Nicole had left Gary over something bad that was Gary’s fault. I never knew what, although some gossip made it back to me from someone who thought I knew—or who righteously thought I should—that “fornicating” with Nicole’s sister-in-law was involved. Nicole said she wouldn’t drag us into it, he was our son, after all. She’d hugged me and cried and said no, he’d need his parents. That was the kindness and the goodness of my daughter-in-law. She said she knew he was truly sorry and he’d promised to prove he could be a good husband, but she couldn’t get back her feeling for him. She went to her parents’ home in Collinsville and got work there, a miracle considering that her family is practically the entire population. Oh, we were a family once. I loved that girl like I’d given birth to her, love her still. She and I used to joke just by catching each other’s eye when one of the men said something clueless. Hers were a golden hazel in most lights, and the thin rims of her glasses matched them.
Anyway, at sixteen, Cody didn’t want to leave his school friends and football team. Maybe the fact that he’d taken the darling Lissie Madison to the Spring Fling factored in. In a way it counted as his first big date because he really liked her. He’d been sweet on her for months, too shy to ask, and finally worked himself up to it with a note passed during Algebra II. Harold told him to ask her in person, look her in the eye, to invite her, and I’d backed him up—having been a teacher, I could hardly endorse note-passing anyway—but Cody was shy. Still, he got a note back that she wasn’t allowed to date until she was sixteen, five months away, but since it was a school dance, her parents might let her and she’d ask.
Well, Harold knew her dad and, as it happened, he soon ran into Matt at the Tractor Supply (where the men around here practically live). Of course, Harold mentioned that he would personally be doing the picking up and the bringing home of Lissie and what a well-mannered, smart, and good-hearted young man Cody was, such a help to Harold on the farm. My Harold could sell ice at the North Pole, but what he said was true. Bingo, Lissie was allowed to go. I thought Cody was going to throw himself on Harold’s feet and kiss them when he heard about it from Lissie.
Sweet Harold. After he and Cody picked up Lissie, he swung by our house so I could see them all dressed up, too: Cody in his first regular suit and a red tie that went with her red dress. His eyes so blue that night, shining with embarrassed delight when I fussed over them, and hers dark and sparkly, with her dark curly hair put up like a grown woman and little rhinestones artfully scattered here and there in it. He’d given her a wrist corsage of three white tea roses with baby’s breath and some green, and she had a white rose for his boutonniere. Nicole paid for the picture a photographer took at the dance and ordered an extra one for us. Wasn’t that good of her? It’s one picture of Cody I don’t need to look at to remember, even though I do look at it on my dresser every day. He was lit-up excited, everything ahead.
After the Spring Fling, Lissie’s parents let her go on group dates with Cody, and likely that, as much as his school, football, and his friends, made him want to stay instead of move with his mother. Maybe us and the farm, too, because he wanted to live with us during the week. He’d have some dinners with his dad, he said, and weekend time with his mom. Gary wouldn’t have it, though. I’m sure it hurt his feelings. If Cody didn’t want to change high schools, living with him was the only option Gary would allow, so that’s what Cody had to do. But Gary was always on him like a burr. They were not alike, which was hard on Gary and hard on Cody, the boy so popular, athletic, and loving our farm, too, as Gary never had. Gary wanted his son to be like him as much as Harold wished Gary were like him. Such pain parents and children inflict on one another, even though we all want to do better, be better. But we don’t, do we? Anyone you love and need that much; well, isn’t hurt and anger just the un-shiny side of that mirror?
But to go on . . . The second Friday of November in 2009, dank as cold mud, Harold was having his own argument with the early dark, still working to harvest the last of the field corn, so he didn’t go get Cody. I’d gotten seasonal work at the Toys! Store over in Elmont. Since I’d retired from teaching, money got tight around Christmas, and the training class was that week, noon to eight each day, which meant I couldn’t help either one of them. Harold was pressured without me, but Cody was going to spend Sunday helping him in the fields, and Harold said they’d get it done right, work past dusk if they had to. Nicole was always generous when Cody wanted to stay with us of a weekend, though it meant she saw him less. She’d come down for his games, take him out to dinner, and head back. Sometimes she’d let Harold and me take the two of them out to eat, and afterward, if we got a private moment to whisper when we hugged good-bye, Nicole would answer again, No, I’m not seeing anyone, and I won’t until Cody’s out of school. He’s had enough to adjust to. She wouldn’t stay overnight with us, though I always wanted her to; she said it would cause trouble with Gary, and she was right.
Anyway, Harold always used to keep on going right into darkness when twilight rose skyward off the earth. He’d tell me not to worry, he could see forever down the fields. “The headlights part that field just like a comb on my black hair,” he’d say, joking because dark as his hair used to be, it had turned that aluminum grey. His eyebrows had gone grey, too, and bushy the way men’s get.
The deer are real in the fields, not fake, the way the drunk driver made one up. Harold and Cody would spot them sliding through growing rows, soundless, or blending into the dun brown of the harvested land, and they’d stop to watch, awed by their wild glory. Because of Cody, Harold had quit hunting. He never went again after he took Cody that one time, the first time the boy had a permit, and saw it all through Cody’s tears. Because of Cody, Harold got new eyes for everything that lives on the land and in the skies. That boy was our Grace.
When he was tested, that driver who killed Cody blew drunk on the Breathalyzer. And he stammered, stammered, when the sheriff asked if the deer was buck or doe. The only witness was Cody, and he was dead.
I called my sister about Cody as soon as I could gather any sounds that made words out of my body, which had become a hoarse sob. She was the only person who said anything sensible. I wish she’d never moved south.
“Just listen to me, Louisa honey,” she said. “We know about this. People are going to say a lot of idiot things to you.” She meant I should remember what it was like when she had the stillbirth and her first husband left her seven months later. Her voice came soft over the phone. She still sounds like herself, hasn’t picked up that Georgia molasses accent. “Just give them the bereavement face and say, ‘Bless your heart.’ Down here, they teach girls to say that instead of bullshit. This is one of the times when people crowd in, nothing anyone says is the least comfort, but no one has the sense to know to shut up. Hang up now so I can get to the airport. I’ll be there to hold your right hand, which is the only one you could throw a punch with anyhow.” She and Charlie made record time from Atlanta to Indianapolis, where a teacher friend of mine who had Cody for sixth grade picked them up.
CarolSue’s quick, practical, and guided me through the motions. When she got here, she took Harold’s pickup, drove forty-five minutes to a decent dress store, and bought me a basic black dress, pretty much the same one as she’d packed for herself. I wore her pe
arls, she wore my old gold chain. I wouldn’t have cared if she’d dressed us in bathing suits and put links of sausages around our necks. A couple hundred times, she saved a life when I was struck stupid by what people thought was consolation. Like when people said, “Cody’s in a better place,” before I could flare and spout, “Really? That’s lovely because I want to send you to join him right now,” CarolSue would slide in with, “Bless your heart. Won’t you excuse us a moment? I believe Harold needs Louisa for something.” Her husband, Charlie, made himself useful for once by keeping Harold’s ginger ale heavily balanced with bourbon from a flask in his pocket. Anything to get through. I had a few myself. Gary and Nicole were separately seeking strangers in the crowd, their faces like slammed doors.
I try not to blame Harold for leaving me with only Gary just six months after we buried Cody. Sure, I have the girls. Did he really think they would be enough? I can’t sleep with them, after all. Maybe Harold figured a heart can only be shattered and left unmendable once, and that had already happened to me, so I’d either go on or I wouldn’t. We’ll see.
He was so mad at Gary, it made me think it was really at himself. I tried to be like green in the spring telling him it’s not your fault, to grow that in his mind, but he kept dousing it with Weed B Gon. Harold tried to make a reason to live out of revenge, and maybe he’d have made a go of it if the sheriff weren’t such an efficient imbecile, getting in his way all the time. But Harold didn’t manage to be smarter than Gus, with his tin badge and precious gun and his waxed cop car. I should have helped my Harold. He’d have gotten his revenge on that drunk driver, simple revenge, after the law failed us. Maybe it would have been enough. Maybe Harold would still be alive today. I don’t know if revenge heals, but maybe it would have let him go on and we could have tried to live again. Now I think revenge is how he got through Vietnam; once his platoon had losses, he got angry enough to fight. To survive. I could be wrong about that. But it’s the only way I can understand how he became something he wasn’t, did things that weren’t in him to do. The war changed him. It was Cody that had changed him back.