“Just think of it!” Caroline said, gripping the wheel as if to shake it. “The two of them together, sleeping and eating together, year in and year out, getting to loathe each other, none of it for the better, all of it for the worse—”
Sharon cried out, “Do you hear what you are saying?”
“They see it better than we do!” Caroline replied, but that was not Sharon’s complaint. She was thinking of Cora, not the bug-eyed children, all ears, at her back. It seemed so obvious that Cora would hear, wherever she was, a voice as loud and brash as Caroline’s. At a turn of the road the wind blew hotly into her face. If she kept her eyes closed, would it all fade away—what she had managed to face, and what she had preferred not to? Hearing grass sweep the bottom of the car, she opened her eyes. Caroline had driven off the road into a shallow ditch of high yellow weeds. Grasshoppers leaped to fall with a metallic click on the hood and the windshield. She remembered how Madge—Sharon had lacked the nerve—would hold the creatures firmly between her fingers and watch them spit “tobacco juice” like Emerson. The hardness of their bodies repelled Sharon. She would run screaming if they touched her. The sight of a sand viper wriggling through the grass would drain her face of blood, leave her speechless. Madge would take her by the arms and shake her. How explain such squeamishness in a country-born child?
Beyond the tall weeds that edged the road, tree stumps torn out by their roots were heaped at the center of a clearing. The deep pits left in the earth had not been filled. It brought to her mind the craters left by bombs. To the rear, almost the color of fire, ripe grain concealed the horizon, and far, far back, the blades of a harvester caught the light. Why had they stopped?
Matter-of-factly, Caroline said, “That’s what’s left.” Sharon continued to gaze with light-creased eyes, a buzzing in her head. Even as she turned to look at Caroline she understood. This pitted field of the stumps of dead trees was all that was left of Cora’s farm. All that was left of the trees, planted by Orion and Emerson, that had led all the way to the pasture, where Sharon and Madge, bringing in the cows, ran like the wind to keep from stepping on something. “Nobody wanted it,” said Caroline. “There was nothing worth saving. When they get the stumps burned, Bryan’ll plant it in soybeans. See there?” Sharon looked to where she pointed. A mixed patch of weeds, grain, and tall corn, including several hollyhocks, formed a small island. “That’s where the barns sat, and the manure.”
Sharon continued to stare, her tongue between her dry lips, pondering the imponderable. Into thin air. How did one measure air?
“I told Madge you could drive right by and not miss it.” Did she feel any loss? Was it the emptiness that evoked the presence of Cora? Not her image, not her person, but the great alarming silence of her nature, the void behind her luminous eyes. It had frightened Sharon. Had she sensed a similar hollow in her own being? Cora Atkins had been for silence, and she would not have countenanced impertinent questions. When she felt the deep silence of her soul threatened she had struck out with her hairbrush. All those unanswered questions were now asked of Sharon.
The car moved away slowly, crunching the gravel. A machine, almost as large as a house, came slowly toward them through a field of grain. Blades wheeled as if it might fly. It cut a swath through the field that left nothing but stubble. A dark pane of tinted glass concealed the driver, if it had one. Such a monster need only keep moving to level houses, barns, trees, anything in its path.
“Poor Cora!” Sharon blurted.
“I’ll never forgive her,” said Caroline. “Never.”
“Caroline!” Sharon cried. She almost barked it, but her eagerness to hear more shamed her.
“She never complained. An animal would have complained. She would still be in all that rubble if they hadn’t moved her.”
A hand to her eyes, Sharon felt her head was splitting. The air trapped about her face smelled of flint.
“At least I can complain,” Caroline said. “She couldn’t.”
With an effort, Sharon said, “She could have, Caroline, but she simply wouldn’t.”
“Could or wouldn’t, she didn’t,” said Caroline, “and now she’s dead.”
Once at the edge of town, within sight of the open fields, Ned and Madge Kibbee’s house now backed up to an alley of commercial buildings that faced another street. Sharon would not have recognized it. The clapboards had been covered with green asbestos shingles to the height of the windows. A glassed-in porch the width of the house, with a metal awning to shade the doorway, had been added to the rear. In the side yard the stump of a tree was mounted with a teeter-totter. A larger and newer house loomed on the west, the shades drawn at the upper windows. The whine of a power machine, in a shop on the alley, rose to a siren pitch, then subsided.
“Daddy’s retired,” said Caroline, “but don’t bring it up.” She removed a bag of groceries from the car, then walked ahead of Sharon to the rear flight of steps. A pair of men’s shoes, caked with grime and sawdust, sat left of the stoop. “Mom’s probably in her bedroom, where it’s cooler,” Caroline said, but Madge was not in her bedroom. She heaved up from a couch covered with a sheet, and steadied herself by gripping the back of a chair. A summer-type frock, with a bright luau pattern, covered her like a hastily wrapped parcel. In her broad fleshy face the features had diminished, the eyes receded. A tremor was visible in the lenses of her glasses. As Sharon approached, she saw that Madge’s eyes brimmed with tears.
“Why, she’s pretty as ever!” Madge said to Caroline, her voice so firm it startled Sharon.
“I’m an old lady,” Sharon replied.
“But you’re a little old lady!” Her shoulders heaved. She might have been sobbing. She drew her hand from the back of the chair to cover her eyes. This show of emotion was relieved by Caroline.
“Where’s Daddy?” she asked.
“He’s napping. When it’s so hot he don’t sleep at night.” A shadow stretched on the floor between them. Madge said, “Blanche, this is your Aunt Sharon. Sharon, you remember Blanche?”
Blanche stood framed in the kitchen doorway, the light outlining her wraith-like figure. Seeing Sharon, she crossed her arms so that her hands gripped her shoulders. In shyness a child might have done that, hugging herself in embarrassment. The light glowed in her thinning hair, outlining her skull.
“Of course I remember Blanche,” Sharon said firmly. Owl-eyed, mute, she returned Sharon’s gaze. What appeared to be jewels proved to be suds drying on her fingers. Unmistakably, she had Cora’s lustrous eyes.
“She’d like to freshen up,” said Madge. “Blanche, you get her a clean towel. She can lie down in your room if she wants to.” She reached to touch Sharon’s arm, gently. “You go along now. It’s an hour before Bryan and Eileen get here. Fayrene and her girls will talk you silly. You better rest up.”
Sharon followed the mute Blanche into and out of the kitchen, where pots steamed, through the dining room, blocked by the table and chairs, a card table stacked with silver, cups and saucers. From a room at the front, moving so quickly it seemed furtive, a figure slipped past them into the kitchen. Blanche gave no sign that she had seen it. Behind them, from the porch, Madge cried, “Ned, did you see her? Why, she’s pretty as ever!” Did he reply? Sharon heard nothing. Blanche had preceded her into a bathroom, with room for little more than one person. She took both soiled towels from the rack with a quick, practiced gesture. A clean towel, thin as the curtain at the window, she placed on the rim of the washbowl. On the sill of the window there were bottles containing seeds, leaves, and creatures feeding on them.
“Thank you,” Sharon said.
Blanche replied, “You’re welcome,” as if Sharon had thanked her for cleaning the erasers. Flies hovered in the dim light of the hall, making no noise. Blanche went ahead of her into the room at the front, where she puffed up the pillow, drew the blind at the window. Again Sharon said, “Thank you.” Again she replied, “You’re welcome.” She left the room with her eyes averted,
not glancing back.
No one, of course, had written Sharon to say that Ned Kibbee had not prospered. They would never say failed, but they might acknowledge he hadn’t prospered. The assured and capable young man Madge had married, a builder of houses, would never grow to be the silent, stooped old man who had slithered past her, furtive as a rabbit. What had happened? Sharon turned on her side, lifting a corner of the blind, as if she might see. Down the street, where the trees thinned, were new houses. Here and there sprinklers were running. New cars were parked along the curbs. A TV flickered on a screened-in porch. Lying back, Sharon gazed at the wall at the foot of her bed. Heat-drugged flies hovered near the light cord. In the blind-filtered light she could dimly see figures on the faded wallpaper, drawn with thin white lines, as on a blueprint. The pattern was flat, without perspective, but objects in the foreground were larger. In the wall of a house the windows were unevenly spaced. The door appeared to be centered, but lacked steps to reach the ground. Much smaller in size was a barn, with the door open to the hayloft. A small figure sat there. Trees, like stalks of celery, thrust up to one side. To the right of the house a stick-thin figure, wearing a stocking cap, held a pail. Of her stay with Sharon Rose, of Briarcliffe, of Chicago, an exotic-looking bird, with a dishevelled topknot, was perched on one of the leaf fronds in the wallpaper. The eyes were open, and bright as hatpins. The wall was streaked with color smears and erasures.
It calmed Sharon to lie quiet on the bed, puzzling it out. Its outline so pale Sharon had overlooked it, a mailbox, on a post, was propped up in a milk can. This object startled her. She had always found it too high to reach. Orion would sometimes lift her from the ground and hold her while she pulled down the lid and peered in. There was seldom mail, but often newspapers and circulars. Orion would then lower her to the ground and she would run with the mail to Cora. But she had lost interest when she could do all this by herself.
Once she had a beau Madge was always the first to look for the mail. When Lillian wrote to Sharon, Madge would bring her the letter, then wait for the stamp. Sharon was very much concerned what Ned wrote to Madge, but all Madge seemed concerned about were the stamps. Sharon did not understand her. Didn’t she see what was happening? In many of her letters Lillian would enclose a small gift, perhaps a handkerchief from Marshall Field & Co. in Chicago, which Madge cared nothing about, but Sharon could sense that it troubled Cora. If it had not been for Lillian, what might her life have been like? She fell into a reverie, both pleasurable and troubling, involving the child-like drawings on the wall and the complexity of her emotions. Were the drawings recent? An effort to recover what had disappeared? On the front side of the house, with its oddly spaced windows, was a door that lacked steps down to the yard. As a child, barely able to walk, Sharon had fallen from the sill into matted grass, and from that moment, to her knowledge, the screen had been kept latched. The door itself stood open to air out the house, but was never used to enter or exit. Drawn in, then erased from the scene, was a tree that had died after Fayrene’s marriage. Had it posed a problem? Did it belong among those things that were beyond recovery?
At the door a voice said, “Aunt Sharon, you awake?”
She considered a moment, but remained silent. The voice did not return. Later she pushed up, as if she might cry out, to see a ghostly figure in the bureau mirror, the hair disheveled, one side of the face wind-burned, putting her in mind of a piece of iron-scorched lace. Then she slept. Not till evening, hearing the clatter of dishes, did she wake up.
Three leaves had been added to the dining room table to accommodate the grownups. The children, Crystal, Carl, and Ardene, sat at a card table between the folding doors. As at her first meeting with Avery Dickel, Sharon faced him across the table, a hulking, graying man who sat waiting for his food, gripping his knife and fork. The gross features, so loutish in a youth, were almost handsome in the ripened man, but a snow of dandruff sprinkled the lapels of his coat. Did he remember her rudeness? He had stooped to scoop up the cat Moses, mewing for food, to curl back the lips and scrape the tartar from its yellow teeth with his thumbnail. The mere memory of it caused her to shudder. Was that one more of the many things she preferred not to face? Caroline sat on his right, and her glance suggested that in one form or another she had heard the story, and that in her opinion animals were better judges of character than some people. Eileen, seated on Avery’s left, had a touch of red in her hair and the freckles believed to be from Avery’s side of the family. She sat erect, her figure spare as Cora’s, her lips firm over teeth that needed adjusting. At her side, Bryan tilted back on his chair to keep his gaze on the light at the window. His left arm rested on the back of Eileen’s chair, his finger toying with the collar of her blouse. She gave no sign that this pleased or displeased her.
Maureen Dickel, almost as tall as her father, sat slouched on the piano stool at Sharon’s left. She had Avery’s hands and large-boned wrists, around which she absently twisted her napkin. To put her more at ease, Sharon asked her what she planned to do. In a reply so casual Sharon was hardly attentive, Maureen said that whatever she did she planned to live life to the full. It left Sharon too surprised to ask what the fullness of this life might include. In a shrill voice, Crystal, who had heard Sharon’s question, shrieked that Maureen worked for Dr. Lewin, and they all went to her to have their teeth cleaned.
“Shut your trap,” Maureen replied.
“If there’s not employment here, there is in O’Neill or Sydney,” said Madge.
“There is if you’re a woman,” said Ned. These were the first words he had spoken, but Sharon sensed that they had heard them many times.
Avery raised his head as if he would speak, but seeing Sharon, he thought better of it. Time had not altered his open-mouthed, unconscious gaze. Caroline said that those who were willing to work no longer had to go somewhere else to do it, if they had a trade. Eileen said that farmers didn’t lack for work, if it was farming, but the way things were going, not many could afford to. It cost Bryan four hundred dollars more a month to farm than the farm paid. They had heard that before too, but they knew that Sharon hadn’t, and allowed time for it to sink in.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” she replied.
Bryan tilted forward to rest his arms on the table. He raised a fork to wag it in Sharon’s direction. “There’s nothing much to understand, ma’am,” he said. “It costs me four dollars a bushel to grow wheat they sell to the Russians for a dollar thirty.”
Eileen said, “Which was why Bryan switched to soybeans.”
“But I’m still losing money. I’ve got farm machinery that cost me double what we paid for the house.”
Caroline said he couldn’t blame on the Russians what was the fault of the commodities market.
Shit on the commodities market, he replied. They sat silent, as if waiting for grace. “The thing I liked about Vietnam,” Bryan said, “was that over there at least I knew who to shoot at. Now that I’m back here I’m no longer so sure who the enemy is.”
Was it their custom to ignore him? Blanche came from the kitchen with a basket of rolls, a plate of celery, radishes, and olives. Bryan was the first to help himself to the olives. Blanche said, “Fayrene, you want to see that Sharon gets some of the pickle relish. It’s part of Cora’s last batch.”
The glass extended toward Sharon, its peeling paper label bearing the words “P. Relish” in Cora’s crabbed hand, was of a watery blue color and had originally been used for jelly. These glasses had been stored at the back of the storm cave, and once required both of Sharon’s small hands to lift one. The back side of the seal of wax had a syrup of jelly she was allowed to lick off. To no avail, Cora tirelessly cautioned Emerson not to spoon jelly with the spoon he had just licked off. “I’m going to lick it off later,” he would reply, as if that settled the matter.
“Just smell it!” said Fayrene, the one thing Sharon was reluctant to do. The acrid smell of the relish prepared in Cora’s steaming kitchen had of
ten pursed Sharon’s lips like the taste of lemon. Fayrene used a fork to serve her a portion, but Sharon was reluctant to taste it. The words “blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh” came to her lips as if spoken.
Madge said, “I don’t know what I’d do without Blanche,” as Blanche stooped to serve Ned some peas in a cream sauce.
Ned said, “I like canned peas better than fresh ones, always did.”
The smear of flour on Blanche’s cheek was less white than her flawless complexion. Was she never in the sun? Madge brushed the flour from her cheek with a flick of her napkin. Behind her closed lips she nibbled on something, but her mind (her mind?) was elsewhere. She did not feel the focus of Sharon’s gaze. The plate of celery and olives that Avery was hoarding she took from him to extend toward Sharon. In the exchange of glances Sharon remarked only the long twisted lashes.
Fayrene excused herself to rise from the table and fasten napkins to the fronts of the children. The men settled down to eating, their heads lowered over their plates. Sharon had been hungry when she sat down, but the oven fumes on the draft from the kitchen, the sight of mouths chewing, the platter of fried chicken with the side bowl of pan gravy, made her slightly nauseous. The disturbance was physical, one of displacement, with objects and persons in the wrong places, at the wrong time. She was asked by Maureen if she liked to fly, which did not help. Her face filmed with perspiration, chewing slowly, Madge sat in a digestive reverie, her eyes upward, scanning the ceiling. She flicked her napkin at flies that settled on the food. Blanche kept their glasses full of iced tea, and Fayrene helped her clear the dishes from the table. Homemade strawberry ice cream, hand cranked by Ned (the only thing not the same being the frozen strawberries), was served from a bowl that cooled Sharon like a cake of ice as she held it. Avery scooped the ice cream to his mouth, chewed and swallowed it like mashed potatoes. Ned said, “You know how you know when it’s real ice cream? It hurts your teeth.” There was a murmur of assent, but Madge shook her head. Time was allowed for the cream she had in her mouth to melt. “You know it’s real ice cream,” she said, “when it waxes the roof of your mouth.”
Plains Song Page 17