by Jessie Haas
“Fold these—no, you can’t.” She looked ahead at the empty road, then dropped the reins on the dash and put her foot on them. She folded the nightgowns into a broad pillow and put it on my lap. “Rest your hands on this. It might feel better.”
I made myself notice the softness of muslin on the backs of my hands, the very slight cushioning, the very slight improvement. I made myself hold my hands so blood would not spot the cloth.
We reached the tree line. Here I had first met Truman. Ca-thlop ca-thlop, went Whitey’s big hooves. Lacy shadows slid over his back. The sight made me dizzy. I looked down. Here was my nightgown sleeve. Here was a bit of lace, a building up and crisscrossing of one single thread. Mother made that lace. With my eyes I followed every crisscross, up and down, up and down.
Out of the birches now, between the old pastures where the blackberries grew. Ca-thlop ca-thlop …
“How do you feel?”
My mind had gone broad and shallow, like water spilled on a table. “All right. All right.”
Ca-thlop ca-thlop, past a farm, past the pasture where I had picnicked with Luke and her mother, past the rosebush, the white roses all turned brown with rain and heat. Ca-thlop ca—
PUT-put-put-put!
Whitey stopped, raised his head high, and higher. He looked like a statue carved in ivory.
Put-put-POP-put!
A car!
Whitey’s sides heaved. His nostrils fluted out in wide cones with each breath. Far ahead the Model T seemed to leap and skip over the ruts, heading straight toward us. I heard a little whimper come out of my mouth, and I hid my face in Aunt Sarah’s shoulder.
For a moment she was there, a warm wall. Then she was gone. The buggy jounced, creaked, and she was at Whitey’s head. She gripped the reins close to the bit and forced his face toward the side of the road. “Whoa! You whoa! Stand—now shhh! Shhh!” The knuckles shone white on her big red hands. “Shhh, now!”
Whitey’s breath rattled like falling hail. His hooves minced up and down. His tail swished. If he got away, there was nothing I could do to save myself, not even hang on. I looked at the ground, just three feet away. Jump! Jump now!
“Can you wave him by?”
I didn’t understand. It was the same voice she was using on Whitey, mixed in with orders and hissing. One of Whitey’s ears curved rigidly toward her. The other swiveled back and forth. “Harriet, can you wave him by? I can’t let go—shhh! Whitey! Shhh!”
The car. Wave the car by.
The right hand hurt less than the left, but it felt heavy, stiff, and curled. The air hurt it, moving hurt it, and the driver of the Ford took a long time to understand. Then he came cautiously, creeping along the very edge of the ditch. He wore goggles and a long white scarf. Between them little could be seen of his face. He seemed more like a bug than a human, but his mouth dropped open in human curiosity as he passed.
When the sounds died away, Aunt Sarah came back, keeping the reins tight and smooth. They never sagged once, even when she climbed into the buggy.
“Now walk, you old fool!” Whitey set off high headed, almost prancing. It was several yards before his body slackened and his head came down.
For the first time since the car had appeared, Aunt Sarah took her eyes off him and looked at me. She looked away again. “Did that scare you?”
I couldn’t understand why she was even asking. It had panicked me, disintegrated me. I nodded, barely. She seemed to see it out the corner of her eye.
“If he saw more cars, he’d get over his foolishness.”
I listened hard to the words. My hands hurt more than I’d ever known anything could hurt. Even shame didn’t matter. Talk, I thought. Maybe that would help. “The Mitchells trained Tulip,” I said. My tongue felt heavy, and the worlds came slowly. “They can lead him from their Model T.”
“Can they?” She didn’t like to hear that the Mitchells had done something clever. “That must be handy, though.”
“But Tulip is the calmest horse in the world.” I wished talking helped more. “Tulip could fall asleep on an active volcano, Mother used to say.”
Aunt Sarah’s breath made a little snort. “The opposite of your critter.”
“Yes.” I glanced at my hands, and every nerve in my stomach twanged. I closed my eyes.
We met no one else. The stone walls and blackberry pastures slipped by. After a time I smelled fresh pine sawdust, and the roofs of West Barrett came into view, few and small among the trees. Down, down we dipped, past the mill, past the little gray house—
My heart knocked. Our door stood open, and two small girls in grubby pinafores sat beside the step, stirring the dirt in the flower bed with spoons. Red checked curtains at the windows … It wasn’t our house anymore. I hadn’t realized it would change.
Aunt Sarah pulled up at Althea’s gate. Before she had to shout, the door opened. “Morning!” Aunt Sarah called. “Has Andy Vesper been this way?”
Althea shook her head, coming slowly forward. She stared at my hands. “What on earth—”
“It’s a rope burn,” Aunt Sarah said, as if that were nothing much. “If you haven’t seen him, we’ll go on down. Do you need a drink, Harriet?”
I nodded. Without a word Althea went back into the house. The pump handle squeaked, and she came out with one of her white mugs, cracked and tea stained. Aunt Sarah said, “Would you mind standing at this horse’s head while I help her drink?”
Althea went to hold Whitey. She looked small and distant. Aunt Sarah held the cup to my lips, and I drank. Water slopped up my nose.
“I’m sorry,” Aunt Sarah said.
“No …”
Whitey snorted and shoved his head against Althea. She nearly fell.
“Whitey! Stop it!” Aunt Sarah said. “We’ll be going.”
Althea didn’t step out of the way, didn’t come to take the cup, for several seconds. “Stop back,” she said when she did come. “I want to know how Harriet is.”
“All right.” Aunt Sarah let Whitey go.
The Old Lady was weeding her garden, out behind the Vespers’ low Cape. She straightened, looked hard at our buggy, and headed at once for the house. “He’s up the street. I’ll telephone.”
We were left alone in the hot, sunlit yard. How—
“Come in!” Mrs. Vesper shouted from the doorway, and disappeared again.
How would I get down? On elbows, on knees, with Aunt Sarah’s hands around my waist. She tied Whitey to the ring in the barn wall and opened the door for me.
“Yes, it’s Harry!” Mrs. Vesper shouted into the telephone mouthpiece. “What? I don’t—” She turned to look at me. “Oh, my goodness! It’s her hands, Andy! Get right down here!” She clashed the earpiece back on its hook. “Harry, sit down! What can I—oh!” She hurried into her pantry and came back with a sweating pitcher. “Lemonade!”
Aunt Sarah stood in the middle of the room, hands hanging at her sides. Mrs. Vesper almost knocked into her, rushing at her cupboard. “Oh! Sit down! Won’t you sit down?”
Aunt Sarah sank onto a kitchen chair, obliterating it from sight. She stared past me, past the wall, past the glass of lemonade that was put in front of her. After one quick look at her, Mrs. Vesper helped me drink.
We waited. The kitchen was dim and still. I could almost hear my hands throb.
A buggy rattled past the window, and a moment later Dr. Vesper came through the door. He looked at my hands and whistled. “What happened?”
None of us answered.
“Sarah! Snap out of it! Are you hurt, too?”
Aunt Sarah stirred and slowly turned to look at him, as if coming from a long way off. “No.”
“Then tell me what happened!”
“Harriet was … training that horse of hers.” Her voice was soft, almost too low to hear. “He … ran and dragged her.”
“Rope burn,” Dr. Vesper said as if that solved everything. “Come on in my office, and I’ll patch you up.”
I stood, feeli
ng as if my legs were made of glass, and went with him into the bright little room off the kitchen. Aunt Sarah followed as far as the doorway.
He leaned over my hands, so close I could feel his breath, and looked them over methodically, section by section. “Harry,” he murmured, “you’ve got to learn to let go!”
Aunt Sarah almost said something. I heard her breath draw in and then sigh out harmlessly.
“Well, it’s not so bad but what it could be worse. Let’s see what we can do.”
I didn’t watch. There was something wet that stung so much sweat popped out on my forehead. Later there was a dressing, and in the middle of that, while I stared intently out the window at the house next door, he suddenly pulled down on the fingertips of my left hand.
“Aaah!” It was a real shriek. Suddenly Aunt Sarah was right there beside me.
“Sorry,” Dr. Vesper said. “But if it heals flat, it won’t heal short. You’ll thank me next time you play the piano.”
I couldn’t make even the first twitch of a smile. He finished the dressing; only the tips of my thumb and fingers showed. Then he started the other one. He was going to do it again.
“I’m going to do it again. Ready? There, was that so bad?”
Someone’s hand gripped my shoulder. “Andy, don’t be an idiot!” Aunt Sarah said.
“Now if you can, Sarah, I wouldn’t mind you two staying until tomorrow afternoon. I can get a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen by then. You can stay right here in the spare bedroom. Maybe Harry’d like to go lay down awhile?”
I nodded. My head felt huge again: big cork head. I followed Mrs. Vesper upstairs, into a hot, dim little room with two beds. Sat down. Aunt Sarah took my shoes off, and I placed myself on the pillow, hands at my sides, palms up.
I thought I didn’t sleep. I thought my hands hurt too much. But after I had opened and closed my eyes a few times, it was evening.
nineteen
We dined on cottage cheese, lettuce, and cucumbers. Aunt Sarah fed me, and Dr. Vesper looked pleased with himself.
I still felt exhausted and not at all like talking. Aunt Sarah and I went up to bed early. She undressed me and put on my nightgown. I didn’t mind that she saw me naked, though I turned my eyes away while she changed, in case she minded. Everything seemed strange and simple. My hands took up my whole mind and left no room for nonsense.
I slept awhile and awoke to the sound of Aunt Sarah breathing. Crickets throbbed. A horse and buggy passed.
Then downstairs something trilled loudly over and over. Feet on the stairs. Dr. Vesper said, “Yup. Yup. Oh, good golly, no! I’ll be there just’s quick as I can.” Bang-bang-bang up the stairs, shuffle and mumble in the next room, ca-rumble down again, and a short time later the horse clopped away.
I lay sweating. My hands hurt more and more, hot, like bars of iron in the blacksmith’s forge. I sat up.
“Harriet?” Aunt Sarah had never been asleep. Her voice was clear and alert.
“I’m all right. I’m … hot.”
She got up, big and white in her nightgown, and went softly to the washstand. She poured water into the basin and gently sponged my face. The water was cool, but my face heated it quickly.
“I want to go outside.” I could hear a breeze out there, ruffling the leaves. “Can I just go sit?”
She drew a long breath, the beginning of “no,” but then she said, “I don’t know why not.” She went to our door. “Mrs. Vesper, we’re going to sit outside awhile. Don’t get up.”
Mrs. Vesper came to her door, all her buoyant gray hair reduced to one braid down her back. “There’s chairs on the side lawn. Harriet knows.”
We crossed the wet grass. My nightgown trailed, getting heavier, but I couldn’t hold it up. I made my way toward the faint white glow of the chairs and lowered myself cautiously onto a surface I couldn’t see—wet, like the grass, cool.
My feet were cool, too, and the breeze felt cool on my face. Far to the west thunder grumbled. Lightning flashed pink in the clouds.
“Clayton’ll be pleased,” Aunt Sarah said.
After a moment I asked, “Why?”
“Storm at night means a change of weather. It’ll be nice tomorrow.” All I could see of her was the white blur of her nightgown. I should say something to keep the conversation going, but my mind felt empty. My hands lay in my lap like live coals.
Aunt Sarah sighed. “I haven’t slept a night off that hill in over thirty years,” she said.
Quite a while went by before I asked, “When did you?”
“When I was a youngster, we went to the fair.” Her breath made the little snort that was laughter for her. “Well, I didn’t sleep that night either! We all bedded down in the backs of the wagons, and when our baby wasn’t crying, the next baby over was! I saw sunrise from the very start that morning!”
I asked into the soft darkness, “Who was the baby?”
She didn’t answer right away. Lightning lit the bottom of the faraway clouds. “That would have been Walter,” she said.
My father. Then she was my age that night, and her mother was going to die soon.
“I hope things are all right up home,” she said.
“Will Tr—will Uncle Truman stay at—” I couldn’t say Vinegar Hill! “Where will he sleep?”
“He likes to sleep under his own roof.” Aunt Sarah sighed again. We both thought, I suppose, of the two houses on the ridge: the gray one crumbling back into the ground on the homeplace, the goldenrod-colored one at Vinegar Hill, with its furniture-crowded sitting room, its empty top floor.
“Which was your bedroom?” I asked. “When you were my age?”
Again the pause before the answer. “Oh, we were always tradin’. Later on, after I was married, things settled down … but we’d swap six or seven times in a year. And fight? My goodness! I remember lockin’ Letty in the closet. She stayed in there two, three hours because Mother was working outdoors. Mother said to me, ‘Sarah, suppose the house had caught fire?’ And I said, ‘Then I’d be rid of that little pest!’ I got a lickin’ for that.”
She’s talking like a regular person, I thought. Like Truman, like Uncle Clayton. It made me realize that she’d always spoken proper English before this, like Mother, or Ida Mitchell. Tell me more, I wanted to say. While she’d been speaking, I was on the hill, rumpusing through the upstairs rooms with those children. When she stopped, I was in my hands again.
“Does it hurt bad?” she asked.
“Not too bad.”
The wind came up in a strong, cool gust. The tree branches lifted and sighed. The night was blacker for a moment and then lit white. Thunder.
“It’s a ways off,” Aunt Sarah said, “but it’s comin’. We’ll have to go in soon. Here.” Her white form lengthened out. She came behind me, and I felt her hands on my shoulders, rubbing strongly.
“Ow!”
“Too hard?” She rubbed more gently. “Funny how this helps, even when the hurt is someplace else. When Ed broke his leg, he always wanted his shoulders rubbed. His mind would go where my hands were, he said, and he’d forget the hurt.”
My heart didn’t hurt anymore. All I had room for was the pain in my hands. My shoulders winced under Aunt Sarah’s fingers. I’d been dragged, too, and my muscles ached, but that was nothing.
Lightning traced a crooked trail across the sky. Before the thunder I asked, “How did Ed break his leg?”
“Toboggan. He had to make himself a jump, mainly because I said he shouldn’t. Well, he didn’t figure he had to obey his sister.”
Her warm fingers kneaded, the lightning flashed, a few cold drops of rain hit us, and I wondered, What is happening? She’d never said their names before. They might never have existed. Now she couldn’t stop talking about them, that young orphaned family, quarreling and laughing.
“We’d better go in,” Aunt Sarah said abruptly.
We got up and hurried across the lawn, hearing the rain come down the street behind us. Drops hit
my back like stones as we reached the door, soaking through the muslin nightgown. By the time we got inside, it was sheeting off the eaves, roaring all around us. The house seemed a small shell, like an overturned canoe.
“Good, you got in!” Mrs. Vesper came into the kitchen, wrapped tight in a dressing gown. She lit a lamp, opened the cupboard, and handed Aunt Sarah towels. “Suppose Andy got indoors before that hit?”
We had no way of knowing.
“Come in where it’s comfortable,” she said, leading the way into the sitting room. “No use pretending to sleep while this is going on.” I sat on the sofa, and Aunt Sarah put a pillow in my lap for my hands to rest on. She dried my hair and shoulders. Then she sat beside me, Mrs. Vesper took the large chair opposite, and we listened to the rain. It drowned out even the thunder, but lightning lit the room two or three times a minute, and sometimes we heard its electric crack.
Eventually that passed on to the east, and the rain settled to a steady, silvery sssh outside the windows. We sat in the circle of the lamplight, surrounded by darkness, not speaking, not needing to …
“—way to greet a man!” The windows were gray with the dawn, and Dr. Vesper stood dripping in the doorway.
twenty
He looked at my hands after breakfast and seemed satisfied. “I’ll look again in the afternoon, and then you can go home.” I was rebandaged and set down to rest.
Mrs. Vesper washed the dishes, and Aunt Sarah dried them. Then she stepped to the door. The sky was deep blue. Raindrops sparkled on the grass, and the puddles shimmered.
“Harriet, where do your friends live? The ones who brought you home?”
“Down the street, not far.” I’d been thinking about Luke this morning, wondering if I could go see her, wondering if I wanted to. Yesterday morning I didn’t want to see anyone, especially a friend. That feeling was gone. I could remember it, but it seemed as if it had been someone else, and that someone else hadn’t answered Luke’s letter.
“Let’s go visiting,” Aunt Sarah said abruptly. “You feel up to a walk?”