In Reach

by Pamela Carter Joern

Cecilia touched a painted fingernail to a packet of beet seeds. “I love beets, don’t you?”

  Surprised, Marlene said, “Yes, I do.” Vernon hated beets. Said they tasted like dirt.

  “Plant ’em by the moon,” Cecilia said.

  “What?” Marlene knew she sounded vague and floaty, like she wasn’t all there. Truth was, she’d been missing for years, though she hadn’t known it until now.

  “Plant beets with a full moon. Plant carrots when it’s waning. You’ll have a better yield.”

  “Is that so?”

  “My father swore by it,” Cecilia said. “Farmer’s Almanac.”

  When the courtroom reconvened, Cecilia took the stand. After she was sworn in, Dill stood to question her. He hitched up his pants, ran his fingers down the seam of his pants. His eyes moved around the room, glancing off Marlene, then the jury, to Cecilia, and finally fixed on the clock above the Judge’s head. “Tell us what you know, Cecilia.” No condemned man could have sounded more reluctant. The crowd held its breath and leaned forward.

  “She planned the whole thing. I don’t know about the law, but I didn’t think self-defense could be planned.”

  Drew leaped to his feet. “Objection.”

  Wearily, the judge ruled. “Stick to what you know, Cecilia. We’ll interpret the law.”

  Cecilia told the story, then. How she ran into Marlene, and they chatted about planting according to the Farmer’s Almanac. Marlene knew lots of folks planted by the moon; she could sense the crowd’s impatience, and her heart began to flutter with hope.

  “That’s it?” Dill asked, his voice incredulous.

  “No,” Cecilia said.

  A small spasm clutched Marlene’s stomach. She’d lost her nerve, that was the thing. She knew it was time, but she couldn’t make herself do the job. She needed inspiration, and that’s when she’d thought of Cecilia. She’d forgotten exactly what Cecilia had said in the drugstore. It was mixed up in her mind somehow, the red beets, the bloody act, the taste of dirt, and she wanted to get the timing right. Plant by the full moon, but what about harvest? Wouldn’t this be more like harvest, when she ripped the beets from the ground, their roots dangling free, the tops already wilting as the living plant died, the red juice staining her hands no matter how many times she washed with soap?

  She rang Cecilia in the middle of the day while Vernon napped upstairs. She knew the moon would be full in another night or two. Cecilia answered on the fourth ring. Marlene had to tell her twice who she was.

  “What do you want?” Cecilia asked bluntly. Marlene had thought there would be small talk. She’d practiced for that, the lack of rain this year.

  “I was wondering . . .” Her mouth was dry, her voice sounding like a squeaky pump.

  “What?” Cecilia snapped.

  “About harvest. Is there a phase of the moon for harvest?”

  “Why’re you thinking about harvest now? It’s planting time.”

  “I know. I was just . . . I was planning ahead. Harvest. For beets. What about the moon?”

  A long pause shivered on the line. Marlene held her breath, afraid Cecilia would either know too much or refuse to answer. To her relief, Cecilia seemed only to be thinking it over. “I’d say full moon. Same as planting. Can’t go wrong with that.”

  “Thank you.” Marlene hung the receiver quietly.

  She pondered for two days whether she needed to do the deed in the moonlight, but she gave that up. Vernon would suspect if she tried to walk him out to the corral after dark, and he had orchestrated this to be a surprise. So dusk it was, on the evening of the full moon. She’d propped the rifle against the barn, out of sight. She helped Vernon get situated hanging onto the fence, looking out on the land he loved. She patted him on the back, her hand lingering between the shoulder blades. A lone meadowlark called across the prairie. She said she had to run up and use the bathroom. “Go on,” he said. She didn’t move. He nodded to her, his gray eyes probing and kind, and said again, “You go on now.” She left his side, picked up the rifle, pointed it at the back of his head, closed her eyes, and squeezed the trigger.

  Marlene listened while Cecilia told Dill and the judge and the jury and the courtroom full of townsfolk about that phone call. She said she’d thought it mighty strange at the time, and then a few days later, when the moon was full, Vernon got himself shot.

  Dill called Marlene back to the stand. Watching him fidget, Marlene recalled how he once stood on her front porch, ran his hands around the brim of his hat, her daddy watching from the front room. She tried to send a message to Dill without talking, the way she could with Vernon—None of this is your fault—but Dill kept on looking miserable.

  “Did you make that phone call, Marlene?”

  “Yes. Yes, I did.”

  A collective jolt vibrated through the crowd.

  “Did you plan on killing Vernon at the time?”

  Marlene hesitated. She didn’t like people thinking Vernon was a wife-beater, but it was what Vernon wanted. He didn’t want her to go to jail. He would have hated people knowing he was sick and weak at the end. Strictly speaking, it was Vernon who planned everything. She didn’t know, when she called Cecilia, that she would shoot Vernon, with the moon. She looked at Cecilia, tried to read her face, but couldn’t. She knew people didn’t like Cecilia, thought her strange, her ways too witchy. When Cecilia first stood up to make her claim, even Drew had whispered, “Crazy old bat,” under his breath. Marlene couldn’t gauge what the crowd thought of her. She didn’t know what the jury would do if she pit her word against Cecilia’s, but having convinced herself it wasn’t an outright lie and responding to a lifetime habit of putting Vernon’s needs first and reasoning that she couldn’t do much to damage Cecilia’s already sullied reputation, she answered, “No, I couldn’t say that I did.”

  Weeks after the acquittal, Marlene threaded her way through October grass to a small cemetery tucked behind a knoll on her land. She’d buried Vernon’s ashes here alongside her ancestors. She stood before Vernon’s grave, then stooped, picked up a handful of dirt, and sifted it through her fingers.

  “Vernon.” She spoke out loud, needing to hear a voice in that vast space. “I loved you best I could.” She stood a while longer, until the chill air made her bones ache. “But you never let me have beets. Wouldn’t adopt a child, neither. You never asked what I thought. Even about this last.” She looked out across the prairie and heard the killdeer and mourning doves. She leaned forward then, as if to tell Vernon a secret. “I never stopped to think about what I wanted. Never did. Never knew how.”

  She walked out through the gate and stopped to loop the barbed wire over the fence post. Looking back at Vernon’s grave, she lifted her hand, a small salute, and let it trail wordlessly through the air.

  Marlene got through the fall and winter in that house by herself. She wandered the rooms, not knowing whether to sit in Vernon’s chair or avoid it. She moved out of their bedroom and into the guest room across the hall. She read mountains of books, crocheted four afghans, painted a mural on the bedroom wall of palm trees and oceans she had never seen. She memorized recipes and psalms from the Bible and poems by Wordsworth. She made a few trips to town for supplies but talked to no one. Radio news, saturated with the Cuban missile crisis, left her disconsolate and jangled. Unprepared for the crushing weight of her loneliness, she thought of Cecilia Parker with something like longing. All through that winter, she heard the echo of Cecilia’s last phrase in the courtroom, Vernon got himself shot.

  When spring came Marlene baked a rhubarb pie. She rolled the crust thin, crimped the edges, poured cream over the top to brown. She drove into town and straight to Cecilia’s house, parked on the street, and trod up the walk with her pie. Before she lifted her hand to knock, the door opened and Cecilia stood there.

  Cecilia tilted her head back and raised each eyebrow into an inverted V. “You,” she said.

  Marlene did not flinch.

  “You planned to kill him
,” Cecilia said. “On the night of the full moon.”

  “Harvest moon,” Marlene said.

  “A harvest moon in May?” Cecilia’s voice rose. Marlene could not tell whether Cecilia was truly dismayed or mocking her, but she nodded.

  “That’s all you got to say?” Cecilia asked.

  Marlene glanced out across Cecilia’s yard and down the years of her life with Vernon. She thought she caught a glimpse of herself, a straight-backed girl who did not stop or wave but kept on walking, long braids swinging down her back. “You don’t know,” she whispered, thinking to prepare that young girl, to shore her up for the full cup of life.

  Cecilia, overhearing, said, “I guess you had your reasons.”

  Marlene looked into Cecilia’s stern face. “I baked you a pie,” she said.

  Cecilia sighted down the line of her long nose. She looked at Marlene’s face and then at the pie. Marlene waited, scarcely breathing.

  “Well,” Cecilia said, swinging the door wide. “No sense letting a good pie go to waste.”

  They sat to the pie, two women on yellow chairs at the laminated kitchen table. Through the open window Marlene smelled the green of spring and the sweet scent of lilacs. She raised a forkful to her mouth and could not remember when food had tasted this good, this clean and nourishing.

  Solitary Confinements

  Ted Brenner approaches his parents’ home in Reach, Nebraska, with a confusing mix of dread and longing. He’s driven from Minneapolis, a trip he makes once or twice a year. On the way up the walk, he reminds himself to unclench his teeth and shakes his shoulders loose. He sets his foot on the crumbling front step, his hand on the screen door. He notices a tear in the screen, serious business in a river town thick with mosquitoes. His fingers grope to close the flap, and he glances through the side window of the house next door. Through a gauzy curtain, he glimpses Mrs. Redmond’s iron lung.

  His father’s at the door, grabs him in a bear hug, pulls him inside the house that smells. Jesus, it’s worse than last time. His dad holds him at arm’s length, his eyes sagging and rheumy, shirttail askew, unshaven. Worse than Ted imagined.

  “Dad.” Ted’s voice sounds low and liquid, maybe his best feature, or so he’s been told. “Dad. Dad, it’s all right.” He pats his father on the arm, straightens his collar.

  When his dad has settled down, Ted lets his eyes stray around the room.

  “Where is she?”

  “Sleeping in the back bedroom. She’s been restless all day.”

  “Did you tell her I was coming?”

  “’Course I did, Teddy, what do you think? But I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “Dad, why don’t we sit down?” Ted takes his father by the arm and steers him to the ragged recliner in the living room. He sweeps a pile of yellowed papers and outdated magazines off the coffee table and piles them in a corner. His fingers leave trail marks in the dust on the table. He opens the sun-stained drapes to let in the afternoon glare. Dust dances in beams of light. One of his mother’s robes, pink chenille with yellow roses, lies sprawled across the rocker. When he sits on the corner of the tweed couch, his hands brush against dried bread crusts that have fallen into the cracks between the cushions.

  He’s not been seated long when his mother drifts in from the back bedroom. Her gray hair sticks up in matted tufts. Dreadlocks, Ted thinks, but it’s all wrong. The whole scene is bent somehow. There’s his once beautiful mother, her lilac robe buttoned crooked, her mouth painted with wild cherry lipstick by a child who can’t stay in the lines, and when his father takes her by the arm and leads her to him, Ted smells her body.

  “Here’s our Ted,” his father says.

  Ted’s mother looks at him with vacant eyes. Her nervous hand paws at his father’s arm. From somewhere out of the distant past, she drudges up her manners. “Welcome to our home.”

  Ted says the only thing on his mind. “Dad, when was the last time you gave her a bath?”

  In the yard the next day, Ted works off some energy. He prunes bushes, pulls up old tulip stalks that haven’t bloomed for years. He plans how he’ll drive to Scottsbluff and buy some annuals. Petunias, maybe. Geraniums, hot red ones. In June there won’t be much left, but anything will be better than this weed patch.

  He left his father sitting at the kitchen table. Walked out on him, to be exact. Same old argument. Ted wants his dad to put his mother in the nursing home. He’s worried that she’ll fall or die of infection or get food poisoning. His dad can barely take care of himself. The house is filthy, she’s unwashed, the ceiling of his old room bearded with cobwebs. His father won’t hear of it. Damned old stubborn fool.

  Ted tugs at weeds and straightens to stretch his back. He looks into the side window of that house next door. The curtain hides everything in shadows, but still he can see the outline of the iron lung, a lime stationary rocket Mrs. Redmond sleeps in every night to ease chest muscles weakened by childhood polio. He shudders. Once, he and a bunch of his friends, fifth or sixth graders, were playing at Roddy Willenbeck’s. Willenbeck’s Mortuary. Roddy’s parents had gone somewhere, and the boys unlatched the basement door where the caskets were displayed. Ted can’t remember now whose idea it was to crawl inside a coffin. Maybe he did it on a dare or to prove something to himself. He can see the ivory pillow and feel it smooth against his cheek. A luxury bed, his nerves jangling, something like pleasure creeping along his thighs, and then the other boys closed the lid. They didn’t open it until he was sobbing, and then they called him a crybaby. Nobody, he decided then, should ever lie in a coffin, dead or alive. Cremate me, he has instructed Harvey.

  Now, standing in his parents’ garden, tulip greens limp in his hands, peering through gauzy curtains at an iron prison, fear climbs up his spine. He bends and yanks at baby ragweed, lamb’s-quarters, clover with its tendril roots, not caring that the weeds rip his hands bloody.

  At the supper table, Ted struggles to make conversation. His mother’s in the back bedroom, feet lifted, eyes attuned to a flickering screen. Her hands knot and unknot, her toes flutter together. Ted doesn’t need to be there to sense her agitation. He waits for his father to ask about Harvey, but he doesn’t. Ted volunteers information about the coffee shop he owns, but his father only grunts. Finally, Ted asks about the Redmonds next door.

  “They’re getting along.” His father says this with a dismissive wave of his hand.

  “What will she do if Will dies?”

  “Same as the rest of us, I guess. Cross that bridge.” His father mops up leftover sauce with a crust of bread. First, they fed his mother mashed potatoes, mashed green beans, baby food–looking stuff. Then they made spaghetti with sauce from a jar. His father doesn’t want to waste any of it.

  “Remember when the Hamptons lived there?”

  His father looks at him like he’s talking about stock markets or openings on Broadway, like he’s way offtrack.

  “C’mon, Dad.” Ted can’t leave it alone. “Remember how Mrs. Hampton used to undress in front of her mirror? Right there in that bedroom.”

  His dad raises his eyebrows. A chuckle rattles around in his chest and exits in a cough. He shakes his head from side to side. “I thought I was the only one noticed that.”

  “She did it on purpose. Turned on the light, stood in front of the window. You’d have to be blind not to see.”

  They laugh then, instant male camaraderie, bonding around the exploits of a vain and lonely woman. Ted feels vaguely ashamed, knows better, but what the hell, he’ll connect with his dad any way he can. Then, without warning, his dad’s eyes shimmer, watery. His lips, smirking moments ago, tremble and fall slack.

  Ted busies himself with his coffee. He swirls his spoon around in the oily slick on the surface. His dad stands and moves toward the stove. He pours himself a second cup of coffee, stands with the cup and looks at the wall as he speaks. “I don’t know what ever happened to Mildred. I haven’t thought of her in years.”

  The next day, Ted is de
termined to buy his mother a new pair of shoes. He can’t bear the run-over, black lace-ups she slides around in all day. He thinks an outing will be good for them. It takes all morning to get his parents ready, both of them in and out of the shower, his father shaved, his mother dressed. After an argument, his dad agrees that his mother should wear an adult diaper. Somehow, they manage to get it on her, only sticking the tape to her skin once. She swats at Ted’s head and misses. Ted wants desperately to cut her hair, but he’s afraid to get near her with scissors. Instead, he washes and blows it dry, styling it as best he can to fall softly around her face.

  He loads both his parents in his red Mazda and drives to Scottsbluff, thirty-six miles through flat and cheerless prairie. His dad acts like a kid playing hooky. His mother keeps knitting and unknitting her hands. Ted chatters all the way there, exclaiming over Chimney Rock, holding his nose past the Minatare feedlots. You’d think he’d never been this way before, but he’s filling a vacuum with anything at hand. Finally, they get to the strip mall in Scottsbluff.

  His mother will not budge from the car. She flat out refuses. Worse, she’s terrified. Ted tries to pull her out, but she wails and bangs on her head. His dad can’t take it.

  “I told you this would never work. Leave her be, can’t you?”

  Ted slams the car door on both of them. He stomps into the shoe shop, picks out three shoes, one tie-up and two loafers, two brown and one black. When a young man walks over, dark hair hanging long on the back of his neck, in scruffy blue jeans and a Soul Asylum T-shirt, Ted shoves the shoes in his face. “I need these in a seven medium, and I want you to come with me out to my car.”

  “Sir?” The kid backs away bewildered.

  Ted presses. “My mother’s out in the car. She won’t come in. She’s . . . she needs shoes. Please.”

  Miraculously, the kid goes with him. He brings a shoehorn and a loopy smile, charms Ted’s mother who slips her feet willingly into all three pairs of shoes. Ted and his dad watch the transaction in amazement. She chats with the boy, asks about his plans. She smiles and dips her head, her old flirtatious self. Any minute Ted expects her to step out of the car and pirouette around the parking lot. After Ted has paid for the shoes and stowed the boxes in the trunk, while he’s driving to the garden nursery, his mother speaks from the backseat.