Chance

by Nancy Springer

  “Nolan saw all this with sorrow. He feared that his loyal companions might be subjected to insult after he was gone—for Kedal and Kedur, being born of Aftalun, were immortal. So, in his old age, Nolan turned his canton over to his sons and set out for a final adventure in the mountains to the south. Kedal and Kedur bounded around him like young pups. When the three of them reached the slopes of Lord Tutosel, he breathed easier, for he judged that they would meet no people there. But at the top of the first pass their way was blocked by a hideous, misshapen old man. ‘Filthy curs!’ he shrieked. ‘Go dig in garbage; go roll in manure!’ Nolan tried to silence the old man, but it was too late; the mocker slipped away, and the dogs had turned to stone.

  “Nolan spent the rest of his days in the mountains, living in the open, windy pass by the two stones that once were his faithful servants. Folk will point out to you the peak where Kedal and Kedur still watch over Vaire with tears rolling now and then from their blind, stony eyes. For what Nolan feared has come to pass: every shepherd boy now has a dog, and men have forgotten that dogs are the gift and get of the gods. But no one goes near those mountain ways, for Vlonda remembers. She roamed long in search of her brother and her sons, and folk say she still skulks, brooding, beneath the shadows of Kedal and Kedur.”

  “I have never had a dog,” Frain remarked. “Abas hates them. He will not allow any in Melior’s court.”

  I got up, and he got up as well, courteous youth that he was. I took off my fine cloak of royal blue, my golden stag-hound clasp. It was presumptuous of me to place the emblem of Vaire on Frain, but I refused to worry; in this way, at least, I would claim him as my son! I put the cloak around his sturdy shoulders, fastened it with the red-gold clasp.

  “Wear this,” I said, “and if anyone calls you pup, smile.” I suppose I was weeping again. He put his arms out to me, hesitantly. I welcomed his embrace. I wept quietly for a while, to get it out of the way, but I was thinking far ahead. I knew that I would never willingly be far from him again, that I would ride with him even if it meant following his mad fool of a brother.

  “Stay here a few days,” I told Frain, “and stand by me at the burial. Then I will go with you to see Tirell.”

  “Thank you, my lord,” he stammered. He was startled. “And thank you for the tale as well,” he added. “I will remember it.”

  I did not know that I had named the place of my own death, telling him that tale. I, the ambitious smith, the extortionist and usurper, would die at the feet of the ancestral staghounds of Vaire. And not kingship or power or a healing touch or all of Frain’s faithfulness would be able to save me.

  WE BUILD A SHRINE

  So we build a shrine to suffering,

  Sprinkle ourselves with our own holy tears

  And eat the bread of bitterness

  And lift our voices to the god of suffering

  Saying, for these my enumerated sorrows

  I deserve:

  Your love, your kiss of favor, your praise,

  Pity, respite, reward, bliss

  eternal, embrace, accolade—bah!

  I wish I could leave my childhood

  Behind me as my father left Ireland,

  Step onto the boat to somewhere else.

  He put an ocean between him and that

  Petty, bitter, lush green land, every sod of it

  soaked with blood,

  Land of sorrows—

  But the Irish never really leave.

  The brogue stays on their voices, on their

  Tongues that sacramental blood-red wine,

  That holy water in their eyes, on their lips

  that ancient cry—

  And as I bewail my childhood,

  They bewail the childhood of their race.

  And so and still we build a shrine

  to suffering.

  © Nancy Springer 1984

  PRIMAL CRY

  Coal town. Hoadley, PA. Big house on the hill, high Victorian, mansion almost. That would be the mine owner’s place, formerly. Avenue of elms all stumps since Dutch elm disease. Some other houses just below, ornate, less big. Doctor, lawyer, mayor, maybe. Several houses, comfortable, along Main Street. Stores, school, Post Office. And taverns, numerous, one on every corner. And churches, nearly as numerous. Slovak, Irish, Polish, Italian, Greek, Lithuanian, Brethren, Lutheran. Railroad tracks right through the center of town, length of Main Street. Below that, houses again, row on row, two stories, peaked roofs, weathered siding or peeling fake brick made of asphalt. Nothing extra. Plain sparrow-brown boxes, enough of them to fill seventeen streets, numbered. Below again, the warehouses, the tarpaper shacks, the creek, orange from acid runoff. Only bony piles and scrub forest beyond.

  Me, I’m an outsider. Only lived in Hoadley a few months. Like another world, Hoadley.

  We moved to Hoadley when Brad took a job with one of the private-sector agencies in Steel City. Career-change counselor. The mills had closed, see. I was four months pregnant with our first child, so no use hunting a job. No jobs to be had, anyway.

  Just waiting for baby, I was good and bored when I met Deb.

  Brad found the apartment in Hoadley. One of the big old places on the hill, cut up—we had the whole first floor. Felt like mine barons. No ten-acre lawn, no wrought-iron fence, no avenue of elm trees, but yes bay windows, yes bevel glass framing the great door with the fanlight above, yes deep shady porch. Looked down over strata, social. Fine view of the slag heaps. Big brick house next door, similar.

  Met Deb at the County Historical Society a few doors away. Place with real slate siding, old horse-drawn ambulance parked on the lawn. Christmas time, I wandered down there to take in the crafts display. Deb was there behind the counter, flanked by blue-haired wrinklies. Odd. She’s about my age, late twenties, tall and slim, terrific clothes, got life enough for the whole place. Cute face, lots of glossy black permed hair, ditzy way about her. Overgrown kid.

  She showed me the counted-cross-stitch ornaments and the candlewicked pillows. All the while she and the wrinklies were pumping it out of me that I was new in town, and where I lived.

  “Gee, I’m your neighbor,” Deb said. “I’m Debora Michaels.”

  The way she said it, every syllable stressed, Debah-rah, sounded like royalty. Always called herself Debora. She never said so, but it didn’t take me long to notice she hated hearing it shortened to Deb. I called her Deb every chance I got.

  “Lin Burke,” I said. That’s me. Lin the loner.

  “Come and meet my parents as soon as you’re settled,” Deb told me breathlessly. “Any time at all. My father’s family is from Connecticut. His mother’s people trace back to the Mayflower. My mother’s ancestors on both sides are Germans from the Brandywine. They go back to Revolutionary times, and there’s a Saltzgiver buried in the cemetery at the Old Swedish Lutheran church in West Chester.”

  Who the hell was she trying to impress?

  Weird, that she was still living with her folks at her age, in the big brick place right next to ours, Roman blinds, corner turret. Couple days later, bored, I went over.

  Mr. Michaels was home for lunch. Local bank president, courtly gentleman, none too talkative. Mrs. Michaels was a round-faced, fluffy woman. She talked enough for both. Did I like Hoadley? It wasn’t what it used to be. Time was when the trains roared through day and night and the snow lay black with soot all winter. Been years since the mines and mills ran, sky glowed red toward the City. Mine owners long gone, like the elms. Took what the town had to give, raped it some say, went away. Left scars and bony piles behind.

  “Good riddance,” said Debora. “The place is a lot cleaner now.”

  “But the people have no work, dear,” her mother told her. “A lot of them can’t meet their mortgage payments. Your father has to find ways not to foreclose.”

  “I don’t know why they don’t move away. Move to Arizona or Nevada.”

  “But their families are here, their friends are here.” Mrs. Michaels sounded shocked.
Why, I didn’t understand.

  There were lots of things I didn’t understand.

  Pictures of Debora all over that house, photos, little girl in Polly Flinders dresses, expensively hand-smocked. Mary Janes, banana curls and white straw hats. Easter pictures, First Communion pictures in front of the Lutheran church. High school graduation draped shot. College, black mortar board and tassel. Banker’s little girl on the front porch swing, looking down over Hoadley. Only child. I have vices, but nosiness is not one of them. Nothing struck me as odd.

  Time went on. I did Christmas, started natural childbirth classes down in Steel City at the hospital, read the newspaper, learned to know Hoadley. Some place, Hoadley. Especially in deep January. Child abuse cases every second week in those houses down below Main Street, the gray-brown ones. Once in the grocery I saw a woman with a bruise on her cheek. She said she fell. Everyone laughed. Even she laughed. But I read in the paper about a woman, a big woman, nearly three hundred pounds, killed her husband. He came home drunk and ugly, and she sat on him. Sat on his chest until he was dead. Said she didn’t mean to kill him. They didn’t arrest her. There was another thing somebody told me about. Happened a few years before. Woman died, and when they went through her things they found babies in her attic. Five of them, all dried up, long time dead, stored in boxes.

  Backward. That’s what Hoadley was like, backward in time. Like the last fifty years forgot to happen. Like people were stuck in the past. People my age would tell me how Pa used to come home mean from the mines and whip them, whip all eight kids, or ten or whatever. People Pa’s age would tell me how a man’s pay was owed to the company store before he even got the scrip. People a generation older, still living, would tell me how they came over from the old country. Ireland, Poland, Italy, Rumania. Steerage, with their families. A younger brother died, or an older sister, or an aunt. Looking for the land of opportunity.

  I would see the families on Sunday, the big families from down below Main Street, out driving in their old beat-up American-made cars, or walking to church in clothes from the Goodwill store, laughing and quarreling.

  Deb came into my kitchen limping. “I about killed myself on the ice,” she complained. “It’s these boots.”

  Spike-heeled, periwinkle-blue Guccis, on the ice that coated the whole world at that time of year. “Don’t you have something with some tread?” I grumped.

  “Sensible shoes make me feel dowdy.” She took off her fur jacket. I saw that she was wearing a silk shirt and her Jordache jeans, the ones that fit so tight she had to lie down on the bed to zip them up. And never would I admit to her how good they looked with the Gucci boots. Or how good she looked. Damn, she was beautiful. Could have been a model.

  “So you’d rather be dead than dowdy,” I said.

  “God, Lin, you are such a party pooper.”

  I saw Deb from time to time. Didn’t really like her. She got on my nerves. Backward, like the town. Airheaded. Went to the Spirit Church, for Christ’s sake, the one some fly-by-night preacher had started up in an empty warehouse on the edge of town, and I could guess what her longtime Lutheran parents thought of that. Saved and devout, Deb was. Intelligent, but narrow—when she got a brainstorm, she would broadcast it again and again, to different people or even to the same one. Me, for instance. Drove me up the wall. But we were sort of thrown together, being neighbors. At least she was interesting to talk with. There weren’t that many people in Hoadley I liked to talk with, not once I got tired of hearing about steerage and the company store.

  “I just found out the most fascinating thing,” she told me, breathless as always.

  “What thing?”

  “Burt Bacharach is my fourth cousin once removed on my mother’s side!”

  How she loved to drop names. Burt Bacharach, for God’s sake. Only Deb would have cared.

  She used to come over in the afternoons and drink coffee with me until Brad came home. “She’s infantile,” he said after he had met her a few times.

  I grinned, agreeing. She was.

  “A real rich brat. Running around in her designer clothes and her Corvette when there are people living on beans and day-old bread.” He met those people in his work a lot, and it upset him. “I don’t understand why you’re buddying around with her.”

  “She’s the only person I’ve met in this town who ever talks about anything except hard times and the high cost of ground beef,” I said. “Anyway, she’s funny.” I liked to laugh at her. Helped my ego.

  Deb was active in the local genealogical society. They met twice a month in the library, a makeshift storefront place. Afternoons, since everyone was unemployed. Deb didn’t have any paying job either. She had majored in American History at U. of Pitt in Pittsburgh, and then she had come home to Hoadley. No problem—she wasn’t complaining, so why should I. She was more serious about her research than most people are about their salaried careers. Than most Hoadley people were about the lottery, even.

  “My great-great-great aunt on the Michaels side is a matrilinear descendant of the Stuarts—”

  “Ed Stewart, the lumber man over in Hemlock Bend?” I said, pretending to misunderstand.

  “The Scottish Stuarts,” she corrected me sniffily. “As in, King James. As in, Mary Queen of Scots.”

  Sure.

  She was sort of an evangelist for genealogy. Had it mixed up in her half-assed religion somehow. Kept inviting me to go along to her meetings. Nothing better to do, so I would go, sit back and smirk while she and her colleagues argued about sources. Contemplating my swelling abdomen and my own superiority took up most of my attention. But one gray afternoon in the library, I got jolted out of my stupor.

  There was a round of relative-upsmanship going on. Deb had indicated that a solitary French Huguenot forebear on her mother’s side might be a scion of some French royal bastard—I’ve forgotten the details. Royalty bores me. But a blue-haired bastion of the Historical Society was bent out of shape.

  “By the way, dear,” she said blandly, “I’ve heard news of your natural mother. Did you know that her husband has left her?”

  Deb tilted her chin up an extra notch. “I read it in the newspaper,” she shot back without an instant’s hesitation. “So fair of them, how they print almost everything. That Phyllis Snyder who’s been passing bad checks—isn’t that your niece?”

  Her adversary went white, fumbled for a rebuttal, then lapsed into silence. No pussycat, Deb. No ordinary genteel banker’s daughter.

  Ice cool, gorgeous and unperturbed, she continued outlining her plans for researches French. Her parents had offered to pay her way overseas. I looked at her until I realized I was staring. Then looked down at my pregnant belly, knowing what I should have suspected long since. The daughter with the glossy black hair, the dark eyes and the many passions was not born of quiet John Michaels and his round-faced German wife.

  Deb told me about it later, in my kitchen, over coffee. She brought up the subject herself.

  “It’s no secret.” She shrugged off the blue-haired wrinkly’s snub. “The whole town knows I’m adopted.”

  “And you know who your birth mother is?”

  “Sure. She’s Italian. Catholic. She used to live down at the lower end of 11th Street, but she’s moved out to Mine 27 now.”

  Another gridwork of gritty brown houses, at the edge of Hoadley. “Do you ever see her?”

  “No!” With vehemence. “I stay away from her, and she stays away from me.”

  I sat back and waited for more fireworks.

  “She didn’t want me,” said Deb intensely. “She gave me away.”

  The woman had paved her daughter’s way to easy street. But if Deb wanted to feel sorry for herself, I wasn’t arguing. “How come?”

  “I was a scandal. Her husband was away, working at the Lackawana mill.”

  “Oh.” Better and better. “Do you know who your father was?”

  “No.” Fiercely. “And I don’t want to know. I don’t care.”
>
  I sat back some more.

  “DeArckangelo arranged the adoption,” she said. DeArckangelo was Hoadley’s most prominent lawyer. Lived in the thickly gingerbreaded house beyond Michaels’s. “It was legal, and my parents told me all about it as soon as I was old enough to understand. And they never cared that my hair isn’t ash blond like theirs. My mother used to fuss with it and put it up in barrettes and pincurls. She said I was pretty.”

  Pathos. Deb waited for me to tell her how pretty she was. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.

  “You have brothers and sisters?”

  “Half brothers. And I am not interested in researching my natural family,” she added, rather tangentially. I hadn’t asked her.

  “If you’ll excuse a stupid question,” I said, “why are you so interested in researching your adoptive family?”

  “Interested” seemed hardly the word. “Obsessed,” I should have said. She looked at me as if I had suddenly sprouted an extra head.

  “Because I want to learn everything I possibly can about my ancestors. When I meet them, I want to be prepared.”

  She really believed—she really thought—even though she went to that cockamamy church, I had assumed a college graduate would have outgrown believing in the afterlife. Enough for one day. I was glad to see Brad when he came home and Deb went away.

  “The woman is insane,” I told him over supper.

  He was in a sour mood. “That’s no woman,” he said. “That’s an overgrown baby.”

  “Still wants her mama? But the Michaelses dote on her. Their world revolves around her.”

  “I wish yours didn’t,” he snapped. I goggled at him.

  “I don’t give a damn about her one way or another! I don’t care if I never see her again.”

  But I let her in when she came over the next day with more revelations for me. And there she sat at my kitchen table, earnestly explaining to me her views of the hereafter.

  “Well, if heaven is what you want,” she said, “I mean, heaven is in your mind, and I started my research years ago, before roots were popular, and that’s what I really want, to meet my ancestors and—and find out all the answers to all the questions I have to ask them.” Interesting theology, if somewhat disjointed. “So that’s what I believe. For me.”