HardScape

by Justin Scott

  “You know, I could run out and get Mom and bring her to your house.”

  “Drive,” she said.

  I drove.

  Just as Connie had always regarded my father as the son she never had, my mother was in some similar way the daughter. But whereas Dad made the perfect son in all his proper splendor, my mother was a Frenchtown girl. As much as she loved Connie, she could never feel comfortable in her presence. Typically, when we arrived at the farm, Mom was fluttering up the walls of her dining room, convinced that something must be wrong with the table setting. Bear in mind she was seventy-five herself, but this morning she was the eighteen-year-old that Bertram Abbott had brought home to a stunned Main Street. She was so distracted that she forgot to worry about me and kind of brushed my cheek hello as if I had just seen her for breakfast a couple of hours ago.

  Connie, who had her blind sides, said, “Oh, let’s eat in the kitchen. Dining rooms are so gloomy in the daylight.”

  I saw my mother start to die and intervened.

  “Let’s eat here. The table’s set.” My mother had probably set it the night before, reset it in the morning, and fiddled with it again as we came in the drive.

  “Mom, can I help carry?” I asked as she headed for the kitchen.

  “No, you talk to your Aunt Connie. I’ll be all right.”

  “He already bored me in the car,” said Connie. “Come sit with me, Margot. Let Ben serve.”

  It worked. My mother gambled that I was capable of shifting her chicken pot pie and salad to the dining room without dropping it and conjured a similar leap of faith regarding the lemonade pitcher and bread basket.

  After lunch Connie sat with her in the kitchen while she washed up and I went out and wheelbarrowed some firewood from the shed to the kitchen porch. There was a nip in the air and no question fall was descending on Frenchtown, which was always colder than Newbury. Sometimes I wondered why my mother came back out here, and sometimes I had the feeling it was for reasons I hadn’t guessed. But on a fall afternoon, there is no place like it. One woman’s dank swamp is definitely another’s teeming marsh. The water draws the migrating birds. The sumac and red maple that thrive on moisture turn red early. The air is thick, damp, and full of life.

  My mother came out while I was fixing the woodshed door, which was losing a hinge. She’s a tiny little thing, almost as small as Connie now, and blessed with those dark Chevalley eyes and hollow cheeks that age with dignity. I could see she was pleased that lunch had gone well. “Connie’s napping,” she said. “Are you warm enough?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Would you like something?”

  “Love a coffee.”

  She hurried inside the house and came back with two mugs and a slice of Connie’s pie for me. I sat on a stump, she in her favorite Adirondack chair, which I had carried down from the patio while she cautioned me not to hurt my back. Settled at last, the coffee still warm, we watched the birds on a feeder and talked about the weather.

  “I missed you by five minutes at Renny’s,” I said, after a long silence and a hesitant smile said she wanted to talk.

  “I couldn’t stay. I was so upset. I thought, Oh my God, it could have been you.”

  “How so?” I asked carefully.

  “He was your age. You used to be like two peas in a pod. His poor mother.”

  The generations were skewed here. My mother had been forty when I was born; Renny’s, barely twenty. Sisters-in-law separated by more than twenty years, they had nevertheless become like sisters.

  I said, “Don’t believe the stories. He wasn’t doing anything wrong.”

  “I’m sure he wasn’t. If it were Pink or one of the others I’d say I wasn’t surprised. But not Renny.”

  “I feel the same way.”

  “I’m sure there’s an explanation for everything.”

  “Everything,” I agreed.

  “Even the money.”

  “What money?”

  My mother looked distressed. “Frances called this morning. The police searched the garage.”

  “And?”

  “They found forty thousand dollars in cash.”

  “What?”

  “Forty thousand dollars. In a shopping bag.”

  “Where?”

  “In back of a closet.”

  I was stunned. Where the hell would Renny get forty thousand in cash? And why would he hide it in a closet? …Even if he was skimming—à la Rose—no garage in this neck of the woods generated that kind of extra cash.…Why? I glanced at my mother. She was hanging in there for her family, but the look on her face forced me to admit that she too had lost faith.

  She looked back at me, blinking rapidly. She dabbed her eyes with a Kleenex and folded her hands, her fingers working.

  “Were you involved?” she asked coldly.

  “With Renny? No.”

  “What about this woman who shot her boyfriend?”

  “I was only there doing an appraisal.”

  “I couldn’t bear for you to get in trouble again.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise.”

  “It killed your father, and this time it will kill me.”

  I took a deep breath, stood up, and walked rapidly down to the swamp, which started quite abruptly at the edge of the mown lawn. It spread for acres, spiked with the bleached gray trunks of dead trees. Mysteriously, the water table had risen when I was a kid, and suddenly the swamp was twice the size it had been and much closer to the house. I did not kill my father. But she thought I did, which was almost as bad.

  I felt her eyes on me, and I imagined her stomach churning as she warred within, angry at me, and angrier at herself for showing she was angry at me. I took another deep breath, working hard at lightening up, and walked back to her, a light comment on my lips. “I swear the swamp’s still rising. Gets any higher you’ll have to swim back to Newbury.”

  “Never,” she cried, startling me with her vehemence. This was one time we would not let things slide in the interest of peace, though God knows I tried, laughing, or trying to.

  “Well, at least you know you’ve got the option.”

  “I will never go back to Main Street. Ever. And when I die, don’t you dare try to bury me up there.”

  “Mother—”

  “I’ve put it in my will. I want to be cremated.”

  “Am I supposed to scatter your ashes on the swamp?”

  “My brother will.”

  “Running the gears” at Leavenworth meant thrusting a sharp object into your enemy and jamming it around, slicing up organs, until they pulled you off the body. Well, Mom was running the gears on me at the moment. This was the first I had heard about cremation or scattering ashes. Clearly, she didn’t trust me with the job.

  “I don’t ever want to see that house again.” Her jaw was working and she was twisting her fingers like a nest of worms. I was terrified she would cry next.

  “But you lived most of your life there. Your whole time with Dad.”

  “Fifty-five years.”

  “You weren’t unhappy.”

  “I was very happy. It’s a lovely house.”

  “It’s your house.”

  “Not any more…” She gazed past me at the ugly little farmhouse she had grown up in. It was one small step up from a shack. Her father had attempted to improve it back in the ’Fifties with asphalt shingles. “Down here, people don’t turn up their noses.”

  “Mother, you had dozens of friends on Main Street.”

  “Down here everyone’s got someone in their family who’s been to prison.”

  Stung again, I fired back, “That’s just because they’re easier to catch.”

  “It’s not funny. All my so-called friends, I knew what they were thinking, they were thinking, Ben’s Chevalley blood came out. My blood. Your father never would have had such a son if it weren’t for Margot Che
valley.”

  “Oh, Mom—”

  “You erased fifty years of slowly fitting in, slowly getting accepted.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “I don’t mind,” she said, fingers flying. “I never fit in. They knew it. I knew it.”

  “Dad loved you. Connie loves you.”

  “Connie is a Christian. Which is more than I can say for most of that crowd.”

  I stood there shaking my head, helpless to unravel the strands of hurt and imagined hurt. I thought that she had been living alone too long with no one to talk to. Telling her that wouldn’t do anything to cut through her confusion, however. Nor, I had to admit, was it entirely confusion. There was a diamond-bright core of truth at the center of my mother’s thinking. The women she had called her friends—the wives of my father’s school chums and neighbors—were, by and large, prisoners of their neat, orderly lives and hostages to their belief that appearances on earth mirrored God’s image of their souls. But they served a second master, a pagan garden-farm god, who both taunted and comforted them with daily evidence that, God-be-damned, good stock was all. Good seed will out. Bad blood will out. I was the tainted product. Proof that Margot Chevalley couldn’t escape her fate.

  No wonder she had suspected me of flying coke with Renny. The poor thing thought it was her fault.

  “I’m sorry,” I apologized again. It had not occurred to me, back when I was standing up for my own principles, that I wouldn’t be the only one to pay. I had survived the public censure of the court, survived the fines that took every penny I had earned in the ’Eighties, survived prison. Now I felt like a commando who had penetrated enemy territory and lived to tell tales of far-off victory and dead friends. And to wonder if it was worth it.

  ***

  “Your mother’s a wreck,” Connie said in the car. The afternoon sky had turned dark. It looked like rain.

  “I know.”

  “What did you say to her?”

  “Exactly what I told you.”

  “Don’t get snippy with me, young man.” Her nap had set her up, and she was rarin’ to go.

  “Sorry. I’m a little upset myself.”

  Connie sat silently until we were well out of Frenchtown. Then she said, “Would you entertain some advice from someone old enough to know better?”

  “Right now I’d take advice from a three-year-old.”

  “Since you’ve come home—and it’s been what, three years now?”

  “Two years.” Less time than I had served in prison.

  “Since you’ve come home you’ve remained somewhat detached. You’re here, but not here.”

  “That’s not true. I’m running the office. I may not be getting rich at it, but in this climate survival’s an achievement.”

  “Yes, yes, yes. But we’re not discussing earning your living. You are earning your living, I suppose, and maintaining your family’s business. That’s all well and good. But you’re living like a stranger in your own town.”

  “So?”

  “Don’t interrupt.…I’m trying to find the proper words to describe what’s become of you.…It’s as if your old friends have grown up normally, while you’re still the boy who left… I know what it is! You’re like a reformed drunk, missing part of your emotional past.…It’s high time you got involved. Time to embrace something.”

  “Or someone?” I asked, scoping out where she was leading.

  “You could do worse than the first selectman.”

  “Vicky doesn’t need a felon in her career.”

  “Do you propose to spend the rest of your life getting over prison?”

  “Now wait a minute, Connie.”

  “I have seen four generations come home from terrible wars. Most get over it and move on with their lives. Those who can’t fell on the battlefield. They simply didn’t know it.…Did you die in prison, Ben?”

  “No.”

  Her eyes flashed at me through her Lilly Daché veil. “Then what are you waiting for?”

  “I thought I was doing pretty well. That wasn’t me in Renny’s plane, despite my mother’s worries. It was Renny. And it wasn’t me who shot Ron Pearlman. It was God knows who. I’m not sure why all this is falling on my head.”

  “Because you seem susceptible,” said my aunt. “Neither here nor there.”

  I cogitated that in sullen silence. The rain, which had been looming darkly, started all of a sudden. Four or five fat drops splashed on the windshield, and the next instant it sluiced the Lincoln like a firehose. I turned on lights and wipers and powered the driver’s seat forward so I could lean into the glass. The road gleamed slick and black, coated in patches of yellow maple leaves.

  “My poor delphiniums,” moaned Connie. “They bloomed again, but the stems are weak.”

  “We’ll be home in a few minutes. I’ll stake them for you.”

  “No thank you. I imagine you’ve got your own to prop.”

  My delphiniums, in fact, were giving every indication of premature death, but I didn’t say so, being too busy concentrating on the road, which was flowing like a river.

  “Ben, look out! Where are you going?”

  “I see him.”

  An idiot in a huge, windowless van was actually attempting to pass. Figuring he was drunk or suffering a genuine emergency, I veered toward the narrow shoulder to make room.

  “Ben!”

  Having given him much of the road and all of the shoulder, I had nowhere to go when he cut in on me. I blew the horn to wake him up, but suddenly he was alongside like a moving wall. I caught a glimpse of one of those little round tinted plastic bubble portholes in the sheet metal and, through that distorting lens, the gleam of an eager face urging on the driver, whom I couldn’t see.

  How did I know he was urging him on? Two clues. A maniacal, toothy grin, and the shockingly loud crash as the van and Connie’s Lincoln smacked flanks.

  “Ben!” Connie cried, frightened, and cried out again as her head cracked hard on her window.

  He came at me again. To my right there was a stretch of old-fashioned guard wire—two strands affixed to wooden posts sufficiently sturdy to prevent a baby carriage tumbling into the deep ditch beside the road. I jerked the steering wheel left. The second crash was much louder. Glass shattered in the rear. Rain and road poured in, but the old car gave back as good as it took and bounced the van halfway across its lane. I floored the accelerator. Multi-barreled reserve carburetors, which hadn’t breathed fire since they left the factory, cut in with a heartening roar. God bless Renny, who had kept them tuned. We took off, forging ahead.

  Unfortunately, the road curved left. Nor did the shoulder get any wider. The van, too, had a splendid engine, and its driver was very, very good. Higher up, he spotted the end of the guard wire before I did. He couldn’t overtake, but he could hit me hard near the rear end and he did, with such force that my rear tires broke loose from the slick road. Swerving wide left, he disappeared around the bend. The Lincoln fishtailed and skidded violently.

  I like cars, but I’ve never been the world’s greatest driver. I think I could have powered the front-wheel-drive Olds out of the skid, but in Connie’s car I didn’t have that option. Despite my best efforts with the power steering, the Lincoln spun hard against the wire, plowed up a hundred feet of posts, and slammed into the ditch, with its tail in the air at a forty-five-degree angle and its nose in the mud.

  “Connie!”

  We were hanging half upside-down in the car, Connie limp in her seatbelt, one leg covered in blood. I was bleeding too, from where the horn had broken and sliced a finger, which I discovered as I spread more blood trying to help her.

  She had a terrible bump on her brow where she’d hit the window and a gash on her knee, which had come in contact with a chrome air vent. Her skin, so thin that it was translucent, had parted like paper, and there was blood everywhere.

  “Connie?”

  She looked frail, and ti
ny, and every one of her ninety years. She opened her eyes, glanced wildly about. I could see her hover on the edge of mind-emptying shock. In that endless moment, fear and confusion threatened to overwhelm her. I didn’t know what to do. It was like watching a porcelain vase teeter on the shelf.

  “Connie, I’ll get help. Can you hear me?”

  “What happened?”

  “We ran off the road.”

  She blinked a couple of times. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, look at my leg. …”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Yes.…No. Yes. Not too much.…” She looked around at the steaming hood angled into the mud, at the tangled guard wire, the trees we’d wedged between, the pouring rain. Then, to my immense relief, her gaze steadied and she was suddenly Connie again. “Ben, you’ve gone and smashed my car. Help me out of this. I’m all tangled.”

  ***

  The volunteer ambulance arrived in ten minutes, by which time a dozen cars had stopped and people had helped Connie out of the ditch into a Pontiac. She greeted the nurse and driver by name. Under no circumstances, she informed them, was she going to the hospital. “Just send Stevie Greenan around when he has a moment.”

  The duty nurse was fighting a losing battle to take her blood pressure, after dressing the cut on her knee, and the driver kept pleading that the hospital should take X rays. I finally took him aside and explained that at her age Connie saw a visit to the hospital as a one-way ticket and got him to agree to just take her home and wait until Steve arrived. She wouldn’t even do that, however, insisting that they might need the ambulance for someone else. She accepted a ride home in the Pontiac, while I stayed to answer surly questions put to me by Trooper Moody.

  “How fast were you going?”

  “Ten miles under the limit.”

  “Come on, you’re a speeder. You’ll always be a speeder.”

  “It was pouring.”

  “And you say you just lost control?”