by Sarah Willis
In the evenings we still walk up the hill to watch the sunset, like we used to when my mother was here. Tonight, while Robert and Megan play in the open field by the road, my father calls me over to where he stands—on the berm. There are words, like berm, that have my mother’s voice no matter who says it. Sometimes I say berm over and over as we walk up the hill, and it’s like she’s right here, invisible, talking in my ear. Dinner is a word like that too, but I’m afraid that might not last, since I have to say it so often now. No one ever comes to dinner the first time I call, except Kip. Even Robert doesn’t run to meals anymore. They are the times when my mother’s absence is most present.
“See the way the road goes down, then back up that next hill,” my father says. “Then there’s a dip you can’t see, and then it rises again. Each hill looks higher, but we’re really higher where we’re standing right now. It’s an optical illusion. There are all these optical illusions in nature, and when I first started painting landscapes, I couldn’t make them look right. I tried and tried. For years, a road like that would look like just a black line when I painted it, nothing at all like a road going someplace. It drove me crazy. I was painting when I was in my twenties. After teaching all day, I’d pack up my stuff and drive out of the city just in time to paint an hour before the sun set. I’d get the hills all right, I guess—I wasn’t great then … I’m not great now either, but that’s beside the point. Anyway, I’d get out my black charcoal, or my tube of black oil paint, and I’d study that road. The angles. The length, the curve. I knew what that road did in my head, mathematically. Realistically. But I couldn’t draw it. I don’t know what changed me, I wish I could tell you that, but one day I drew it with a gray charcoal, lightly, freely, not exactly as it was, but where it wanted to go, as if the road wasn’t made of asphalt, but of light and movement. And it looked, well, better. I was pretty happy. I’ve drawn roads a hundred times since then. Sometimes they are wide and practical, sometimes potholed and well used, sometimes mysterious. Sometimes they’re Prussian blue, sometimes burnt sienna, sometimes a mixture of copper and Payne’s gray, and they change color as they rise and fall; they’re never all one thing. Never just black. You know, there are some oil painters who feel you should never use black, it’s deadening to a painting. I don’t think that way. There is no doubt some things need black. It’s just there are so many other choices. So many ways to see something.” He pauses here, seeing something; hoping I’m seeing the same thing, I guess. I don’t say anything. I’m getting good at this listening thing. Well, better.
He continues. “I know you read my letters. I wish you hadn’t, but what I want to say to you is, who I am to you, the bad guy, is not all of who I am, and even if you can’t see that now, I know you will, and I want you to know that no matter what happens, I know you love me. And I love you.” Then he kind of trembles. I can see his hands shake, because all this time I’ve been looking down at his hands and his feet and sometimes his shoulders, and the road. Then those arms, which are still shaking, rise up and move around me like wings, and he hugs me. After a little bit, I hug him back. Then we stop and step back.
“God, that’s been building for a long time.” He laughs.
“Guess so,” I say.
Robert and Megan come over and we run down the hill.
One more letter comes from our mother. It’s addressed to my father and I don’t open it. After he reads it, he says there’s a note inside for each of us. They are very short notes.
Dear Tamara,
It was so good to see you. You looked beautiful. You have such a pretty face, but I could tell you are mad at me. I don’t blame you. I have only recently realized I have been mad at my father for dying, and I have never forgiven my mother. If she drove into that tree on purpose, which I will never know, it was the act of a coward. If it was an accident, I wonder what distracted her. Not thoughts of me. I suppose I need your forgiveness now for my not being there, and your understanding. I know I ask too much of you. I always have. But I ask you to be brave. Be always brave.
Love,
Your Mom
It’s not fair I can’t tell her she’s asking too much, that being brave hurts. If she just asked me not to cause too much trouble, I could probably do that for her. She thinks she’s being comforting, but all she’s comforting is herself. Still, I’m glad she wrote. That she had the energy to write.
I don’t ask Robert or Megan to show me their letters. Maybe someday I will.
After we are done reading our notes, my father calls us into the living room. I hope it’s not another analogy about art and life. I appreciated his effort, but once was enough.
We sit down, expecting the worst. What could be worse than our mother dying of TB and our moving to Utica is beyond me, but I bet my father can think of something.
He pulls the floral chair around, so he’s facing all of us, then begins. “I have promised your mother something she has asked of me. Here it is. I am to find a house in Utica, not far out in the country. She wants you to be able to walk to school and the stores. And she says we have to live there until Megan finishes high school. If I have to travel to paint, then I’ll have to travel. I imagine there are some interesting places nearby I can paint. She says when she comes back she won’t have the energy to move, and I agree. So that’s that.”
No one says a word. This is too good to be true. And it’s too horrible, because there is no doubt my father would never have agreed to this unless he thought her request was the kind you can’t refuse.
The very next day my father starts his farewell painting of the farm. He sets up his easel on the lawn, close to the road. The ditch is right behind him. I wish he would step back to look at his picture from a distance, and fall in that ditch. He will. It’s just a matter of time.
The manila envelopes come. Pictures of houses, cut-out ads, scribbled notes from the man who is helping my father find us a new place. It feels so familiar, these manila envelopes. They mark the endings and beginnings of my years—except they have come much too soon this time, less than six months since our last move. It throws me off. I can’t remember what month it is. I wake in the morning thinking I should be getting dressed for school. I expect it to snow. I laugh when I’m sad. I eat when I’m not hungry.
Looking forward to leaving here makes me angry at myself. I am a traitor to my own desires. I am frightened by how easy I am swayed, how what I believe in my heart can change at the turn of a few words, the trading of dreams. It feels too easy and I fight every moment I look ahead. I find the only way not to think about it is to stay busy. I do puzzles and play records. Talk with Brenda. Play marbles and hide-and-seek. Weed the garden and take pictures. My father has to buy six more rolls. He complains, but absently, as if he’s complaining because he thinks he should.
I tell Rusty I don’t want to have sex again, and even though I can see he looks pretty disappointed, he just nods and asks if he can still kiss me and do other stuff. I say sure, and we do, mostly behind the big maple. Sometimes we wrestle in the grass, groping at each other, nipping at ears, bending back fingers until someone says uncle, and sometimes we walk up Valley View Hill and run down it, hand in hand, until our fingers separate and we spin off at our own speeds.
One day, Megan convinces all of us to have a tea party in the bomb shelter. Even Helen agrees to come. Megan puts an old blue woolen blanket down on the cement floor, which is dry now and covered with fine brown dust. We make Kool-Aid because we don’t have tea, and carry out a package of gingersnaps, mugs, and real plates. Helen makes us say grace before we start to eat. Drinking Kool-Aid with our pinkies held up, we talk in high silly voices about the weather and pretend movie stars are our best friends. Robert imitates Mae West, and does a great job of it, until we are laughing so hard the cookies spill from our mouths. Brenda shows us how she can blow Kool-Aid out her nose, and Rusty throws a cookie at her and it bounces off her chin and falls down her blouse. The cookie slips right down, since there’s nothin
g much to stop it, and it comes right out the bottom of her blouse and lands in her lap. We all try throwing cookies at Brenda, to see if we can do that again, like playing basketball. Kip eats the cookies off the ground, wagging his tail madly. It’s a perfect day.
My father wouldn’t know if we went to the moon during these days. He paints his farewell picture, reads ads, makes phone calls, gets phone calls from New York, opens manila envelopes. He eats whatever I cook with a nod of thanks.
Over a dinner of deviled ham sandwiches and pickles my father tells us he’s found us a house.
“I haven’t seen a photo, but it sounds perfect,” he says. “It has a bedroom and a bathroom on the first floor. It will be easier on your mother when she comes home. She’ll have to take it easy. And there’s a room with all windows that can be a studio. There are two large bedrooms and another bath on the second floor, and a large attic, Tamara, your bedroom, if you want, with an outside staircase, so you can have some privacy. Doesn’t that sound like a good idea?”
I nod dumbly.
“We can move in September 2nd,” he says, then drinks his Kool-Aid.
It’s Saturday, August 28th. He’s talking about less than a week away. No one but he is still eating. He takes a big bite of deviled ham and chews, looking at us expectantly. There is no sadness in his face. No sense of loss.
“When are we going to leave?” Robert asks.
“Wednesday. We should pack Tuesday. I was thinking of asking Rusty to help. I’d pay him. Do you think he’d like that, Tamara? A little extra spending money?”
I shrug, refusing to let any of this be easy for him, even though I’m already picturing that attic, the outside stairs.
“Can we take the comics?” Robert asks.
“I don’t think so,” my father says. “They don’t belong to us.”
“The Burns won’t mind,” I say. “They don’t need comics anymore.”
My father nods. He can see the logic in that. “Well, you’ll have to ask them, Robert.”
My brother’s face clouds over. He won’t dare ask the Burns.
“I’ll ask them for you,” I say.
“Thanks,” he says.
“Who will live here?” Megan asks my father. “Who will take care of Kip and the cows?”
“They’ll find someone.” He finishes his food and gets up.
“Want to go up the hill?” I ask Megan and Robert.
They say yes. We do the dishes first. We leave the kitchen spotless. It isn’t ours to leave a mess. It never was.
At the top of the hill we walk into the tall grass. Together we stomp down a circle of the rough, spiky grass. When we sit, we are invisible from the road; the grass surrounds us, bounds us, makes everything simple. There is nothing but us.
Before, being alone with my brother and sister made me crazy; long car rides and faraway lonesome places with only them and always them. But right now it feels good, comfortable, just right. They are the only ones who know exactly how I feel. We are all three of us torn between anger and hope. Fear and hope. Hope is on the other end of everything I feel right now.
“Do you think we’re really going to stay at this place? For years?” My brother says this with all the disbelief of someone asking if it might rain elephants.
“He says he promised her,” I say.
“What if she dies?” Megan says. “He’ll move us if she dies.”
“She’s not going to die,” Robert says. “Don’t say that.”
“He can’t break a deathbed promise,” I say. “We’ll have to stay there anyway.” We sure are being practical about all this. I guess that’s our mother in us. I bet we’ll keep finding bits of her in us for a long time.
The night is coming quickly now that the summer is almost over. The light fades, as if in a hurry to go somewhere. A bat swoops low, just above our heads. I wonder if we stayed here in the tall grass how long it would take for my father to come looking for us.
As a gentle breeze makes the grass whisper a constant shhh, one star appears in the sky. I try to memorize the way we are sitting, the sky-blue color of my sister’s eyes in this light, the way she waves the mosquitoes away with her small little kid’s hands, the defiant tone to her voice when she repeats after me, “We’ll have to stay.” I try to hold inside me the exact length of my brother’s hair, the way he sits with his knees bent, the lines of pebbly scabs on his shins from a fall down this hill. I close my eyes and we are here, inside me.
The day before we leave, two men with papers to be signed and a slat-boarded truck come to take Edith away. Rusty and Brenda run across the road as Mr. Burns leads Edith out of the barn, a rope tied around her neck. She refuses to move and Mr. Burns tugs and jerks on the rope as Edith twists her head and snorts so loud it sounds like she’s struggling for each breath. The two men help drag Edith up the ramp and into the truck, then they swing up the ramp and latch it shut. The truck is made of slats with open spaces, so the air can get in. Edith moos steadily and stumbles about inside, bumping into the sides of the truck. I want to pat her, tell her we love her, but there is no time. The men are professional cow movers. She is gone in minutes.
Mrs. Burns keeps her head bent, eyes on the ground. Her cheeks are red. Dr. Ostrum and some people from the Animal Bureau are coming next week to test the rest of the cattle and the bull. They will have to tranquilize the bull first. I’d like to see that.
My father drives our car around to the other side of the barn and hooks on the trailer. With several stops and starts, he manages to back it up by the side porch. I hate this trailer. I hate it worse than liver and snakes.
“We better get going,” Mr. Burns says. “We don’t want to get in the way. Unless you want some help?”
My father says no. “We have everything under control,” he says, nodding at all us kids. “But thanks anyway.”
Before they go, I ask about the comics, the puzzles, and the little metal town. Mrs. Burns says to take them, take anything we might want, including the bike. My father waves his hand and says, “No, no, please, we shouldn’t,” but he hasn’t got a chance. Robert, Megan, and I are working together, thanking the Burns, saying how much we appreciate it, we’ll take such good care of everything, we’ll always remember them. Mrs. Burns’ eyes get all wet and my father ends up shaking his head, then shaking their hands.
Mrs. Burns gives me a hug. “Bye, honey,” she says. “Take some jam too.” I grin as my father rolls his eyes.
She gives Robert and Megan hugs also. Mr. Burns shakes everyone’s hand with a strong, tight squeeze. “Drive carefully,” they both say, more than once. They leave, with Kip in the car, his head out the window, his ears flopping in the breeze. They have decided to chance his living with them, even by the busy road.
We pack. Rusty and Brenda help. Helen is at church, talking to the minister. We have to move everything around in the trailer several times to make sure the bike isn’t near any of my father’s paintings. He is frantic that the bike might shift and the handlebars poke a hole in something.
When we’re done, we have packed everything but a few clothes, some comics, and three packs of gum.
We all eat dinner together at the Murphys’ picnic table. Mrs. Murphy acts like I brought her a pot of gold when I hand her a jar of Mrs. Burns’ pickles, so I go back over and get her two more. She refuses to accept them, so when she’s not looking, I put them in her cupboard. I counted twenty-six more pickle jars in the Burns’ basement pantry.
When Mr. Murphy says grace, my father lowers his head, but doesn’t close his eyes or fold his hands together. Silently, I thank him for bowing his head. My mother wouldn’t have, but I believe the Murphys deserve this bit of pretense for all the nice things they have done.
Just as dinner is over, I get a gigantic splinter stuck in the palm of my hand. It’s the size of a spike. Brenda says she’ll get it out and tugs at it with her fingernails. It breaks off, leaving a slash of wood deep under my skin. Brenda wants to dig that out with a need
le but I don’t let her. She pouts the rest of the night until I give her my going-away gift, my peach-colored dress with the white-trim collar I wore to church with her family. I’ve almost outgrown it. Helen says she can take it in, where needed. Brenda gets all sappy and says she’ll be my best friend forever. If we were staying here, she probably wouldn’t be speaking to me next week for some reason, but I tell her she’ll be my best friend forever too.
School starts tomorrow, so we have to say good-bye to Rusty and Brenda tonight. Rusty gives Robert a wood gun with a shiny tin handle. Helen gives us a Bible. Brenda gives me a half-used bottle of perfume. Rusty tells me to write. It’s ten o’clock at night when my father calls us in, saying we have to get some sleep for the big day tomorrow. I hug Helen and Brenda good-bye. Rusty takes my hand and walks me across the road, almost to the porch, even though everyone’s watching. I tell Robert and Megan to get inside the house now before I beat the beans out of them, and they go in. I can see the curtain I put back up yesterday sway as I kiss Rusty good-bye.
When I wake in the morning, my hand hurts from the splinter that is still stuck under my skin. It’s not just my hand that hurts, though. My chest is tight, my jaw aches, and my stomach’s sour. Pretty much like I always feel the day we leave. The splinter’s just an extra. I’ll have to soak it out when we get to Utica. There’s no time now. My father hustles us about as if a flood were approaching, as if our very lives are at stake if we don’t leave by ten o’clock on the nose.
I pull the sheets off my bed, noticing for the first time a brown stain on the mattress the shape of an ear. Blood, maybe mine, from my curse, or maybe it’s Timothy’s. I guess it doesn’t matter. We have both bled here. This is what I leave behind then, not a ring or a brush or anything as simple as that. I like the idea. I tell myself it is both Timothy’s and my blood, mixed together. I put on his black T-shirt and my blue jeans. Last night I put his wallet back in the box upstairs. That’s when I took the glass. I wrapped it in layers of newspaper and packed it very carefully. I did it for Mrs. Burns. I think she’ll understand.