They hadn’t come away with much. During the drive home the sun was low and gold on the land. Through the car window Homer watched the shadows getting longer and the farmhouses shining amber, the light hardly reaching their roofs. There were two chairs in the front yard of one of the houses. The farm seemed past its day, a clothesline had fallen, and the grass was growing up around the chairs. They were the common metal chairs with the shell-shaped backs Homer had seen everywhere all his life. They sat together at an angle that made him believe a man and wife would sit there after their dinner. Whoever it was who used to sit there did not sit there anymore, and this realization opened up in Homer and sent a full ache through his body. He buckled over and held on to his knee and the stump of his right leg. He hiccuped little gasps of air, trying to hold out, as if it were a wave of nausea that might pass. But it went on and ended in a long, long cry that he couldn’t control. And after he had let go, there was a part of him that was left behind, perturbed: “That’s an old man that’s crying. Listen to that. Who’s that crying?”
Robert pulled over to the side of the road and Homer stumbled out. Somehow he still had the idea he was going to be sick. He only cried. He stooped down and buried his hands in the gravel along the road.
After a while Robert came to stand beside him, close enough that Homer could feel the cloth of his work pants against the cloth of his shirt. And when they finally drove home, it was dark, and they didn’t talk.
The girl’s name was Elizabeth, cousin of the Virgin Mary. He’d researched it last week and found her story on the very first page of the gospel according to Luke. Homer, who hadn’t looked through the Bible since Christmastime in his parents’ house, had sat in the dusty, green brocade rocker of his own house, holding the first page of Luke between his fingers. He had turned the page back and forth, reading both sides several times. Now he repeated the story in his mind, adding a detail each time the rubber ends of his crutches pressed into the pavement.
At the store he looked for her behind the reflections in the glass door. When he got closer, he saw her hair and her brow bent over the cash register; her wrist was curved above an item on the counter. The bells rang when he pushed the door open, but she didn’t look up, and if she had, it would have been with an expression no more surprised than Jenny used to have when he returned to the living room from the bathroom.
When she had finished with the woman she had been waiting on, she looked up. He put his pipe in his pocket and smiled at her.
“Hello.”
“Hello,” she said back.
He leaned his left thigh against the counter and let his crutches rest on either side of him. The straps of his pack had become twisted, so he struggled to pull his shoulders out of them. He moved his arms awkwardly and inside he was saying, “Jesus, hurry up before she tries to help you.”
She made no move to help, and as he wrestled with his pack, he felt how very still she was. All this time he was looking down. He finally got his pack off and onto the counter. He busied himself with the ties on the flap of the knapsack. She placed her hand on the canvas of the sack, and he knew this was a way for her to say, “Don’t fuss so much.” But he couldn’t stop, couldn’t find anything to help him raise his eyes and look into her face.
The bells rang, and she moved away to the cash register to wait on a customer. He quickly set the tomatoes out on the counter. He pulled the blue bowl out and quickly filled it with tomatoes. He felt a rush of panic as he did this. He didn’t want her to turn before he was finished, not just because he wanted it to be a surprise, but because there was something in the act and the way his hands looked that he didn’t want seen. He sprinkled a handful of wax beans over the top, and when the bells on the door rang again, he looked up. She was looking at the bowl.
“Homer, the colors!” And she raised the bowl up to study the speckles in the enamel.
He looked at her chin and her neck and the way her arm traveled down into the loose sleeve of her smock. He didn’t want to be gawking at her when she looked back at him, so he studied the many items hanging on cards above the counter. He saw the toenail clippers hanging next to the little clippers. He inspected his thumbnail, regarded the clippers again, and decided maybe it was better if he bought them when she wasn’t working.
He went back into his pack, she put the bowl down, and he reached over with a gruff, “Here,” and placed a potato in the palm of her hand.
“A potato,” she said, then waited as if he had something to explain.
“Well, yes,” he said. “It’s a potato.”
“It’s just that a few weeks ago you told me that your specialty was potatoes, and I thought this might be one of them.”
“Well, I don’t know how special it is, but it’s a good potato.”
“Homer, you told me you had developed a special breed. I just want to know. Is this one of them?”
Homer looked at the potato and nodded.
She raised it up to her eye level. “I think the potato is a vegetable of great integrity,” she said.
“Ha! Did you learn that in college?”
“No.” She pursed her lips. “There was a lady, Mrs. Ruscuss, who lived next door to us until she died. She had a garden like yours, and I used to squat in that garden for hours with her. She used to tell me vegetable stories. My favorite vegetable story was about the potato. Mrs. Ruscuss was from Hungary, so she had a funny accent. She would say, ‘You will neva eat a bodada wit out a hart. All bodadas have good harts. Dey’re undaground vegetables und dey protect demselves, und dey take a long time to grow.”
“Nonsense,” Homer said.
“I listen to your old stories,” Elizabeth said. “You could be polite enough to listen to mine.” She turned around and began to stack cigarette packs into the rack behind the counter. Homer said, “Aren’t you going to tell me the rest?”
“Nope.” She ripped open another carton of cigarettes.
“I have a friend Robert, who’d make a good potato,” Homer said, trying to make her laugh.
“He’s your friend you used to work with at the station.”
“I didn’t remember telling you.”
“You were transferred to do scheduling after your accident. Robert works out in the yard, not physical work the way you used to work. He inspects cars, and tracks, and machinery. What you never did tell me was how you lost your leg.”
Some schoolchildren came ringing through the door. Homer looked at the clock above the coolers. Three-thirty, already it was the beginning of the rush. He left her to tend to her business, and as he came back to the counter with a carton of half-and-half, he felt sad. He set the carton down to be checked out. Some more children rang through the door, followed by their mothers. Elizabeth answered a question of one of the mothers about the time of the next bread delivery. While her head was still turned in the direction of the ladies, she placed her hand on the carton of cream. Some of the children holding wrapped ice-cream bars waited impatiently behind him. She sighed a little for his sake, letting him know that she wasn’t happy about the rush either, and she began to ring up his purchase.
A man in a suit with a newspaper under his arm pushed through the door. “Wehell, Popeye!” he said. He was a commuter who knew Homer from the station. Homer nodded and gave him a half smile. He leaned forward on his crutches as she totaled the machine. She turned to face him, and everything sounded quieter for a minute.
“Can’t you just tell me just one more small thing about potatoes?” he asked her.
“They have long memories. Now, will you answer my question the next time?”
He shrugged and made a sound from the back of his throat. She looked at him for just a second before she waited on the children with the ice-cream bars. With only a small carton inside, he imagined his knapsack looked rather silly on his back. He hesitated a little on his way out the door. “What should I bring you next time? Should I bring you some zucchini?”
“Oh, Homer!” she said, unable to l
ook up from the register. “You’ve brought me zucchini twice a week for six weeks now. I’ll be leaving for school before I can finish even the half of what I have.”
He stood by the door and waited for her to finish with the commuter’s purchase. “What do you want then?” The commuter was walking toward him smiling. He tried to look past him at Elizabeth.
“Bring me some rhubarb,” he heard her say. “But remember, I’m leaving soon.”
“Allow me,” said the commuter as he opened the door, making the bells tremble. “Popeye, I’ve missed you at the station. How long’s it been? Five years?”
“It’s been ten.” Homer pulled his hat a little farther down over his eyes and crutched away from the man, who had already begun to thumb through his newspaper.
Six weeks’ worth of zucchini, he thought, as he crutched along the walk. The season is getting on. Six weeks of zucchini and he’d known her now for ten weeks. Two months and two weeks, he thought. Homer needed to count like this—to keep his numbers straight—to tell one year from the next. Two more tomato plants this year. The pear tree is sixteen feet high, when last year it was only fifteen. And his life, like everyone’s, he supposed, could be marked and measured. The day he began to work in the yard. The day he married Jenny. The day he lost his leg. The day he retired. The day Jenny died. And now, he had to admit, he was counting back to the day he met Elizabeth. Something had changed since Elizabeth. What that change was he hadn’t talked to himself about. He’d responded to the change as he’d respond to an alarm clock in his sleep. Getting up in the dark, and moving about while still unconscious. Moving through a remembered ritual, and finally coming to in the dawn, at the breakfast table with food in his hands.
He’d talked to her about himself more than he had realized, and now she was asking about his leg.
He’d told her about it in his head.
What was there to say out loud? “The coupling slipped between two cars. I got caught. I don’t know the details because I was unconscious.” In his head he was able to tell her more. “It changed my life. In my dreams I walk down the sidewalk on two legs, and always in the end I’m walking to a sad place. When I wake up, I recognize the sad place is daytime and remember it’s gone.”
“Why does she want to know the details?” he muttered, for the first time feeling angry with her. And immediately after this outburst he corrected himself. It wasn’t only the details she wanted. He’d bring her something good tomorrow. Then he heard her words. “Bring me some rhubarb.” He was pretty sure the rhubarb was already past its time. But he hoped he might find a few young stalks. He hurried home.
In the garden he lifted the mammoth rhubarb leaves to find only tough, pithy stalks. It had been neglected for three years, and he couldn’t find a single new plant. He went into the house, dejected, and sat on a kitchen chair with his elbows resting on his thighs. Then he stood up on his one leg and threw his hat down on the table. “Don’t be such a miserable old cuss!” he said. He hopped over to the sink and picked up the coffee can in the corner. He cut off a plug from a square of tobacco on the counter, hopped back to his chair. He plopped down, set the can next to his foot, and chewed. He thought about the last time he had cut rhubarb.
That was the summer before Jenny had died. One day he’d cut the rhubarb in the habit of summers before, but then it came to him that she couldn’t possibly have the energy for the canning this year. His hands were hesitant after that, but he had a compulsion to keep picking, a sense not to let good go to waste. By the time he was finished, he’d decided it would trouble Jenny if he brought any of it into the house. He left the basket in a far corner of the back porch, with the idea he could give it away to the neighbors.
The next morning Jenny, dressed in her nightgown and his wool socks, had gone out on the porch to feel the air. She came back into the kitchen, where Homer was drinking his coffee, dragging the basket behind her.
“Jenny, no!” he’d shouted angrily, because anger was the first to break out of all the feelings that swarmed between them in that minute. She pulled the basket over to the sink and started washing the mud off the stalks. He sighed. Then he came over to the sink. “Sit down now, you’ve washed enough.” He finished washing the stalks and turned to find her chopping rhubarb at the table. He put his hand over her chopping hand. “Jenny, you don’t have to.” But she was stubborn about it. He remembered it being an awful tiresome job. The rhubarb was acidic and pungent and the sugar was sticky. There was steam everywhere, and it seemed they were never going to finish. There was always more sauce in the kettle, and then Jenny would come out of the pantry with a few more clean jars to fill.
But sitting there now in the kitchen, bent over his coffee can, he wanted to go on remembering that day. He had counted the jars when they were finally finished and then begun to take them to the pantry. Jenny had walked behind him, carrying two of the warm jars against the bib of her apron. In the pantry she had stood beside him. She reached up with the two jars. “Oh!”
“Oh, what?” Homer looked at her.
“This is the best part—bringing them in here and setting them on the shelves. It was always this time when I had the surest feeling I could take enough from the summer to last until winter.”
Homer had chewed his tobacco out, and he was restless. He got up and dialed Robert’s number. There was no answer, and he imagined the phone ringing next to the TV with its little people moving about on the screen. He hung up and went to the pantry. When he opened the door, the western sun shone through a little end window. The rhubarb glowed in the bottoms of the jars. He tried to detect the two she had set there herself, but they all looked the same, their tops covered with dust, because for three years he had left them untouched.
He brought two of the jars out and washed them. He set one of them on the table to give to the girl. He went on washing all of the jars, including the pepper relish and the stewed tomatoes she had canned in earlier years. He washed the pantry shelves before putting them back, and he went on to clean his kitchen, beginning to make the improvements he had decided to make that morning. He went to bed with a true, physical tiredness that he hadn’t felt in a long time, and he dreamed back to being a boy, before Elizabeth, or Robert, or even Jenny had known him.
In the morning he was fervent in his washing and grooming. He waited with his cup of coffee for the time when the rush at the Stop ‘N Shop would be over and Elizabeth would not be busy. When the time came, he packed the jar of sauce and set out. His scrubbed skin felt alive in the air.
His heart beat with a strong energy when he approached the store, and it felt as though he were marching up the incline of the parking lot. He came to the reflection in the door, and through the reflection he saw her solitary profile standing very still, with her chin lifted only slightly, as if she were listening for something and expected to hear it very shortly.
The beating of his heart had amplified to the sound of a marching band. His own voice rushed from some unexpected place, a shout: “I love…” He stopped. Both words startled him like pistol shots. He began to shake. Hunched over, he gripped the handles of his crutches, waiting for all the noise to pass. Did he really shout that out loud, or was it all in his head? He raised his eyes and looked through the door to see if she had heard, but she hadn’t turned toward the door. She was as still as before, with only the slightest smile on her face. Homer looked around to see who else might have heard. There was no one. In his distress, he crutched away from the door to the side of the building. He stood facing a dark green dumpster.
After a while Homer went home. The shock of those two words, whether they had been pronounced out loud or not, had been enough to undermine everything he had thought he had made himself ready for. He cut a plug of tobacco but didn’t chew it, poured himself a cup of coffee and left it to get cold on the table. He sat down and stood up and sat down again. He took the Bible in his lap and searched for his name. He couldn’t find his name or any clear reason for what was
happening to him. He was an old man. He tried leaning back in his chair, like the old man he was this year, and last year, and the year before. He let his wrists hang limply over the arms of his chair, sighed, and put an attitude in his head about life being past. But he couldn’t keep ahold of this attitude, because the girl’s face would come to him smiling slightly, as if she’d just heard something and was about to tell him.
He got up and raised the window shade to let some of the afternoon light in. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jenny pulling the other one up. He blinked and went on to dust the living room. That night he read through old letters, and he went to sleep with the words she had sent him across the ocean when he was a soldier. Words sent to him and meant to hold him for the long time before he could hear from her again.
He woke in the morning with the words, and they followed him into the kitchen and whispered to him all day as he cleaned his house. The next day he heard them too, but on the third day he was more alone in his work, except for sometimes when he would step back to appraise another pile of neglect he had found. Then he’d put his hands on his hips and say, “Look at this!” and he would feel her behind him, tying her apron strings, laughing in that low way she had.
While cleaning the shed, he found pruning clippers and was able, finally, to cut his long thumbnails. He marveled at the two pieces he’d removed, each the color and texture of seashells. The two little pieces had been on the ends of his thumbs for so long that he was reluctant to throw them away. He put them in his shirt pocket.
It was when he was potting the geranium that he felt ready to go back to the Stop ‘N Shop. Kneeling there, he dug his hands deeply under the plant to keep its roots safe. He pulled it gently out and tucked it into a clay pot. As an after-thought he poked his orphaned thumbnails into the soil of the pot. In the kitchen window the geranium’s blossoms changed in color to a brighter, more precious red. And in turn the flower transformed the colors of the wall, and of the windowsill, and of all the objects nearest it, into new colors.
House of Heroes Page 8