Even if I kept them at a distance, I liked to watch them. I realized that I was very fond of them, and in some strange way, I was invested in this new lease on life they had embarked on. I wanted them to succeed. I kept track of their rituals, their patterns. For example, early every morning Clara poured a pile of peanuts on the grass outside the gate house. The squirrels and birds in the cemetery would congregate around the house. I felt a strange comfort in this ritual, as though I were a part of it. One day, I thought, I would be early enough on my way to school to catch a glimpse of her dress as she passed back into the house. But she was already gone every day, and I would find only the chattering animals, some of them still coming forward across the grounds.
I could hear Connie’s organ practice waft over the playground at morning recess. She always seemed to be learning a new piece, and once she learned it, she didn’t seem to improve much upon the playing of it. She would, instead, move on to a new piece, a new pattern of numbers to match to her keys.
They hung their laundry out on the deck at night, to keep the messiness of it in the dark, they said. In the early dusk one evening I left the classroom late, in time to catch them just finishing this task. They turned to each other as though they were just finishing a talk between themselves when Connie bent over, her arms curled out before her. I thought at first something was physically wrong, but the way Clara embraced her sister, I realized Connie was crying. I backed into the shadow of the school building and watched. Connie was hidden in Clara’s arms with just a small part of her dark head protruding from a corner of Clara’s shoulder. My strongest impression was the rhythmic movement of Clara’s arm as she patted Connie’s back. Over and over she patted her, until I could no longer see them in the resolute darkness, and I shuddered as I walked home with my first comprehension that pain could be constant and rhythmic like that, that the comforter needed to find the rhythm and know it, as Clara must know Connie’s.
Clara died in her sleep on a Wednesday morning in the spring. I thought there was something wrong that morning when the animals and I once more intersected, and I saw that there was no food for them, although they continued to sniff and search around the yard. I knew there was something wrong when both of them missed mass, but I waited.
They said Connie didn’t call anyone until Wednesday night. I imagine Connie trying to wake her over and over. I imagine the cats walking over her bed as though nothing were wrong. I imagine Connie starting for the phone again and again, but returning to her Clara, wanting nothing to be wrong. Why should Clara stop when there was still some left in the fund?
I heard the organ music on Wednesday afternoon. That I didn’t imagine. Even after Clara was gone, Connie played it, and it wasn’t difficult as long as the numbers were marked. People keep moving, don’t they?
Even after they announced the news at Thursday morning mass, I couldn’t go to Connie. I was not old enough, nor brave enough. I could not watch over her. All it seemed I could do was just watch her, furtively from the churchyard. Two dusky nights I watched that woman as she wandered over the deck’s surface. She fiddled with unnecessary laundry, sometimes stopping to exclaim words to a billowing clean shirt or to ribbons of clean stockings. Sometimes she huddled over in that hurt way. But I couldn’t go to her. I didn’t know the rhythm, not yet.
HOMER
The earth around the potato gave in easily. It had rained the night before. The old man dug it out, wiped the mud off with a stroke of his thumb, and said to himself, “This is one I’ll give to her.” He rubbed it again with his thumb and wiped the skin back to expose a small, moist white spot. He’d show her how tender the skins were on new potatoes. He’d have to clean his fingernails though. Mud was caked under his thumbnail. The nail had grown long again. Over the years it had gotten thick and yellow, almost as thick as his big toenail. The others weren’t so hard to cut, but the thumbnail—he’d just about given up on that. He’d work on it before he went out today.
He’d brought three blue enamel bowls out into the garden to fill with the vegetables he would pick. After he put the last potato on the top of the first bowl, he crawled over to his tomato plants. The tomatoes looked, beautiful in a blue bowl. His wife, Jenny, had told him that, but he’d forgotten. Yes, she used to keep oranges in that color bowl, too, and banana peppers. Banana peppers and tomatoes together in a blue bowl; that would be perfect. He was sorry he hadn’t planted banana peppers this year. He decided the closest he could come in color would be wax beans. If he gave the girl one of the bowls along with the vegetables, would she think that was too much? When he was finished picking beans, he crawled back to the other bowls and to where his crutches were lying. In the garden he was as good as any man. Missing the lower half of his leg made no difference when he got around on his knees. And that’s what he did in his garden.
He put the three bowls in a peach crate that sat on four low wheels. Then he hoisted himself up onto his crutches. He hooked a rope, which was attached to the crate, through his back belt loop and pulled the little homemade cart behind him as he crutched toward the house.
He washed his hands in the bathroom sink, swirling light brown water down the drain. He rubbed his thumb against the rust stains in the basin, but couldn’t make a difference. He hopped a step back from the sink, one wet hand on his belt and the other arm draped over his crutch. “There’s got to be some improvements around here,” he muttered. He hopped back one more step and saw the whole of his bathroom in a way he hadn’t seen it for years. He scolded himself, speaking loud and clear for the first time that day. “Now, what’s the advantage of living under so many cobwebs? No wonder you never have company.” He was seeing it through her eyes. He was thinking, What if she came to visit? He must have some better towels in the closet than those two he was using every day. He leaned toward the sink, looked into the open medicine cabinet: too many odd bottles with labels that had bled into single, dreary patches of color, bottles Jenny had bought years before, their purposes lost to him now. A small mountain of corroded razor blades on the first shelf, some so disintegrated they looked as though they were coated in toast crumbs. “What’s all this?” he said. Jenny used to use his old blades for sewing and for scraping the knitty balls off of their sweaters. “And damn tooth powder over everything!” He removed fingernail clippers from the second shelf and blew the white powder off them.
He closed the medicine cabinet and set about trimming his nails. With this task the old man was taking unusual care. He folded out the little blade that was hinged in between the clippers. “Rusty,” he said. But it was good enough to scrape the dirt from underneath his nails. He needed better clippers for his thumbs. Those bigger toenail clippers might work. He wasn’t sure, but he imagined one hanging over the girl’s counter at the Stop ‘N Shop. He usually stared up there when she had to turn away to wait on another customer. He imagined them hanging up there on cards, little clippers, and next to them big clippers.
He came out of his daydreaming and saw himself in the cabinet mirror. “Popeye,” everyone called him. He looked at himself. He didn’t have pop eyes, just gray, ordinary eyes. They were a blue blue when he was a boy. He confirmed this for himself. This confirmation of memory was an hourly struggle, now that there was no one left from his past. No one to say, “It’s true, Homer, you had the bluest eyes as a youngster. You don’t now, but you certainly did when you were younger.”
Everyone called him Popeye because he wore a trainman’s hat, because he smoked a corncob pipe, because his forearms were abnormally large from crutching for thirty years, and because he had an old man’s voice. He was a character, and none of these characteristics would change. This he had determined a few years ago.
There were two people who called him by his true name: his friend Robert, who still worked with the railroad, and the girl at the Stop ‘N Shop. He would give Robert some vegetables today, although he didn’t believe Robert ever knew what to do with them. Robert ate out mostly. The girl, he was sure, kn
ew about vegetables.
The kitchen of the old man’s house appeared to him as forgotten as the bathroom had seemed a little while earlier. Years ago, in his parents’ house, there was a copy of a painting that had hung on the wall as long as he had lived there. It had become so familiar to him that it grew invisible. He didn’t remember it was there, until he saw the same print one day in a bank building. In the waiting room of the bank he stared at the painting and the title, The Gleaners, and searched his memory to know where he had seen it before. It came to him as he sat at the desk of one of the loan officers. At that moment he felt a panic-stricken sadness to realize how easily he’d almost lost an image from his childhood.
Homer stared hard at his kitchen. “Well, just a little bit here and there,” he said, from where he stood in the doorway. He didn’t need as many as four coffee cans for his tobacco spit. There were simply some things he needed to get rid of and some things he needed to add. There were too many newspapers and a fly swatter that wasn’t good anymore. He could pack the jars of odd nails and hooks and hinges in the toolshed and make room for something nice on his windowsill. It wouldn’t be too much to pot a geranium from the yard. There was so much he had let go since Jenny died. Everything but the garden.
Homer packed a large army-issue knapsack with the bowl and the vegetables and set out for the day. Robert’s house was a block away, toward town. Robert always worked the third shift at the rail yard because it was the best pay and because he fancied working when most other people would want to be home. Lately, Homer had become more aware of his friend’s habits. Almost every detail in Robert’s life was drab and unconscious, except for his train set. Robert’s train set was the largest, most magnificent collection in all of the Great Lakes states. It took up almost the entire first floor of Robert’s house, and the tracks continued upstairs so the trains could travel from floor to floor. Homer was glad to see his friend’s dusty old Dodge sedan parked beside the house. Robert’s front yard was a short walkway in between two crabgrass patches the size of bath mats.
Homer pulled himself up the steps and crutched straight through the empty screened porch into the house. Robert had the thunder clouds going above his little train town. Tiny bolts of lightning leaped out of small puffs of gray smoke. Homer had asked once how they worked, but as usual Robert was noncommittal. Homer avoided crutching on the many miles of tracks winding over the living and dining room floors. He hopped carefully around the houses of the town, and he had to wait for one of the trains to pass in front of him before he could proceed into the kitchen. Besides Robert’s bedroom, this was the only room with furniture. The TV was blaring on the counter. It was always on, even when Robert was away from the house. Homer had heard the tinny voices coming through the windows. He found Robert leaning into his open refrigerator, his dark green work pants stretched across his round rear end.
“Looking for lunch, Robert?” he said.
Robert straightened up slowly and turned around just as slowly. He was a middle-aged man with shoulders sloping under his dark green work shirt. He always looked the same. A little white V of T-shirt at his throat, with a few light brown hairs curling over the neck. Homer looked at Robert’s flat, impassable glasses and smiled.
“Hi,” Robert said in a soft monotone. In the fifteen years that Homer had known him, Robert had used a voice neither more nor less intense than this.
“Well, I brought you some things from the garden.”
Robert pulled mustard, a plastic package of bologna, and a little covered carton of margarine out of the refrigerator while Homer unpacked his bag. He came over with these things to stand beside Homer at the table.
“What am I going to do with all that?” he said.
“Eat them, for God’s sake!” said Homer.
“You know I don’t cook.”
“For potatoes you set the oven at 350. In forty-five minutes you take them out. Do you have hot pads?”
“Yeah, I have hot pads.”
“You see, forty-five minutes for small potatoes and an hour for the big ones. After they’re cooked, it’s no different from eating them at a restaurant.”
Robert spread mustard over his bologna sandwich and didn’t respond. This was the closest he came to being ornery.
“I see you added a couple grain elevators to the town downstairs. Did you put some upstairs?”
“No,” Robert said. “Upstairs it’s not so agricultural; it’s more of a mining town, a steel mill town. I talked to a guy in the yard. He’s got a way to grind crude coal into little pieces. I thought I could put a couple piles by the river up there and build a couple barges.”
“That would be nice,” Homer said. Robert was quiet and seemed to have forgotten about his sandwich. Homer tried to look past the glare in his glasses. “What’cha thinking?” he asked.
After a few moments Robert said, “I was thinking, if I put barges in the river, I need to make the bridge into a drawbridge.”
“I guess that’s true,” Homer said. He could tell this was one of those days when it was too hard to be with Robert.
On his way to the store, he tried to recall if he’d ever talked about Robert to the girl. He knew he’d never mentioned her to him. Robert was more set in his ways than Homer, and Robert was some thirty years younger. The girl was at least fifty years younger, but there was a knowing way about her. There were people who knew more than they could know from just their own life. Jenny had been like that. He remembered the nights he had awakened with the distinct sense she had left their bed. He would roll on his side to be sure his wife was lying there asleep. He had never found her gone. Still, on nights like those he believed she was dreaming much farther back than the time he knew.
The Stop ‘N Shop had been built ten years earlier. It was across the tracks from the station where he had worked for twenty years after his accident. He must have gone this route ten thousand times. Homer had grown used to the way he traveled down the street, a calloused swing from his armpits, followed by the thump of his left leg on the pavement. He had never learned to drive with his one leg, though he could have. The year Jenny got sick, they had traded in their manual transmission for an automatic. With each progressive step of her illness she became more insistent that he renew his license. One morning as they leaned over their coffee cups, she had grabbed the cloth of his shirt cuff between her fingers and said, “Homer, you’ve got to accept the fact that we’re not going to be a couple forever!” He’d stood up to pour himself another cup of coffee and sat down again, tightlipped, unable to look at her. She had started crying, as if surprised and hurt to hear her own words. He scraped his chair back, slammed out of the door. He forgot to pull his crutches into the car, so when he backed out he left them toppled over in the driveway. Of course he was too angry to learn to drive that day. He drove half of a block using his left leg, and then drove back into the driveway crushing one of his crutches on the way in. He threw the keys against the windshield; they slid down and clattered into one of the vents at the top of the hood. There he stood, wondering how he was going to fish them out. He was out of breath as if he’d been running. He realized if Jenny looked out of the window at that moment she would pity him.
That night Jenny had rubbed her hand in a circle over his lower stomach. They had whispered together, even though there was no one else in the house to hear. With the warm circle rubbed into his stomach, he had forgotten in the dark what was happening to her. Her voice was in his ear, as he had fallen deep down into sleep. “You were so beautiful; the bluest eyes I have ever seen. I wanted you more than anything, anything, anything.…”
The first day she went into the hospital, he had resolved he would learn in time to drive her home. But she had died two days later, and two days after that he had put the car up for sale for a ridiculously low price. It was bought that same day by an eager young man in the neighborhood. Homer cursed himself every time the boy drove by.
It was when Jenny died that Robert had proven himse
lf a friend. He didn’t come to the funeral, or send a note, but on the Saturday following the burial he had parked his car in Homer’s driveway and come to where Homer was standing and looking over the spring mud of his garden. Robert said, “On Saturdays I do my errands. I figured if you had things to do in town, you could ride with me.”
Homer could hardly make out Robert’s uncomfortable figure in the morning mist that had settled over his backyard. He had waved his hand, muttering, “I don’t need anything.”
“What about seeds and manure?” Robert had said. Robert’s words had seemed unimportant to Homer. “I’ll get them soon enough,” he said.
“Homer, you don’t have a car.”
Homer sighed and hoped it wouldn’t require any energy to make Robert go away. Robert had stood there for a very long time and finally said, “Let’s go to the car now.” Homer had gone with him like a sleepy child on his way to school.
In the car, Robert had given him a pad of paper and a pencil, saying, “Make a list of what you need.” Homer had written down the words: seeds and manure. Gradually, Saturday after Saturday, Homer became more aware of the things he needed, and Robert was always there at 10 A.M. to fetch him.
There was an older nurse in the cancer ward. After it was over, she had touched his arm as he stood by the elevator. “It won’t be more pain than you can bear,” she said. “You’ll feel her gone only a little at a time.”
It had finally hit him one day in the country. He had driven with Robert to a large machinery auction. They hadn’t gone to buy the machinery, but to see what sort of interesting odds and ends might turn up. The two of them had ambled over muddy ground, stopping to look over skids holding pipes, hooks, rusty brake drums. Auctioneers moved through the crowd, stopping next to a tractor, or a skid of goods. They used megaphones. Wherever they stopped, little groups of men clustered around them. One auctioneer came up to a skid where Homer was standing and let go his string of names and prices. Homer couldn’t understand a word of his cacophonous mumbo jumbo. Crutching away, he was made aware of how long it had been since he had been a working man, once so familiar with most of those machines.
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