What happens next is Mrs. Pence in the kitchen door. At some point the Debussy étude must have come to an end. She’s wearing her embroidered Chinese dressing gown, and her hair hangs over her shoulder in a thin white braid. She looks like an ancient china doll as she gazes, frail and surprised, at the scene in her kitchen.
“How nice to see you’re having friends over, Ruth.”
“Yes,” says Isaiah. He sets the coffeepot back on the stove and comes around the table to put his arm around Mrs. Pence’s shoulders. “They’re friends all right. But they’re getting ready to leave.”
Brazos has pulled himself back together. He stands and sets his coffee cup in the sink. “Sorry, ma’am. I appreciate the coffee.”
He looks at me. “First I knew you had a brother,” he says, and he’s gone. We hear the front door open and shut behind him.
24
On Saturday, while Mrs. Pence’s piano students come and go, I think about mowing the lawn again or at least pushing the mower over the brown stubble. The air is sultry, but the smoke’s not as bad. Maybe the crews have gotten the fires under control, or else I’m getting used to the fumes.
From the shade of the blue spruce in the backyard, I can look along the side of the house and see a narrow slice of the front sidewalk. The blonde “Für Elise” student—Madison Albert—wheels up on her bike with her satchel of music, and a minute or two later a younger girl, probably the stumbling “Song of the Volga Boatmen” student, crosses the sidewalk in the other direction. She calls to somebody, and soon I hear a car pulling away. Her mother, I suppose, picking her up after her lesson.
Late July. Unrelenting sun. I feel beads of sweat trickling through my hair and down my neck, and I retreat to the deeper shade of the porch and retrieve my cup. The coffee is lukewarm.
Piano students coming, piano students going, the eternal circle of motion that never seems to change. I haven’t seen or heard from Brazos since last Saturday at the Three Hundred Club. Probably he’s still angry. He’d planned to drive back to Boise soon. Maybe he’s already gone.
Summer’s almost gone . . .
The kitchen door bursts open behind me. I jump and turn, slopping coffee. The “Für Elise” girl, Madison, wild-eyed, seems as suspended as a strip of silent film on pause, her hair falling out of its ponytail, soundless words pouring from her mouth. Behind her the screen door hangs ajar. Then motion resumes, the screen slams shut on automatic hinges, and she’s running toward me and screaming.
“It’s Mrs. Pence, I don’t know what’s the matter with her, I couldn’t find you, I ran all the way upstairs and looked for you, I didn’t know what to do, it’s Mrs. Pence—”
She’s still babbling, still explaining, as I race through the kitchen where the familiar range and refrigerator and sink have turned into strangers, down the hall where Ray Pence smiles from his photograph, and into the piano room.
Mrs. Pence half-lies against the practice piano bench where she fell. Her mouth ajar, her lips blue. I hook her dentures out of her mouth with my finger and drop them on the rug, then ease her away from the bench until she lies flat on the rug, pinch her nostrils, and bend to breathe into her mouth until her chest rises and falls as I lift my mouth from hers. Again. Again. Count slowly. Again.
“I didn’t know what to do, she was okay and talking about the arpeggios, and then she just dropped over, and I think she hit her head on the corner of the bench, but I don’t know, and I didn’t know what to do. Mr. Pence, Mr. Pence, I didn’t know what to do!”
Who is she talking to?
Someone looms between me and the window, a dark shadow in the corner of my eye—“You need me to spell you?”
I shake my head, breathe deeply into her mouth again, and manage to gasp between another breath and the next, “Ambulance?”
“I already called.”
Isaiah’s dark fingers on her wrist, checking her pulse. I can’t break my rhythm to ask how he got here. I can see Mrs. Pence’s dentures, a pair of yellowish grotesques, where I dropped them, and a wet nose on my arm that is Jonathan, but the voices over my head are babble.
“Mr. Pence, I didn’t know what to do, and I was looking everywhere for Ruth, but I couldn’t find her, and I was afraid I was all alone—”
“Madison, you did just fine.”
“Is she going to be okay?”
“We’ll hope so.”
Breathe again. Count slowly. Breathe again. My vision darkens. Her dentures seem to rise and fall on the rug as I raise my head to breathe deeply and bend to breathe into her mouth. I’ve been breathing and counting forever, I’ll go on breathing and counting forever.
“You okay?”
I nod between breaths. Then, where there was only the frightened girl’s babble and the deepening veil over my eyes and the rhythm of my counting, a burst of shouting and lights and clanking metal.
Somebody’s getting between me and Mrs. Pence, pushing me aside.
“It’s okay, we got her now.”
A pudgy man with a beard and ponytail fits a mask over Mrs. Pence’s face, while his companion, taller and slimmer, attaches a hose and turns on a pump. Her chest rises and falls as the pump goes to work. The pudgy man pulls a stethoscope out of his pocket, plugs it into his ears, and listens for a minute or two.
“Got a heartbeat. Okay, one, two, three.”
Together they lift Mrs. Pence on a white-sheeted stretcher and set it on its wheeled rack, the pump wheezing the whole time.
Silence where there had been racket. I stand and wish I hadn’t when the pianos start to tip over. Isaiah catches me and steers me to a bench.
“Put your head down,” he tells me as I get a glimpse of the “Für Elise” girl’s face, Madison’s face, bathed in tears.
“Oh, Mr. Pence,” she weeps.
“Is your mom coming to pick you up?”
“No, I’m on my bike.”
“We’ll drive you home.”
Isaiah leaves to pull the Pontiac out of the garage, and Madison sits beside me on the piano bench. “Ruth, I was so scared!”
“I know. I was scared too.”
“How’d you know what to do?”
I wonder myself. Bill the Drummer, I half-remember. Somebody had OD’d, and Bill the Drummer started mouth-to-mouth and coached me between breaths to spell him.
“Is Mrs. Pence going to be all right?”
“I don’t know.”
Isaiah is back. “I hope that was your bike in the middle of the front sidewalk. I loaded it in the trunk of the car. Ruby, are you okay now?”
“Yes.”
At least I’m not dizzy, although it’s a shock to walk out the front door and find it isn’t dark yet but broad late daylight and the Pontiac its stately self by the curb, the lid of its trunk slightly raised where Isaiah had to batten down Madison’s bike with a bungee cord. He’s getting into the driver’s side when Madison screams, “My backpack!” and goes running back to fetch it.
“God,” says Isaiah.
Madison climbs into the back seat, and Isaiah shifts the Pontiac into gear and is pulling away from the curb when there’s another frantic squeal: “No seatbelt!”
Isaiah seems to mull deep and serious thoughts before he says: “No. Once upon a time there were no seatbelts in cars.”
“Really?”
“Really. It’s not that far to your house. I’ll drive careful. You’ll be all right.”
Madison’s house turns out to be only a few blocks away, on another cottonwood-shaded Orchards street, a smallish bungalow with flaking gray paint and a scorched lawn. I wait in the Pontiac while Isaiah helps her get her bike out of the trunk and walks her to her door. A couple of boys stop riding their bikes in figure eights to watch, and I recognize them as the kids who hang around the mailboxes.
Madison Albert. What is the connection with Anne?
“Her mother was Francis Albert’s first wife,” Isaiah explains when he comes back to the Pontiac.
“Why did she ca
ll you Mr. Pence?”
“Because it’s my name.”
He’s silent then, keeping his attention on his driving until we reach the grade and turn down toward Main. Then he adds: “She’s one of my high school students. She’ll be a junior this fall.”
Magpie nest, full of shiny things hidden in the dark. Isaiah had had a name, and it wasn’t Pence. I’d known his name once, but now it dances, elusive, through the twigs and feathers and droppings of the magpie big mess.
More than my mind can hold.
The familiar town lies below us. There stretches the shopping mall, there lies the campus, there waits the hospital. Perhaps it’s the late sun playing a ghost’s waltz across roofs and treetops and the slow current of the Milk River that casts it all in a strange new light, while Isaiah and I, locked in our ancient chariot, hurtle toward whatever rises to meet us.
25
“Let’s walk,” says Isaiah.
The air hangs warm and smoky along the hill overlooking the Milk River. I don’t know where we’re headed or even which direction until I locate the Big Dipper, like a cup with a long handle, hovering over the dark bluffs beyond the Milk River and hoarding its invisible water like the pitiless drought itself, and I realize that we’ve driven north, over the Milk River bridge, into a part of town that’s strange to me. It’s not really late, although the houses on both sides of the street are lighted. When we come to the end of the residential street, we’re looking across a small park set in a ring of ornamental lights on the very crest of the hill.
The light poles are too high, or the light globes too frosted, for me to see my feet, although I feel I’m walking on grass toward a small indistinct structure, perhaps a gazebo, on the far edge of the park. Then I stumble on a shallow depression in the grass and nearly fall.
“Careful.” Isaiah catches my arm.
My eyes adjust enough to the dark to make out a series of long narrow trenches along the side of the park that overlooks the river, seven or eight trenches beyond the one I nearly fell into. Are they empty graves?
“Rifle pits.”
“Rifle pits? For what?”
“For fighting off Indians,” he says, and catches me before I fall into the next trench. “We can sit in the gazebo. There’s a bench.”
The gazebo smells of cedar. The bench faces out, overlooking the lights of downtown and the reflections on the surface of the water where the Milk River flows on its endless journey. Isaiah digs into his shirt pocket and takes out the makings: papers, lighter, baggie of cured clippings from which the familiar sweet scent rises. He rolls his joint and lights it, and I see the red glow as he takes his drag and breathes out.
“Want some?”
I take a hit and breathe in the smoke and feel its reassurance, like the calm face of an old friend.
“They’re talking about legalizing the shit in Washington State this fall,” he says, when I hand back the joint.
“Does that mean you’re going to quit growing it back of Mrs. Pence’s garage?”
Isaiah laughs.
We sit in silence for some time, feeling the calm from the smoke, until I say, “Was there an attack?”
“No, but they thought there was going to be.”
I wait, but he’s thinking his own thoughts.
“The Nez Perce Indian War of 1877,” he says after a moment. “The Nez Perce were on the run from the U.S. Army, all the way from Washington and across Idaho, and they fought the army at the Big Hole in western Montana and fled across Yellowstone Park and up into the Judith Basin, and folks here in Versailles thought they were likely to keep riding north and attack the town, so they dug the pits and posted lookouts, but nothing happened. The Nez Perce veered east, over by the Bear Paws. Instead of crossing the Milk River into Canada, they stopped to rest, and that’s where General Howard caught them.”
He tells me a little more, about the broken treaties and the refusal of the Nez Perce to give up their homeland, their enforced resettlement, and the revolt of the patriot warriors, while I half-listen and imagine those lookouts on the plateau, watching the prairie for any sign of war ponies, while behind them in their pits crouched the waiting men with rifles. The Milk River and the outline of the bluffs would have been about the same as today. Fewer lights, of course. Far fewer.
Would those lookouts and riflemen have been relieved when dawn broke and no Indians on ponies appeared as faraway specks that materialized out of the bunchgrass and sagebrush?
Or maybe they had been spoiling for a fight and were disappointed. What was it about fear?
Isaiah stirs, as though I had asked aloud. “Brad Gilcannon died, you know.”
“No. I didn’t know.”
“A couple of years ago.”
Brad gone. For a long time he had seemed, at least to me, as permanent and certain a presence as the prairie that enclosed Versailles. The policeman who kept us safe. The local hero, until his investigations went sour. Now I feel a curious absence, like an empty space next to me.
“What did he die of?”
“Heart attack.” After a moment he adds, “I’ve always wondered if he really believed all that shit.”
“What shit?”
“The covens. The satanic rituals.”
I think about it. “I always thought he did. I believed it, except the part where I said I’d seen it. I guess I believed Brad.”
“You were how old? Nine?”
“Eight. Nine by the time I testified.”
The evening has darkened, and the lights of downtown below us are pinpricks. A car drives past us, following the beam of its headlights, and turns past the park to take the street down the hill. Isaiah makes a sound somewhere between a chuckle and a choke. “You loved Brad, and you believed him. And he believed Anne.”
I wait for his next question, but he doesn’t ask it. What did Anne believe? Where did it all start?
The car leaves a silence behind its passing. The prairie is a field of darkness. An enemy has gathered on the horizon. I see the glint of moonlight on their rifles, hear the snorts of their ponies and the restless dancing of unshod hoofs. The fear on the plateau above town is like an inflection spreading from man to man. We have to be ready! The Indians are coming! We still have some time but not much time. We have to act!
“Seems like a long time ago in some ways. In some ways not so long.”
“No,” Isaiah says, and I’m not sure which he means.
“What I keep coming back to,” he says. “Brad must have believed it. If he didn’t believe it, why did he do what he did?”
“You mean, file all those charges and so on?”
He nods. Whatever he’s thinking is distant.
“There must have been a prosecutor. And a judge.” I’m trying to remember. Were there juries? I hadn’t appeared before a jury. They had taken me into chambers to tell my story to the judge.
“They must have all believed Brad. And his witnesses. Seems pretty damned improbable when you think about it now.”
“Did you believe any of it?”
He’s silent for a long time. “It was scary as hell,” he says finally. “All those grown-ups in suits looking like the end of the world was coming. It was scary that they were scared.”
He pauses. “What I didn’t believe,” he says, “was that I’d seen any dead babies. Or fires on the altar or people running around in black robes. Or having sex in church. I was what, eleven? Even when I was eleven, something like that would have tended to stick in my mind.”
I have to laugh, and Isaiah puts his arm around my shoulders.
“That’s better,” he says.
“What do we do now?”
“I’m going back to the hospital. You’re going home and get some rest.”
“I want to come with you.”
“I’ll need you to spell me in the morning. And you need to take care of Jonathan. And water the garden.”
What we talk about instead of what we need to talk about.
�
�Your name wasn’t Pence.”
“No.” Long pause. “The name on my birth certificate was Isaiah Pride. I changed it to Pence when I turned eighteen.”
“Why?”
“I wanted a name that was at least part of what I knew I was.”
*
“She has a good pulse,” the doctor on duty had said. “We’ve got her on oxygen, got her on a drip, made her comfortable. She may never regain consciousness, but then again she may. And then we’ll see.”
Dr. Brenner was waiting in the lobby, the robot with a heart. “Can I do anything for you, Ruth?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and I dropped down in the chair beside him.
“How’s Isaiah holding up?”
“Not great.”
“He’s a good boy.”
Then Dr. Brenner surprised me by taking my hand, until his grip told me it was his hand as well as mine needing to be held, and so I held it until an aide came to tell me that Mrs. Pence was settled in a hospital bed with her oxygen and her IV pole and I could see her.
“Talk to her,” advised the night nurse. “You never know what they hear, but sometimes it seems to soothe them to hear a familiar voice.”
Isaiah and I fall into a routine, one of us sitting at Mrs. Pence’s bedside and the other going back to her house to take in the mail and the papers and feed Jonathan and catch a few hours’ sleep. Although Isaiah insisted on that first shift, by the next shift we’ve traded, so I, the natural nightwalker, sit with her through the small hours.
“What kind of a musician are you,” I tease him, “that you can’t stay up all night?”
He grins and shakes his head. “I don’t know what I’ll do when school starts and I’m teaching all day. I may have to trade back with you.”
“At the college?” I’m surprised. I know the fall term won’t start for another two weeks.
“When my school starts. Mike Mansfield High School. Faculty meetings. Lesson plans. That shit.”
Taking a cue from the night nurse, I buy a portable CD player and hunt out some classical piano discs, mostly Beethoven and Liszt piano concertos. By my second night of sitting beside Mrs. Pence, I learn how to place a pillow at the back of one of the plastic vinyl chairs, sit back, and use the other vinyl chair as a footrest. I sip water and listen to Liszt over and over while I watch twenty-four-hour cable news with the volume off and think my thoughts.
Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin Page 14