by K J Steele
“Sorry about that. The old gal doesn’t smell so good, does she?”
“That’d be a major understatement,” Victoria tried to respond lightly, opening her window wider as well, hoping to blow the sobering effects of morbid reality from their space. “You think they’d do something about her.”
“Do something? Like what?” Elliot questioned her loudly, adding the fan to the wind whipping wildly through the cab.
“I don’t know. Put her in a home or something.”
Elliot shrugged. “Well maybe, but a home probably wouldn’t work, either. She’s okay, doesn’t hurt anyone. I worry about her, though. She gets herself a long way from home sometimes.” He shook his head lightly, “I just don’t know what the best answer would be for people like that.”
Victoria knew perfectly well what the best answer would be but refrained from offering it. Too many people in the valley were willing to look far and wide in order to avoid seeing the plain hard truth before them, and it seemed sweet, gentle Elliot would prove no exception in this case. He drove along encased in private thoughts, and she wondered at the genuine sorrow evident on his face. Sorrow for an old woman, denied the liberty of death, who didn’t even know his name.
“Who was George?”
“Who?”
“George . . . she called you George. Do you know who that was?”
“No. I don’t think it was anyone, really. Just her imagination,” Victoria countered quickly, anxious for the conversation to end before it got started.
“Hmm, maybe. I’ll bet if you asked the old-timers, they’d be able to tell you who George was,” he offered helpfully.
“Probably could. Oh, look, your groceries fell over.” Victoria busied herself rearranging them, hoping to shift the conversation.
“She always calls me Johnny. Benson Ferguson told me Johnny was a neighbor boy her sons spent a lot of time with growing up. Spent so much time together people took to calling them the triplets. He said Johnny’s parents forbade him from enlisting, said they needed him on the farm. I guess he was pretty shook up about the accident, went out in the field and shot himself two days after the twin’s funeral. Isn’t that awful? Such a waste of life. I guess you probably already knew that though, hey?”
Victoria nodded solemnly, although the tale was so familiar to her it had lost the edge of truth, Bobby dragging it up and needling her with it when he was feeling particularly morose. And it was all good and well for Elliot, a newcomer to the valley, to be filled with such patient compassion for an old soul. He had not endured endless years of Mrs. Spiller’s frightful wailing as she wandered desolate streets searching for her vanished family. His was not the heart that ceased momentarily in the dead of night as gnarled fingers clawed open bedroom windows to reveal a gnarled face. There had been times, twice, that Victoria had bent to her as Elliot did now, attempted to ease her suffering and relieve her pain, but it was no good. She was eternally broken, could not be fixed. Victoria considered a bullet to the brain would be but a small mercy if one had the gumption to do it.
~ Chapter 5 ~
The rambling driveway, better maintained by far than the main road, ushered them cordially up to a quaint blue and white Norman Rockwell house. A collection of farm animals, obviously secure in their status as no more than fat pets, lounged in the shade of towering trees with armfuls of leaves. After only a year in Elliot’s hands, the farm bore but a faint shadow of resemblance to its former self.
A gaggle of geese, disturbed from their resting place under an ancient maple, waddled indignantly in front of the truck as a welcoming dog woofed a hearty greeting and trotted out to hasten them along. Victoria turned her head to take it all in, amazed to see every tractor, every harrow, every hoe had its own place, and everything was put away like a toy farm set packed up for the night.
“Wow, you’ve done so much work around here. What a difference. I would have thought this place was a mow-down.”
“Pretty much was! Sure would’ve been cheaper!” Elliot laughed. “Actually, it did turn into a much bigger project than I’d first envisioned. When I look at these old places, I tend to see them how they could be not as they really are, and I always seem to underestimate the amount of work required to transform them. My brother says I could dream a castle out of an outhouse, and he’s not really too far off the truth.” He leaned forward to gather the groceries from the floor by her feet, his head almost in her lap by the time he’d recovered an errant orange from the corner. “Want to come in and have a look?”
Victoria’s face flushed hotly. “Oh, no thank you. Maybe some other time. I’ll just wait here if that’s okay.”
“Okay by me.” He winked as if he understood her dilemma. “If you change your mind, just come on in,” he added as he started up the steps, which emptied onto the porch that ran across the face of the house like a wide, gap-toothed smile. He stopped briefly to chat with the cats and tousle the retriever before disappearing through the front door.
Victoria leaned her head back against the seat and watched cotton clouds puff languidly across the sky. The moment felt surreal, and she half expected to see brush marks on the horizon, wishing she herself could just be painted eternally into such a blissful scene. She did want to see the house. Wanted more than to just see it. She wanted to join Elliot in his home, explore the brilliant creations procured by his incredible, artistic hands. She wanted to sit with him on the fan-back wicker chairs that graced the porch like two Southern belles and discuss Portugal, Spain, France, the world, the universe . . . life itself. But it could not be. Even now she stood dangerously beyond her limits, and Bobby’s voice lumbered up through her reverie: she refusing to acknowledge it, the pleasure of her moment being so far in advance of the displeasure of his.
A smile slipped from her heart and onto her face. She wiggled free of her shoes and pulled her long legs up onto the seat, wrapped her arms around her knees and rested her cheek against them. She felt happy. A song, bright and lively, played inside her head the words bursting onto her lips before she had a chance to quiet them. She tried to envision Elliot’s life in this place. Closed her eyes and was instantly met with his, staring back through the void direct and inquisitive, his interest in her open and undisguised. Her face ran hot and she smiled again, flattered but also flustered by his attention. She tried to imagine the inside of the house. The welcoming living room, the warm bright kitchen, but her mind was filled with images of the sun streaming full into his bedroom window, gliding across the rich pine floor and onto the bed, murmuring him awake with a fiery bronze kiss. Rising from the snug embrace of his tangled sheets, she watches as he stretches his long limbs, his body painted in the white-gold hues of early morning. Behind him, asleep in the bed, she is conscious of a form, still safe in the cocoon of sleep. He turns and smiles at the figure who admits no identity, but she knows it is her, can only be her.
Bobby’s voice rises loudly in her mind, his face escaping the mental shutter she had composed for him, and she shakes herself loose, reprimands herself for being ridiculous and struggles back into her shoes as she hears the screen door bang. She watches as Elliot emerges from the house with an armload of camera equipment, coos at the cats coiled in the laps of the wicker ladies and makes his way toward the truck.
“Hope I wasn’t too long.” He laid the camera equipment on the seat, reached for the ignition and stopped, his eyes on her face, concern on his.
“You okay?”
She was surprised by the question, confused as to its origin.
“Yes, I’m fine. Why?”
“I don’t know. You just looked kind of sad. Really sad, actually.”
Instantly she shrugged a smile, a practiced reaction to temporarily erase all feeling from her face. Their eyes met, a tryst between them, and she struggled to return his piercing gaze calmly. Finally he looked away, and started the truck. Whether he’d believed the lies he’d read in her eyes she could not tell, but she hoped so. She’d like to tell him the tr
uth. Share with him just how desperately trapped she felt. How incredibly close to her heart he’d cut with his casual suggestion of her opening a studio. But what could come of it? He could listen attentively. Be compassionate, caring. But he, for all his considerable learning, all his worldly knowledge could not change the facts of her life. So what could be gained by laying herself open before him in the cold rain? His sympathy? Or worse. His pity. She rejected the very thought. Shut herself up tight. No, she thought. There was simply no point in bringing up things that couldn’t be changed. Elliot, delicate to her discomfort, shifted his attention to the sky, frowned a bit too obviously.
“Hmm. Hope we can get out there before we lose too much light.”
She surveyed the day, knew the strong afternoon sun would be holding fast for hours yet but understood that he knew this also, realized he was grasping thinly at ways to release her discomfort and she played along.
“There’s a shortcut. Through the back of Jack Webber’s place. You turn off just before his hay shed.”
“Really?” Elliot said. “Through the back of Jack’s place? I never knew there was a road back there.”
She’d heard the words escape her mouth and instantly regretted them, cursing her inherent helpfulness.
“Well, it’s not much of one. An old logging road, actually. Might not be such a good idea come to think of it. Could be blocked off or anything by now. I haven’t been down it for years. Since I was a teenager. Used to pick berries down there sometimes,” she added hastily, and not altogether convincingly.
“Berries? What kind of berries?”
“Well, you know, like blueberries and huckleberries and stuff . . . strawberries.”
Elliot nodded slowly, looked over at her and winked.
“Probably not the only berries that got picked out there, are they?”
“Elliot!” She blushed. Felt sixteen again. Giddy and beautiful. Like she actually held within her the promise of love.
Jack Webber’s farm pulled them closer. The truck dipped and angled off the main road and began to follow a rutted, overgrown impression of a trail that ran along the edge of the field. Clusters of trees sprouted up and thickened until the truck was lost under a canopy of fury-armed spruce and fir, the sun reduced to an occasional twinkle through thick branches. She’d been down this road many times before. She knew it well. A false darkness closed over her with memories. It had been a game for her really. A way to divert the stifling boredom of empty summer nights. But games had rules and, as long as everyone played by them, the games could go on. Billy Bassman enjoyed her rules. Enjoyed laughing at them, enjoyed bending them and, the night the game ended, enjoyed breaking them.
The moon had hidden its face early that night, and once he’d killed the engine and turned off the headlights, there was no light at all. No light until he ripped her open with a blazing white pain that drove every last breath from her body, every seed of dignity from her soul. Afterward, he’d laughed. Told her he’d taken her for himself and every two-bit Tom she’d played for a fool and blown off like a fly. When he turned on the lights to find his cigarettes, she’d closed her eyes. Closed her eyes and wished she never had to see the light again. Later that night she’d drained the hot water tank trying to scald herself clean. But his dirt lingered in her mind, could not be washed away anymore than the irrevocable crimson that stained her panties.
She looked at Elliot. He too was occupied by his memories, but his face held the lightness of good times gone by, once lived, many times remembered. She felt sick to her stomach, couldn’t wait to get back onto the main road. He felt her eyes on him and smiled.
“Little food, little wine . . . have a good time. Beautiful spot for a picnic, hey?”
“Ya. Beautiful.”
“What? Don’t tell me you don’t like picnics.”
“No, I do. Just don’t feel well, that’s all. This bumpy road I think.”
“Know what I think?”
“No. I’m sure I don’t.”
“I think that you need to learn to have some fun. Loosen up, let go a bit.”
“Really. Thank you, Mr. Freud.” She wrinkled her nose up and threw him a toying look of disapproval. She couldn’t catch if his words were meant as an observation or an invitation, so she settled on the more flattering of the two and felt herself feel better. It was nice, she reflected, being with him. Listening to his well-woven stories, laughing as he revealed his imperfections, which he laughed at as well. And she did feel better. Felt better than she had for a long, long time. Perhaps even better than she ever had. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and, blocking her past from her future, felt better indeed.
“Whose place was that?” Elliot asked, flicking his head at faded remains stooped in the distance like sad, neglected tombstones. Victoria shrugged, not looking aside, not willing to invoke that name by her own lips.
“Oh, I know whose it was. Benson was telling me about them. An original Hinckly family. Brassmans, or something like that, right?”
“Ya, something like that,” she agreed, attempting to reorganize the camera equipment which had bounced across the seat.
The Bassmans were always referred to as an original Hinckly family which, although implying some sort of great honor, actually meant little more than that the eldest surviving members of the community could no longer recollect a Bassman that hadn’t originated from the town’s own womb. Mr. and Mrs. Bassman had been a stiffly religious couple who, although believing all things were inherently evil, consoled themselves that some things were also inherently necessary and an uncountable sum of children promptly sprang up to give visible support to their views. The family grew as the house in town shrank and, before their fifteenth wedding anniversary Mr. Bassman had secured a sizable farm. The 160 acres, acquired off the destitute back of widow Lynch, had appeared at the time to be a considerable blessing, the perfect arrangement to gain the maximum benefit from such a large family. Unbeknownst to Mr. Bassman, however, the land, although fertile, proved to be water poor, and they’d scarcely settled in before the well started coughing up a thick, muddy phlegm. He’d searched desperately for a new source, but each new well he dug sputtered dry, and eventually the whole farm had to be abandoned as virtually worthless. The family was re-interred into a rented shack at the edge of town. Mr. Bassman had taken a job in the bush, felling trees, living all week in a stinking bunkhouse that he returned to eagerly after a weekend at home in a house that simply did not have room for him.
Slowly the whole family disintegrated, Mrs. Bassman taking to locking her kids out of the house to ease her exhaustion, nursing her depression with a self-prescribed elixir that she bought at the liquor store in one-gallon jugs. Her husband, his faith dried up completely with the last of the wells, set his own broad shoulders against the gates of heaven and was determined to gain the power and the glory for himself. He was a hard worker. Made good money. But the tribe of voracious, unruly children ate the dollar bills straight out of his hands. Although he labored a lifetime, he never overcame the loss of the farm, and his dying words were said to be a curse on the corpse of the widow Lynch.
The children, after being moved back into the confines of town, did what came natural after an upbringing of such severe deprivation; they drank. Drank like each new bottle was their savior, fearful each drink might be their last. As time moved on, the Bassman kids all grew up and coupled, creating more and more of their ilk until the whole valley was run through with them like noxious weeds.
“I’d like to explore around that place some time.”
“You would? Why? Just a bunch of old junk left lying around.” She wrinkled her nose, this time the distaste not playful but real.
“I don’t know. I just like snooping around, I guess. I find people’s histories interesting, don’t you?”
“No. Not anyone around here, anyhow.”
“Oh, come on, everyone has a story to tell. Even the people around here.”
“No, not here t
hey don’t.”
“Sure they do, they just need to find someone who wants to listen.”
She looked at him with a drawn face, eyes indicating specifically how much she disagreed with him.
“You have a story, don’t you?” He grinned, disregarding her eyes that narrowed slightly, warning him off. “You do, Victoria. You have a story and I’d love to hear it sometime. Everyone has one. Every single person in this world has a story to tell.”
“Not one that needs to be told,” she countered.
Elliot pulled the truck over to the side of the road, Mc-Cully Hill rising up to the east of them. He sighed and looked over at her with mock resignation.
“Okay. Probably you’re right and I’m wrong. But I’d still like to hear your story because I’m sure you have one.”
“Yup, I do. Want to hear it? Here it is. Born, lived, died. Pretty interesting, hey?” Catching the look of concern on his face, she softened her eyes, shook a wisp of hair from her face and laughed lightly. “I’m joking, okay? It hasn’t been that bad living here. Come on, I’ll help you carry some of this stuff.”
The trail that led from the base to the top of McCully Hill started steeply then fell off to a gentle incline, and they climbed it easily, Victoria leading with Elliot following close behind. He stopped occasionally, inspected a leaf, turned over a stone, explained to her the various rocks rising up underneath their feet, each one a separate geological mystery.
“Boy, great view.” He whistled softly.
A solid wall of granite rose up twenty feet above them on their right side, a barricade of trees on their left.
“What view? I can’t see anything but rocks and trees.”
“Really? Not from my vantage point. Best view I’ve seen for a long time.”
Victoria stopped, turned to see what he was looking at and met his smiling eyes.
“Where? I don’t see any—”
His pleased grin clued her.
“Very funny. Try to keep your eyes on the trail.”