by Summer Wood
Wrecker waited for his anger to ebb. Then he picked up the letter and read it through to the end.
When he finished, Wrecker sat in the only chair and let his head rest in his hands. He heard soft footsteps cross the deck before Willow appeared in the doorway, and he lifted his head to meet her gaze. She was thinner than he ever remembered seeing her. Her face was pale. She had dressed for town. “You came back,” Willow said.
Wrecker gestured to the letter. “You’re leaving.” It jumped out of his mouth like an accusation.
She crossed her arms loosely on her chest and leaned in the doorframe. “It’s time to go.” She gestured to the boxes. “I’ve hired someone to come get my things tomorrow.”
Wrecker looked away. Why now? he thought to ask, but he didn’t think he wanted to know the answer to that. “Where to?”
She gave a little twitch of her cheek. “Eureka, temporarily. I rented an apartment there. I have some things to take care of.” Wrecker glanced down and fingered the page, and she nodded. “I was out in the meadow,” she said, and smiled softly. “I saw you come inside.”
“Were you waiting for me to read this?”
Willow gave the slightest shrug. “Some things can’t be said.” She waited for him to lift his head and slowly added, “And some things have to be. I want you to know this, Wrecker. I thought Melody was making a mistake when she took you. I thought she would grow to regret it.” She hesitated. “I was wrong about her. I was wrong about you, too.”
Wrecker struggled to keep his face impassive.
“I’m hoping to be wrong about myself, as well.” She slowly rose and crossed the room. She turned at the door. “That photograph? I know you don’t want that. I’ve kept it for you for a long time. If you’d rather, I’ll hold it until you’re ready.” She watched his face. And then she nodded and she turned and left.
Wrecker gave her time to cross the meadow and make her way toward the road, and then he stood and stepped outside and gently pulled the door shut behind him. He looked out at the evening fog beginning to wisp its way in off the ocean, and it gave him the courage he needed to look down at the object in his hand. It was a small, square black-and-white photograph. The stamp on the back read “June 30, 1968,” and there were two people in it.
One of them was him.
Wrecker walked back to his cabin. It was lonely there. It was a boy’s room, and he didn’t feel like a boy any longer. He lifted the quilt with its sails and waves from his bed, felt its familiar heft, and folded it. He set it on top of his dresser. He looked at it there and then he picked it up and shoved it onto a high shelf, out of sight.
Ruth was in the farmhouse. She watched him warily as he dragged himself up the steps and into the kitchen. “So you heard?”
“Willow’s leaving.”
Ruth nodded her head. “I guess we all are.” Wrecker looked at her sharply. “Didn’t she tell you?”
“She told me a lot of things.”
“She didn’t say anything about the farm?”
“Like what, Ruth?”
“Oh, honey.” Ruth sighed and it sounded like the end of the world. “Without Willow’s half, Melody can’t afford to make the payment. She’s trying to find a way to keep the farm out of foreclosure.” She bit her lip. “She thought she might have to sell the place.”
Wrecker paled. He would need to borrow the truck, he said.
Melody was outside, sitting on the stone steps of the savings and loan. When she saw the truck she slowly stood up. He had come back. She waited quietly while he parked and crossed the street to approach her. He was taller than he had been the week before. He was more beautiful than she remembered. He was his own man. She had not ruined him. That she had managed that— “Well, look what the cat drug home,” she said wryly, and let her happiness spread across her face.
Wrecker reached into his back pocket for the check. He unfolded it and handed it to Melody.
She shook her head. “Six thousand dollars. Where did you get this?”
“Len kept it for me.”
She looked again at the check and slowly realized what he meant. “Your mother’s money,” she said softly. She folded it in half and passed it back to him. “That’s yours, son.”
“Deedee.” His face looked pained. “If the farm is in trouble, let me help. It’s my home.” He paused, and his voice lowered, took on a grudging tone. “And you’re my mother.”
Melody searched his face. “I know that,” she said quietly. “You think I don’t know that?”
“I know, but—”
“You think I don’t know that?” She reached up and patted his cheek. She grabbed him around the middle and fake-pummeled his ribs. “You think I don’t know that, bub?”
Wrecker’s face wrinkled like he’d suddenly been exposed to too bright a light. He gave a small, asymmetrical pant. “The farm?”
“The farm is ours.” Melody shrugged, and gestured to the building behind them. “God knows why, but they gave me the loan.” She took his arm. “Come on,” she said, dragging him into the street. “You drive. Let’s get home.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Dying felt to Ruth like a physical thing, a tickle in her throat or a ringing in her ears that she couldn’t locate precisely but that wouldn’t go away, either. It wasn’t painful. She was used to pain. Her whole body was going to hell, and it was taking the slow road, making time for scenic detours. Her joints ached, her ankles swelled, and once in a while her bottom leaked without prior notice. Her lungs made room for only half a portion of air with each breath. On some days, the worst days, even her sense of humor seemed under attack. Things weren’t as funny when you saw them through the lens of decrepitude. And once that was gone? What was the point? Better to lie down in the road and let the next speeding truck wonder what made the bump when it took the corner fast. She had given Bow Farm twenty years of her life, and that ought to be enough. Of course, they were bonus years. Twenty years she hadn’t expected to have. And Bow Farm had given her—
Well. It had given her Wrecker.
But the day was fast coming when he would leave, too. The boy was twenty years old—a man, almost—and the world beckoned. He was talking Alaska. He was tossing around the idea of a winter down near Jack, surfing the breaks at Redondo Beach. He had gotten a roof on his new house and was holding off on finishing the inside until he was ready to spring for materials. Wrecker had matured into a man’s body, solid as a stump, with a good mind and a growing command of his emotions. His judgment was ripening, he was capable beyond compare, he had a little money banked from working with Len and a motorcycle he loved with a passion. He rode the Ducati, Ruth could only hope, with more caution than he had the little Enduro that lay wrecked and rusting under a tarp behind the barn. Caution wasn’t his strong suit, Ruth knew, but he made up for it with quick reflexes and a modicum of luck, and she kept the prayers rolling. Once she crossed over, she’d be able to keep a closer eye on him. If it didn’t work that way, she’d be seriously pissed. She’d want to have a word with whoever had set things up.
It was a bittersweet thing, watching Wrecker launch; and it was painful, too, for Ruth, watching Melody seesaw between wanting it for him and dreading it at the same time. Melody was slowly getting the hang of letting go. She had more or less given him free rein to make his own choices, to live as he pleased. She’d never been much good at discipline, anyway. But the idea of him going? Being physically away? Melody couldn’t stand to think of it. She said stupid things and flapped her hands more when the topic came up, and then berated herself afterward for reacting that way. Wrecker took it all with a grain of salt. He was certain he’d be leaving, Ruth suspected, and he seemed to know Deedee would come around. Ruth had to marvel. There was a degree of trust there that looked more like grace than the result of any effort. Not that they hadn’t both had to try hard.
Melody was more sentimental than any of them, Ruth had come to realize. The summer before last, when Willow left, it cu
t a hole in Melody’s heart that still needed some mending. By the end of the first week there was no trace of Willow but the ruts the moving truck left in the soft dirt of the meadow and the piers and wood floor of the yurt. It was all of them at Bow Farm, and then a week later it was one less. Ruth was surprised to see how Melody pined for her. It had been some years since the two of them had exchanged much more than a civil word, but let Willow leave and all of a sudden the loss registered for Melody, a gaping hole that made her mope around and second guess every decision she made. A whole year passed, a year of no communication. And then Ruth made sure the phone rang while Melody was standing in the farmhouse, and it was Willow, just calling to say hello. As easy as that, they picked up where they had left off. The two of them spent the better part of an afternoon on the telephone, said things they’d never thought to before. Willow was living up near Seattle, Ruth already knew. She’d made contact with her sons and had begun spending regular time with them and their families. Her daughter worked for a high-powered law practice in New York and had let Willow visit once, but it hadn’t gone well. Willow wouldn’t give up trying, she told them. Her kids were everything to her. Ruth didn’t say much to that. Privately, she thought, ha. Everything. And Len?
But Willow was gone from Bow Farm for good, it seemed; and before long Wrecker would slide away into adulthood; and sometime in the not-too-distant future, Ruth knew, she’d be leaving, too. Checking out of this earthly hotel. The process had already started. She was being gently stalked, her attention drawn from the people and places she walked among toward the ones she’d been parted from, so many years before. She felt for Melody. It was a lot of good-byes for a girl who loved family. For all her oddity, Ruth thought, Melody was cut out for motherhood. She loved the bustle, loved living daily in the rough embrace of the people she adored and fought with. It would be hard for her to adjust to living alone.
For herself? Ruth thought: Any day. That buzz, that whisper—it had already begun. And that would be all right. Cremate her, strew her ashes at the beach, and she’d finish the work she’d started all those years ago.
But it wasn’t Ruth who went first. It was Meg.
It wasn’t as though they’d lacked warning. The doctors had expressed their concern. But Len had nursed Meg, and spoiled her, and bullied her into regaining her health. Already she’d outlasted their predictions by twelve good months, so what did the doctors know? Len let himself believe she’d beat the odds. Until the strokes began. Brief ischemic episodes, the doctors called them; unwelcome little visits from an invisible thief who robbed Meg of her meager speech and then stripped from her every shred of capacity and personality. It would be a blessing, Melody thought, if Meg were to pass quietly in her sleep. It seemed that way to Ruth, too, whose prayers asked for a merciful end, and to Wrecker, who didn’t think Len could stand much more.
And yet it came as a shock to them all, the morning Len ran through the woods and across the meadow to find Wrecker. He still had no phone, and the poor man had had to leave his wife’s body cooling in the bed and go for help. To Wrecker, to Ruth and Melody, it was a surprise, and mixed in their sadness was a measure of relief. But to Len, it was a travesty. It was a brutal error and a mark of failure. He had failed—but at what, he couldn’t tell them.
Len crossed again to the home he’d shared for all these years with Meg, and Wrecker gathered them together, Ruth and Melody, and shared the news and split the tasks. Melody took charge of the telephone, notifying neighbors and planning the ceremony. That done, she joined the others and together they moved Meg’s body to the lumber shed, covered her with a flowered sheet, and supported Len back to the cabin. He collapsed on his bed, comatose with grief. Ruth would stay with him, it was decided. Melody would attend to Meg’s body. Wrecker, who could neither console the living nor prepare the dead, offered to dig the hole for Meg to lie in.
“Out back by the edge of the woods,” Len whispered, and Wrecker nodded.
Ruth left Len for a moment and stepped outside with the others. She mopped her face with a handkerchief and blotted the sweat at the base of her neck. It was warm enough to fry an egg on the tin roof of Len’s lumber shed. She took Wrecker’s sleeve. Charlie Burrell had a backhoe he could use, she suggested.
“No,” Wrecker said. He stood tall and wouldn’t be swayed. “I’ll dig it myself.”
“Then dig fast,” Ruth said, and made sure he understood. It was August and Meg was in a hurry to rot. They would have to get her to ground before she liquefied like an old tomato. Wrecker nodded soberly and turned from them. At the edge of the porch he lifted a shovel and they watched him walk away, his shoulders broad and his tread heavy.
“I’ll send Jack to help when he gets here,” Melody called after him. “For all the use he’ll be,” she added, her voice low and ironic.
“Maybe he can make the time pass quicker,” Ruth murmured.
Wrecker turned once and flashed them a smile, and then passed out of sight.
Ruth patted Melody’s hand. “I’d better get inside. Do you know what you’re doing?”
“Figured I’d start with a washcloth and a bowl of warm water, and pray for inspiration.”
Ruthie smiled. “That should do it.” She turned toward the door. “Melody? Light some incense. Meg’s going to get ripe.”
“You did everything you could, Len,” Ruth said. She did not move far from his side for the long day and night and half a day again it took to prepare for Meg’s burial. It was the living who needed the vigil. The dead was lying on cleated planks in the lumber shed, washed by now, and oiled, and wrapped. A neighbor woman had arrived with skill and experience to share with Melody, and together they made sure that Meg would go out in style.
“I know,” Len answered, as he did each time. There wasn’t much more for either of them to say, but Ruth thought it was good to keep Len’s larynx from closing up from lack of use. She prodded him with this every hour or so when they were both awake. He didn’t cry. She suspected he didn’t know how to. Sometimes men lost the knack for it when they moved past boyhood and into the narrowed expectations of their later years. Or maybe Len was just cried out. The Meg he’d lived with for the past eighteen years was a sweet girl, and Ruth would miss her. But the Meg he’d married? She’d been long gone. That was the shame of it, Ruth thought. He’d spent all these years unable to mourn the loss of the woman he loved, and now that he was finally laying her to rest he had nothing but regret to grieve her with.
The goose? She knew how to cry. They let her grief speak for them all. She was an elderly bird and her voice wasn’t nearly as strong as it had been in her youth, but she’d been heartbroken by the loss and was determined to let the world know. She waddled around their frequent haunts, her plaintive honk echoing in the yard and threading through the saplings that had sprung up in Meg’s vegetable garden. Len didn’t think he could live with that, he said. It was the longest sentence he’d strung together since he’d woken to find Meg still beside him.
Len was vertical, now. He’d tired of lying in the bedroom, and now, the second day, they had moved together into the kitchen. Ruth was cutting banana slices into an enormous bowl of Jell-O while she boiled macaroni for a salad. She gazed at him with pity and irritation. “Wait and see if you change your mind,” she said. “We’ll take her if you still want.” She glanced out the window, and sighed. “All right, then. People coming,” she reported. She crossed to him and ran her fingertips along his temples to smooth his errant hair. “You’ll have to speak to them. Are you ready?”
All of Mattole, it seemed, assembled in Len’s yard to honor Meg. The neighbors came with their arms burdened with the food they’d cooked and the flowers they’d picked from their gardens, and they milled through the small cabin and mumbled whatever words they had to offer their sympathy. The women hugged Len and the men clapped him on the shoulder in shared sorrow. Len wasn’t an easy man to comfort, but he showed them his gratitude. He straightened his back and he received the
m with a somber grace. Late in the afternoon, after Meg had been laid to rest and the food had been eaten and the small talk had been made, they went home and said That poor man, and weren’t sure why.
Ruth kept looking around, but she never came.
Melody had thought that she would. She’d called Willow as soon as she heard the news and the two of them had spoken briefly, just long enough to relay the information and discuss arrangements before she got off the line to make the rest of the calls and go attend to Meg’s body. Willow had said she’d come down to say good-bye to Meg. She said she thought she would. She said she’d think about it and either she’d come or she’d call to say she wouldn’t make it. Ruth frowned. She pinned Melody with a stern gaze and made her promise not to say anything to Len. If she comes, she comes, Ruth said. It wasn’t right to get his hopes up.
So many people did come, finally, that they almost forgot about Willow. Even DF Al showed up, looking older and more handsome after a three-year stint building water systems in Nepal. There’d been a few men in the ten years since Al went on his footloose way, Ruth knew, but she could tell Melody couldn’t escape the feeling it gave her to see him again. He left often but he couldn’t seem to get completely free of the Mattole. Once in a while, Melody had confessed to Ruth, she wondered what it would be like if he changed his mind and gave in to its pull in a permanent way. She might get tired of him, then, she thought. Better they spread things out.
When the time came to bury Meg, the men gathered in the lumber shed and gravely and graciously negotiated their positions. Wrecker and Jack and DF Al and Charlie Burrell’s son Charlie Jr., who’d turned out all right after all, each took hold of a handle. They carried the cleated plank with Meg’s body slowly through the yard, leading a procession of mourners, and wound their way to the edge of the woods. Len walked alongside, his body held as straight as he could muster, which wasn’t very straight at all. When they reached the graveside, the men lowered their burden to the ground.