by Hadley Dyer
“Actually, Christina invited us to her cottage for the weekend.”
The french fry felt like it was lodged in my throat. “Lisa doesn’t like the outdoors touching her.”
“Nat doesn’t even want air touching her. But I guess we’re going.”
I swallowed hard and peeked again at the Elevens’ table. Christina was sitting with Joshua in the middle; Lisa was barely hanging on to the edge. This wasn’t exactly her dream of the perfect senior year, and it opened that tiny chamber in my walnut heart where everything small and mean lived. Maybe if she’d been less eager to be done with me, we could have made up by now and she would be having the birthday she really wanted. Indoors, unwrapping the vintage Broadway poster I’d picked out of a catalog for her back in June.
“I have to work anyway,” I said. “Stop feeling sorry for me.”
Bill was giving me the puppy head tilt. “Doug said there’s going to be a huge shack party out at the Scotch Shore. You should go. You’ll have way more fun than us.”
“We’ll see.”
“You know, the rules state . . .” Bill opened his biology binder, pretending to read. “She who asks first gets priority, but, uh, that should not stop anyone else from taking her nineteen-year-old-looking self into a liquor store to buy the person, uh, herewith and henceforth, some birthday booze. . . .”
“I’m sorry, I think you just accidentally asked me to buy you alcohol for a party I’m not invited to.”
He shoveled a handful of fries into his gob, chewing them with his mouth as wide open as possible.
“Buddy, why don’t you ask . . .” I was about to say Doug, then remembered the old bottle of moonshine at the back of my bedroom closet. Was it still good, like Rupert said it would be? Or I could do a trade with Doug for something less science-projecty. After all, that guy across the table—the charmer with the mouthful of masticated potato that he was letting ooze onto his mock turtleneck—had chosen us over Tracy, and since “us” still included me, it wouldn’t hurt to do him a favor.
Like a wee karmic bounce for my good intentions, a postcard from Sid was waiting for me when I got home from the Grunt. It had a photo of a hang-in-there kitty swinging from a tree with a penis drawn on its fluffy white front. On the back of the card he’d scrawled:
Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment.
—Michael Corleone, The Godfather Part III
Unless your enemies are cows.
—Sid Abbott, This Card
PS: Not that I’m taking sides
I dumped wet, heavy leaves out of Rupert’s old wheelbarrow onto the compost pile. My back was aching, and I’d had a minor cardiac event when some variety of rodent had dashed out of the leaves and over my feet. I could handle that in the outdoors, but inside the old house I sometimes still got the heebie-jeebies. One evening I reached under the kitchen sink to grab what I thought was a scouring pad, and a mouse carcass disintegrated in my bare hand.
It had quickly become obvious why Rupert had let things get so bad. For all his talk about wanting to go out of this world swiftly, he seemed awfully afraid of overexerting himself. But he kept busy, always had a little project to work on. While I raked, he sat on the side veranda, taking apart an old radio and watching Shaggy root around in the temporary pen that Francis had set up for him. The earth he’d turn up would become a vegetable garden next year.
“Someone’s going to need a bath tonight,” Rupert said.
“How does that work exactly?” I asked. “One of you holds him and other hoses him off?”
“Hose?” Rupert put down his magnifying glass. “Girl, the hose water’s far too cold, far too cold. No, we do him in the house.”
“You mean in the tub?”
“Sure, in the tub. Where else are you going to take a bath?”
“How do you get him in and out?”
“He steps in, and he steps out. You have to put towels down because he’s feeling uncertain on his feet these days and he gets nervous stepping on the wet tile. Mostly psychological. He’s still spry.”
Shaggy was at that moment sinking to his knees before thudding heavily onto his side and sighing. Nap time. I sat in the grass beside him, reaching into the pen to stroke the bristly fur along his back. “You remind me of my friend Bill,” I whispered.
He farted appreciatively.
“Rupert, what did you put in that moonshine?” I asked.
“You try it?”
“Not yet. I was wondering how you made it.”
“Well, you got to have a still. Matter fact, my still’s still down in the basement, in the cold room. The Constable thinks I’ve lost the key. Suppose we should clear it out before he finds out otherwise.”
Did I care what the Constable would make of the idea that was beginning to take shape? What I could do with a working still? No, I did not. He had been such a prick at dinner that I’d gone back to dodging him again. Every time I found one of his soggy herbal tea bags sitting on the edge of the sink, collapsed into itself like a miniature, moss-scented Jabba the Hutt, I thought again of how he’d baited me. You must be a wellspring of flawless decision making. It hardly made sense, the way he put it. Besides, that was why he’d come here, wasn’t it? To live out a romantic fantasy about living among country people, soaking up their folksy wisdom? Then he got right pissy, as my crazy uncle Burpie would put it, when people turned out to be just like themselves.
“Why don’t we go have a look at it?” I said to Rupert.
It took us two hours to locate the key to the cold room that Rupert insisted he hadn’t lost, eventually finding it in a trunk in his room where he stored old bedding along with some expired lottery tickets worth about twenty bucks, three silver dollars, and a ballpoint pen. “Burying things seems to be your thing,” I said. “What’s with the pen?”
“Must have accidentally set it down when I put away something else,” he said, tucking it into his plastic pocket protector. “Lord knows what we’ll find with all them bodies I buried in the cold room.”
There wasn’t much to a still, as it turns out. A dusty old electric stove, a bucket, a pot, copper tubing, other odds and ends. “Now, that bottle you found, that was grain alcohol,” Rupert said. “But when I was your age, we used to make what they call sugar shine. Cheap as dirt. Cook up some sugar, dump it into a fermenter, add yeast, let it sit.”
“That’s it?”
“More or less. My buddy Len used to add a good shake of grape cough syrup. For flavor, see.”
“What about real fruit?” I asked, and he pondered this seriously. “Not that we’ll ever find out.”
“Oh, come on, girl. Not with the two of us living with the law.”
“Though you could say there’s an educational component. Like, the idea about the fruit, that’s a hypothesis we could test out.”
“And it’s not like we’re selling it. That’s when they throw the book at you.” Rupert gave me an impish smile. “I knew you were going to be the good kind of trouble,” he said.
We went to three different grocery stores, in three different towns, to pick up the ingredients and glass jars with lids. We didn’t exactly look like criminals—in the car I noticed Rupert was wearing mismatched shoes—but he insisted that there were too many people around with long memories, and wouldn’t get out of Abe when I bought the yeast.
Once we’d scrubbed down the equipment and finished the initial cook, we had to let the mash ferment down in the basement for a couple of weeks. After that, we finished it off and pulled everything together in the jars, some with peaches on the bottom, some with apples, and dashes of cinnamon and nutmeg. They were so pretty, it was a shame I couldn’t show my mother.
“It’s yours,” Rupert said. “Do what you want with it; just don’t let the Constable find out. I never thought a little booze did a kid harm.”
I reserved a couple of jars that I hid behind the antique plates at the back of Rupert’s old hutch and gave a couple more to Bill. “May you always overcompensate for
being a cop’s daughter,” he said, holding the jar of apple shine up to the light. Then he actually hugged me.
The rest I brought to my fellow delinquents at what became an epic shack party on Lisa’s birthday weekend. I got into the finals of a new drinking game Doug invented called Shot Shot Chug, danced my tail off, had a brief make-out session with Skateboarder Brad, and everyone’s vomit smelled like granny-baked pies.
I might have been on my own island, but at least I could swim.
Seventeen
I greeted Rupert in the kitchen with a pair of plaid slippers that had a rubber tread. “Gee, I could wear them outdoors,” he said. “They’re sturdy enough.”
That’s basically what Bill had said when I’d given him his pair, which he’d been wearing at school with less and less irony every day that week.
“Yes, but you won’t because this is how we’re keeping the floors clean.”
“The Constable, he goes out one door, and the Corporal, she comes in the other.”
“Corporal outranks constable, so you’d better listen to her,” Francis said, padding into the kitchen. He set his mug on the edge of the sink, taking out the tea bag and plopping it down beside it.
My back teeth clamped together.
I’d walked from the lighthouse after picking up my paycheck, coming in from the side veranda, and hadn’t seen his car in the drive. He’d started a new shift schedule, something like five days on, three nights on, three days off. I must have miscalculated.
“Thought you’d be at work,” I said.
“Off today. Can I stick around?”
“Yes.”
“Say that again?”
“Yes . . .”
“No, the first time you—”
“Yep. Yup. Yeah. Yay?”
“There’s an Elizabeth Bishop poem where she describes the way people around here say yes as they breathe in. It’s supposed to mean something like, Yes, life’s like that. Also death.”
I’d never heard myself say yes like Francis was describing, but it brought to mind Nat’s sighs, what she could say with an exhale.
That’s nice.
That sucks.
He’s so dreamy.
You’re so right.
If you say so.
Why don’t you kill me?
Seriously, just kill me.
“We’re all about the subtext,” I said, and gave an inner high five to Miss Aker for teaching me to use that word in a conversation.
“You’ll stay anyway, won’t you, kid?” Rupert asked.
There were about a million other things I’d rather have been doing, and from the way Francis was looking at me, I could tell that he could tell. “Up to you,” he said. “Lots to do, whether I’m around or not.”
I forced a smile. “Rupert, you got the fish and blueberries out of the deep freeze?” He nodded. “Should be enough for one more,” I said to Francis.
“No, thanks. I don’t like fish.”
I made a deep pot of blueberry grunt for Rupert, sploshing plain flour dumplings into the hot cauldron of sweet berries. After years of watching Mum, it was like whistling an old song, and soon I was doing just that, with Rupert nodding in time to the old Celtic tunes.
As I made the sweet stew, I stewed about Francis, who was in the living room, sewing new buttons onto a jacket. Had I seen a guy sew before? My own coat had a button that had been hanging from its last thread for weeks. I’d also never heard someone refuse to eat because they didn’t like it. My parents used to make us eat disgusting foods a few times a year—sauerkraut, liver, the chewy seaweed dulse—Dad because it was “character building,” and Mum because she was terrified we’d turn up our noses at a meal at someone else’s house. If we’d ever done that in front of her, she would have excused us from the table and tearfully wrung our necks.
I moved on to “Something in the Way” from Nevermind, which I’d discovered in the cassette deck that Francis had tucked next to Rupert’s old record player. Rupert began to sing: “It’s okay to eat fish / Cuz they don’t have any feelings. . . .”
He caught my eye. “I take in more than people think,” he said.
Since we were on the subject of fish and had been on the subject of Elizabeth Bishop and possibly because I thought Francis might be listening, I griped to Rupert that Miss Aker had assigned us the poem “The Fish” for homework and I thought it was cheesy. Francis dropped everything, literally, ran upstairs for his collection of Elizabeth Bishop poems and thumped it on the kitchen table. “Cheesy,” he said. “Cheesy.”
The poem, if you haven’t had the pleasure, is about this woman—or this person, I don’t remember if it’s a woman—who catches a huge fish. As it’s flopping around she sees that it’s got fishing lines in its mouth from tearing itself free in the past, like ribbons hanging down from war medals. Relics of former battles. But she’s caught the fish, and this could be the end of the line for it, so to speak. Except . . .
“She lets the fish go,” I explained to Rupert. “I know she comes to appreciate it, to see it differently and all that, but . . . she lets it go.”
“Sounds like you’re not big on a happy ending,” Rupert said, “and Mick here is.”
“She said cheesy, not happy.”
“Cheesy because it was the obvious thing to do,” I said. “It’s like, why does every romantic comedy end with someone running through the rain to tell someone they love them? Why can’t, for once, people just shake hands and wish each other well?”
“So it would have been better if Bishop had defied expectations?”
“It would have been more interesting. Nervier.”
“But maybe she chose that ending in spite of the fact that it seemed like the obvious choice.”
“How’s a person supposed to know that?”
“Does anyone read a poem without asking themselves what it means? It’s poetry, not reportage. There’s subtext.”
“It’s sentimental, Francis.”
“Yeah, it is, Frances. That’s what makes it brave.”
The rally over, I became aware of how long I’d been looking into Francis’s absurdly blue eyes. I didn’t want to be the first to look away, was determined not to flinch—until Francis grinned. “Why don’t you give it another chance?” he said.
I read the poem again. Near the end, she describes how she “stared and stared” at the fish, this veteran of at least five previous battles, and begins to understand the size of her victory as a pool of oil spreads a rainbow around the engine that soon encircles the entire boat—
—until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
“Well, maybe,” I said. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
I read the lines again, nodding. The important part seemed to be before she let it go.
Rupert squinted at the book. He couldn’t read much without his magnifying glass and we hadn’t yet made the daily rediscovery of it. “So no one eats this fish?”
I escaped with Shaggy to the soft-floored tack room of the barn. It was steeped in the deep scent of old wood and hay and the earth itself behind a stone wall sculpted around the hill slope that intruded inside. A few dusty bridles still hung from nails. Miscellaneous trash had gathered in corners—piles of yellowed newspapers, empty pop bottles, paint cans, rusted tools. I reached for a silver lozenge tin overflowing with ancient cigarette butts, meaning to dump it into the garbage bag I’d brought with me, but then thought better of it. It was like a still-life painting, a picture of Rupert before he had his heart attack and gave up smoking, before he started leaving his magnifying glass in the fridge or on the side of the tub and in other improbable places. I could almost see him leaning against the corner of the stable, cigarette dangling from his lip, in his baggy jeans and suspenders and a soft flannel shirt with its plastic pocket protector, which always held two pens.
Shaggy announced Francis’s arrival with a loud squeal. He could be like a dog som
etimes, as excited to greet you after you’ve come back from the bathroom as he would be if you’d returned from months at sea.
Francis scratched him between the ears then took a ten-dollar bill from his back pocket and handed it over. “Rupert can afford to buy his own slippers. Believe me, I’ve helped him with his banking. But you know this is a guy who lived through two world wars and the Depression.”
“My mum’s like that too. Frugal for life.”
“You’re his biggest extravagance. His only extravagance. He knows he needs you if this whole staying-at-home thing is going to work.”
“Can I ask you something? Why me? Why not post an ad for a housekeeper?”
“He wanted you. Just you. Said he could tell that you’re a real firecracker and a great defender of pigs.”
The mention of firecrackers silenced us both. I remembered again the weight of Francis on me, my shoulder blades pressing into the cool mud as colors rained down from the black sky.
“Hyperbole, but I’ll take it,” I said.
“I don’t think . . .” He hesitated.
“Does hyperbole not mean what I think it means?”
“No, you’re right. But it might be pronounced hi-PER-bolee.”
I’d said hyperbowl.
I wasn’t a blusher. Lisa couldn’t answer a question in class without red blotches appearing on her neck, and when she was truly mortified, she looked like someone had been hanging her by the ankles. Not me, sayer of anything, if not everything. As it turns out, not always correctly. I could feel the fire creeping from my collarbone to my cheeks. What evolutionary purpose could this be serving, announcing to the world that a person knows she’s humiliated herself?
“Sorry, that’s a dick move,” he said, “correcting someone’s pronunciation. I never know whether it’s worse to let people keep saying things wrong, or—”
“No, no, it’s fine. Fine. Whew, I don’t feel very well.” I rubbed the back of my burning neck, fooling no one, not even Shaggy, who was staring up at me with profound pity. “I’m gonna splash some water on my face.”
I was seething at the hose by the side of the barn. Not at Francis, at myself. God, I must have sounded like Mum. Was verbal dyslexia hereditary? I’d always had a problem with laborious—though it should be layborus—and ethereal, a frothy white dress of a word that my mouth was determined to turn into ereethral, which sounds like the end of an angel’s urinary tract. Worse than my fumble: the pathetic attempt to pretend that I wasn’t embarrassed when I so clearly was and should be.