“I’m sorry,” she said to Samuel. “I’m just tired is all.”
“Well, I invited him, so do what you want, but he’s coming. Isn’t that right, Samuel?”
Samuel grinned. “Can’t argue with the nurse.”
They stopped at Freely’s General. Miriam hadn’t been there in months, tried to relax while picking out a peach pie. The girl at the check-stand, in her black nails and lipstick, who’d worked there for years and whom Miriam felt she knew though she’d never spoken to her beyond the transaction at hand, stared at Miriam. Miriam suspected what she wanted. Photos of her mother had gotten out on the Internet, the truck door splattered, her mother facedown on the asphalt. Girls like her were curious about such things.
“I like your nails,” Miriam told her.
The girl didn’t blink. “You want your lottery ticket?”
“No,” Miriam told her. “Thank you, sweetie, but I don’t play that anymore.”
Samuel stood waiting on the porch. He carried the peach pie while Evelyn hauled the picnic basket, and Miriam a pitcher of tea. They followed the twine through the maze. As long as they followed the twine, Miriam figured everything would be okay. But then they turned a corner and there, far down the hall, strolled the older McGahee boy. He wore a yellow T-shirt, the longbow in his fist, the dogs at his heels.
“Boy!” Miriam shouted.
The dogs turned, bounded happily back toward Miriam. The boy surveyed them all, then darted away.
“Come back here!” she shrieked.
The boy didn’t halt.
Samuel called, “McGahee, you stop where you’re at.”
The boy leered back, slowed to a trot. Samuel handed Evelyn the pie. He said he’d make sure the boy left the field, took off at a jog. Miriam watched the boy near the hall’s end, staring hard into the rows, slapping his bow against the stalks he passed.
Twenty minutes later, Samuel returned to the rotunda, said he’d trailed the boy out of the corn and watched him run up Old Saints Highway, said he’d later go talk with the boy’s father. They all sat around the table. Miriam’s energy had dwindled, her mood somber.
“I used to play the lottery,” she said. “Same numbers every week. Dreamed of having so much money I could tell certain folks to go to hell.” She locked eyes with Evelyn. “Some dream, huh? I’ll bet you’ll all be glad when I’m dead and no longer a burden.”
Evelyn looked away.
Samuel’s suit jacket hung on the seat behind him, and he reached into its breast pocket and retrieved a silver flask. “Hey, nursey,” he said to Evelyn. “I give your patient some medicine?”
Evelyn answered without pause. “Give her a double.”
Miriam sipped whiskey in her tea and watched the clouds smother the sun. She stroked Wooly, her bones feeling brittle, as if her fingers would break if pressed. A horde of grackles exploded from the field, up into the gray. She watched the birds rise and drift, then dart en masse, as if yanked by invisible wires, down again into the crop.
Samuel squinted at Miriam.
“What?” she asked him.
“Nothing.”
“Say what you have to.”
He sucked his teeth. “Can still get some feed from this crop. Before the birds get it all.”
Miriam shook her head. “It’s my land.”
“It don’t put you in good standing.”
“I don’t care what the others think.”
“No,” he said. “Don’t put you right with God.”
“God?” Miriam chuckled once. “Oh lord, Samuel. I think God’s rightly proven me out of his graces.”
“Bad things happen to good people.”
“And me? You think I’m a good person?”
Samuel eyed his flask on the table. “You’ve always been kind to me.”
“But I’m going to Hell?”
“I didn’t say nothing about that.”
“But that’s what you think?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Well, maybe there’s not a Heaven and Hell,” she said. “Maybe this is all we’ve got.”
The wind hissed through the corn, smelling of rain.
“Shame to waste a crop,” Samuel said, shrugging on his suit jacket. “That’s all I meant.”
A drizzle became a downpour became a storm. Frantically, they gathered what they could and scampered through the maze. The tea pitcher slipped from Miriam’s grip, and Evelyn yelled to leave it. They huddled beneath Samuel’s jacket, were soaked through by the time they clambered up the hill and under the porch’s eaves.
Evelyn ran inside and returned with towels. She gave a towel to Samuel, wrapped one around her mother’s neck. “Come get a hot bath,” Evelyn said, ruffling the towel over Miriam’s hair. “Then we’ll get you into bed.”
Miriam yanked the towel from Evelyn’s hands. “I’m not a child,” she snapped. “Get Samuel some dry clothes, and bring me some, too. Samuel’s going to stay awhile,” she said, loud enough for Samuel to hear at the end of the porch. “We’ll play cards and just wait it out together.”
Samuel turned from the railing. “McGahee’s out there.”
Beyond Samuel, the rain overwhelming the gutters fell in a quavering fan, and through the blear Miriam saw the box of rust that was Seamus McGahee’s truck at the end of her drive.
Miriam stepped to the porch rail. The green sky hung bearded, the curves of the maze alive, flexing, swelling.
They pulled chairs around the sofa where Miriam lay propped by pillows, played gin rummy. Samuel wore Evelyn’s denim work shirt and big gray sweatpants. Between games, he peered out the windows. Rain drummed on the clapboards. The parlor’s wainscoting was dark, and though the lamps were on, a gloom resided over them.
“Put on the radio,” Miriam told Evelyn.
Evelyn switched on the radio, turning the tuner dial, unable to find anything but static. Miriam hadn’t heard his steps on the porch, but saw a figure in orange just outside the screen door. The figure called for Samuel.
Samuel turned to the voice. He looked to Miriam, asking permission. Miriam nodded, and he crossed the room and opened the door. There waited Seamus McGahee, in a hunter’s slick and cap, his thick beard and high rubber boots glistening wet.
Miriam clutched her cards to her chest. Samuel asked Seamus to come in, but the man just gazed at his boots.
“My boy’s missing,” he said. “My oldest says he’s in that corn. Says you run him off ’fore he could find his baby brother.”
The child was seven. Seamus had been searching for two hours. He stood in the dingy porch light, his eyes seeming to bore through Miriam. Samuel said he’d help look, and stepped onto the porch to grab his jacket and shoes.
Evelyn squeezed Miriam’s arm. “Stay here.”
Miriam felt as if the storm raged inside her. She pressed a hand to her sternum, said, “Flashlights are in the pantry.”
Evelyn ran down the hall and returned with the lights. She held a palm to Miriam’s forehead. “Maybe you should just get to bed,” Evelyn pleaded, gazing into her mother’s eyes. “Please don’t be stubborn, Mama,” she whispered. “Not tonight.”
A nod was all Miriam could manage.
Evelyn kissed Miriam’s head, then hurried out on the porch.
Miriam watched through the screen door as Evelyn handed each man a flashlight, then lifted a red poncho over her head. Miriam eyed Seamus McGahee’s orange slicker, Samuel’s light-gray legs, as the men stepped off the porch and down into the slanting rain.
Miriam lay on the sofa, the rain ticking like pebbles against the windows. Gradually, the storm relented. Unable to rest, Miriam stepped out onto the porch. Wind trickled damp against her cheeks. The air reeked of mud. Water dripping from the eaves was all that moved, the maze steeped in molasses dark. Miriam was sure this was what death would be, dark and quiet and terribly lonesome.
Then she didn’t want to be alone. She rushed inside and dressed in her rubber boots and winter parka. She trod slowly
, cautiously, down the hillside. Clouds parted to a spattering of stars. Where they’d normally enter the maze, Miriam searched for the twine, but the rain had flushed the grade and it wasn’t to be found.
Mud sucked at her heels as she listened for footsteps, for voices. Shivering, she wandered. Hall upon hall, each bowing indistinctly, every selfsame corridor an empty aisle of quiet.
She stumbled upon the rotunda, the little table blown over, blankets strewn about. The rotunda corridors were the mouths of mines uncharted. Miriam picked one, bent a stalk to lean over the gap. If she returned to the center that hall would be marked.
She plodded again into the maze, the halls bending, endlessly looping. Time dripped as rain from her fingers. Her elbow throbbed. The bones of her knees knocked like flint against flint. In her mind, each sparking step was a day removed from her life.
Moonlight glinted off something in the mud. Was it metal? A pipe? Miriam shuddered, crouched over the object. It was the tea pitcher, its rim veined with cracks. Shreds of mist wafted overhead and Miriam yelled Evelyn’s name. She closed her eyes, an ear turned to the sky. Listening became physical, her shoulders flexed, her neck stiff.
Miriam heard nothing but the wind, and then it struck, churning tumults of rain, and she hugged her knees, chin to her chest to shield her face. Trembling in the bubbling mud, Miriam felt her mind sliding. She willed her imagination toward the way her mother used to sing Sunday school songs while she gardened, the way she’d wrinkle her nose when working her puzzles.
But Miriam’s will faltered, and she bolted from her stance and flailed into the corn behind her, swimming through the rows. She cried as she had that evening when, outside Freely’s Diner, boys in school jackets taunted Evelyn from the bed of a pickup, yelling filthy things, whistling, with everyone around, Walt Freely and Pastor Hamby, Doc Peterson and half the church, as they’d all just come from her mother’s funeral. But no one rebuked the boys. They all just shied away to their cars, and Miriam couldn’t tolerate such a disgrace, and shouted down the boys, a terrible scene of cursing, wailing, of men ushering her away.
Evelyn drove them home. Miriam didn’t want to go back into her mother’s house and walked down into the field, the corn to her knees, wishing, even then, it was high enough to hide her from the world, and the world from her.
Miriam stepped from the corn and out into a corridor like all the others. The clouds had cleared. In the sky hung a crisp white moon. Nubs of stalks glistened, as did puddles pocking the field. Many puddles were impressions of boots, and Miriam followed them.
Soon the corridor dipped into a swale of standing water. Miriam paused before going down. She gazed into the water, struck by a flash of recognition. She’d stood here before. Stood in this very spot, squinting down into darkness. Suddenly she felt it, a memory in her muscles, the weight of a pipe, the cracking jolt up her arm.
She rushed down into water to her shins, to her thighs. Bracingly cold, she thrashed, grasping through the muck to find what she knew was there. But it was only water, only mud. Miriam crawled out wheezing. She sat slumped, her boots still in the pool. Boot prints covered this rise, frantic prints gouged in the mud.
Miriam sensed someone behind her. She turned and through a blur of tears saw a yellow shirt at the top of the slope, a bow poised, an arrow aimed down at her.
The arrow passed as a hiss, a bee sting to her ear. The boy gaped down, the bow now at his side. He turned, ran. Miriam pressed a hand to her ear. Blood came off on her fingers.
She moved without thought, rising, following the prints in the mud. Where they ended, the boy’s legs stretched out from the rows. He sat upright, his bow clutched to his chest, his eyes craters of rust, lidded, vacant.
Miriam knelt beside him. His skin was cold, his thin body quaking. Her parka was wet, but dry inside, and she wrapped it around his shoulders. He leaned stiffly against her. She pulled him to her, then laid them back in the corrugate.
Corn tassels glittered above them, framing the night sky. The boy began to moan, his teeth pressed to her throat, his cries far more than sounds, as if some violent brood were clawing to escape him.
Miriam steeled her grip on the child and studied the stars in their multitudes. Points of light slowly took form, the black matter of space a shoreless lake of stars, a latitude of boundless depth, and she strained her eyes, trying to see beyond her vision’s means, trying to glimpse the flesh of an upturned palm.
4
Dawn rose hot. The ground steamed. In Miriam’s yard, the sheriff made calls to mobilize volunteers. Evelyn cleaned and bandaged Miriam’s ear, as she sat on her porch under a blanket. Miriam said nothing about the boy shooting the arrow, and now watched him and his father out in the drive. The McGahees stood separate from everyone, spoke to no one, not even each other.
Pastor Hamby arrived by eight thirty. Miriam watched him talk with Helen, who’d met him at his car. He shook hands with Seamus. Miriam saw Seamus nod, and then Pastor Hamby spoke to the boy, who stared at the gravel and didn’t move.
By nine, twenty men from the volunteer fire department mingled in the yard. By nine fifteen, K-9 units from Fairmont pulled into the drive. Evelyn made muffins, offered them around. Helen came onto the porch and told Miriam to stay put, assuring her they had plenty of help and would find the boy.
Then Seamus McGahee was there at the bottom of the steps, his eyes glaring sullenly up at her. The boy stood at his hip, his hair still flattened with mud, still wearing her parka. Helen turned to them, as well, and they were all quiet.
“Warned them boys to stay out your field,” Seamus said, in an awkward explosion of words, glancing sideways at his son.
They watched the child, waiting. Then Seamus smacked the boy’s head, and the boy blurted, “Sorry, ma’am.”
Miriam stared at the child, at his ugly expression.
The boy took off the parka and dropped it on the porch steps. His yellow T-shirt, now ripped across the neck, clung to his thin frame.
Then the McGahees turned and stalked back up the driveway and toward their truck. Once they climbed inside, the sheriff peered down at Miriam.
“Anything I ought to know here?”
The volunteers had begun down the hill, stumping toward the field. Miriam watched McGahee’s truck rumble slowly away, and shook her head.
Members of Miriam’s church arrived, hauling food and water out to the volunteers. Searchers scoured the stream bank, peered into every shadowed corner of Miriam’s barn. Helen asked Miriam to search her own house, and she and Evelyn crept about like the undead, opening closets, moving boxes, shining a flashlight into the attic, into the narrow slot behind the boiler.
All the while, seventy police, with eight dogs, and fifty firemen methodically paced the corn without ceasing, dozens of civilians flanking the field’s edges in case the boy emerged unnoticed. The mud made things terrible, Miriam overheard a red-bearded fireman tell Helen. Hard enough to keep their footing, let alone find a child. The staties brought in a helicopter, circling low, the stutter of its propellers drowning out the baying hounds, voices hollering the boy’s name.
Miriam sat on her porch in a rocker, just waiting for them to find him, to see him carried out, a rag doll in some stranger’s arms. But they found nothing. A little after five, Samuel Franklin trod up the hill and told Miriam they were having trouble keeping track of the rows, that the searchers were confused by the maze.
She knew what he wanted. “Cut it down.”
“You sure?” Samuel said.
Miriam nodded.
He patted her shoulder.
Evelyn sat on the top porch step, her head leaned against the banister. She’d not spoken, not moved, for an hour. Now she stood and faced her mother. “I’m going to lie down,” she said.
“All right, sweetie,” Miriam told her.
Evelyn slunk past them, disappeared into the house, and Miriam heard her footsteps going upstairs.
“This sure is a thing,” Samuel said, gazi
ng out over the valley, the yard a scuttle of commotion.
“He’s in there,” Miriam said.
By seven dusk had passed, the air hardening to a chill. The crews sulked back to their trucks. Miriam watched them from the parlor window. The house lay dark, but she hadn’t the will to switch on the lights. Then they were all gone, even the pastor and sheriff sliding off without bidding good night. Miriam didn’t mind. They must all feel it, too. Everyone exhausted. Everyone just a little bit lost.
She found Evelyn sitting on her bed in a nearly dark room, a suitcase opened at her feet, underclothes and shirts neatly packed.
“Evelyn?” Miriam said, softly, from the doorway.
Evelyn’s shoulders lifted and fell.
The night was clouded. Scant light trickled in through the windows. A clock’s red numbers glowed on a nightstand. Miriam stepped in beside her daughter’s bed. They’d never bothered to change Evelyn’s comforter from when she was a girl, still a pink and purple quilt with little balls of yarn fringing its edges.
“I had a terrible dream,” Evelyn said.
Miriam picked up a stuffed animal, a tattered elephant they called Mr. Gray.
“About that boy,” she added. “About them finding him in the trunk of my car.”
Miriam tapped Mr. Gray’s floppy ear.
“I have to get away, Mama,” Evelyn said. “Going to go get set up again for school.”
“All right.”
Evelyn leaned over and Miriam heard the suitcase being zipped.
“You could go tomorrow. I’ll make you breakfast.”
Evelyn’s shoulders fell slack, her chin to her shoulder. “Can’t sleep here anymore.” Her voice quavered. “Got to go. I’ve got to.”
“Wish I could, too.”
Evelyn wiped her eyes, raised herself up. “I’ll be all right. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”
Miriam lowered herself onto the bed. So many nights she’d sat here, reading stories, singing songs to her daughter before tucking her in. She grabbed Evelyn’s shoulders, trying to embrace her. At first, Evelyn held rigid, but then she turned toward her mother and Miriam felt her daughter become flesh.
Volt: Stories Page 13