Opal moved then, as she had for months, nightly, daily, across Johnson’s imagination—
“It seems to me and, gentlemen, I hope you’ll agree, that outfitting your house with the most effective stun-hammer available on the market today is something you’ll want to pursue, even if you felt that the humanitarian aspects of using the instrument were of small concern. We know that there’s an art to what we do here, and our art cannot be as tidy and regimental without it. Furthermore, the end product’s of a perceptibly higher taste quality if you do use it. What I refer to is the FlumpBlin Velvet-punch. We have heard of some clients who have gone so far as to incorporate the very fact they use this newest pneumatic, high-impact stun-hammer as an integral part of their advertising campaigns. Your little old ladies are very touched indeed by any indication of industrial humanitarianism. It can, we believe, result in increased sales. I don’t possess particular knowledge about each of you gentlemen’s markets, of course. But take you, Mr. Johnson, just for instance. If the area your house targets in Nebraska is it? Yes, if the area your house specifically targets has at its boundaries competitors who overlap your own distribution network, market analysis would show that by adopting the fact you make use of the Velvet-punch, which is demonstrably the most technologically advanced such device made in this country today, you can put quite a cramp in their style. Well, then, if you will just follow me, we would like to demonstrate exactly how the FlumpBlin Velvet-punch works.”
Advancement of learning in the new world, Johnson thought, and the salesman reminisced as they walked through the showroom: “Important feature of the Chicago houses is the adaptation for rapidly dealing with the premanufactured merchandise which they receive. See, in Chicago the cattle are driven up these winding viaducts, by which they eventually reach the roof. It’s a sight to see, state of the art. Each of the prebies passes round and round and into a narrow pen where they give them one quick blow to the head, drop them through the trapdoor on down into a room. That’s where they start to make the real rounds—round steak, ground round, you get the picture.”
And the group laughed, uneasily.
Opal
August 1956
FIRST THE CUCKOO came out and sang eleven times its chirrup. Then it disappeared again behind the double doors. After that, the band of painted cows, horses, pigs, goats and a one-eyed goatherd paraded around a winding track set in the second-story balcony posed along the perimeters of the clock house. Heavy cast-iron weights shaped like elongated pine cones dangled at the ends of brass chains. They hung from the cuckoo clock down along the papered wall so low they nearly touched the kitchen floor. And at the end of eleven strokes the clock played its tune:
Bone-white, the moonlight got caught in segmented spines of a cloud, a vertebral column across the starry flatness. Where was mama Opal?
Cepheus and Cassiopeia were framed high in the window, and she said their names out loud. She leaned forward in the sloped seat of a red wicker chair, placed her elbows on the kitchen table, craned her neck so that her head was almost upside down, and peered up at Cassiopeia. The sky was as much blue and gray as black.
There was a man shouting in the next room, his hysteria muffled by rag rugs, deep-cushioned furniture, doors, the wall. The voices of several others counterpointed and interjected to fill pauses left by the first man, uncle LeRoy. Deep musical vibratory resonance filtered through the kitchen, the cuckoo song done.
The girl sat quietly. Her hands were firmly cupped around a porcelain mug filled with warm cocoa. A whitish film had formed on the circular surface of her hot chocolate which, when she placed her index finger on its center, lifted like a hoary skin away from the pale milk. She pushed the chair away from the chrome-legged table with its painted metal top and walked now over to the window above the pewter sink. Along the length of horizon was a taffeta of blackish and yellowed clouds. These low banks were all that remained of the thundercloud which spun the tornado down from its base earlier that day and came right through Babylon, just where it wasn’t ever supposed to go. She couldn’t help but think all her Lucretius and her invocations and prayers to the vesper star and all that up in the hayloft had something to do with breaking the hex on the twisters. It had come down, she was convinced, looking around for her, not any of the others. But it seemed it mistook mama Opal for her. She turned and tiptoed to the door adjoining the front room, where the men were talking. Cupping her ear to the door she eavesdropped.
“It’s just too early for you to go drawing those kinds of conclusions.”
“No sir I feel it here,” came uncle’s voice, “I sense it, it was bound to happen, she was fated. I never figured this was what would happen but a body never knows.” His shuddering clipped words into staccati, lending them the kind of grandeur that preachers sometimes display while terrorizing their congregations. The girl froze when they were quiet again. She was prepared to jump back into her chair at the table, where uncle had told her to sit while the visitors were in the house.
“There’s only one eyewitness swears she was even within ten miles of the plant, Roy, and he’s flat on his back in the hospital don’t know which way’s up. Got a concussion left him unconscious for who knows how long, they didn’t even find him in all the rubble till late this afternoon.”
“That’s right, said he got plowed under by a couple of steel girders and a bandsaw. Was lucky he didn’t get cut in two. Not too reliable a source I’d say, poor bastard, brush with death like that.”
“All I know is she went to work this morning and she never come home after the storm hit,” uncle replied. “If this man says he seen her at work, he seen her at work.”
Mr. Johnson cleared his throat, then entered the conversation. “Now, Roy, listen to me, this man didn’t exactly say he saw Opal.”
“It was Opal.”
“I came into the back room and sent everybody home the minute they put up the alert, Roy. There was only a couple of the boys decided to stay on. Now I know for a fact that I told her to go on back here to be with you and the girl till the storm passed through, and I’m damn sure she set out to do just that. We searched the whole damn place high and low well as the surrounding countryside, and all we come up with was these couple of men who stayed on when they shouldn’t have. One of them is dead because of it, and the other one thinks he’s seeing angels in his hospital bed.”
“She might be helping out back in town still, she’ll be along in a bit.”
“Johnson here says they called everything off for the night. That was an hour ago. She would have been home before now.”
“I’d have thought Johnson would be the last man in the county willing to call off the search.”
“Just what do you mean by that?”
“I think you know what I mean.”
maybe mama left Johnson to go find Nicky and’ll send for me
“Look, Roy.”
“No, you look I don’t think you want to hear what I’d like to tell you, in front of these men.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Johnson declared.
“I think you do, sir.”
“Listen you two this isn’t a bit helpful in finding Opal.”
Johnson cleared his throat.
“There’s no finding Opal if Johnson’s called the search off,” LeRoy said. “Maybe he doesn’t want to find her.”
“I didn’t call the search off, the mayor did.”
“The mayor did,” scoffed uncle.
“It’s true, Roy,” said a man whose name was Shau.
“A snap of the finger here on Johnson’s hand and what would happen? I’ll tell you what. The search’d be on again.”
“Don’t be absurd, Roy,” Johnson said.
All the men spoke at once in Johnson’s defense. After they quieted down, uncle LeRoy added, “It’s not that he doesn’t have his reasons.”
“That’s enough,” announced Johnson. “I’m going. I’ve lost half my plant today, my business, I’ve ha
d a man killed, others hurt and Mr. Mann’s sister is still missing. I’ve got better things to do than sit here and take this man’s abuse.”
“Patience,” Shau said to Johnson.
“Worst part about it’s she deserved what she got,” uncle LeRoy went on, talking to himself. “There wasn’t no choice in it.”
“Everybody thinks the world of you the way you’ve taken Opal and the girl in,” Johnson said. “Not the least myself. She’s a fine woman, hard worker. But it’s not me that controls the sky. Putting any blame at my doorstep in this is wrong, it’s evil. We’ll look for Opal, keep looking until we find her. You should rest now. Take care of Hannah, and rest.”
“Her? She’s a curse, that’s what. She’s the very devil in my life, that’s what she is. And her mother with no husband. Now she’s finally paid for it, they decided to take their toll on her this time. Now I’m left with the curse.”
“Don’t blame troubles on the girl.”
“Not in my house you’ll not instruct me what to say and what not to say,” uncle shot back, his chest closing and voice rising.
“Listen to reason, Roy.”
“I think you’d better be on your way now. I appreciate your coming but there’s nothing more to be done here.”
The three men left in a chorus of false encouragement as Hannah slipped back to the kitchen table. After several long minutes uncle came into the kitchen, and saw that she was asleep, her head propped on her hands, resting sideways on the table. She heard him grumble, smelled the whiskey, emptied her mind so she could sit perfectly still as he came up close behind her and with his rough lips kissed her—he hardly knew how—on the back of her head, straightened her hair a bit, extinguished the light in the kitchen, and returned to the front room. She spent the rest of the fitful night sleeping, then waking, then sleeping, curled on the hook rug under the table. This was where her uncle found her the next morning as the cuckoo sounded nine strokes. She was going to find why the wind came for her—it was going to be in the book.
Mama.
Vache
October 1958
WHEN BLACKLEG BROUGHT down his prize young Angus, uncle fell mute and refused food for three days before openly assigning the blame to me. After mama Opal’s disappearance things hadn’t got better between me and uncle. I’d have been happy to go somewhere else to live but there wasn’t anywhere else to go. The death of this Angus, and how each of us reacted to it inwardly, drove us further apart than ever. And without mama Opal to reason with him and to console me there wasn’t much to do. Of course, we both knew it wasn’t my fault Vache got sick; she was my girl, but of veterinary science I was innocent as any child of thirteen, especially one who had been raised in the city, might logically be. After Kitter came out and lanced her leg, uncle began to eat and speak again, and to drink. He confined himself, as he would confine himself generally thereafter, either to ordering me about or rehearsing his long since unshakable concept of me as the cause of everything bad that befell him, as the single reason things, anything, went wrong.
He wheezed and had both hands dug down deep in the back pockets of his gabardines. The disease had a mysterious name. Charbon symptomatic.
Vachel (spelled Vachelle by me who had registered her birth, named her) I had led across a rough sumpy clearing of brownish brambles and gray-green nettles, sharp stones and rachet-edged brush, swordy ryegrass, mud. I’d left the gate ajar. This was the marshy field she’d come down into, where the animals were not allowed.
It was then, I suppose—low-lying, mucky from rain, rough, brambly, the uncut field—natural infection set into her torn hind leg. I soaped and washed all her cuts. She seemed to get better. But two months later I came upon her in the unmowed lower field again, breathless and gaspy, her pulse firing.
“Bacillus chauvaei,” Kitter said.
“What’s that?”
“Shushup.”
“But, Roy, this was inoculable.”
My uncle LeRoy pulled his hat off and ran his forearm across his wide brow.
We stood over poor Vache, her loins, flank and breast swollen grotesquely. Dr. Kitter shook his head, philosophically, bent over and fetched out the scalpel from his black morocco bag in the grass. A sour-smelling, sour-red and frothy jam spurted up the fine blade and spattered across his wrist and fingers when he lanced the tumor.
“Blackleg, all right, bacillus chauvaei, charbon symptomatic. We’re going to have to put her down.”
“No.”
“Hannah, I said shush.”
Kitter wiped his hand back and forth in the deep green grass. A glint of light caught against the scalpel blade. He pinched his handkerchief along its base, pushed downward toward the blade tip. Uncle drew his hands out of his pockets, rubbed his wrinkled neck with one agonizing movement, coughed.
“Well,” and he glanced at me but I looked away across the field. “You need any help then?” he asked.
“Let Hannah stay down here to help me out,” the doctor said. “It’ll be good for her to learn about these things. You just go on up to the house, Roy. We’ll be along in a few minutes.”
Uncle replaced his hands in his back pockets, smacked his lips. It was a disconcerting sound. “No, no,” uncle answered, matter-of-factly. “She’s coming up with me, here’s enough damage for one day.” Then he made an odd whimper, which caused my chest to tighten.
“Now, Roy, it ain’t Hannah’s fault.”
“You need any help then, or not?” uncle replied, clearly.
Dr. Kitter turned his head, looked away from us, toward a grove of white-barked quaking aspens, their rounded leaves quivering though there was no breeze. Mama Opal used to tell me aspens quaked in the still air and that’s how the wind got started sometimes.
“You just go on up to the house,” Doctor said. “I’ll be along shortly.”
“Get to home, gal.”
I looked down at Vache’s head, her eye black, clouded, strength gone. Turning away, I started up the hill. Kitter put her down while I climbed the quarter mile up the slow incline back to the house. Uncle followed me, quiet except for his labored breathing, ten paces back.
Hannah
November 1959
I DECIDED ON my fourteenth birthday that I would go to work at Mr. Johnson’s movie theater. This is what mama Opal would have done if she were in my place. She was gone, she never was coming home again, I knew that now, I’d cried and cried, knew the whole time that that wasn’t what she’d want me to do, cry. I telephoned him and told him I wanted to take him up on his old offer. When the words came out of my mouth I could almost hear them as if they were words spoken by mama Opal. They had adultness to them. He asked me whether uncle would consent to allow me to work there, and I told him yes. But I hadn’t asked uncle LeRoy. I was too old for that kind of malarkey. And if uncle LeRoy knew what my purpose was in wanting to save up money he might have just given me the money and told me to go. I don’t know. Maybe not. But it had to be my money to go away with, and not his.
On the first Saturday I was going to go into town to work I told uncle what I had done. Just so there would be no questions that might come up later in Mr. Johnson’s mind, I even told him that Mr. Johnson understood that I had taken the job with uncle’s approval. I knew he wouldn’t argue with me. We seldom argued anymore. What point was there to it? he complained. He was right, there wasn’t any point to it. He wasn’t my mother. I could hear his elephant-slow boots mount the stairs and he called down, telling me never to mention Mr. Johnson’s name in the house. I know that uncle cherished his solitude, and this is part of the reason he allowed me to work at the Bluebird. But this was a giant step, and if he had argued, we both knew he would not have won.
Our relationship had entered into a new phase, had arrived at a new kind of silence, as if there were nothing more to discuss and our arguments, when we did have them, were waged with eyes. He had never touched me again after that night in the kitchen. Whenever he came near me I had a way of look
ing at him. I could almost feel my eyes become electric, and I could square my shoulders too. Who knows if he even noticed this thing I did or, if he did, if it made him scared of me like it was supposed to? But when I gave him “lip” these past three years I did it knowing, more and more, that I had an invisible glass around my skin, unbreakable by him or anybody else. I was my own father and mother and there was nothing he could say to change it.
Mr. Johnson was tolerable—a little, as James Riding would put it, lightweight. I didn’t blame him for what had happened. Maybe he loved my mother. Maybe he was of two minds. Maybe she was pregnant and she went away to have the baby. All fantasizing, but it’s okay. He took it upon himself, even when she was still alive (dead, you see, it can be written, so—even before she died he took it on himself), to look after me. He thought of me as a tomboy with my hair cut so short (I cut it myself with scissors and a bowl)—but he said, “Hannah, there’s a whole world to fill with people, and somebody out there’s got to be a tomboy.”
I stopped wearing dresses. Not that I had so many in the closet. Uncle LeRoy’s sister-in-law commented I had filled out enough that I could wear mama Opal’s dresses, her silk organza with the stripes like a tiger, or her white organdy that went so well with the navy bonnet. But I was cool to the idea, I don’t know quite why.
At the movie theater there was a projectionist—James Riding whom I mentioned—who wore cowboy boots, blue-jean shirt and pants, and a Navajo buckle he had bought during his travels to the pueblos in Arizona. Except for his sharp, red-black beard spotty as lichen along his cheek, he was tolerable-looking, and told stories of his travels to places as far away as Buenos Aires and Lima and the Panama Canal. James Riding had a low opinion of Mr. Johnson and of just about everybody else in the county, but he had great respect for me. He said I reminded him of himself, how my independence was pronounced, how I had my gaze trained toward great adventures.
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