My mother’s one-note laugh knocked against the ceiling.
Aunt Elaine put the box down on the table. I set my large package next to it. “You don’t of have to want to open it and look now if you don’t,” I said, and felt my face go red because I was caught between the way I had once spoken in that house—without self-consciousness—and the way I was trying to speak with Sands and Aunt Elaine. When I looked up, my father was shooting his eyes into me. I could see the hairs on his beard shaking. I was a traitor, and in his way of thinking, nothing, not even a murderer, was worse than that.
I was about to mention the money when he shifted his eyes to Aunt Elaine as if Sands was not there and spat out, “You stoled her on away.”
From all those hours of working with Sands, I could feel that he didn’t like my father any more this time than he had on their first meeting. I guessed he didn’t like the smell of smoke and old cooked food and mold either. I looked at his arms and shoulders. Next to my father’s twitching fingers, they seemed enormous and too still.
Aunt Elaine turned to face my father. “Really?” she said. “The story I have was that you tied your daughter to a tree. In the woods. At night. And left her there, hungry and in pain and eaten up by mosquitoes. I seem to remember writing you both a letter about that a little while back. Maybe you’ve forgotten, Curtis. Maybe this will remind you: Attorney Robert Baker. Does the name ring—”
“Not’n yourn business,” my father said. His eyes flicked once to Sands, an appraising glance, a naked evaluation.
“Is that so?” I noticed that Aunt Elaine had gone very quickly from being polite to looking like she was going to start yelling at them again. I had another moment of thinking I shouldn’t have come, or should have come alone.
My father bumped his chin down one time in an angry nod.
“The trouble with you, Curtis,” Aunt Elaine was saying, and I wanted to tell her to stop then. I knew, I could feel, that years of anger had built up inside my aunt and were about to spill out. She was brave as a bear, but she didn’t know certain things, seemed to have no idea of the kinds of actions her brother-in-law was capable of, seemed to think words had equal force to a chain saw or a knife or a willow whip. “The trouble with you has always been that you aren’t smart enough to separate the people who want to be kind to you from the people who want to hurt you. You think everybody wants to hurt you so you live in your little hard shell out here in the woods. When you come out of the shell it’s so you can hurt somebody first before they hurt you. We came here—your daughter, your child, came here bringing a gift for the baby in your wife’s womb. She wants to give you money, too—because you still pretend to be unable to work—though I told her several times that she’s given you enough money over the years. I bet you haven’t even taken your wife in for a checkup once in her pregnancy, am I right? You don’t know about things like that. You don’t pay attention to things like that, do you, Curtis? The health of a woman and an unborn child. But you know how to tie your grown daughter to a tree.”
Except for his nine fluttering fingers, my father’s body had an odd quietness about it. But in another second I saw that the skin of his face was moving the way the top of a pond moves when a breeze runs across it. His eyes flicked over to Sands, and one chip of a smile went flying across his lips. It was the smile of a person who knows he is going to get hurt and in a strange way likes it. The hurt confirms something in him, some expectation about how the world works, some sense of his own ability to bear pain, if nothing else. He made the chip of a smile—I realized then that I’d told Aunt Elaine but never told Sands about being tied to the tree—and then he turned his eyes to Aunt Elaine and said two words very quietly. “Little whore.” He was starting to say something else, “Get out,” I thought it would be, when Sands, moving faster than I’d ever seen, grabbed him by the front of his T-shirt, lifted him off the ground, and pushed him back hard against the doorjamb. I heard a sound like “hunhn” when the air came out of my father’s body. His eyes were fixed unblinking on Sands’s face. I saw no fear in them at all. Sands’s other hand hung at his side but he had made the fingers into a fist.
“Cut you,” my father said, looking into Sands’s eyes.
“All right, then,” Aunt Elaine said. “Stop that now.” She put her hand on Sands’s back but he didn’t seem to feel it. For about two seconds my mother had a smoky smile drawn in pencil on her face, then it fell away. There were a few times when I’d listened to Sands talk about nonviolence, how wars were wrong, how killing was wrong. He seemed to mean what he said, but I could see that there was another part of him where those words didn’t come from. His left arm was held out almost straight, bunching the fabric of my father’s T-shirt against his throat. I could see that he was pressing forward and that if my father moved down off his tiptoes he wouldn’t be able to breathe.
“Cut your whore mother, too,” my father squeaked out, and when I heard those words, and saw Sands’s other hand swing up, I thought that if he hit with a fist, my father’s head was going to fly right off like a bearded doll’s head, like the plastic head of the figure outside the plumbing shop. But when Sands hit it was with an open hand, and so hard the noise was like a gun going off in the room. My father went flying over sideways, caught himself on a chair for a second, and then the chair fell and he fell with it. In an instant he’d scrambled to his feet, his eyes like the eyes of an animal, blood on his mouth. My mother was watching with two hands spread on her belly, a cigarette pinched between the fingers there, a twirl of smoke rising as if from the fetus itself.
The words that came out of Sands’s mouth then were like air being forced out between his teeth, like steam from a kettle. “SaythewordagainPastor,” I thought he said, though I have never asked him about it and I might have heard it wrong. “Saythewordagain.” He was facing my father with his hands in fists now, a different man than the man I had been working with, completely different. A killer, I thought. And I thought that my father, who was also a killer-man, knew it. In my father’s eyes I saw that he expected it would be like two animals in the woods, one of them a catamount or a coyote, and the other a raccoon or a fox, with no amount of mercy there. No rules. No forgiveness. None at all. It seemed to me that my father knew about things like this from far back in his life, from his early years with Dad Paul or when he’d been upstate, or both. There was no hatred in his face, and no fear. It was almost as if he was looking at something related to him, the way one animal looks at another, not seeing it so much as feeling its existence through its own existence. There was blood running from my father’s mouth, a good amount of it, but he seemed not to notice and he was holding the chair in one hand in such a way that I knew he would swing it if Sands came at him.
“Enough,” Aunt Elaine said, in what was meant to be a strict voice. “There’s a pregnant woman here. This isn’t a bar.”
But the men weren’t listening. My mother took a drag from her Prime as calmly as if she was watching a scene on a street corner from out a third-floor window. She said, “Yeah, we all are none of us a saint here,” in the way she had, a crazy way almost. It was almost as if she was trying to make fun of someone, Aunt Elaine probably, but the joke came out crooked. I tried to think of her walking out into the dark woods to untie me, holding in her hand a knife four sizes too big for the job of cutting rope.
Before my father and Sands could say or do anything else, I took the money out of my pants pocket and set the folded green bills, two hundred dollars, on the table near the packages. For a minute a new silence fell across the room. I said, “I want of to give you money for the baby now and I want to go.” My mother and father were looking at the money. I stepped across and put my hand on Sands’s left arm. Without speaking to him or looking into his face, I moved him gently back one step away from my father. I had my back turned to my father—I didn’t have the courage to look at him then—but I could feel his anger like smoke on my neck.
“I don’t care about any o
f the rest of this now,” I heard Aunt Elaine say nervously. “I don’t care about you, Emmy. Or about Curtis. If you ever were sister and brother-in-law to me, that’s finished now. But if you have trouble with the pregnancy, the smallest trouble, you come get me immediately. You get to a phone and you call. Or you drive to the church they’re building and you tell them to get me. Do you hear? That’s what I care about now, about that baby, and about this young woman here who you’ve treated worse than an animal. You and Curtis just come and get me, that’s all.” She turned to my father and for a moment I thought she would step across the room and attend to his bleeding mouth. But she looked back to my mother. “And stop drinking and smoking, for God’s sake. Just for these months. And if one little thing seems not right, you—”
“Gittin’ you all out now,” my father spluttered. I turned to look at him, saw that blood had sprayed onto the front of his shirt when he spoke. He didn’t reach up to wipe it and had not taken his hand off the chair or moved his eyes from Sands’s face.
Aunt Elaine looked at him. Everyone was looking at him. The blood ran into his beard.
“We’re going,” Aunt Elaine said. She moved so that she, too, was between Sands and my father. She looked at her stepsister one last time. My mother smiled a crazed, mean smile back at her, a bitter good-bye, and then we were going out the door, Sands beside and a little behind me, walking backward. Another second it seemed like and we were in the car. At the end of the driveway I turned and looked out the back window. The door was open but I couldn’t see anyone there.
Twenty-nine
Through the heart of the summer, the only season of real heat in our part of the world—though even then the nights are usually cool—I stayed living with my aunt, rode the bus to work most days, and struggled not to think about my parents too much. Sometimes I let myself imagine that my mother and father had sold the house and land and gone off somewhere in the truck with the money, or taken a bus to Canada or Florida and were never coming back. Other times I felt they were standing on the sidewalk, watching me, waiting for me, and I had to force myself not to turn and look.
As if they knew I didn’t want them to, Sands and Aunt Elaine never talked about my parents. And Sands never again brought up the idea of my living in the rectory, which made me believe that, after seeing the kind of parents I had, he’d changed his mind about the invitation. Maybe he didn’t want a person from a family like that living with him. Maybe he didn’t want to worry about my father showing up some night to, as he used to say, “make a revenge.”
On Sundays, my aunt and I would ride up along the river on the Vermont side and have lunch in one of the towns set into the hills there—the Windsor Diner was a favorite of ours—or drive south into Massachusetts, where she knew a few nice places to walk in the woods. Sometimes I paid for lunch on these outings, as a gift or a thank-you, because I was never allowed to pay for anything else. Twice, Sands came along, pleasant enough but very quiet, as if he had seen something in himself he was so ashamed of he’d made a vow never to speak again, or as if he was working out plans behind his eyes—for his cathedral, for his future. He touched his mother once in a while, and she touched him, but I waited for him to use a certain word and he never did.
Something was happening inside me in those weeks. Years later, when I was pregnant for the first time, I recognized the feeling. I moved differently, looked at the world differently, felt a kind of power growing through the middle of me. I thought about my parents, but I was no longer so afraid of them. I saw Aaron in town once and said hello, but, though I could tell he wanted me to, I didn’t stop to talk. The cathedral still filled my life, but I felt this new strength even when I was miles away from the work site. I remember—and this may seem like a trivial thing—going into a women’s clothing store in Watsonboro and, for the first time in my life, buying underwear that wasn’t plain white.
Board by board we finished sheathing the two sides of the main roof. As much as anything I had ever done, I liked standing high up on the boards and looking out over the town. From the top of the cathedral I could see the roofs of all the buildings nearby, the white steeples of two churches, and, beyond them, a piece of the Connecticut with hills folding down to either side. Sands had told me that when we finished screwing the oak boards into place, and then finished with the small connecting side-roofs, a team of men would come to put hundreds of small squares of slate over them—one of the few things he seemed unable to do himself. We still had the three doors to hang, he said, and metal gutters to run along the roof edges above them, and then a patio and walls to build before the landscapers came to smooth the grade. If we timed it right, he said, we’d finish the outside work just as the weather started to turn cold. We’d have a new furnace installed and could spend the long winter on interior work: figuring out how we wanted the inside walls to look, laying down smooth concrete and then a wooden floor over it; putting in some kind of seats or pews or furniture, he hadn’t decided yet.
I didn’t ask where the money for all that would come from. I didn’t want to think about those things. I felt that new strength inside me, but, having lived for so many years in a universe of complete unpredictability, I didn’t much trust plans, especially plans that made the future look like a happy place. While I was on the job, I tried to bring my thoughts only to the task at hand—the hot black plastic of the drill handle after it had been sitting in the sun, the sound the bit made as it bored through the dense oak, the way Sands and I had to always lean in against the roof to keep from falling over backward and sliding all the way down onto the top of the staging, the way we’d use a crowbar to pry a slightly crooked board in tight against the one just below it. I tried to concentrate on those things, but Sands and his elaborate plans were like a sugary tongue licking against the skin of my arms and face.
As time passed, I thought of my parents a bit less, but I never stopped worrying about the baby. The summer went on; the days began to shorten and the nights to grow cooler. Aunt Elaine often brought a newspaper home; I scoured it for news of Pastor Schect and his church. But there was nothing, no news from the woods or West Ober, no evidence that those people still existed at all. Once, without my aunt knowing, I put twenty dollars in an envelope and mailed it to my mother and father at the Waldrup Road address and included a note saying they should use it for the baby. The letter was never returned or acknowledged, and I never saw my parents in town, and neither Cindy nor Sands nor Aunt Elaine offered any word of them. It was as if, wounded yet again by the world of people, my mother and father had retreated still farther into the north woods and were living there off the small trout my father caught in the stream, the deer he poached with his bow and arrow, the berries and ferns my mother picked.
And then one day in August, just at the point where I had started to believe I would never see them again, I was on a ladder struggling to fit together the pieces of metal gutter over the front door when I heard a familiar rumbling and backfiring. I looked up to see my father’s truck racing down Main Street toward me. Sands was working at the peak of the roof, caulking the last joints there before the slate workers came, and my first thought was that my father had come to kill him. The humiliation of our visit had festered and swollen and burned in his mind all those hot weeks—I’d suspected that would happen; I’d suspected my life had gotten too peaceful to be real—and at last something, a remark my mother made, a few days of having no money for meat, had blown the smoldering coals to life, and he’d gone out and borrowed or stolen a shotgun, and here he was, speeding like a crazy man down Main Street, about to jump out of the truck and start firing.
I tried to call a warning to Sands, but before I could accomplish that the truck skidded to the curb and I could hear a panicked yelling. The passenger door swung open. My mother put one foot gingerly to the ground and I saw her large belly and then, a second later, blood all down the front of her jeans. For an instant I thought my father had cut her. But then he, too, was out in plain view,
trotting in a wide circle as he came around the truck, his face torn open by what were almost screams. “Help!” he was trying to say, but what came out of him was “Heh! Heh! Heh!” And then, “Heh, Majie you! Heh me! Heh! Heh! Heh!”
By the time I climbed down and ran to the truck, with Sands two steps behind me, my mother had managed to get both feet on the sidewalk. She was leaning back against the edge of the seat with her arms spread, one holding the armrest of the door, one the body of the truck. Her face was painted in fear, too, but the colors were different, a palette of various off-whites: cheeks, forehead, chin. Her eyebrows were arched and her nostrils flared and her mouth stretched, and everything was stuck in that position as if she was trying to let the pain pour out of her through her face. There was blood everywhere—on the step of the pickup, the seat, the sidewalk. It soaked the inside halves of the legs of her jeans. Without the smallest hesitation, Sands picked her up and carried her to his truck. I held the door open. He set my mother in and propped her upright until I could climb in after her. Neither of us even looked at my father. Sands backed the truck around and sped out of the lot too fast, bumping down over the curb so that my mother let out a tortured groan. Her head sank down toward my lap and I held it in both arms.
We went flying down a side street to the river road, then over the bridge, my mother making small cries, “God, God, God,” as the truck bounced over the uneven surface. We shot up the ramp onto the interstate and went along there in the fast lane, over a hundred miles an hour, I was sure. Once, I glanced in the side mirror and thought I saw my father’s truck shrinking in the distance. I worried about the police, but Sands just kept the accelerator down, both hands on the wheel, eyes fixed on the road. Shortly before we reached Watsonboro, I felt my mother lose consciousness in my arms, and I began shaking her head lightly between my palms. “Ma, Ma. Go awake, Ma,” I said. “Go awake.”
The Talk-Funny Girl Page 27