by Lauren Wolk
Rusty snorted. “They don’t count.”
“I do remember one French teacher …” Joe made an hourglass in the air.
Rusty grinned. “But no real girls?”
“Nary a one.”
Rusty turned the frog this way and that, upside down, and then set it free. It sat on the bank, getting its bearings for a moment, before leaping into the rushes that grew along the water’s edge. “I don’t think I’d like that too much,” Rusty said. “Sounds boring.”
“It was,” Joe said.
They both realized, suddenly, that except for the one brief reference to his father, this was the first time Joe had spoken to Rusty of his past.
“I don’t remember a single thing I learned from picking a frog to pieces,” Joe said.
And for the rest of the afternoon, they scoured the banks for amphibians, scrutinized them gently, and then went home empty-handed.
Joe had not asked Angela about her absent husband. He had quickly learned that the people who lived in Belle Haven did not like to be questioned even though they were, as a rule, a talkative bunch. And despite the fact that he had been schooled among rude young men—perhaps because of this—Joe knew without thinking about it that to speak casually of Angela’s husband would be like speaking casually of the newly dead. Angela herself was the one who brought it up.
“Has Rusty told you anything about his father?” she asked Joe at the end of summer while they sat together in Angela’s living room, waiting for Rusty to come home with a Sunday trout. It was the only supper that the Kitchen did not serve—Sunday supper—and Angela’s only chance to sit down to a proper meal with Dolly, Rusty, and, quite often now, Joe.
“No, not really.”
She lit a cigarette, killed the match. “Has anyone?”
“No, Angela.” Joe liked to say her name. He had decided that the women in Belle Haven had the nicest names he’d ever heard—Rachel, Angela, May, Coral, Ophelia, Anne, Helen, June. “And you don’t need to tell me anything either,” he said.
“Well, maybe I do,” she said. She smoked her cigarette for a moment, never moving it far from her lips. “You may eventually hear something or other, and you need to know what’s really true and what you may hear from Rusty.”
“The two aren’t the same?”
“Not like I wish they were.” She sighed, went into the kitchen to fetch some more iced tea.
“It was the strangest thing,” she said, coming back. “Buddy was a really good boy. Buddy … that was his name. Still is, I guess. He had beautiful manners. Never got into any trouble. Got along with his folks. But so … so exciting, too. I’d never met anyone quite like him. I saw him for the first time at a corn festival in Randall, where he lived. We were both sixteen. We were watching a tractor pull, and I got splashed with mud. He ran and found a wet cloth somewhere and helped me get the worst of it off. And then we began to see each other the way young kids do, at movies, ball games. He played the harmonica. Looked a lot like Jimmy Dean. I was in love with him and him with me before we turned seventeen, and it was the real thing. Didn’t matter how old we were. Not then.” Angela took a long swallow of tea and put her bare feet up on the coffee table. Joe sat with his back bowed, his head hanging, his elbows on his thighs. It was how he listened, now that he had learned how.
“We got married, right after high school, even though everyone wanted us to wait a while, especially Buddy’s folks. Buddy was good with cars, so he took a job at a garage in Randall. I sold stuff door-to-door. Makeup, mostly. Had to get all painted up and walk around in high heels.” She made a face. “I’d drive Buddy to work and then take the truck around Randall, Fainsville, Jupiter. But the outfit I worked for didn’t like the idea of an old pickup, so I had to park it somewhere and do each block on foot.” Angela held a foot in the air, turned it one way and then the other. “By the time I got home at night my feet looked just awful. God, they hurt.” She took another drink of tea.
“Then I got pregnant with Rusty when I was still only eighteen and after about a month I got fired, which saved me the trouble of quitting. I kept having to stop to throw up in somebody’s petunias. And my feet got much worse. It wasn’t working out at all. After that we couldn’t afford to pay rent on our own place, and Buddy’s parents didn’t have any room, so we moved in with my mother. She was still living down by the school at the time, in the house where I grew up.” She glanced over at Joe, smashed her cigarette in a tray as big as a football.
“Before you have kids, you just can’t know what it’s going to be like to have a baby come along and change everything. Everyone told us what was coming, but hearing about it didn’t do a thing to prepare us—not for the joy or the hurt. And Buddy was so excited about having a kid, always walking around with a big smile on his face. He didn’t seem to mind living with his mother-in-law. He watched me get big as a house and lose all my color and have my hair falling out all the time, and he treated me like I was a goddess of fertility or something. He had stars in his eyes. I was very happy that whole time, thinking about what kind of father he would make.” Angela lit another cigarette.
“In the first few days after Rusty was born, Buddy could barely speak. He was absolutely overcome. He had this perfect little son and I was okay and everything was fine.” She hung her left hand on the back of her neck. “And then Rusty got the colic and cried for four months straight.
“After the first month, Buddy started sleeping at the garage or out in the truck or sometimes on his parents’ couch. He’d come home and try to help me, but he just couldn’t stay. He tried, though. I’ll give him that. But there was something very wrong, all of a sudden. He came home one night when Rusty was about twelve weeks old, and the poor little kid was bawling his head off. Buddy had a beer and he watched some of a ball game on TV. And then he came over to where I was rocking the baby and he picked him up—I thought he was just going to walk him a bit—and he started to shake Rusty so hard his … his little head was snapping back and forth. I thought it was going to break right off.” Angela tried to smoke her cigarette, but it fell out of her lips and she had to scramble for it. “I finally got Rusty away from him and I ran into the bedroom and Buddy stood out in the living room and screamed until he was hoarse. He kicked in the television and he threw a lamp through the front window, and then he sat down on the floor and cried.” Angela rubbed some flakes of ash into her blue jeans. “When he came around he got really scared and ran out of the house, bunked with a friend for a couple of days. Then he finally came back home and we all sat in the living room and stared at each other. Me, Buddy, Rusty, and my mother. She sat in the corner and didn’t say a word, but she wouldn’t leave us alone either.”
Angela smoked her cigarette some more. “You don’t know her very well yet, Joe, but my mother is one hell of a woman. Quiet. Keeps to herself. But she’s as solid as a rock. Sold her house so I could buy this place. I never even had to ask.” She stared, remembering. “Anyway, she sat there with us so Buddy would behave himself, I guess. I had Rusty in my lap. He’d been crying all day, and he still was. Buddy got down on his knees and begged me to forgive him, and I did. I was feeling pretty desperate myself, and I thought I could understand how he had lost control for a minute like that. But after an hour in the house with Rusty crying the whole time, Buddy all of a sudden started to look wild again. My mother went in the nursery with Rusty and shut the door, and I stood outside it while Buddy paced around the house, pulling on his hair and cursing and looking like he was going to break something. And then he left the house and got in the truck and drove off.” Angela’s cigarette was all ash now.
“I know it doesn’t seem very likely that a man would run off over a crying baby. But that’s what Buddy did. I didn’t believe it at first, had the police looking for him for weeks. But about six months later I got a letter from him. Even when I sat down and read it, I had an awful hard time believing that the man I had known so long could suddenly change so much. He hated Rusty. He hated him. And of course
he hated himself—I mean really hated himself—for feeling that way about our little baby. But there was something … wild about Buddy by then. He was like a grizzly or maybe a hyena. Some kind of animal that kills its young.” She closed her mouth, and Joe could see that she was chewing the lining of her cheeks.
“If it’s one thing having a child has taught me,” she said, “it’s not to judge other parents. I used to see people in the grocery store or on the street with their children, and I’d think, ‘I’ll never act that way when I have kids.’ But now I lay off. Nobody else can know how a child can change you. Turn your life inside out. Thank God, I’m one of the lucky ones. From the time that boy was a knob in my belly I’ve loved him as much as I can love. And when he is an old man, if I am still alive to see that, I will still love my boy with every bit of my flesh and every particle of my spirit. And I know Buddy loved him too. He had to. But to him Rusty was like a magnet, or a lightning rod. Every regret that Buddy had ever had, every doubt, every complaint, every kind of anger was unleashed on our baby. It was a horrible thing to watch. And I know that is why Buddy left. He would have learned some control, Rusty would have outgrown his pain and that incredible selfishness that infants have, but Buddy would never have been able to look at his son without knowing what he was capable of doing. Without remembering those bad early days. Without longing for a different sort of life.” She picked up her glass of tea and drained it.
“Rusty thinks that it was me his father left. And that, too, is the truth.”
When Joe put his arms around Angela, he had to fight not to pull immediately away. It shocked him deeply to feel how thin she was, how hard her muscles, and how strong the shudder that ran the length of her. But then he felt her relax, her head grew heavy on his shoulder, and he found that he was gently rocking her, and she him, and that he, too, was comforted.
By the time Rusty came home with the trout, Joe and Angela were laughing, and neither of them ever mentioned the absent Buddy again.
“You have a good knife?” Rusty asked Joe as they picked their way through Ian’s pumpkin patch the day before Joe’s first Halloween in Belle Haven.
“I guess,” Joe said, turning over a nice pumpkin, looking for rot. “Want to carve it at the Schooner?”
“Sure,” said the boy. “It’ll be easier to cart home that way. We can carve one up for you, too.”
But it turned out that Joe did not have a proper knife. Nothing quite sharp enough or small enough for pumpkin teeth or fragile pumpkin brows.
“Here,” said Rusty, pulling a whittling knife from his pocket. It was very sharp. “My grandma taught me how to carve walking sticks out of sumach when I was a kid. Sumach looks like deer antler, has real velvety sort of bark, comes off smooth as you like. The stick’s no good for anything but a day’s walk. After that it dries up. Warps. But it’s a pleasure to carve.”
Joe sat and looked at the boy, found it hard to believe he was just ten. It must have been the talk of knives and carving. Men talked of such things. Yet these things were foreign to Joe. The knife was heavy in his large palm. He snapped it open on its capable hinge. There were no notches in its blade. It was a good knife.
They spent an hour on the pumpkins, scooping out their pulpy meat, saving their seeds for the oven, and making elaborate faces in their rinds until the light began to fail.
“That’s a good knife,” Joe said, wiping the blade on his pant leg and snapping it home. He held it out to Rusty.
The boy looked at the knife. He looked at Joe’s face. Perhaps he was remembering how little Joe had brought along with him from wherever he’d been.
“You keep it,” Rusty said, wedging his pumpkin into the basket of his bike.
“Don’t be silly,” Joe said, holding out the knife. “I can get another one.”
“I’m not being silly. I know you can get another one. Have this one,” Rusty said, turning his bike so it faced the lane and home.
Joe remembered the small apartment above the Kitchen, Rusty’s tiny room, how neat it was. (“I thought kids’ rooms were supposed to be messy,” he had said the first time he’d gone upstairs. It was only later that he realized Rusty did not own enough things to make a mess, or to neglect them.)
“Thanks,” Joe said, slipping the knife into his pocket. It was the first thing Rusty gave to Joe and perhaps the most important gift he would ever receive.
“Whittle something and you’ll see for yourself how nice it is,” Rusty said as he left. “It makes you nice and sleepy if you do it on a doorstep. Especially if the lightning bugs are out.” And Joe breathed in relief to hear Rusty speak like the boy he was and ought to be for some time to come.
There were no lightning bugs out that night, for they were all mated by now and content. But there were still crickets out flexing their harplike legs, spiking the night with raspy love songs, and no one believed that snow was mere weeks away. Joe sat on the steps of the Schooner with a narrow trunk of sumach and Rusty’s smooth-handled knife. The sun had set but not departed. The sky was nearly green. Birds in flight were black against it. The blazing trees stood still, barely breathing. One star appeared. Another. The knife’s silver blade stroked the wood. The flesh underneath the bark was soft, cool, and very white. Ribbons of bark fell at his feet like garlands. And the moon came calmly up into the sky. Rusty was right. Joe had never felt more solitary. Or more content.
When the cold finally came to Belle Haven, Joe spent his spare hours wandering through the woods and fields, collecting stones as big as grapefruits. He lugged them home in a satchel, a few at a time, and piled them in the middle of the clearing. When he had enough, he made some mortar and built a fireplace of sorts, big and deep enough to shield a fire from the wind and the snow. He topped it with a chimney, capped that with a vent to keep out the wet, let out the smoke, encourage an upward draft.
On many cold winter nights, Joe built a beautiful blaze in his fireplace and sat bundled before it, whittling and wondering what went on in other places he had been. When it snowed, he stayed indoors, listened to his small transistor, read book after book after book. He did not own a calendar and tried hard not to think about his approaching birthday. Or about Christmas. Or about the twin he would now never know any better than he knew Angela. Not even that well. Not nearly as well as he knew Rachel.
Something had happened to them on the night back in May when he’d called his father. She had sat beside him on his bunk for a long time, stroking his hair, holding his hand for the last hour of darkness and long into the dawn until he finally fell asleep. He had opened his eyes to find her sleeping in a chair beside him, their hands locked, Ian and Angela gone. He had barely moved for an hour or more, afraid of waking her. Had watched her face, studied the way her thick, cinnamon hair coursed down her neck, marveled at the way she curled, catlike, in the unyielding chair. After a while, she had opened her eyes, taken a moment to decide where she was, and looked down at their clinging hands. When she had gained her bearings, she smiled at him uncertainly and yawned.
“Get dressed and follow me,” she’d said after a bit, and he had.
She had taken him back to her house on the hill where there was plenty of hot water, a good shower, and breakfast in her garden. They had not spoken of his father or anything else from his past. And, in part because of his reluctance to talk about such things, she had not revealed much about herself either. They would discover what was important, in their own good time.
By Labor Day, Rachel and Joe were the kind of friends who unabashedly tell each other when they have something stuck between their teeth. They played late-night Scrabble and outdoor cribbage, did the crossword puzzle every Sunday morning, read each other’s palms, cut each other’s hair.
Joe felt, with Rachel, as if he had been taken apart, bone by bone, and put back together again in a far less imperfect way. She felt, with him, as if she would live forever. They had each had good friends before, but neither of them had ever had this. They didn’t even know what
to call it, so they didn’t call it anything at all.
It was Rachel who tried to convince Joe, as they sat on her front porch paring apples for a pie, to call his faculty advisor at Yale, for the fall semester was scheduled to begin in just a few days. He was no longer concerned about revealing his whereabouts: his phone call to his father had already left traces and had, furthermore, convinced him that no one was likely to seek him out. But the thought of calling Yale made him hurt. It made him feel unwell.
“All of that’s over and done with,” he told her. “Besides, I’d hardly qualify for a scholarship.”
“You’re just looking for an excuse,” she insisted. “If you want to go back to school, just take out a loan until your birthday. By then you’ll have money of your own. Loads of it. Good God, man, it would take you ten minutes to get tide-over money. Probably less. I don’t know why you haven’t already gone ahead and done it. You’re not worried about your father tracking you down anymore, so why not call up your banker and get some money?”
He looked at her carefully. “You’re a terrible actor,” he said, taking her hand and putting it to his lips. “You would go mad without me, and you know it.”
“Go take a flying leap,” she said and burst out laughing. “Pig.” She threw an apple peel at him. “You still haven’t answered my question.”
“I’m doing just fine on my own,” he assured her. “The money will still be there when I want it. And so will Yale.”
“Well, to tell you the truth, I do understand how you might feel that way.”
And that was when Rachel finally told Joe about her parents: their lives, deaths, legacies.
Joe had already heard these things from Ian and Angela but had waited for Rachel to be ready to tell him herself. Like Angela’s story about her husband, and like Rusty’s gift of the carving knife, knowing about Rachel’s loss had so softened Joe’s heart that he now felt newly saddened. As she spoke about her parents, tears in her eyes, his own lips trembled. His own chest ached.