“And the Lord, he’s gonna bury us under for it. For all we done. . . .”
“And Ariel, Pa. She’s waiting for you.” The mention of my daughter’s name quiets him, and in that moment, I know he sees me.
“Ariel? Where is she? She can’t be here. Can’t see this. Oh, don’t let her—”
“It’s all right, Pa.” I’m hoping to soothe him with my words, because I have no idea how to do so with my touch. “It’s Sunday. Sunday dinner? She’s waiting for you at home.”
Bits and pieces are coming together in his mind, and he tugs himself away. He looks at the water.
“Is the glass clean?”
“Cleanest you’ve got.”
He drinks it down in one ungrateful swallow.
Russ is beside me now, his hand on my shoulder. I sit up straight, thinking by now we must both look like a grim pioneer couple.
“You had us worried, Lee.” His voice is gentle, filled with more kindness and compassion than my father could deserve in a lifetime. “I think it’s best you come home with us.”
“Can’t.” His eyes dart to the window. “Truck’s been stuck more’n—” He looks to be calculating, but abandons the pursuit. Russ graciously moves on.
“We’ll take you with us.” His fingers squeeze my shoulders, telling me that we’ve already discussed this, and I’ve agreed. Now it’s a matter of convincing Pa.
“Ain’t leavin’ my home. I seen what happens. People leave, and they don’t come back. Ever’ man I had workin’ for me, gone. Neighbors pulled up, drivin’ off without so much as a fare-thee-well. An’ ever’thing they worked for? Blowin’ away.”
“It’s only for a little while,” I say. Anybody would think that Russ and I have spent countless sleepless nights preparing for this moment. Long conversations about how we would approach the subject, who would say what. I suppose, had he the clarity of mind to do so, Pa might have seen this as some kind of an ambush. A kidnapping with nothing less than rain as ransom. I guess Russ and I have a long history of figuring out life as it comes along, though, and this is another one of those moments when we are in perfect concert. Or, at least, he thinks we are. I’ve got a bit of an off note in my mind, because what Russ sees as an escape for Pa spells escape for me, too. There’s no place in our apartment to set him up. No room anywhere, except for that little room behind the storeroom, where there’s a cot and a washstand. Jim’s room, meaning now he’ll have to go.
I glance over to where he’s standing in the kitchen doorway, and with the same suspicions that have followed me since I was sixteen years old, my father’s eyes follow.
“Who’s this?” He asks the question with the same sneer as every time I ever brought a boy home.
I jump in. “This is Russ’s friend from before the war. Remember we mentioned him a few weeks back?”
Jim approaches, holding his hand out as if the two men were meeting under normal, cordial circumstances. Pa stands, mustering a dignity that makes me feel both sad and sick. He touches the tips of his fingers to the tabletop, as if none of us will notice his need for support, and returns the gesture. As he introduces himself, he juts his chin toward Jim’s empty sleeve.
“That happen in the war?”
“Yessir.”
Immediately there’s a respect and rapport between the two that I’ve never seen with Russ. My mind sends silent showers of gratitude to Jim for treating Pa like a man, and not the quivering, raging being that had been present only moments ago.
“And if it’s all right with you,” I press on, “Jim’s going to stay on out here for a bit, while you come home with us.”
I declare it with the authority of being the only woman in the room, my voice carrying the same facade as before, as if this arrangement is the pick of a dozen scenarios the three of us spun during the drive out from Featherling.
“What’s he gonna do with that one arm?” Pa speaks as if the man himself isn’t standing right in front of him.
“I can do more work with one arm than most could with five. Worked my way across this country once I got dropped off back east. Railroad. Farmhand. You can’t name a job that I ain’t done.”
A response grows in the eyes of my father—eyes that were empty a few moments ago. This is the man he would have chosen for me. A laborer, a soldier, not some college boy who skipped the war to cower behind a pulpit. Even worse, one who’d ruin his daughter and give credence to the cloud of gossip that had surrounded me all my life.
“Why don’t you go to your room and pack up a few things?” I speak gently, not wanting to renew his ire. “Russ will go with you to help.”
Neither man looks pleased at the prospect, but Pa makes his halting way out of the kitchen, and Russ follows at a respectful distance, sending me a final smile that, in his mind I’m sure, is meant to bring me comfort.
“You don’t have to do this,” I say as soon as Jim and I are alone. Immediately we drop into the ease of posture and conversation that marks our afternoons together. Pa and Russ might as well be on the other side of some rolling wall of dirt, and not just down a dark, narrow hall. “I was speaking off the cuff.”
“Kinda sounds like you’re tryin’ to get rid of me, Nola. Why would you want to do that?”
His look challenges me, and I lower my voice, hoping he will follow suit. “I think Pa would rest easier knowing someone’s here. To watch over things.”
He dislodges his feet to take a slow turn about the kitchen. “This place is done for.”
“Don’t say that. This is—rather, was—my home. Pa just hasn’t been able to keep help for a while, and he won’t take any kind of charity. But if he doesn’t know . . .”
My words trail off because he is right beside me, and I need all my breath to do battle against the thickness of the air.
“Another secret?” He traces the word in the dust of my childhood kitchen table.
“I don’t think of it that way.”
“What do you think about?”
He covers my hand with his, forms it until I, too, am tracing the word. Secret. I can hear Russ and Pa grumbling with each other in the next room, and I figure I can remain here in his grip at least until the end of the word. Never before in our afternoons together have I allowed such proximity. We’ve always shared a common, tacit agreement that our intimacy must be confined to conversation. Ideas and shared, impossible desires.
“Sometimes,” I say, when we’ve finished our spelling and I’ve drawn my hand back to my side, “I think about what kind of work Russ has you doing for him in the shop.”
“He hasn’t told you?”
“Not a word, but I guess if you’re going to stay out here, he’ll have to learn to get along without your help, just like he did before.”
“What if I want to come back home? With you?”
Something rises within me, the inner hackles of a dog set on protecting her pups, and I all but growl, “It’s not your home.”
He is unfazed. “To my room, then. Where my things are, or has it been your plan all along to rob a poor one-armed stranger of all his worldly possessions?”
I immediately feel ashamed and apologize with my tone if not my words. “I’ll have Russ bring you your things. And then, as you please, you can stay here or move on. Head out to California with all the other Okies. Please, Jim.” I reach out, touch his arm, laying my hand on that place that some might say makes him less than a man. “I know you’re a friend to Russ, and for that—”
We hear their voices and I take my hand away, swiping our secret off the table as Russ and my father—both looking considerably more haggard for their excursion—pause in the doorway.
“Are we ready?” Russ asks, giving no room for any answer other than one affirmative. Pa, again, seems vacant, but no less angry. He clutches a small canvas bag with both hands.
“I think I can do some good here,” Jim says, as if wrapping up our conversation. He’s speaking directly to me, his words intended to elude Pa’s hearing. �
��Sweep up. Seal the windows. Don’t know what the rest of the house looks like, but I’ll do what I can.”
“There’s no electricity and no running water in the house. You have to use the pump outside.”
“I’ve pumped water before.”
“And the wash—all the bedding must be filthy.”
“I’ve slept on dirt before. Hard-packed on the ground.”
“And food.” Already I’m regretting this decision, trying to lure him back under Russ’s very eye. “I don’t know what he has. . . .”
“He can have what you brought from the church supper.” I sense a hint of impatience in Russ’s contribution.
“And when that’s gone?” Jim’s question is directed at me, and it takes all I have to hold my voice steady in reply.
“I’ll send some out. With Russ, later, when we send your things.”
Pa seems clueless as to the immediate circumstances, let alone the discussion of his home, but something prompts a hoarse thank-you from his cracked lips, and Jim strides across the room, hand extended.
“Thank you, sir,” he says, drawing us all into his ruse, “for the opportunity. It’s a hard time comin’ across good, honest work these days.”
CHAPTER 9
WE BRING HIM HOME with his body full of desert, empty and dry in mind and spirit. First thing, Russ takes him to the shower, helping him out of his clothes as he would a child, and stays close on the other side of the curtain while Pa stands under the cleansing stream. We don’t have any kind of running water back at the farm; Pa always said such a thing made a man weak and a woman lazy. So this is new to him, raising his face to the warmth, the water creating a fine film of mud—like Adam in the garden—before, eventually, rinsing it all away.
“Told me he didn’t remember ever being clean all over at once,” Russ will confide in me later.
That cleanliness seems to be not only unfamiliar but unsettling. He wraps himself in Russ’s blue robe and wanders into the front room, his bare feet taking unsure steps. I’ve never seen him barefoot before. He wore his boots to work, his brogans to church, and his slippers to bed, for all I knew. I wince at the sight, embarrassed for his vulnerability. I know my floor holds a certain amount of grit to it—impossible to keep anything truly clean—and I feel myself poised to take the blame for the resurgence of dirt on his body. But he says nothing. Only asks for a glass of water.
“Of course, Pa,” I say. “Why don’t you sit down?” But until I physically take his arm and guide him to the chair he sits in every Sunday afternoon, he simply stands with a vacant face and searching eyes.
When it is time for Russ to lead the Sunday evening service, we are met with a conundrum. Preparations have to be made in the room downstairs—fresh bedding and towels; Jim’s things packed away—but I can’t leave him sitting upstairs in the living room alone. I have a horrible vision of his awakening, confused, and walking straight out our front door, off the balcony, and landing in a soft drift of dirt below.
“I’ll stay with him,” Ronnie volunteers a little too eagerly. “We can listen to the Hour of Prayer on the radio.”
It seems the best solution. We find a pair of soft, clean pajamas for Pa to wear, and as soon as Russ is out the door, I settle the three—Ronnie, Pa, and Ariel—in front of the radio with slices of sugar-buttered bread and warm milk.
“I’m downstairs if you need me.” I speak directly to Ronnie, who all of a sudden seems like such a grown-up young man. Strong and responsible, carefully admonishing his little sister not to slurp her milk, and discreetly offering his grandfather a napkin to wipe his grizzled chin. In that moment, the sight of them, together, terrifies me. It isn’t the maturity of my son that stirs that storm of fear; I’ve been watching him grow, minute by each minute of his life, since he was nothing more than a heart-stopping awareness.
No, it is my father, instantly ancient, infirm, transforming me into one of those women. Soft, matronly, cooking rice pudding and mashed peas, speaking with a steady increase in volume, the roles of parent and child reversed. It is the age of my father that makes me old; his decline, my decline.
What a fool. Teasing myself with an idea of what I used to be, what I could have been, back when my father was young. Shameless flirtation with cautious steps outside the edge of my family, the family where I am wedged so squarely in the middle.
I go back to our armoire to find a set of clean sheets—the cleanest we have—before rummaging through the bureau to find clothing for him to wear when his strength returns, as everything he brought with him will need three washings at least before it can be worn. All of this I drape over my arm and take downstairs, through the shop, and into the back room. I haven’t been in here, not once, since the day Jim took to sleeping on the narrow cot tucked within. I keep my cigarettes stashed in the bathroom cabinet, and I smoke them on the front balcony. He tried to join me once, but I held him on the third step with a simple no, punctuated by a pinpoint glowing orange. He left me to hide in my shadows, never approaching me again.
Now I find myself in a different darkness, no longer as familiar as it used to be. I am the stranger, the intruder, and I cannot predict what I would find were I to blindly feel my way through it. The light is a single bulb in the middle of the ceiling, and when I pull the chain, an explosion of light reveals everything about him.
While my bundle from upstairs remains a neat, folded cube within my grip, Jim Brace spills out all around me. Shirts draped over empty crates, books lined up sloppily on a shelf. A narrow bed—the cot having been replaced at some point, without my knowledge—unevenly made, the loose rippling blanket not quite pulled, not tucked. And a pillow, with a soft dent.
An empty chair sits in the corner, and I set Pa’s things on its seat. I’ve stashed two cigarettes in my apron pocket, and with a shaking hand I light the first, inhaling the smoke and blowing it out. Stalling, yes, but also reveling in unforeseen victory.
He is gone. Blown away before he can take me with him.
Spying a worn leather bag in the corner by a box of out-of-date almanacs, I’m galled by its familiarity. I remember it from that first night, slung over his shoulder in our kitchen doorway. My cigarette burns away in three deep drags before I grind it straight into the floor to be swept away later. The metal clasps of the bag are smooth and silent, its cavernous center smaller than I imagined. A few items lurk in the darkness, and a power other than my own guides my hand in exploration. Another book—a small Bible by the feel of it. A glass bottle. Socks. A comb. All the bits and pieces that make a man.
Were he a traveler, Russ would have the same things.
That thought emboldens me further to take liberties I’ve no right to claim. It isn’t a Bible but a thin volume of poetry, and a thumb through the pages unearths notes written in fading pencil.
August 9, 1928.
Chicago, in the Park.
Something to read at sunrise.
The glass bottle holds a scent so familiar, I see his face the moment I uncork the lid. I’ve no right to such recognition, and even less to run my finger inside the neck, bringing a hint of it to my own skin, transferring it to the inside of my wrist, right at my pulse.
The horror of my action jolts me to where I nearly drop the bottle, and I shove the cork back in with double strength. I don’t want to run the risk of its breaking in the bag, so I take a shirt, a blue one, and hastily wrap it protectively around the glass. Before I can succumb again to any such brazen impropriety, I stride around the room, snatching up clothing and keeping it at arm’s length while folding it sloppily before shoving it in. I wrap his safety razor in a scrap of towel, and search for a case to protect the pair of thin, gold-rimmed reading glasses found on the small table next to the bed, thinking it strange that he never wore them in our afternoons reading together. The thought that he would hide such a thing makes me smile, and I lift them up to my eyes to test their strength. Doing so brings the spot on my wrist where I’d rubbed the tonic. With a simple turn,
I touch my cheek to his scent and breathe him in.
I chastise myself out loud. “Stop it. Stop being such a fool. Stop.” And still I feel a ridiculous smile tugging at my lips.
Three books are stacked haphazardly on the overturned crate on the other side of the bed, and I have to put one knee on the thin mattress and crawl over to get them. One is a copy of Jude the Obscure with a stamp proclaiming it the property of the Dennison City Public Library. I think back to his telling me he wasn’t much of a library guy, and after an initial twinge of betrayal, decide that this might be the reason why. The other is a well-battered pocket-size road atlas. I turn the pages, following the red wax pencil paths with my finger, touching the places he’s been.
The third, I discover, isn’t a book at all, but a clever little cardboard box designed to look like one. The word Treasures is stamped where the title would be, and a piece of blue silk ribbon is tied around it to keep the lid down. With less than a breath’s hesitation, the ribbon is slipped away, and the thin cover opened. Inside, a modest amount of money—less than ten dollars, I’d guess—and a handful of train ticket stubs. Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Chicago, Detroit. There is a heart-shaped medal on a purple ribbon, three shirt buttons, and four packets of headache powder. And then, just when my conscience pricks at me for such bald-faced snooping, something catches my eye.
I drop the books onto the bed and sit down, the squeak of the springs threatening to expose me. I push the corner of a headache powder packet aside, and find my own face behind it.
The back of my neck turns ice cold in recognition, knowing before I even take the photograph out from the bottom of the box what it will be. Hidden behind what looks like a trusting Dennison City Public Library card is Russ’s face. He looking lovingly at me on the day of our wedding.
“He . . .” But I don’t know what I want to say to myself. I don’t even know which he I mean. “And how . . . ?” But of course, Russ had sent it. He told me as much—corresponding with a buddy; wanting to show me off.
On Shifting Sand Page 9