The Writing on the Wall: A Novel

by W. D. Wetherell

  This is where August this delicate barefoot doe-like girl wanted to go once she got off that bus. “Well, it’s a long walk,” I told her. “A good five or six miles until you come to the shoe. Let me give you a ride.”

  She didn’t want a ride she wanted to walk which was important to her that she travel that last stretch on her own. She grabbed her pack and swung it around until most of the weight fell on her hip so it was like a baby she carried though a pretty hefty one. She walked past the house got caught up in the heat shimmering off the pavement and just before she dissolved completely I could make out the wavy remnants of her wafting toward the hills.

  A week went by. It was still too hot to work on stripping the wallpaper but I went into town and bought some scrapers so I’d be ready once the heat broke. When I came home the mail had just been delivered with a letter from Andy which was a rare enough event. Things were still fine at Fort Puke. His company had finished basic now and were undergoing advanced infantry training attacking Tiger Land learning what it was like to fight in Vietnam. He volunteered for lots of jobs he said. Potato peeling ditch digging mosquito control. He couldn’t stand it standing in ranks being asked for volunteers and no one raising his hand so he’d raise his. It just shot up he couldn’t help it. Their instructor was named Sergeant Cobb who was tough but fair and you wouldn’t want to get on his bad side but he had taken a fatherly interest in Andy so all in all things were fine. In their free time he was watching TV mostly so I didn’t have to worry about him getting sick in Diseaseville.

  No sooner had I finished reading this than I heard a soft whisking noise on the screen like a kitten scratching to get in. August! She had a happy smile on her face and was dressed in canvas overalls that made it seem like she had been working pretty hard though I noticed she had embroidered the floppy bottoms and tied on little bells.

  “Come on in!” I said.

  I asked if she was hungry and she said no but when I put out a plate of brownies she gobbled them up pretty fast then asked if I had any Coke. Maybe they didn’t have enough food up there yet since growing season wasn’t over or maybe she was used to so much sugar in the suburbs she needed to be weaned from it gradually.

  During her walk she had woven a necklace of black-eyed Susans which she hung around my neck. We sat on the porch and I listened while she talked. It was mostly about her home down in New Jersey and how much she hated it though she spoke very soft. Everybody always so competitive so obsessed with money and status going to cocktail parties and bragging about what cars they drove voting Republican building ticky-tacky houses not caring about anything except the stock market meanwhile living the most destructive least sustainable way of living ever invented. She rattled off her list then did something I thought was cute. She waved her hand toward the south and mouthed “Bye-bye” to it like a little girl.

  I don’t have a girl of my own to tell stories to or hear stories from so maybe that’s what made her visits special. We never had those wars mothers and daughters go through when the mother wants the daughter to be like her and the daughter doesn’t want to do that so there’s war.

  She said things were getting easier at the Shoe as they began forgetting the selfish every man for himself dog eat dog rat race world they had been brought up in. There was an aura of peace they could sense hovering right above them which was as real as the sunshine and the only way to let it descend was to create harmony among themselves and the only way to create harmony was to work and work digging the moat that was going to protect them from the outside world which was the term they gave to the independence they strove so hard to build except on Mondays which Rosen had decided were going to be devoted to meditation.

  “Rosen, huh?” I grunted. “Sounds like he’s the big cheese up there. Where’s he hail from?”

  “California. The desert part.”

  “Yeah? Well, does he ever talk about himself being the Messiah?”

  She laughed with that. She thought my questions were hysterical.

  “He has a new name,” she told me. “We call him Granite now.”

  “Granite? Hard granite stone?”

  She nodded. “Yes, only harder.”

  It was clear she admired him. He often hiked into Canada leading strangers who mostly kept their faces hidden and when he came back it was with more weed than they could possible smoke and this special kind of Canadian oatmeal everybody devoured. And there was good news now. Lilac her best friend the nicest girl the one everybody loved was pregnant and the baby could come at any time.

  “Our baby,” August called it. Everybody in the Shoe that’s what they called it. Ours.

  She drank two more Cokes before she left and I sent her away with some Oreos to munch on her long walk back. Next Thursday when she came I made sure I had chips and brownies and cupcakes and all the secret things she craved. A very sweet girl!!!

  I told her that if they were going around gathering wisdom from the old folks then they better make sure to visit Mrs. LaBombard up the road. That’s the old Hogg house which the LaBombards had bought after they left Quebec during the Depression and the reason they left Quebec was because Edgard LaBombard was an atheist and communist and every other radical thing you can be up there and since the Catholic church was in charge of relief he either had to bring his family across the line or starve.

  He died a long time ago but Therese LaBombard is pushing a hundred. “I came to America in Nineteen Tirty-Tree with my thirteen children and voted for Roosevelt tree times,” she likes to say and if you smile at what she does to English she’ll switch right over to French.

  She’s the best cook I know especially with potatoes and game which is why I told August to look her up. “Extended” they say about recipes up here and no one can extend a recipe like Therese can. Nowadays they call french fries with gravy “poutines” but she sneers at that and makes poutines the old way boiling potatoes in cheesecloth and drenching them in maple syrup. Tourtier and chicken tricot and a hundred dishes made from turnips. There’s always something baking at Therese LaBombard’s!

  Much later after everything that happened happened and things grew quiet again and I finally got the wallpaper stripped off I went over to her place with a question.

  “My house, Therese.”

  We were rocking on her porch but now she stopped and squinted at me over the black plastic glasses that were always sliding down her nose.

  “Oui?”

  “The Bruckners owned it before us.”

  She made a face. “Lazy people. Ate from cans.”

  “And before them?”

  “Howards. Here when we moved in. Nineteen Tirty-tree.”

  “Before them?”

  I could see her thinking looking out toward the hills. She wasn’t used to being asked something about the past she couldn’t answer.

  “Don’t know,” she said with a despairing shrug.

  “A family named Steen? The rich people in town? A young woman named Beth? Any of those ring a bell?”

  Therese wasn’t a quitter not when it involved figuring out connections so I believe my questions tortured her considerably. I felt guilty for asking but there was no other person in town who might remember.

  When she shook her head I tried a different tack. “Did you ever hear stories about a teacher who was drowned in the river?”

  “A teacher? In the river?” She clasped her hands to her cheeks. “Mon Dieu!”

  “Thank you, Therese. Merci beaucoup. And don’t forget about those young people I mentioned. You teach them about turnips and they’ll be grateful.”

  I’m skipping you around now and we need to move summer back the other way to eight days after August’s second visit. The heat broke that afternoon. A thunderstorm boomed down from Canada and within the space of ten minutes the temperature dropped twenty degrees. It got dark as early as it does in winter so by five I could hardly grope my way over to switch on the lights. There was a bang on the door that made me jump and then whoever i
t was ran around to the back and started hammering there even louder.

  It was August plus a girl with frizzy hair and terrible acne and a skinny young man wearing a green poncho and hip boots. August’s face was too open and soft to express alarm but there was definitely anxiety there and her hair was flattened to her cheeks from the rain. “We need your help,” she said reaching for my arm. It was because I’m a nurse and they didn’t know anybody else who would come.

  They had brought the truck down and the rain made its psychedelic paint even more psychedelic like it was sloshing crazily back and forth along the sides. I grabbed my boots and they hoisted me up on back. The ride into the hills was the wildest I’ve ever been on since on their way down to fetch me they had blown out two tires and the young man named Gabriel drove on the rims. Add to that the rain wind thunder and having to swerve around downed trees and ducking under branches so as not to get swept off and the two girls clutching at me and vampire bats yo-yoing up and down making the girls scream and all in all it was a trip to remember.

  It took an hour to get to the Shoe sign which the wind had snapped so the toe stuck in the mud. The rain wasn’t quite as bad here and there was enough light in the sky to see the land was all blasted and ruined with nothing but jagged tree stumps and huge piles of slash. Geezus I said to myself. What A-bomb fell here? A tractor was mired off to the side of the road near a trench wide enough to make me wonder whether they were digging a moat after all. There were pennants or banners stretched across the trees and then when we got to the main building there was a flag with vertical bands I had my suspicions might be Vietnam’s and I don’t mean the South part either.

  August tugged me toward the door but first I told Gabriel to get some tires on the truck and get them on quick in case we had to go fetch a doctor. I knew now it was Lilac I had been called for because there’s a smell that comes during childbirth that maybe only a mother can catch or a nurse but it’s got urine in it and blood and sweat and something sweeter that’s hard to describe but was waiting for me the moment I went in.

  This had once been a logging camp and you could still see scars on the floor from hobnailed boots. The homemade table and chairs had been shoved against the wall to make room for a bed lit by kerosene lamps hanging down from the rafters. Lilac lay on a mattress where the beams converged and judging by the way she rolled and heaved she was well along. She was a little slip of a girl who seemed even smaller with the enormous thing that was trying to happen just down from her middle. I went right over and knelt by the table and told her my name and said I was there to help things along and she nodded in gratitude though I don’t think she was aware of much now except the force that had hold of her which had to be bewildering compared to what puny forces she could muster against it. She took my hand and pressed it hard to her breast then moved it to her mouth found a finger and started desperately sucking. For comfort I suppose. I let her suck all she wanted.

  We weren’t exactly alone with this. The other commune members squatted on their heels against the wall watching so it was like summer camp after all and this was an initiation ceremony they were required to attend. My first instinct was to shoo them all away but then I realized Lilac was drawing strength from having them near. “Our baby” August called it and maybe they were helping by just being there tightening their pelvises in sympathy the girls or feeling their penises shrivel in guilt the boys. There was one big girl with thick pigtails who looked serene as a Viking princess and I delegated her to keep mopping Lilac’s brow while I concentrated on what was happening lower down.

  What was happening lower down looked normal enough to me though naturally it scared them especially with her moans which were awfully LOUD. I didn’t think we’d need to send to town for my doctor friend but could see it through ourselves. It wasn’t even a nurse they especially needed. What they needed and needed badly was an adult.

  Two adults. For standing against the wall rocking slowly back and forth on heels was Rosen or Granite or whatever he wanted to be called. A lot of men intimidate you with their size and brawn but he was one of those rarer ones who impress you by their thinness like they’re showing you they don’t need much from life and because they don’t need much from life they’re a hell of a lot tougher than you are. He had on ragged work pants a red flannel shirt taut suspenders and looked like he had stepped into that room from 1885. He stroked his blonde beard while he rocked but never smiled never came close to smiling. Granite is a good name for him since his skin is steel gray with albino veins and you know if you touched him touched him anywhere nothing would flinch.

  He was the one I glanced at whenever I needed something. Towels hot water compresses rubbing alcohol swabs. I only had to nod and he knew instinctively what I wanted and went to fetch it. I liked him for that hard as he was. And for all the talk about it being “our” baby I knew from the intent way he stared that the baby was his.

  Lilac’s labor lasted most of the night but there were no surprises other than how a little thing like her could howl so loud and so long. I didn’t need to do much until the baby began crowning than I started in massaging since I wanted it to be positioned just right. Maybe that helped because toward the end Lilac became much quieter. The last hour was rough even so. I’m just as glad a doctor wasn’t there because he would have gotten impatient and reached for the forceps but I waited and in the end hardly needed to do anything but tie off the cord. The Viking girl turned out to be named Kit and she did a good job cleaning the baby and wrapping him and handing him to Lilac who once her exhaustion wore off and her disbelief smiled so beautifully it made me sob.

  “What’s his name?” I said slipping open the blanket enough to admire him.

  “Luddy,” she said.

  I didn’t get it.

  “Muddy?”

  “Luddy.”

  “Cuddy?”

  “Luddy.”

  “Perfect name,” I said. I never heard of it before.

  I’m making myself out to sound like an expert but that was the first birth I’d ever been at where I wasn’t the one doing the pushing and moaning. I was never frightened though and that’s because I drew strength from the eager hopeful way those young people stared. I don’t know if any of them is an artist but you could paint a pretty good picture if you’d been watching that night. The rain streaming down the windows and the kerosene lamp beaming off the pink hill of Lilac’s belly and luna moths beating their wings against the screens trying to get in and the warmth of the wood-stove on our backs and the girls twirling their necklaces like rosary beads and the boys smoking weed and Granite over there in his corner holding us all together by the fearless way he stared. I looked over once and saw twin gold dots toward the bottom of the window felt it was raccoons come to watch or porcupines or bobcats and sensed at their back the wild forest land that surrounded us lonely beyond lonely forgotten beyond forgotten hardly even part of America at all and yet right there in the center pressing it back bawling its head off this gift of new life.

  It was dawn the sun was burning the dew off the windows before I felt sure enough about things to leave. Granite walked me out to the truck and before we got there he grabbed one of his men by the shoulders and pointed to the old stable they used as their barn.

  I was way ahead of him.

  “Nope, I don’t want any piglets,” I said. “This was for free.”

  That seemed to annoy him. He didn’t like being beholden to anybody. It would be better if I liked pigs.

  “Nope,” I said again. “Don’t want any lambs either or honey or berries or dope. Had some fun here, thanks go to you.”

  August rode back with me on the truck and when we got to my house she didn’t want to let me go.

  “Out with it,” I said. I could see those soft round eyes holding something in.

  “Why does it have to be torture?”

  I said what any woman would say.

  “Because it always is, always has been, always will be.”


  This didn’t seem to satisfy her and I know it didn’t satisfy me and probably sounds easy and smug to you. But I guess that’s what they wanted me to say why I was brought up there what my role in all this was. To tell them the miracle we witnessed wasn’t so special after all but the most natural thing in the world.

  The words looked tattooed, she had pressed so hard on the skin of plaster. Every fifth or sixth sentence ended with gouges instead of periods and Vera finally understood these were places where the points of her pens must have snapped, just like the lead of pencils. What kind of woman writes so hard the pen breaks? What kind of woman would use three colors of ink and change colors, it sometimes seemed, almost every word? And how many cartons of pens must she have bought, to be so extravagant?

  At first the writing extended all the way across the wall, but she must have realized she would never fit in everything she had to say, because she suddenly switched to relatively neat and ordered paragraphs similar to Beth’s. Maybe it was the strain of this that made the pens snap—she didn’t like margins, borders, indents, rules.

  Reading Beth, Vera’s head had remained steady and intent, a platform for her attention to rest on, but reading Dottie, trying to follow her swoops and splashes, her head kept swaying, so the words seemed to come through the muscles of her neck. The childbirth business came that way—by the time she finished reading she was massaging her shoulders trying to press out the kinks. Having Cassie had been ridiculously easy, to the point she was even somewhat disappointed that she hadn’t had the chance to prove her determination and courage.

  “Don’t you worry about that,” the maternity nurse told her. “The ones that cause no trouble now torture you plenty later.”

  Torture. Maybe it was a nurse word. Dottie had used it four times and each time it was as if she had reached her hand out from the wall and slapped Vera across the face. She had probably jotted it down without a moment’s thought, hyperbole but who cared, never worrying about how someone might react, that unknown someone who forty years later would be reading what she wrote.