River of Heaven

by Lee Martin

  Then I say the thing that’s been rising in me ever since the day Maddie appeared on the deck of Stump’s ship. “She brought something to me. Maddie. Some joy I hadn’t known in years.” I’m embarrassed to say the rest, how she made me remember what it is to know love, so I say her name again, “Maddie,” hoping that will be enough this time to make everything clear.

  “She’s a tough kid,” the pencil-tapping detective says.

  “But still a kid,” I say, and here I break down and can barely say what I know I must. “I feel responsible for what I’ve brought into her life.”

  “Here’s the truth of the matter,” the detective says. “I’ve been investigating homicides a long time, and the one thing I know is sometimes innocent folks just get in the way of trouble.”

  I wish I could be satisfied with that, but I’m not. After everything I’ve gone through on this night—this night that should convince me of the haphazard devilry dancing all around us—I still can’t get cozy with the notion that, as the detective says, sometimes we just get in harm’s way. Think about it. We touch the world—we stoop to pick up a penny, build a fancy doghouse, follow a boy down the railroad tracks—and sooner or later the world touches back. We’re not even safe in our dreams. We come out into the cold night, our sleepwalking flinging us to the devil’s den.

  Everything—the noble intention and the ragged heart—is all tied up together like the knots Arthur surely thought he’d made strong enough, secure enough, to keep Herbert Zwilling in my basement. That’s what breaks me, the thought of how close we were to avoiding all that happened from that point on.

  “Please,” I say to the detectives, and they finally agree that, for the time, there’s nothing more to ask me. They’re convinced I had nothing to do with the body in my kitchen or the one in the frozen field.

  The detective who was flossing his teeth accompanies me to the door. He even lays his hand on my shoulder in a gesture I understand is meant to be a comfort. “If anyone’s responsible for anything here,” he says, “it’s your brother.”

  They won’t let Cal go, not tonight. He’s killed a man, and even if it was in self-defense, as I know it was—Cal with that Ruger Single Six in the pouch pocket of his hooded sweatshirt, just waiting for the right time to make it do its business—it’ll take a while to prove that, and there’s all these connections to Leonard Mink and the Michigan Militia to sort through.

  There will be months and months, I imagine, of investigators coming to ask me questions, but for now, nearly dawn, there’s no call for the police to hold me. I step out into the hallway, and at its end I see Maddie. With her are Vera and Duncan and Nancy Finn, and, yes, even Stump, on a leash someone has rustled up.

  “How did you know to come?” I ask Vera and Duncan.

  “I called Duncan,” Nancy says.

  “And I called Vera,” says Duncan. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

  Of course, it would be Vera who would be here to ease us back to the living. She’s even convinced the social worker that Maddie will be all right with us, that we’ll take care of her. I remember the way Vera rubbed my back that first night at the Seasoned Chefs. Vera who has always counted on decorum and hospitality to carry her through the lonely times since her husband died.

  “We’re going back to Mt. Gilead,” she says. “I’ve got rooms ready for you and Maddie at my house. You’ll stay there as long as you need to. You won’t want to go back to your house for a while, Sam. Maybe not for some nights to come. Don’t worry. You and Maddie are welcome as long as you need to stay.”

  “What’s going to happen to me?” Maddie says.

  Vera takes her hand. “We’re not going to talk about that right now,” she says. “We’re just going to go home.”

  But first I have to have a word with Nancy Finn. I wait until Duncan has driven us back to her neighborhood, where now the sky is brightening in the east, planes are taking off from the airport, and neighbors are dragging garbage cans to the curb. A few folks gather in a driveway and watch Duncan’s Scion glide by, and I know they’ve been witness to the comings and goings of the police working the crime scene after Cal and Maddie and I were already downtown. Now there’s only those neighbors following us with their curious stares—even Cal’s Explorer is gone from Nancy’s driveway, towed into a police garage, I imagine, for searching—to bring back the horror of the night now past.

  I insist, despite Duncan’s protest that he’ll see to it in a snap, on escorting Nancy to her door. She gives him a kiss on the cheek and turns from her position in the front seat to grab Maddie’s hand one more time—Maddie who’s sitting in the back between Vera and me.

  “Dear one,” Nancy says to Maddie. “You let these good folks see after you. You’ll do that, won’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Maddie says, her voice a whisper that tells me she’s at that point where Cal was the evening he came to my house and said, “Sammy, it’s me. It’s your brother.” That point of surrender to the kindness and care of others.

  I get out of the car and hold the door open for Nancy. I offer her my hand and she takes it the way she did that night at the Cabbage Rose. She squeezed my hand then, just as she does now, and I walk her to her door and wait until she’s unlocked it with her key and is about to step inside. I want to tell her everything about that April evening when I followed Dewey down the tracks, and how later I had the foolish notion that I could walk away and find a life that would one day have nothing to do with what had happened, but I can’t find the words, so I say, “Thank you for being so kind to Maddie.”

  Nancy hesitates, the door half open, her hand on the knob. It’s like she can’t bring herself to step inside, and I can tell she’s trying to make up her mind about something. Then she looks me in the eyes, her own narrowed against the sun up full on the horizon now, its glare slanting across the front of the house.

  “Sammy, you broke Dewey’s heart when you turned away from him.”

  Here we are, at this point I’ve tried to avoid, this moment of truth where I tell Nancy the first thing—he kissed me, he called me his sweetheart—and then everything unravels from there. But I can’t tell her that. I can’t have that kiss, sweet and as full of love as it was, lead from there to here—from the innocent to the ugly. So I say, “I was a kid. A stupid kid.” Then the memory of the two of us that night in the alley becomes too much for me, and my throat closes up and I can’t say another word.

  Nancy says, “I know how much Dewey loved you.”

  I find my voice long enough to acknowledge that, yes, I loved him, too, only I was afraid. “Duncan hinted that you knew about Dewey and me. You never let on. I hope it wasn’t because you were ashamed of him.”

  “I loved him.” She gives me a fierce look. “Whoever he was, I loved my brother. I didn’t want his life to be any harder than what it was. I’m sure you know all about that, Sammy. Even today, in a small town like Mt. Gilead, it can’t be easy.”

  I bow my head. I’m close now, so close to telling her everything. I feel the trembling in my legs as if at any second the earth will give way and I’ll disappear forever. “Nancy,” I say, but before I can go on, she stops me.

  “People can be good, Sammy. Sometimes all we can do is believe in that.” She’s telling me, I know, to keep looking forward, as she must have somehow learned to do after Dewey was dead—to keep looking ahead and hold faith in a good life to come. “Go home now, Sammy.” She steps across her threshold and turns back a final time to face me. “That dear girl needs you. Even if you’ve never been able to manage it before, now’s the time to believe in your own good heart.”

  19

  AT VERA’S, THE BEDSHEETS AND PILLOWCASES ARE CRISP and hold the soothing scent of lavender from the sprigs she hangs to dry in her linen closets. “Just a little touch I like,” she says. “It calms the jitters. Puts the heebie-jeebies to rest.”

  She has pajamas for me. Freshly laundered and ironed, she points out. “They were my husband�
��s,” she says.

  I put on a dead man’s pajamas and stretch out in bed, Stump beside me. He sniffs the pajama shirt, then my face, relying on his memory of my scent. Then he gives my chin a lick, reclaiming me, and the two of us drift off to sleep.

  Maddie sleeps in a room across the hall, and when I wake, so late in the afternoon the winter light is fading, her door is still closed.

  I tap on it. “Maddie,” I say. “Are you all right?”

  “You can come in,” she says, and I open the door a crack and see the bed, the covers tossed back, and then Maddie sitting on the window seat, wearing a chenille bathrobe, her knees drawn to her chest the way they were the first time I saw her sitting on the deck of Stump’s ship.

  “I didn’t hate him the way I let on sometimes,” she says, and I know she’s been thinking about Arthur. I know the regret that’ll be hers from now on.

  So I tell her there’s no profit in dwelling on the should’ves and could’ves and what-ifs. I tell her the truth. Her grandfather loved her—that’s a fact—loved her no matter the bumps and scrapes between them. I tell her the story of that evening before Christmas when he and I came back from shopping at Wal-Mart, and we saw her peeking through the sheers at the picture window, and he told me the story of the time her mother turned her out of the house. “The night you were barefoot,” I say. “The night it was snowing and you had to wrap rags around your feet and sleep in the garage. Your grandfather told me that and how much it broke his heart to think of it.”

  I hold in my mind the picture of him on that evening and how he told me he intended to stick by Maddie and love her no matter what troubles might lie ahead, and I tell her all this, too. I sit beside her on the window seat and together we watch the dusk come on.

  Vera lives on Silver Street in one of the stately two-story federal houses featured each year at Christmas during the Holiday Tour of Homes. Gaslights still line the streets here in White Squirrel Woods, the way they did years ago before electricity, and it gives me a peaceful feeling to look down on their glow and to see the light they throw on the cobblestones.

  “He said that?” Maddie says. “He said he loved me?”

  I think of what he told me those days in autumn when we measured and cut and nailed the planks for Stump’s ship—how the ancient Egyptian and Chinese shipbuilders carved eye goddesses into the bows so the ships could better find their way. I think of Arthur’s Bess and how much I want to believe that when Herbert Zwilling put a bullet into his head, she called him to her. I hope Dewey had someone to do the same for him. I like to think the spirits of the dead keep watch for us, and when the time comes to join them, they shine a light to carry us across the river of heaven.

  But here’s what I wonder. What happens to the ones like Leonard Mink and Herbert Zwilling—anyone who’s deliberately done evil against the tribe we are on this earth? Do they have someone on the other side calling them home, someone who remembers them when they were innocent, the way I remember Cal when he was a boy and we slept in the same room, and I whispered to him one night, “Are you asleep?” If it happens that I cross over first, will my mother and my father—the old hurt between him and me forgotten—be there to greet me? Will we be a family again the way we were in Rat Town before Dewey’s death, and then, together, will we wait for Cal to come home?

  “Yes, he said that,” I tell Maddie. “Your grandfather loved you with all his heart.”

  “I loved him, too,” Maddie says. “He took me in when I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

  For a good while, I don’t say anything, knowing that we’re up against the hard truth that here Maddie is, no family to call her own, only what we can cobble together for the time—me and Vera, who moves about below us in her kitchen, the smells of dinner beginning to fill the house.

  “I guess you’re stuck with us for a while,” I tell Maddie.

  “Guess so,” she says, and for the time, we leave it at that, waiting, as I know we will for some months, to see what the end of our story will be.

  SOMEHOW, WE GET BEYOND ARTHUR’S FUNERAL AND BURIAL. We pay attention, as Vera insists, to the details, and that’s what gets us through. She’s there to offer advice about flowers, and the musical selections for the service, and the headstone for the grave. When it all gets too much for Maddie, Vera’s there to comfort her, and Maddie gives herself over to her care. I watch as Maddie reaches for Vera’s hand at the gravesite, and I’m glad that the two of them are at ease with each other, glad that Vera is there for Maddie the way Bess would have been.

  In the days that follow, the courts want to put Maddie in foster care, but I won’t let that happen.

  “I can’t,” I tell Vera. “She’s been kicked around enough in her life.”

  Vera nods her head in agreement. “We’ll fight it,” she says. “I have an attorney. I told you, Sam. You and Maddie can stay here as long as you want.”

  So we do. Then one evening, Vera and I are sitting in the living room while Maddie takes Stump for a walk. Vera has a fire going, and we sit in armchairs close enough so I can feel its heat across my legs. She gets up to stoke the fire, and the logs crackle and pop.

  “I’m thinking I’d like to adopt her,” I say, an inclination I didn’t even know I had until I heard it find words. As soon as I say it, I’m terrified and delighted.

  “Oh, ducky,” Vera says. “Do you think that’s a good idea?” She speaks to me in that soothing voice she uses when she’s intent on helping the Seasoned Chefs prepare a dish. “Sweetie, if you try to adopt Maddie, they’ll dig around in your business. Are you sure you want that?”

  “My business?”

  “Who you are. What you’ve done. The way you live your life. I’m just saying you better make sure you don’t have anything you’d rather folks not know.”

  She pokes at the fire again and leaves me to think about what she’s said. I wrestle it around, coming to the conclusion that Vera has always known the truth about me. I know how it would play in court, particularly in this small town, if an aging homosexual came forward to say he wanted to adopt this sixteen-year-old girl. I feel in my bones how unfair it is. From the time I called Dewey a queer until the moment Cal came back and tossed everything willy-nilly, I kept to myself and did no harm to anyone. I lived a private, sensible life. A lonely life, to be sure, but one I chose. Now, at the time I most want to reach out to someone else—most want to express this love I feel for Maddie, the greatest affection I’ve felt since my boyhood with Dewey—I’m forced to admit what I should, by all rights, be able to keep to myself.

  “Vera,” I say, and I’m so taken with anger and embarrassment, I can’t go on.

  “Sam, please understand I’m not sitting in judgment of you.” She pauses as she puts the screen back in front of the fire and hangs the poker on its rack. “I just want to save you from trouble on down the road. Some people just aren’t meant for how ugly this world can be. I felt that about you the first night you came to the Seasoned Chefs. I rubbed your back and felt the curve of your spine, and there was a nerve just below your shoulder blade, and it was trembling. I could tell you were someone who needed TLC.” I look at her, not knowing what to say, overwhelmed by the fact that she touched me and knew right away the life I had. “Yes, sir,” she says. “A lot of Tender Loving Care.”

  “You know about me,” I say, and it’s a relief to finally say it to someone after all the years I’ve kept it a secret. “You know what I am.”

  She comes to me, then, and she touches me again, this time a brush of the back of her hand across my cheek. “It’s not a wrong thing to be, Sam. It’s just that now…well, if you try to adopt Maddie, I’m afraid they’ll send her to foster care for sure.”

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  As I ask the question, I understand that Vera, ever since her husband died and her daughter left to live in Sweden, has been living her own lonely life, filling it up with her radio show, and her cooking lessons for the Seasoned Chefs, and her mi
niature dollhouses. One of them is on the table by the window. Although it’s less spectacular than most any other house in Vera’s collection, this bungalow happens to be Maddie’s favorite. I’ve seen her in this room looking at the front porch with its swing where a girl sits, a tabby cat on her lap. “It looks so cozy,” she said one day. “So ordinary.”

  Where else, I think, should Maddie be, but here, cared for and loved, having, finally, the sort of easy living she once upon a time pretended to detest, but secretly longed for? A life where she’d never have to go barefoot into the snow, or have her father leave, or watch her mother or grandfather die—exactly the sort of life Bess would have given her if she’d had the chance.

  “Sam,” Vera says, “I believe I do.”

  Then Maddie is coming through the door, announcing that the temperature is falling and she’s frozen. And hungry. “Man, I’m starved,” she says, kneeling to let Stump off his leash. He comes over in front of the fire and flops down on the hearth rug. “Really, Vera,” she says. “I’m just about starved to death.”

  Like this, we make a family. Then one night at bedtime, I linger on the upstairs landing, listening to Vera and Maddie talking in Maddie’s bedroom. The door is open just a crack, enough for me to see that Maddie is standing by the side of the bed. The hem of her nightgown falls to her ankles. I see her bare feet on the floor.

  Vera, whom I can’t see, says, “Do you think you’d like that?”

  I know I should go on to my own room and leave them in private, but I can’t stop myself from eavesdropping.

  “You mean for always?” Maddie says.

  “I’d be your guardian,” says Vera.