The Possible World

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  Who would sit for hours and fine comb the hair of reform-school boys? Easier just to shear them and be done with it.

  “Did they boil your clothing?” I looked him over. Perhaps this whole idea was a mistake.

  “Yes,” he said. He stayed where he was, as if knowing I was teetering on a decision.

  “Well, all right then,” I said, sounding more certain than I felt. “You’ll be cooler without all that hair anyhow.”

  “Why are you working on that dead bush?” As he came closer I saw the shadow of stubble on his scalp, like ashes. “What was it?”

  “It’s a rosebush.” It did look dead, stunted and budless, reaching out of the ground like a skeleton hand. But a lower branch on the same bush had put out a tiny leaf, just a wee green fold, like a leprechaun’s ear. “Look at that,” I said, showing it to Leo.

  “That’s just a leaf. Not a flower.”

  “It’s a sign of life,” I said. “These rosebushes were deader than this when I came to live here, and I cared for them and they came back to life.” It had taken three years. “They’re not just any rosebushes. They were brought over here on a ship more than a hundred years ago. Each of them was just one little branch once, and a ball of dirt. The people who brought them left important things behind so they could bring these.”

  “Why would they do that? They could just get new bushes when they got here.”

  “These roses were home to someone.” He looked skeptical. “And they need water. Do you remember where the pump is? Take that bucket, fill it up, and bring it back with you.” He took the empty bucket and trotted off. I called after him, “Get some gloves from the shed.” They’d be too big, but better than nothing.

  I could always send him away at the end of the day, tell Prior Charles I’d take Gregory instead, or more likely no boy at all. Who needed a boy around?

  As I was thinking this, I looked up and saw Leo coming back down into the cemetery with the water. He looked like nothing so much as a miniature convict, in the striped cotton outfit the school provided for outdoor work, with that bald head. He was walking quickly but carefully, watching his feet so as not to trip or spill, and was humming a tuneless tune that might have been intended to be “Clementine.”

  Maybe it was the humming broken around his breathing, or maybe that shining white vulnerable skull. That’s all it was, perhaps, the kind of charity you feel for a puppy at the door, or a cat once you’ve taken the fatal step of feeding it. Put down a bowl for a stray and it’s your responsibility, my mother always said, even if it never pays you back with love. Even if it scampers at the sight of you and hisses if you get too close. I knew at that moment, watching him coming toward me, that I wouldn’t be sending Leo away. The deed was done.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  * * *

  Leo

  FIRST THE SOFT LUMP OF butter in the bowl, then a whole twinkling cup of white sugar; mash them together with a wooden spoon until they become a grainy-fluffy substance. Two eggs, cracked one at a time on the side of the bowl and beaten in, then a spoonful of brown fragrant liquid from a tall bottle. Into a separate bowl goes the flour, the cup dipped into the sack and a finger swept across the top, and a spoon of baking powder sprinkled over; the whole thing sifted twice. Clare shows me how to combine the dry with the wet, pulling the whisk through and shaking the batter off the wires. You don’t want to bruise it. She tosses a cup of plum chunks into a big spoonful of flour and sprinkles them over the batter, takes the bowl from me and folds the fruit in with a few strokes.

  When the batter’s been scraped into two greased and floured tins we start again, with a clean mixing bowl and more butter-sugar-eggs-and-flour.

  “We could make more than two at a time,” I suggest. “We have six pans. We could use a big bowl and make enough for six at once.”

  She shakes her head. “Some recipes can’t be multiplied.”

  Why not? I ask, and she says, There’s little forgiveness in baking.

  So we wash and dry the bowls and start again, do it all over until we have six pans each three-quarters filled with airy yellow plummy batter. She takes a jar from the cupboard, offers its wide mouth to me to smell: last summer. She presses a design into the top of each cake, a heart made of cherries.

  Six pans fit into the oven side by side, and while they’re baking we have a sandwich outside on the porch in the cool dirt-smelling air, a blurry curtain of rain between us and the green world.

  At Roscommon, I eat my fill. After a few weeks I notice that the pail of water that had seemed impossibly heavy is no longer so difficult to carry. And it’s quiet here. At St. William’s, the machines working in the laundry shake the ground all day and most of the night, and boys, even when they are sleeping, are noisy. In Clare’s cemetery and garden, there’s real silence. I tell that to Clare and she says, You’re not listening. I hear what she means: the birds’ singing and the distant noises of the cows and horses, the chuckling of the hens in the coop. Still, all of it so much quieter than St. Will’s.

  After lights-out I lie awake as long as possible. When I judge that all the other boys are asleep and am reasonably sure that there’ll be no surprises, no manure slipped under my pillow or honey dripped into my hair, I close my eyes and allow my mind to wander back to the little yellow house. I go up the path to the front door, the tulips on either side that Mama and I planted two years ago. But as I reach the front step the door transforms, the white with three square panes near the top darkening and thickening into Roscommon’s glassless cottage door. And when the door opens it’s not Mama there, but instead the tall woman who feels less like a stranger every day. She smiles at me and there’s no worry in it, only welcome. I wake with tears slipping from my eyes down into my ears, hot tracks of betrayal.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  * * *

  Lucy

  MY PHONE VIBRATES ON THE mattress. I clutch at it with sleep-clumsy hands and it slides off the bed and drops onto the carpeted call-room floor. When I look over the edge of the bed, the screen shines up at me:

  Are you asleep

  I retrieve the phone and tap in:

  Not anymore

  Was that too snarky? I watch the dot triplet begin on the other side. After a couple of minutes it becomes:

  There are buds on the lilac

  The bushes outside our apartment building, no taller than your knee. They leaf out quickly each year, within a week going from bare branches to full green with cascades of tiny purple blossoms. They don’t last long, and we always leave our windows open during lilac time, to enjoy their powerful fragrance.

  The next frost will kill them I type, then erase.

  I can’t be nice all the time, but I can make an effort to be nicer some of the time. I hear my mother in my mind suddenly: slow down, Lucybee, take your time. Definitely her voice; she was the only one who used that nickname, I can’t believe I forgot it. I can’t believe I’ve remembered it now.

  Spring is coming I type, and press Send.

  The pulsing dots on his side appear again and eventually turn into:

  I’m writing a new song

  I type That’s great! and reconsider—does it seem condescending? I delete it, put in What’s it about and delete that too. Who can explain a song in a text? And will he feel pressured to say it’s about me, or about us? What if it’s about the Good Listener?

  Finally I type I’d like to hear it and let that linger for a few seconds, before pressing Send. And fall back to sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  * * *

  Clare

  LEO WAS FULL OF QUESTIONS. He drove me to distraction with them. Why did I live here? Where had I been born? What was my favorite day of the week? Why did I keep watering the dead roses instead of pulling them up? If I could live in one season permanently, which would it be?

  I live here to care for the cemetery, I told him. I’d been born in a different part of Rhode Island. Weekdays were all the same to me. And the roses mig
ht come back, we’d have to wait and see. Definitely spring, the world reborn, a celebration. He liked Wednesday, and he didn’t think he’d want one season all year-round, but if he had to, he’d choose spring too.

  In his interrogations, there was an element of restraint. He didn’t press once I’d given some sort of answer. And he didn’t ask the questions anyone else might, such as why I lived alone, or where my people were. In turn, I didn’t ask him if he remembered his parents, or how he’d come to be at St. Will’s.

  That didn’t mean we didn’t find other things to talk about. A thousand topics interested him, and he was forever posing questions I could answer, like what the stars were made of, and if the earth really turned like a top like Brother Angus had said, why we didn’t all fly off; and things I couldn’t, like how a magnet worked and what was in the bomb we had dropped on the Japanese two years before he was born. Fire, I told him, stars are made of fire, and it’s gravity that keeps us all anchored to the spinning world. When I didn’t know something, I told Leo to ask the brothers; but he sighed and said they always gave the same answer: everything happened because of God.

  “Where do you go to church?” he asked one day when we were pinching up small weeds from the asparagus bed. We had dug the trench the week before, built a long mound of earth in its center and laid the crowns there, draping the bare-knuckle-white roots to either side and sprinkling soil over them. During this tender time before the plants settled in, hoe and fork were too rough. There wasn’t anything to do but squat and pinch with bare fingers.

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “Never?”

  “I used to go to a fine church, with a big stained glass window and an oak door so heavy it took two men to open.”

  “Was it Catholic?”

  “Of course it was Catholic. You need to keep your mind on what you’re doing. See there, you’ve missed some.”

  He backtracked to pull up the offending shoots.

  “If you don’t go to church, won’t you go to Hell?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He was startled by this; he sat back on his heels and stared at me.

  “Fear of Hell shouldn’t be what drives a person to do right,” I told him. “And besides, why would God create all of this”—I swept a hand around at the vivid green, the trees vibrating with birdsong—“and then wait for us inside a dark building?”

  His eyes followed my hand, then came back to meet my gaze.

  “Brother Angus says we can’t know the mind of God,” he said.

  “That means my guess is as good as anyone’s.”

  He was still looking around, as if seeing the place for the first time.

  “You could grow honeysuckle,” he said. “It smells good.”

  “Honeysuckle is hard to control,” I told him. “And strong. It’s really just a big weed.”

  “My mother likes honeysuckle,” he said, surprising me. So he remembered his mother?

  “Well, it is an honest flower,” I conceded. “It tastes as good as it smells.”

  I felt a twinge in my chest and slipped my hand behind the strap of my overalls, rubbing the scar just above my heart. The sun had made its way to the fringe of trees on the horizon behind us, leaving a rimless bowl of blue.

  “It’s going to rain tomorrow,” I said. “And none too soon.”

  “How do you know? You always know.”

  “I feel it,” I said, taking my hand out again. There was dirt from my fingers on the blouse. I’d have to rinse it out tonight.

  “Like Brother Michael. He feels it in his gout. Do you have gout?” He directed an interested gaze at my foot.

  “No I do not,” I said, getting up and going over to the wheelbarrow that stood at the ready, filled with earth from the digging, enriched with manure from St. William’s livestock. I slid the spade into the rich mixture in the wheelbarrow and spread a thin layer to either side of the central raised mound in the trench. Two inches a day and plenty of water, and the trench would be to ground level in a month. Then a full three years of care after that, to be ready to pick and eat. Asparagus is a commitment. Maybe my impulse purchase of these crowns the Saturday before had been a stab at Prior Charles. A statement: I’m not going anywhere.

  Inside the house, I took a jar of strawberry jam down from the cupboard, made sandwiches, and sliced them from point to point while Leo filled two glasses from the pitcher of sun tea. We sat on the front step, in the shade of the porch overhang. In wintertime, a taste of this jam could bring tears to my eyes, but the evocation of spring’s balm is not so powerful in summer. I noted merely that the fruit was oversweetened, and decided I’d use a little less sugar next year.

  “If it’s not gout,” Leo said.

  I didn’t know what he was talking about for a moment. Then I sighed.

  “Leo. It’s none of your business.”

  “Well, nothing is really.”

  There was that naked look on his face, when it seemed that the bones of his mismanaged childhood were rising up through the skin of his general good nature. I understood his statement immediately: he had no business, nothing private, no secret that he did not share with his dormitory mates or the monks. Nothing in this world could be said to belong to him, to matter to him and him alone: he had no business. In that moment, I made a decision, to give him my secret, or at least part of it, to keep. It’s our secrets that make each of us different from everyone else. Our secrets, and what we choose to love.

  I reached for the glass and chased down my own mouthful.

  “I have a splinter,” I said with the exhale. “It aches when it’s going to rain, and itches before snow.”

  “Where?” Leo asked, fascinated. He sucked jam and butter from his fingers. His hair had partially grown back, and stood out from his skull in a velvety pelt; he no longer looked like a little convict, but he had a convict’s manners.

  “Use your napkin.”

  He rubbed his hands perfunctorily on the cloth. “A splinter where?” he said again.

  “In my chest.”

  He looked incredulously at the place where the overall apron lay against my breasts, and then blushed and jerked his eyes away. He’d already finished two of the four sandwich triangles I’d made him, and now he took up the third. We chewed for a while in silence.

  “Were you born with it?”

  “Of course not. Who’s born with a splinter in their chest?”

  “How did it get there then?”

  “That’s a long story,” I said, swallowing the last of my tea and standing up, stretching out my backbone krik-krik-krik. “You’d best be getting back.” We always said back, never home.

  He wolfed the remaining sandwich, drank down his tea, wiped his hands carefully on his napkin. Then rose to his feet, his young spine limber and soundless.

  I took up the plates, now empty but for a smear of red and some small light fragments of crust, while he went down the path, heading into the cemetery. I had tried to get him to use the gate, and sometimes he remembered, but not this time. He put his hand on the wall and vaulted over the bare rosebushes, then dropped down onto the other side. I stood there watching him go. Not until he had disappeared beyond the tree line did I notice that my hand was against my chest again, a firm pressure, as though to protect the secret burrowed there under the skin and the bone.

  * * *

  DOES IT HURT?

  Sometimes. When it’s going to rain. And some other times.

  It’s been in there since—

  Since that day, yes. It was the root of the spike that I pulled out after the hurricane. The doctor says it was actually lucky: if I’d pulled the whole thing out, I would have died on the spot.

  That’s luck all right.

  * * *

  WE SETTLED INTO a routine: Leo came in the midafternoon every weekday and stayed for supper. As the sun was sinking, he’d go back through the woods.

  When I scraped our supper plates one evening, I noticed that there was only
one chop bone in the scraps. I said nothing about it, but when Leo went through the door, I waited just a minute and then followed.

  I found him in the shed, kneeling just inside the door. He looked up when my shadow fell over him.

  “What do you have in here?” I looked into the space. “It had better not be a raccoon.”

  He clucked his tongue softly, and a tiny shape unclotted itself from the shadows and ran to him. A kitten, so young that his fur made a fuzzy halo around his form; no markings yet.

  “I found him in the rain barrel,” said Leo. The kitten wound around and around in front of him, pushing his cheek against the boy’s fingers with each pass.

  “Did you leave the lid off again?”

  “I’m sorry.” His voice was small, ashamed.

  “If he’d drowned in it, all that water would have been poisoned.”

  “I think he’s lost,” said Leo. “He should be with his mama.”

  His mama was probably dead; there were plenty of predators around to have made a meal of her. The kitten raised his head as if he had heard my thought and blinked his yellow eyes at me.

  Leo brought out a napkin from his pocket and unfolded it, revealing the half-eaten pork chop. He scraped meat from the blade of the bone with his fingernails and put the scraps down on the floor. The shed filled with the sound of purring.

  “He purrs and eats at the same time,” said Leo, proud as if he’d taught him to do it. He added, “He’ll be useful. He can catch mice.”

  “He’s too young yet to catch his own food. A mouse would probably eat him.”

  “He won’t be any trouble,” said Leo. “He can sleep in here.”

  “He’s a wild thing. He doesn’t need us.”

  “He does,” said Leo. I knew he was trying not to cry. “You said. He’s not old enough to catch his own food.”

  Other boys mistreated cats, I knew, out of evilness or boredom. They tied their tails together or set them on fire to watch them try to outrun the pain. There had to be something deeply good in a boy who’d known a cruel life not having turned to cruelty himself. A boy who responded tenderly to weakness, instead of exploiting it as a pitiable exercise of power. I watched Leo petting the little creature I’d told him he could not save.