She Stopped for Death

by Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli

  Dora offered coffee but Minnie shook her head and moved to take a seat at the table.

  “Coffee makes me sweat,” she said over her shoulder as she fanned at her flushed face. “Love a glass of ice tea though, Dora. Lots of ice, if you don’t mind. I see you didn’t make it to church.” She watched Dora pop ice cubes from the trays. “Didn’t miss anything. The sermon was on venal sin or something like that. Lost my interest after the first five minutes.” She accepted the tall glass from Dora then sat back to spread out the strips of paper on the table. “Came down to get a book for Candace. She just turned fourteen, and I figured it’s time to teach her about sex and stuff, and I don’t have a clue myself what to say.”

  “You must have had sex at some time in your life.” The squeak in Zoe’s voice hid laughter.

  Minnie leaned back, giving Zoe a wide-eyed look. “Of course I have. Where the hell you think I got those babies from?”

  “What’d you tell Deanna when she turned fourteen?” Jenny asked.

  Minnie thought hard. “Deanna? Told her to keep her legs closed. And you see what good that did me.”

  Dora leaned over Minnie’s shoulder, reading the wrinkled scraps of paper in front of her.

  “Found ’em in your library box, Dora. Thought it had to be some kid thinking it was funny to stick papers in there. But when I looked close, seems somebody wrote something on each one of ’em. Look for yourself. There’s a poem on every one of these papers.” She counted. “Six poems. Seems funny, somebody putting things like that in one of your library boxes.” She leaned back in the chair and grinned at the women around her. “Coals to Newcastle? Ice cubes to Eskimos. Poems to a little library.”

  Dora picked up the first of the papers, then the next, the next, and finally the last of them. When she looked around the table, her mouth hung open.

  “This is what Emily was doing down here last night,” she said. “She didn’t come to take a book. She wanted to share her poems with us. Oh, my, listen to this:

  Echoes in the house

  Predict the universe.

  Simple sounds that

  Only death can share.

  A gong, as time hangs waiting.

  The rasp of her winter’s cough.

  A crack marks temperature descending,

  From silence to divinity.”

  “Huh?” Minnie sipped her iced tea. “It doesn’t rhyme. I like poems that rhyme myself. You know: ‘There was a young girl from Paducah, who—’”

  Dora interrupted, “But this is a wonderful poem. And we might be the first to ever read it.”

  Not to be quieted, Minnie jumped back in. “Who are you talking about? That Emily Sutton down by the swamp?”

  “She was here last night.” Dora nodded.

  “What do you know? Nobody’s seen that one since before I can remember. Supposed to be getting famous and instead came home here and doesn’t leave that old house.”

  Minnie leaned back and sniffed. “I don’t like to speak ill of anybody, as you well know, but talk about nose in the air! Saw one of them out on the street—the poet or her sister. That was a long time ago. Hair was a mess, kind of brown and gray even then. Like a refugee from some old country. Tried to be friendly to her but she wouldn’t give me the time of day.” Minnie nodded twice to make sure they understood what she was saying, then picked up her napkin and tapped gently at her lips, drying them. “You know they got a cousin does the shopping and such for them. Used to live here. Lives in Traverse now. Talked to her a couple of times over at Draper’s market. Althea Sutton’s her name. She sure wouldn’t say much about the two sisters. I asked a couple of times. Not meaning to be nosy or anything. I just wondered if the girls were sick or something.”

  “There must be a reason she’s reaching out like this now.” Dora turned to Zoe and Jenny, but they couldn’t get their mouths open before Minnie jumped back in, not about to give up center stage.

  “And then there was that business with the mother. Died the way she did. Went down there with my brothers to watch the back of the house burn. House is made of stone but that back ell was all old wood. My dad said it was a disaster waiting to happen. Nobody knew the mother was even in there until later, when the police went through the ashes and found her bones.”

  “Terrible!” Zoe was shocked. This was a piece of town history she hadn’t heard before.

  “Someone told me when we first moved to town,” Dora said. She got up to get more tea and ice for Minnie. “I have to admit, I’ve been by there many times. So sad about those two sisters. Both of them friendless and alone.”

  Minnie was thinking hard. “So that’s Emily putting poems in the box? Well, what do you know? Abigail Cane will be tickled to death to hear it. You know she’s been wanting to have some kind of celebration of Emily’s poetry. Readings and such. Wouldn’t it be great to have her there to read her own work? We could have a kind of Glad-You-Are-Out party.”

  Dora ignored Minnie and turned to Zoe, patting the slips of paper. “Oh, please go to Horizon. Get her something wonderful. We have to say thank you somehow—for these.”

  She picked up the slips of poetry, one after another, and hugged them gently to her breast.

  Chapter 4

  Traverse City was as it always was in late summer. Front Street was swamped with slow-walking, ice-cream-licking vacationers enjoying the best that a small city on a large lake can offer. Souvenir shops vied for attention with fine dress shops and galleries and coffee shops and restaurants and bars down the whole of Front. The other shops sold cherry products like jellies and jams and ice cream and fudge and T-shirts and calendars and any apron you could ever desire with a cherry on it.

  Jenny, hunting for a parking place along the curb, liked driving slow and watching people, especially happy people on vacation. It made her miss Chicago a little—not enough to go back yet, but Bear Falls was a sleepy town and sleepy towns get dull if you don’t have much to do. And Jenny didn’t have much to do. Not at the moment. Maybe something would come up. Maybe she’d find a job. Or maybe something would work out with Tony—this “thing” growing between two damaged people.

  Thirty-six years old. Two failures behind her. Johnny Arlen, her first love, whose complicated mistakes and allegiances had destroyed not just the two of them but so many others. Then two-timing Ronald, whom she felt no love for anymore.

  Everything in her past made her not just skittish with Tony but downright wary. She found she parsed every word he said, watched his body language, and counted kisses and hugs while passing her own out like candy on Halloween—one at a time.

  There was a lot to think about. A woman her age couldn’t just slink back home and hide for the rest of her life. Well, unless you were a weird poet like Emily Sutton. But that wasn’t who Jenny was. The time would come when she’d get antsy and nervous and want to return to the working world. How and if that would include a carpenter from Bear Falls was still a long way beyond her.

  She and Zoe had sandwiches at the Brew, then strolled down to Horizon Books, stopping to give directions to a perturbed family, the father with his sunglasses flipped up to his forehead and a finger on a downtown map.

  The employees at Horizon greeted Zoe and Jenny and asked about Dora. Did she need any more books for her libraries? How was she doing now, with her library back in service after the vandalism earlier in the summer?

  And then both Jill and Amy, true book women, offered to find poetry for Emily, both amazed she had been out in public. “She is still loved in poetry enclaves everywhere. Any time she wants to come in and give a reading, we’d be happy to have her,” Amy offered.

  “People would be lined up.” Jill smiled a pretty smile at them.

  “Does she have new work?” Amy asked. “How exciting!”

  They headed to the poetry section, looking for contemporary female poets. Jill found Claudia Emerson’s Secure the Shadows and put the book carefully into Zoe’s hands.

  “You sure this is something Em
ily Sutton would like?” Zoe asked, looking skeptically at the cover photos and bits of writing. She skimmed through the poems, stopping at “Late April House Fire along Interstate 81.” Zoe closed the book thoughtfully. Maybe it wasn’t the best choice—would the poem bring up memories of her mother’s death? Still, Zoe believed in signs from the universe, and she had a creeping feeling that this was one poet talking to another.

  Jill nodded, her head tipped to Zoe. “She’s a real poet. Emily will love her work.”

  Amy put a finger into the air. “And I’ve got just the thing.” Her sweet face was eager. “It’s in my office. My copy, but I want her to have it.”

  When Amy came back she delicately put a copy of Hannah Weiner’s Code Poems into Zoe’s outstretched hand. Zoe stared at the cover. A wheel, with words embedded in it: “When does it or you begin?” The message swirled at the very center of the wheel.

  “What do you think?” Amy asked, her eyes lighting up.

  Since Jenny knew nothing about poetry, she relied on the experts. Code Poems would be fine.

  Leaving, they thanked Amy and Jill for their help, Zoe giving a special smile to the book women who’d made magic for them that day.

  With the books for Emily purchased, they were on to Boomer’s Electronics to buy a printer. Zoe found one on sale and bought it. The salesman carried the printer to the car, then helped Jenny stow it in her trunk.

  On the way out of town, driving up 31, they argued about stopping at a resale shop in Elk Rapids. Zoe loved resale shops. Jenny won, so they didn’t stop. They argued about hunting for puffball mushrooms in the woods they drove past. Nothing suited both of them but going back to Bear Falls and setting the books on Emily Sutton’s porch.

  “What we should do,” Zoe said, scrunching her face into a kid’s devilish grin, “is drop the books on the porch, ring the bell, and run.”

  Jenny didn’t enter into Zoe’s game. She had her mind on that house by the swamp. It was a place that always scared her. On every Halloween, she’d run past there just to be frightened, never to stop and cry out, “Help the poor!” None of the other kids did even that much; they went blocks out of their way to be spared. Her mom had told her the Sutton house was like the house in To Kill a Mockingbird, where strange things happened and strange people lived, but it wasn’t right to be afraid just because the women who lived there were different.

  “We will put the books on the porch, ring the bell, and walk away like two grown women.” She was firm with Zoe.

  “Maybe you will, but if that door opens, I’m running like hell.”

  Jenny shrugged. “Your legs are short. If she catches somebody, it’s going to be you.”

  Zoe frowned, thinking about her fate and wondering how she could work up better traction, maybe find a pair of magic shoes. What she imagined was flying right by Jenny and sticking her tongue out as she got to the car and sped away.

  “Soon as we leave the books we’ll go tell Mom,” Jenny said. “She’ll be eager to hear what we did and what we bought for Emily.”

  “We’ll put Dora’s name on the bag so she’ll know who brought the books.”

  “You’re just afraid she’ll blame you if she doesn’t like what we bought.”

  Jenny sped up, excited now about the book delivery, and maybe later seeing Tony—if he found the time. No, she told herself. If we both find the time and really want to see each other. She wasn’t going to get trapped into that sitting-by-the-phone crap she’d done with Johnny. Waiting for hours. Hoping. Then acting mean as a snake to Mom when he didn’t call.

  She was thinking ahead and didn’t take much notice of a white truck coming the other way, heading back toward Traverse City.

  “Isn’t that Tony?” Zoe watched the truck approach, then frowned over at Jenny. “I thought he was working all day.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  They watched as the truck drove by, Ralenti’s Carpentry emblazoned on the side. Jenny was about to wave and honk, but thought better of it. He was staring over the wheel, deep in thought. He didn’t notice them as their vehicles passed.

  For some reason, Jenny’s face burned. An old, empty feeling rolled over her. Nothing she could name. Not surprise. Not even anger. Something deeper in her gut, closer to hopelessness, a leftover of curdled bad memories. It felt like the first time Johnny Arlen had lied to her, then told bigger lies, and then dumped her. Or the first time Ronald Korman lied about working late, and she’d been nervous but told herself not to be silly. And the other times when he lied about where he’d been. Lame lies, as if it didn’t really matter anymore, even though she worked in his law office and people talked.

  And then that last betrayal, when he and a young female client ran off to Guatemala to meet the girl’s wealthy parents, and he called to ask Jenny for a divorce.

  “Maybe he’s picking up wood or something.” Zoe flounced back around in her seat.

  “All the way to Traverse?”

  “Hey, if you’ve got questions, call him, Jenny. Don’t get mad for nothing.”

  Jenny nodded. Zoe was right. She was heaping Tony with the sins of past loves. She fished her cell from her pocket and hit his number in her favorites.

  “Hey!” she said when he answered. “What are you doing?”

  She turned and made a face at Zoe as she listened to the deep voice on the other end.

  “Really?” she said. “All day, huh? I’m at home, too. Just thought you might like to take a break and come over. Oh, of course. All those house plans to work on. Yup. Sure. I can tell you’re busy . . .”

  She hung up and stared straight out the window without a word until Zoe piped up. “Why’d you lie about being home?”

  “Same reason he did.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “Working.”

  “Oh.” Zoe chewed at a thumbnail as if that’s all she had to think about.

  They said nothing more about Tony. Jenny turned at the long side road toward Lake Michigan and back to Bear Falls.

  In town she took Oak, then went over to Thimbleberry Street and Emily Sutton’s house. She was no longer excited about the possibility of meeting the famous poet, but only wanted to get home where she could stomp and swear about perfidious men in the privacy of her childhood room.

  * * *

  Jenny drove down the narrow road that ran beside Pewee Swamp, a dark, buggy place where thickly twined cedar and hemlock trees grew up to the side of the road, their dark trunks reflecting in standing water. Tangles of upended trees with clawlike roots and twisted, bare limbs blocked all ways into the swamp, giving it a forbidding look that kept most people away.

  Into the curve of the road, where it narrowed, the swamp opened to wider spaces of water dotted with hillocks of vegetation, small islands in the black, filmy water. The swamp was a mass of moving shadows. The few kids who’d braved the swamp here at its widest—never Jenny—bragged about seeing dammed beaver pools and water so deep they couldn’t say how long a big rock took to settle to the bottom. Some kids trekked farther in during a dry year and still came out soaked from shoes to caps, bitten viciously by mosquitoes, telling high tales of strange things watching them from dark places. The best way to know the Pewee, it was said, was in winter when the waters froze and you could get to the interior, though you’d have to be careful if you wished to make it back, testing every step you took on the ice, marking your trail along the way.

  Jenny had no plans to go into that dank place. Too many sudden bursts of flapping wings even as she drove past.

  “I went into the swamp a little way once,” Zoe said. “Down by Freddy’s Bait Shop. Freddy cleared a path. Still, just a little way in, the path got squishy. I thought I’d sink for sure. Lots of birds. Pewees nesting. Cute little things. Herons standing in the water. Talk about prehistoric—watching one of those herons take off is like some Jurassic Park thing. There was a lizard sunbathing in the middle of the path. A big lizard. I could’ve sworn it was an alligator. Scared m
yself right out of there. Haven’t been back since. You ought to go in at least once, Jenny. Different world from the rest of Bear Falls.”

  Jenny shuddered. “No thanks,” she said.

  “There’re probably Indian Pipes in there right now. Emily Dickinson’s favorite flower. Up on dry places. Strange to see them growing in the swamp, or anywhere. White pipes on leafless stalks. I was struck dumb the first time I found one.”

  “Don’t doubt that,” Jenny said as she rounded another curve. The Sutton house was just ahead.

  Both women fell silent.

  The two-story house, built of stone—stones of many shades of gray, black, and white and of many textures, from polished rock to angular, rough stone—grew out of its boggy acreage, one of those aged farmhouses found at the edge of many small northern Michigan towns. This one didn’t sag, as if tired, the way most old houses did. The stone walls were straight and solid. It was only the wooden pillars across the front that were giving way, the porch roof swaying slightly to one side.

  Zoe held the books, fumbled in her purse for a pencil, then wrote “From Dora Weston” on the Horizon bag.

  They stood outside the gate looking up the slight rise to the house.

  A set of narrow, tall steps led to the wide porch and then to an old screened door hanging from its hinges. Beyond the screen was an unpainted door with a large window covered by a thick lace curtain.

  Nothing moved around the house or beyond the unpainted picket fence. The small crooked gate opened into a bare dirt yard with patches of tall weeds and a few wild daisies. A large oak to the side of the yard had grown to an ungainly width and height. Dead branches littered the roof of the porch and the ground around the tree. Piles of last year’s leaves, windblown, lay caked against the fence.

  Jenny couldn’t see into the swamp from where they stood. Too many weeping trees and thick bushes hid it, but she heard jungle-like screeches from birds, a croak from a bullfrog, and a sudden rush of wings as herons flew off, over the trees, toward Lake Michigan.