When We Get There

by Shauna Seliy

  I slept until the sound of shoes knocking down the stairs woke me. I opened my eyes and sat up. The room was empty and everything was quiet. It was still dark. I thought I might have imagined the sound, but then I heard a door downstairs open and close, and cold air blew through the room. I got out of bed and stood on my bare feet on the wood floor. Coming the rest of the way out of that sleep was like swimming up through layers and layers of warmth. I wondered if steam rose up from my shoulders and back like it did from the great-uncles when they worked the fields in the cold. I could feel, maybe for the first time in my life, the heaviness of all that I needed to do just to stand up, my bones holding together and balancing on top of each other.

  I walked down the hall to the room where Slats was staying. I thought it might have been her going down the stairs, but she was in there asleep. I went to Great-grandfather's bedroom. The door was open and the light from the hall shone on his white sheets and blankets. He had a wide bed with tall, spindly wooden posts at each corner. It was the only bed like that I'd ever seen and I always thought of it as a bed for a king or a president, or someone like Great-grandfather who owned a lot of animals and fields. There was grass and dirt scattered over the bed and the floor; it must have fallen out of his pockets. He was gone.

  Downstairs, everything had been cleaned up and cleared away, and everyone had left. Except for the buzzing of the freezer and the wind knocking against the windows, it was quiet. I looked out the window. I didn't see the Skylark, but I still didn't want to go out there. The dark looked big. I kept thinking about Great-grandfather, though, walking in the cold, no shirt on him.

  I took an old coat from the closet, pulled it on, and stepped outside. There was no fire anymore, but the air still smelled charged with it. The lights above the barn doors had burned out, or someone had turned them off, but a dim light was on inside. I headed toward it. The animals were making a racket. A few dogs were just outside the barn doors looking in. When they saw me coming, they shot off a round of barks.

  I found Great-grandfather standing in the middle of the barn with a sack wrapped around his naked chest. He was talking to the animals, addressing them. He picked up a hen and whispered in her ear, put her down, and then he leaned over Valentina, his favorite goat, and said a few things to her.

  It wasn't like other years. Other Christmases, talking to the animals was a good part of the night. People would carry drinks to the barn, sing pieces of songs while ice knocked against the insides of their glasses. Great-grandfather would tell us how fortunate we were that this was all we had to do to make good luck for the farm. He'd had a neighbor in his village in Russia who'd had to walk the whole perimeter of his fields on stilts every Christmas Eve to make sure he'd have a big harvest. Then Great-grandfather would talk to his animals and they'd talk back and he would translate for us. He said the animals answered in a language only he knew. His translations were always about how good crops were on their way, and good weather, and good health. Then it would be over and we'd go back in the house and have the rest of the night of people singing and drinking and telling stories.

  He squinted at me. "Benci? No. No. Lucas. Of Mirjana."

  "Hey," I said.

  "That coat you wear, was used to be Benci's coat."

  A cold wind blew through the barn, lifted up some dust, and scattered it. I said, "We should go inside."

  "I was conversationing with Valentina." This was a regular-looking, gray goat with white patches and long ears that flopped down on the sides of her face. He had three other goats besides Valentina, five Polled Herefords, a handful of Suffolk sheep, and a set of dogs. They were all mild-mannered, and they stuck close to him, especially the dogs. I could never tell the dogs apart from each other or even tell how many of them there were. It was more like they were a part of him than that they were separate animals. When he walked the property, they'd swirl around him like a wide cape. But Valentina was the only animal on the farm with a name. Even the dogs went nameless; he called each of them and all of them together sobaka, "dog." He gave Valentina a name because he thought she was the smartest of his animals. He named her after the famous cosmonaut, the first Russian lady to make it up into space, Valentina Tereshkova.

  He said, "I was telling to Valentina about Tot-to, about dedushka. When I was small, Tot-to makes steps creak. He lived under there, under stairs. I can't run down without mother yelling at me to be careful of him."

  Dedushka meant "grandfather," but I didn't know the other word. I didn't know one bit what he was talking about. "It's real cold," I said.

  He touched the sack he had wrapped around him and pulled it tighter.

  The light came on outside of the barn and we both turned toward it. Slats was standing by the doors blinking. "What's all the excitement?" she said. "Jesus, Dad, what is that you're parading around in?"

  He looked down at the sack and shrugged. He went on talking to Slats, mostly in Russian. He said that word again, Tot-to. He looked up at the ceiling and held up his arms. The sack fell down around his feet. I could see his whole white chest and his skinny arms. I looked away.

  Slats said, "Seems some people can't hold their liquor, evenafter a lot of years of serious practice."

  She took one of his arms and wrapped it around her, behind her neck.

  "You do the other side," she said to me.

  I shook my head. I didn't want to touch him, his white skin hanging off him.

  "Can you open the door for us? Or is that too taxing?"

  Upstairs, I stood out in the hall while she put him to bed. She said to him, "Look at me tucking you in, just like you and mamushka used to do me."

  He started shaking. Slats held his hand and said, "Person could probably get themselves dead if they stood outside long enough in a piece of sack, Daddy."

  He said a few things back to her. I heard Great-grandmother's name—Katalin—but the other things I couldn't understand. "What's he talking about?" I said.

  "We need a person can translate the language of the inebriated. Come in here, feel his hands."

  "I don't want to."

  "They're freezing." She rubbed the blankets to warm him up, but he kept shaking. "I'm going to make a hot water bottle for him. Don't let him wander out of here. Who knows where he'll end up next."

  "What's Tot-to ?

  She looked at me for a minute like she was sizing me up, deciding what kind of answer to give. "It just means 'that one.' It's like when you say 'that one, over there.'"

  After she was gone, he lifted his hand out from under the blankets and waved for me to come into the room.

  "I'm all right out here," I said.

  "I'll say to you what is dedushka, what is Tot-to. At night, when you hear bottles knocking on pear tree, it's him making sound. When they break, him also. When he is angry with us, he spoils pears and bottles. When I am young as you in my farm with father and mother, Tot-to lived inside with us, under stairs. But when I come to here, he takes up living in pear tree. From there, he can see everything, good things coming, or bad. Bad luck he can see, and if he wants, he can stop. Is protector of us." His breathing got deeper and slower. He closed his eyes and pulled the blankets close around himself. "You are understanding me?"

  "Sure," I said. "I guess."

  "Now that tree is broken, Tot-to will leave us here." He reached up and rubbed his fingers together like he was feeling the air between them. "This is why everything is now turning so cold. He is warmth for us. But now he pulls away, like ship."

  Something about that gesture of his, rubbing the air between his fingers, made me feel like someone had dumped ice down my shirt. I went to the room I was sleeping in and sat in the chair Slats had pulled up to the window. When she came upstairs, she cursed at me for leaving him alone, and went off to bed.

  People were always doing different things to stay safe in the mine, carrying pictures of saints or coins they thought were magic, or wearing special belt buckles. Putting the cotton between my dad's toes was my
mother's way of protecting him. I had my own way. Most nights when we went to the Croatian Club and there was a band, a man sang, but every once in a while this woman was there. I don't know if she even lived in Banning. I never saw her anywhere else but the club. She would just sort of appear and sing this one song, always the same Croatian song, "Samo Nemoj Ti." The song didn't have a lot of lines, just a few that were repeated over and over. The refrain, "77 si raj ski cvijet" meant something like, "You are a flower from heaven." But it wasn't the words of the song I liked so much; it was something the woman made in the room with her voice. It was like a kind of big net, but it didn't fall over us, not that kind of net. More like it went through us, knotting us all together so that no one could leave the dance hall, or the club, or the town without the rest of us. "Tebe ljubiti ja necu prestati" the song went. "I'll never stop loving you."

  Though my mother favored the trumpet and flugelhorn blasts of Balkan brass bands, she would dance or sing along to just about anything, but not this song. She said she couldn't take it. So we would, all three of us, sit together and watch other people dance. I would think the song was doing something I couldn't do—keeping my father safe from falling slate and poison air.

  I thought maybe Great-grandfather's idea about the protector that lived in the tree was something like that. From the tree you could see to all corners of the property, just like from nearly anywhere on the farm you could see at least a slip of shining bottle, a spray of leaves. And the tree was noisy sometimes. When the windows were open and it was breezy outside, you could hear the bottles knocking into each other.

  I went downstairs. I wasn't sure what I was going to do, but when I got to the dining room, I knew. I took a plate out of the cabinet, shined it with my sleeve, and set it down on the table. Though we hadn't had to that night, if someone in the family or a close friend had died during the year, we set out a place for them at the dinner table on Christmas Eve. Some years there was more than one place. I always thought it was spooky having the empty chair with the plate and silverware set out, like inviting a spirit to the table, but Great-grandfather said we had to "for to show respect, and for to be with them one more time.

  I got a fork, a spoon, and a knife. I got a shot glass too, though I knew my mother didn't go in too much for the pear brandy. I set the place for her and sat down next to it.

  She left me a note before she went away. Written in the empty space between two stories in the newspaper. Keep things right like your dad would have said to, at school, I mean, and whatever else he would have told you if he was still here. Dont come looking for me. I’m going to be far away from here anyway. For a little while. And L> dont go thinking this means something bad about me—/ couldnt take it. All the love I have—M.

  I sat at Great-grandfather's table for a long time thinking about where she might be, and though most of the time I did what she told me to, I wondered how I was going to find her.

  Chapter 3

  My mother wasn't the first woman to disappear from Banning—that was Mrs. D'Angelo, the policeman's wife. This happened a couple of years before the fireshot blew out next to my father. Everything was regular then, though it wasn't until everything changed that I knew that. My father went into the mine in the morning and came up out of it in the afternoon. All I knew of Zoli was that he worked at the Plate Glass with Slats, and he didn't wear plastic safety goggles like the rest of them. He wore old glass goggles attached to a leather cap, like a pilot from the First World War.

  Mrs. D'Angelo and her husband had come up to Pennsylvania from an old coal camp in West Virginia and moved into the empty house across the street from us. They only lived there a year or so before she slipped away. The night before she left, we had our first deep drop into that winter's cold. I was in the kitchen working my math. My mother came in the house smelling of cold. She said, "I just saw one of the phony deer on the Markovics' lawn shake with a chill and fall over. It's freezing out there."

  Marko Markovic and my father were best friends. He and his wife ran the Croatian Club. He was the bartender. She was the cook, and their son, Walter, who was in my grade, helped them out. Their house was next to the D'Angelos'. Both of their backyards faced the woods that belonged to the Bluebird mine. The Bluebird pit was back there with its mouth sewn shut. They'd closed it a long while before I was born, because of a slate fall. Most of its buildings had fallen down, but its toadholes were still there, and its coke ovens, and all of its old boney. Boney is the bones of the coal—ashes and spent coal. Bluebird had the tallest boney piles in Banning. Sometimes when the sun was going down behind them, they looked like small volcanoes ready to open up and take the sky apart.

  My mother hung her coat and hat in the closet. She said, "You shouldn't go out in that cold tomorrow. We have to be careful of your sensitive teeth."

  I didn't have sensitive teeth. When she wanted company, she'd keep me home from school, and after my dad left for work, we'd go to Brilliant and have lunch in the department store cafeteria, or we'd go to the movies. There were no restaurants or movie houses in Banning. We used to have all that when the mines were running, but the only working mine left by then was King, and people were always saying its days were numbered. The buildings were still there for the movie houses and the restaurants, but they were empty. We had a grocery store, and a drugstore where you could get magazines and cigarettes. We had the Croatian Club, and the big windy hall where the Slovenes held their dances. If you were after something else, though, you had to drive out on the snaking road lined with old coke ovens to Brilliant.

  I said, "These teeth are hurting me already," and closed my math book.

  My mother opened the newspaper to look for a movie. She said she'd been visiting with Rose D'Angelo across the way. She said, "Sometimes a person gets more than they signed up for." I didn't know if she meant Rose D'Angelo or herself, or if something in the newspaper had her thinking about how things were for people out in the world in general.

  Going to sleep, I thought about how the next day I'd be sinking into a movie seat while everyone else was at school. My father hadn't come home yet, the Markovics were still at the club, and Mr. D'Angelo's carport was empty. My father had been telling me, for as long as I could remember, that when he was away I was to take care of my mother. He smiled when he said it, and I think he meant it as a joke. The idea of me looking after another person must have struck him as funny. I could hardly take care of myself yet. But I always took it seriously, and nights like that, when it was just me and my mother and Mrs. D'Angelo home in our houses, I figured myself in charge of things.

  My father woke me up the next morning. He pulled aside the curtains and pointed out the window. "It's a damn handsome layer of snow, isn't it, Lucas?" He turned to look at himself in the mirror above my dresser. "I can't do a thing with my hair today," he said, smiling. He had wavy black hair that grew down to his collar and that he parted to the side. It often fell down in front of his eyes, though, like it was that morning. We had the same blue eyes, he and I; everyone said so.

  I got up and looked out the window. The snow rose up in a wave to cover our picnic table benches, and in another wave against the piece of fence that held our grapevines. It was falling still.

  "If you help me get the car out, I'll give you a ride to school," he said, and left the room without waiting for an answer.

  I put my school clothes on so he wouldn't be on to us. I went outside. Usually our snow was heavy and wet and turned to slush when it hit the ground. But that morning the flakes flew away from each other, stayed whole, were sharp to the touch. They stung my face and the bottoms of my ears sticking out of my hat.

  My dad and I were shoveling the drive when Mrs. D'Angelo came out of her house. Sometimes her light brown hair was twisted up on top, and sometimes it ran loose all the way down her back. That morning it was loose.

  She walked across the road toward our house leaning forward, pulling her bright green coat collar up to her face. She walked by like
she didn't notice us, even though we were making plenty of noise, and went into our house. My dad was singing one of his Croatian songs. Mrs. D'Angelo wouldn't have been able to understand him; she couldn't speak anything but English. When she came to the Croatian Club with us, I used to stay near her and change things from Croatian into English for her.

  My dad opened the garage and started up his car. He wanted to make sure he could get it out before he ate breakfast. While he was warming the engine, Mr. D'Angelo came across the road in his policing outfit, blue stripes on the sides of his pants. "Lucas," he said. "Seen Rose?"

  My father had been complaining lately about the way I looked away from people when they talked to me. He said it made me seem like I'd been raised by beasts in a dark forest. I forced myself to look at Mr. D'Angelo and concentrate. He had short red hair, and his cheeks and chin were always shaved clean, like he'd just taken a razor to them. He was harder to look at than most people because of the things people said about him. They said that down in West Virginia he carried a switch he'd made from the skin of a striker he'd drowned in a mine pond.

  I said, "She went into our house, Mr. D'Angelo."

  "What's she doing in there?"

  "Probably having a coffee. They like a coffee around now."

  He stared at me until I started feeling nervous with that answer. I said, "Pretty much everyone does."