The old woman in the corner looked at me sidelong, steadily. She stuck a long finger far into her mouth to feel a tooth. Then she said, “She’s gettin’ growed.”
Sylvie replied, “She’s a good girl.”
“Like you always said.” The woman winked at me.
So we sailed above the water rickety click into Fingerbone, and Sylvie and I climbed down in the freight yard.
And then we walked home. Our dishevelment was considerable. But the ruin of my clothes was entirely concealed by Sylvie’s coat, which hung beyond my fingertips in the sleeves, and to within an inch of my ankles. Sylvie combed back her hair with her fingers, and then hugged her ribs and assumed an expression of injured dignity. “Don’t mind if they stare,” she said.
We walked through town. Sylvie fixed her gaze six inches above eye level, but in fact no one stared, though many people glanced at us, and then glanced a second time. At the drugstore we passed Lucille and her friends, though Sylvie seemed not to notice. Lucille was dressed like all the others in a sweatshirt and sneakers and rolled-up jeans, and she looked after us, her hands stuck in her hip pockets. I thought I should not draw attention to myself, knowing the importance Lucille now placed upon appearances, so I simply walked on, as if unaware that she saw me.
It was a relief when we came to Sycamore Street, though the dogs all ran off the porches with their ears laid back and barked and nipped at us with a ferocity that I had never seen. “Ignore them,” Sylvie said. She picked up a stone. That seemed to excite them. People came out on their porches and shouted “Here, Jeff,” and “Come on home, Brutus,” but the dogs seemed not to hear. Down the whole length of the street we were encircled by frenzied mongrels who made passes at our ankles. I modeled my indifference on Sylvie’s.
When we were at home finally, Sylvie made a fire and we sat by the stove. Sylvie found graham crackers and Cheerios, but we were too tired to eat, so she patted my head and went off to her room to lie down. I was almost asleep, or I was asleep, when Lucille came into the kitchen and sat down in Sylvie’s chair. She did not say anything. She pulled up one foot to retie a sneaker and looked around the kitchen, and then she said, “I wish you’d take off that coat.”
“My clothes are wet.”
“You should change your clothes.”
I was too tired to move. She brought some wood from the porch and dropped it into the stove.
“It doesn’t matter,” Lucille said. “Where have you been?”
Now, I would have told Lucille, and I meant to tell her, as soon as I composed my thoughts. I began to say, To the lake, and To the bridge, but I felt warmly that Lucille deserved a better answer. I wished very much, in fact, to tell Lucille exactly where I had been, and it was precisely my sense of the importance of telling her this that put me to sleep. For I dreamed and dreamed that Sylvie and I were drifting in the dark, and did not know where we were, or that Sylvie knew and would not tell me. I dreamed that the bridge was a chute into the lake and that, one after another, handsome trains slid into the water without even troubling the surface. I dreamed that the bridge was the frame of a charred house, and that Sylvie and I were looking for the children who lived there, and though we heard them we could never find them. I dreamed that Sylvie was teaching me to walk under water. To move so slowly needed patience and grace, but she pulled me after her in the slowest waltz, and our clothes flew like the robes of painted angels.
It seemed Lucille was talking to me. I think she said that I need not stay with Sylvie. I believe she mentioned my comfort. She was pinching a crease into the loose denim at the knee of her jeans, and her brow was contracted and her eyes were calm, and I am sure that she spoke to me in all sober kindness, but I could not hear a word she said.
9
In the weeks that followed the sheriff came twice. He was a tall, fat man who stood with his chin tucked in and his hands folded beneath his belly and all his weight on his heels. He was dressed in a gray suit with hugely pleated pants and a jacket that was taut as upholstery in the back and upper arm. On both occasions he stood in the front door and talked about the weather. Everything in his manner suggested the deepest embarrassment. He sucked his lip and looked only at his thumbs, or at the ceiling, and his voice was barely audible. This man regularly led the Fourth of July parade, dressed in buckskins and tooled-leather boots and mounted on a broad, faded bay. He carried an oversized flag that rested in his stirrup. He was followed by the frail old chief of the Fingerbone tribe, and his half-Irish stepdaughter, and the oldest children of her first marriage. Then came the majorettes. Of course I knew that his function was more than ceremonial. The people of Fingerbone and its environs were very much given to murder. And it seemed that for every pitiable crime there was an appalling accident. What with the lake and the railroads, and what with blizzards and floods and barn fires and forest fires and the general availability of shotguns and bear traps and homemade liquor and dynamite, what with the prevalence of loneliness and religion and the rages and ecstasies they induce, and the closeness of families, violence was inevitable. There were any number of fierce old stories, one like another, varying only in the details of avalanche and explosion, too sad to be told to anyone except to strangers one was fairly certain not to meet again. For decades this same sheriff had been summoned like a midwife to preside over the beginnings of these stories, their births in ditches and dark places, out of the bloody loins of circumstance. So one must imagine he was hardened. Yet clearly he was embarrassed to knock at our door—so inarticulate with abashment and regret that Sylvie could pretend the reasons for his coming were obscure.
It was not the theft of the boat he came about, though that had been reported, nor my truancy, since I was almost old enough to leave school if I chose to. It was not that Sylvie had kept me out on the lake all night, because no one knew just where we had been. It was that we returned to Fingerbone in a freight car. Sylvie was an unredeemed transient, and she was making a transient of me.
Fingerbone was moved to solemn pity. There was not a soul there but knew how shallow-rooted the whole town was. It flooded yearly, and had burned once. Often enough the lumber mill shut down, or burned down. There were reports that things were otherwise elsewhere, and anyone, on a melancholy evening, might feel that Fingerbone was a meager and difficult place.
So a diaspora threatened always. And there is no living creature, though the whims of eons had put its eyes on boggling stalks and clamped it in a carapace, diminished it to a pinpoint and given it a taste for mud and stuck it down a well or hid it under a stone, but that creature will live on if it can. So certainly Fingerbone, which despite all its difficulties sometimes seemed pleasant and ordinary, would value itself, too, and live on if and as it could. So every wanderer whose presence suggested it might be as well to drift, or it could not matter much, was met with something that seemed at first sight a moral reaction, since morality is a check upon the strongest temptations. And these strangers were fed on the stoop, and sometimes warmed at the stove, in a spirit that seemed at first sight pity or charity, since pity and charity may be at root an attempt to propitiate the dark powers that have not touched us yet. When one of these lives ended within the town jurisdiction, the preacher could be relied upon to say “This unfortunate,” as if an anonymous grave were somehow deeper than a grave with a name above it. So the transients wandered through Fingerbone like ghosts, terrifying as ghosts are because they were not very different from us. And so it was important to the town to believe that I should be rescued, and that rescue was possible. If the sheriff felt he should not come knocking at a door behind which no murder had been done, he had seen more than any man should see and was to be pardoned. It was because of his tolerance of transients that they haunted the town as they did, sleeping in abandoned houses and in the ruins of fallen houses, and building their shanties and lean-tos under the bridge and along the shore. They seldom spoke in our hearing or looked at us directly, but we stole glimpses of their faces. They were like
the people in old photographs—we did not see them through a veil of knowledge and habit, but simply and plainly, as they were lined or scarred, as they were startled or blank. Like the dead, we could consider their histories complete, and we wondered only what had brought them to transiency, to drifting, since their lives as drifters were like pacings and broodings and skirmishings among ghosts who cannot pay their way across the Styx. However long a postscript to however short a life, it was still no part of the story. We imagined that if they spoke to us they would astonish us with tales of disaster and disgrace and bitter sorrow, that would fly into the hills and stay there in the dark earth and in the cries of birds. For in the case of such pure sorrow, who can distinguish mine from thine? The sorrow is that every soul is put out of house. Fingerbone lived always among the dispossessed. In bad times the town was flooded with them, and when they walked by in the roads at night, the children of Fingerbone pulled their quilts over their heads and muttered the old supplication that if they should die sleeping, God would see to their souls, at least.
Neighbor women and church women began to bring us casseroles and coffee cakes. They brought me knitted socks and caps and comforters. They sat on the edge of the couch with their offerings in their laps and made delicate inquiries about Sylvie’s can and bottle collection. One of these ladies introduced her friend as the wife of the probate judge.
I was actually glad that Lucille was spared these scenes. First of all, neither Sylvie nor I had any thought at all of inviting neighbors in. The parlor was full of the newspapers and magazines Sylvie brought home. They were stacked pretty neatly, considering that some of them had been rolled, perhaps to swat flies. Nevertheless, they took up the end of the room where the fireplace had been. Then there were the cans stacked along the wall opposite the couch. Like the newspapers, they were stacked to the ceiling. Nevertheless, they took up considerable floor space. Of course, we could have made other arrangements, if we had planned to entertain, but we did not. The visitors glanced at the cans and papers as if they thought Sylvie must consider such things appropriate to a parlor. That was ridiculous. We had simply ceased to consider that room a parlor, since, until we had attracted the attention of these ladies, no one ever came to call. Who would think of dusting or sweeping the cobwebs down in a room used for the storage of cans and newspapers—things utterly without value? Sylvie only kept them, I think, because she considered accumulation to be the essence of housekeeping, and because she considered the hoarding of worthless things to be proof of a particularly scrupulous thrift.
The kitchen was stacked with cans, and with brown paper bags. Sylvie knew that such collecting invited mice, so she brought home a yellow cat with half an ear and a bulging belly, and it littered twice. The first litter was old enough already to prey on the swallows that had begun to nest on the second floor. That was good and useful, but the cats often brought the birds into the parlor, and left wings and feet and heads lying about, even on the couch.
Of course the ladies who came to our house had killed and scalded and plucked and gutted and dismembered and fried and eaten fowl beyond reckoning. Still, they were startled by these remnants of swallows and sparrows, as much as by the cats themselves, which numbered thirteen or fourteen. So long as the ladies were seated in that room, or in that house, I knew that their attention would never wander, the subject would never change. I always excused myself and went upstairs to my room and took off my shoes and crept back down again, and by this simple ruse I became privy to the workings of fate, my fate, at least.
In their conversations with Sylvie, there were many silences. Sylvie would say, “It looks like winter is early this year,” and one would say, “I’ll send my husband over to fix those broken windows,” and another would say, “My little Milton’ll split some kindling for you. He needs the exercise.” Then there would be a silence.
Sylvie would say, “Could I get you some coffee?” and one of them would say, “Don’t bother, dear,” and another, “We just came by to leave the mittens and the cake and the casserole,” and another, “We don’t want to disturb you, dear.” Then there would be a silence.
One of the ladies asked Sylvie if she was not lonely in Fingerbone, or if she had found a few friends her own age. Sylvie said yes, she was lonely, and yes, it was difficult to find friends, but she was used to being lonely and did not mind it.
“But you and Ruthie are together a lot.”
“Oh, all the time now. She’s like another sister to me. She’s her mother all over again.”
There was a long silence.
The ladies who came to speak to Sylvie had a clear intention, a settled purpose, yet they were timid about threading the labyrinths of our privacy. They had some general notions of tact but very little practice in the use of it, and so they tended to err on the side of caution, to deal in indirection, and to succumb to embarrassment. They had salved the injured and tended the ill and soothed and grieved with those who mourned, obedient to Biblical injunction, and those who were too sad and solitary to want their sympathy they had fed or clothed, to the extent of their slender means, in the silence of heart that made their charity acceptable. If their good works supplied the lack of other diversions, they were good women all the same. They had been made to enact the gestures and attitudes of Christian benevolence from young girlhood, until these gestures and attitudes became habit, and the habit became so strongly engrained as to seem to be impulse or instinct. For if Fingerbone was remarkable for anything besides loneliness and murder, it was for religious zeal of the purest and rarest kind. There were, in fact, several churches whose visions of sin and salvation were so ecstatic, and so nearly identical, that the superiority of one church over another could be argued only in terms of good works. And the obligation to perform these works rested squarely with the women, since salvation was universally considered to be much more becoming in women than in men.
Their motives in coming were complex and unsearchable, but all of one general kind. They were obliged to come by their notions of piety and good breeding, and by a desire, a determination, to keep me, so to speak, safely within doors. For surely they had in recent months remarked in me a tendency to comb my hair almost never, and to twist it and chew at it continually. They had no way of knowing that I spoke at all these past few months, since I spoke only to Sylvie. So they had reason to feel that my social graces were eroding away, and that soon I would feel ill at ease in a cleanly house with glass in its windows—I would be lost to ordinary society. I would be a ghost, and their food would not answer to my hunger, and my hands could pass through their down quilts and tatted pillow covers and never feel them or find comfort in them. Like a soul released, I would find here only the images and simulacra of the things needed to sustain me. If the mountain that stood up behind Fingerbone were Vesuvius, and if one night it drowned the place in stone, and the few survivors and the curious came to view the flood and assess the damage, and to clean the mess away with dynamite and picks, they would find petrified pies and the fossils of casseroles, and be mocked by appearances. In much the same way, the tramps, when they doffed their hats and stepped into the kitchen as they might do when the weather was severe, looked into the parlor and murmured, “Nice place you have here,” and the lady who stood at the elbow of any one of them knew that if she renounced her husband and cursed her children and offered all that had been theirs to this lonely, houseless, placeless man, soon or late he would say “Thanks” and be gone into the evening, being the hungriest of human creatures and finding nothing here to sustain him, leaving it all, like something dropped in a corner by the wind. Why should they all feel judgment in the fact that these nameless souls looked into their lighted windows without envy and took the best of suppers as no more than their meager due?
Imagine that Noah knocked his house apart and used the planks to build an ark, while his neighbors looked on, full of doubt. A house, he must have told them, should be daubed with pitch and built to float cloud high, if need be. A le
ttuce patch was of no use at all, and a good foundation was worse than useless. A house should have a compass and a keel. The neighbors would have put their hands in their pockets and chewed their lips and strolled home to houses they now found wanting in ways they could not understand. Perhaps, pious as they were, these ladies did not wish to see me pass into that sad and outcast state of revelation where one begins to feel superior to one’s neighbors.
“Do you hear anything from their father?”
Sylvie must have shaken her head.
“Or Mr. Fisher?”
“Who?”
“Your husband, dear.”
Sylvie laughed.
There was a long silence.
Finally someone said, “Do you know why we’re asking all these questions?”
Maybe Sylvie nodded, or shook her head. She said nothing.
The lady persisted. “Some people—some of us—feel that Ruthie should have—that a young girl needs an orderly life.”
“She’s had so much trouble and sorrow.” So much, yes, she has, it’s the Lord’s truth, it’s a pity. It is.
“Really, she’s all right,” Sylvie answered.
Murmurs. One of them said. “She looks so sad.”
And Sylvie replied, “Well, she is sad.”
Silence.
Sylvie said, “She should be sad.” She laughed. “I don’t mean she should be, but, you know, who wouldn’t be?”
Again, silence.
“That’s how it is with family,” Sylvie said. “You feel them the most when they’re gone. I knew a woman once who had four children, and she didn’t seem to care for them at all. She’d give them string beans for breakfast, and she never even cared if their shoes matched. That’s what people told me. But I knew her when she was old, and she had nine little beds in her house, all made up, and every night she’d go from one to another, tucking the children in, over and over again. She just had four, but after they were all gone she had nine! Well, she was probably crazy. But you know what I mean. Helen and Papa were never close.”
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