House of Heroes

by Mary LaChapelle

  One night, after so much silence, Lucy had turned to him, and he couldn’t see, but sensed, she had propped her head on her hand. “Things stop being simple,” she said. “Sometimes I wish I’d never wanted anything. First you want something, and then you know about it. I read a book about a complicated man, and I fall in love with him. I can’t be happy drinking beer with the fellas on the ball field anymore. I feel separate from them. I listen to a new record, and as hard as I try, I can only play half of the violin on it. Only half.”

  She rubbed her thumb along the dip below his eye, like he was a baby and there was a sleeper there. “What you know gives you trouble. You can’t change what you know.”

  He pushed her hand away. “I don’t know anything,” he said.

  “I think that you know I’m getting ready to leave here.”

  “Why?” he said.

  “I’m afraid to. I don’t want to, but I need to. You’ll feel the same way in a few years.”

  “No, I won’t,” he said.

  “Yes, you will.”

  Her insistence made him angry, suddenly, very angry. A moment ago he had yearned for her to give some form to the thoughts between them. And now he felt only mistrust. He remembered when Harley had insisted that the first time Lakeund was with a woman, he would tear something in her and make her bleed. He felt, then, that he was turned inside out, like he was the woman, and he could never let that happen. It was as though Lucy had led him to the edge of a cliff, stupidly, not knowing what she had been doing.

  He grew very quiet, almost sleepy, and turned away from her. The sky was changing, and he watched it. He thought about mathematics, counting, and getting to the end of things—all the stars. But this, again, was too much like thinking about eternity, so he stopped.

  He’d stood up and left her there, couldn’t believe it as he was walking away. “Don’t go,” she said.

  Just that one time he’d done that. But then he remembered waiting in the back hallway, hours it seemed, until she came into the house. And the air in the hallway was a little rotten with the smell of old potatoes. And every few minutes he wondered why he was waiting, feeling the dread that he did. Maybe he had hoped that she didn’t really mean to leave and that nothing would be changed when he saw her. But she had come in, and looking at her face, he realized for the first time that he hardly knew her. He didn’t know why, but it was like a twilight she had brought into the hallway.

  He put his head down and realized after a while that she had sat down on the step next to him. There was a yellow bulb burning overhead. She had put her hand on his leg, said, “You’re not a little boy anymore.” It was a plea, something she needed from him. “I feel so very sad, Lakeund. Sometimes I wonder if there could have been a way to stay simple. Then I think, No, all it takes is one dream, and you’re left with no choice but to be brave and go along with it.”

  He had stood up, letting her hand fall away. “I’ve got to get sleep for the morning,” he said.

  “I’ve got whiskey in my room,” she said. “We both could talk.”

  “We both need sleep,” he said.

  And that he had always remembered as the turn of things. Why they had stopped going to the hill, why it didn’t come up again.

  It wasn’t as if he had stopped loving her. But at that time even her name changed for him. There was a time when he heard it or said it and it had no meaning for him. It was like the smell of cattle or the continual rumble of plumbing in the house: it had been there since he was born. Now the sound of her name surprised him. The word meant her. She was something separate from him once she had decided to leave.

  Looking out the upstairs window, a quietness would come over him. He would think her name, watch her cut her meat, bring it to her mouth, and eat it.

  He learned how to tease her, the way she had always teased him. And they hardly ever talked except in this teasing way. Although sometimes they would be laughing, their fingers interlocked in some skirmish, and a sadness would take over her face, and he knew he looked the same way.

  She talked about leaving a lot. She was growing out of the farm, and the town for that matter, she’d tell them at the table. The family would argue, and he’d keep quiet, refusing to picture where else she could ever be. And he’d hear that word dream again. Dreams, dreams…not really as though it had been said right there in the room, but as if the words were only faint sounds passing over the roof of the house.

  He wasn’t prepared for her leaving. Weeks later he heard the angry voices in his parents’ bedroom—his father screaming something about the devil in her. That same night she had run out of the house and told him to follow. It was a moonlit night. She took him into the old silo, where the only light was what shone through the cracks where the wood was coming apart. She said, “I have to say good-bye to you.” And once again she had him in the dark, except for the few dim fingers of light that fell on her face and shoulders.

  “Lakeund, did you hear me?”

  He felt suddenly as if he was in danger of some serious injury, that the rotten old silo might collapse or that he might be standing on a board ready to give way.

  “It’s so dark in here,” he said. “Let’s go back.”

  “Lakeund.”

  “You don’t have to go anywhere.”

  “I have to.”

  She had moved closer to him, and there was only one patch of light on her chin. She took his hands in her own, said, “Grip them hard.” He put all his strength into this, but weakened a few moments later, knowing this was her way of leaving him. “You mustn’t be afraid,” she said. Then she pulled her hands away and moved out of his sight. He had a hard time finding the silo door. His hands were full of cobwebs, and he felt that panic again.

  Finally he found the light of the door, and once outside he thought he could see her by the house, stooped over to gather a bundle. He called and ran. And she ran, over the first field in the direction of the road. He had run through the field and up the shoulder of the highway, but she was out of sight, hidden, or already too far away.

  Lakeund heard Harley drunk and ringing the bell out front. Listening to Harley made him angry all over again. He put his hands on the fence post in front of him and pulled it out of the ground and the weeds by his feet. He rocked with the post, straining, as if there was a chance he could pull the whole fence out of its place. Then he dropped it. If only Lucy would come home and see how it was for him. Sometimes he would imagine, if only she would get a grip of his hands like she did that last time and tell him what he was supposed to do. He felt so alone. He climbed through the wire and walked into the meadow. He kept parallel with the road until he saw the others pass by in their truck, then he walked home.

  Bob Lowell found a motel forty miles up the highway. He’d turned the light on and found the room so dingy that he’d turned it back off. Then he had laughed at himself in the way you do when you’ve had too much to drink and watch your own behavior as if it were that of a stranger’s. He turned the light back on and set the bag of burgers and a single bottle of beer on the bedside table. They were the classic, old-fashioned hamburgers wrapped in wax paper and smelling of butter and onions. But he noticed that the table was chipped metal enamel, covered with a film of dust, and it put the food in an unfavorable context. It reminded him of how greasy the grill had been at the tavern where he had bought them a few miles back, and this further reminded him that he had the tendency to unduly romanticize taverns and other such things.

  He turned the television on, turned the light off again. As he sat on the frayed chenille bedspread to remove his shoes, he decided that staying in this motel was an atonement for his romanticism. It was a half-built place, like he’d seen in so many sections of northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Places where he imagined people had come to live or people had always lived and didn’t want to leave because they believed in the beauty of the land and further believed that the beauty would care for them. But the truth was, there is competit
ion in the commerce of beauty: for every man who wants to build a pasty stand on the highway, two more will have the same idea, and many of them will be unable to make a go of it. And in his travels he had seen the beginnings of these enterprises: the abandoned framework of an outbuilding, the support timbers already gray from the weather, and a sign in the house adjoining that read: PIES FOR SALE, and beneath that one, KNIVES SHARPENED, and beneath that, SMALL ENGINES REPAIRED.

  He watched a National Geographic program on television about a variety of oceanic wildlife only recently discovered. Until this year, oceanographers had lacked the technology to dive into the deep habitat of these beings. They were strange, blind, ephemeral organisms swimming under the lights of underwater cameras, and the narrator in slow, measured tones spoke about their origin, postulated that these species were older than any ever seen before by man, and through study of their primitive natures there was much to be learned about our own.

  Lowell was reminded of another National Geographic article he had read several years before, an article about regions of the world where for some reason people were more likely to live into their hundreds. There were photos of elderly folk in the Ukraine, but the photo that left the most lasting impression was one of an ancient brickmaker in the mountains of Mexico who was 130 years old. The writers speculated that his longevity may have resulted from the continuous exercise involved in his traveling up and down the mountains, or from the altitude, or perhaps even from a diet of little fat and many starches.

  Most shocking to Lowell was a photo of the man’s feet. They had been utterly transformed—wide and gnarled, with the toes spread apart like fingers. This was because of the many thousands of days he had used his feet to mix mud in a large trough, kneading it over and over so it would be soft enough to shape his bricks. Lowell had remembered looking at the photo several times feeling a fascinated horror. Why? he kept asking himself. But it was really the man in the picture he was asking—Why did you do this?

  And this made him think of Lakeund. He had been hungrily eating the first hamburger, but remembering the whole scene in the bar—the jagged glass being pressed into Harley’s arm—tainted its flavor, and he set the remainder down on the napkin in his lap. What was wrong with Lakeund? What if they had begun the conversation in the bar in a different way? What if they had all begun by putting their cards on the table, begun by saying we are all very sad, even Harley is sad. And Lowell would have said, “I am, too. I make a career out of knowing what people want, and I’m always wrong. People don’t know what they want. We get a glimmering sometimes, but we’re fooled. The original sensation is too often replaced by what’s immediate, what is available at the time.”

  When Peter decided that he wanted a business of his own, was it really a bar that he wanted? Or was the bar some shortcut to his basic inclination, something that he could imagine being possible? Lowell remembered driving along the highway and seeing the bell out in the yard. That was what had attracted him in the first place—there was something about that bell. What if it was the bell that had drawn Peter there too? What if the bar he had bought was only a distraction from the stronger feelings that bell had provoked, something he, Peter found easier to make sense of.

  It seemed that people needed to keep track of those first basic inclinations, lest they lose sight of them and find them selves one day strangers in their own… Lowell looked down at the hamburger, which was half-eaten and cold in his lap, and snorted once through his nose. A little laugh at himself, because he was going on in his head like a philosopher. But then he felt sad again. Was it the brickmaker’s dream to live 130 years? Was it his own dream to decide how many vending machines were needed in a small airport terminal? How did you ever know? They should have stayed together at the Meadow Bell, especially after Lakeund cut Harley. They should have talked and talked until they got to the meaning of that wound.

  Because there was no moon, Lakeund wasn’t sure what time it was when he finally got back to the farm. Perhaps it was 1 A.M. The minute he stepped onto the porch, he could feel his wife waiting for him. He opened the screen door, lifting it a little so it wouldn’t scrape across the wood floor. In the kitchen it was too dark to see, so he stood at the door and planned how he would find his way upstairs. He thought about how Lucy’s ocean would look at night, that if it was as dark as the sky, they would look like one thing. And yet Lucy would never feel lost in a place like that, not like he would.

  He couldn’t hear a sound from his children. He moved in the dark to a small room off the kitchen where he knew he would find Jimmy sleeping. He couldn’t see him. The boy’s breathing was light in the air, almost impossible to hear, and Lakeund was reminded of a whistle he himself had owned for a very short time. At one point he had learned to trill it like some afternoon bird. But for most of that week after his fourth birthday, he had simply lain on the hill with the whistle in his mouth and breathed through it. The sound could never have been called music. It was too singular and thoughtless—only a new sound that mixed in with the sounds of the heat and the crops, the flies and the road.

  He paused with his hand on the stair railing, reminding himself again that he must climb the steps quietly. He began to say something in his head, and he realized that he was saying it to Lowell. He was remaking their conversation from before. He was saying to him, “Having a son is a way to start over, of being young and innocent. There is this most precious time when nothing is needed, everything is already yours.” Lakeund put his foot on the first step. “But that changes. Lucy would say, ‘First you want something, and then you know about it.’ Do you know what you find out?” Lakeund needed to cover his mouth, realizing this thought had just come out in a whisper. “You find out that wanting is dangerous. You find yourself in the middle of wanting, and you can’t go either forward or back. So I’m watching my son, and as soon as he starts to wish for things, I’ll tell him he cannot go back now, he cannot be simple. And if he tells me he wants to make cheese, I’ll tell him that only if, by some miracle, it is the driving wish in his heart. I’ll tell him it wasn’t for me, and how some nights, when I think about another day of cheese making, I feel I might die. And that is not a safe feeling. I thought I would be safe staying here, but I’m not. I should have trusted Lucy.” That’s what he wished he had told Lowell when he had the chance.

  By the time he’d reached the bedroom, his eyes had adjusted enough to see the silhouette of their window, but he couldn’t see his wife. He was quiet about undressing, and when he slipped into their bed, it was as if he were trying to make no impression with his body. She was so quiet that he knew she was awake, and he lay there with his hands on his chest, waiting for her to make some sound.

  “Eileen?”

  With no answer from her, his voice folded into the dark and left him unsure that he’d ever spoken.

  “What?” she said, finally.

  “Are you mad at me?”

  She took a deep breath. She seemed so far away from him that if he’d reached out to touch her he would have touched only black air.

  “I’ve been having lots of thoughts today. I want to make some changes. Eileen?”

  She sighed deeply enough to cut him off. She had been holding air in ready for that sigh. “Lakeund,” she said, “are you going to go away from us again? Am I losing you again?”

  “No, no. It’s not like that Eileen. I was just remembering all the things Lucy used to say.”

  “She’s gone. Don’t think about her.”

  “Why does she make you so mad, Eileen?”

  “Oh, Lakeund, you’ve been gone all night. If you’d just told me where you were going.”

  “I told Jimmy, Eileen. I told Jimmy to tell you.” And then he realized, he shouldn’t have mentioned Jimmy. This time he should have kept him safely in his head.

  Eileen moved suddenly in the bed, and he could feel her leaning over him. Her voice was coming from above him instead of beside him. She said, “I don’t want to go through this aga
in, Lakeund. Listen to me. There is no Jimmy. We have no Jimmy. He’s nothing but an idea, a fantasy you’ve…”

  But her voice disengaged, floated up to the ceiling and then dropped away, a night hawk—that lonely thin sound. And Lakeund wanted to tell her it would be okay—he needed only a little more time—it was just a loss taking care of itself. But he couldn’t make the words. He was a sleeping man, explaining a dream to his wife before he had stopped dreaming it. The dream of a boy and what the boy knows, about his heart and the bell and being brave. He would sing her this song, finally bring the sound to earth; it would not be lost again. Lakeund turned his head toward the morning still dim in the window, a blue-black sky, the shadow of the barn roof, the old pine bowing with sleep—anything he might find to be real and familiar.

  DRINKING

  A man and a woman have their lines in the river called the St. Croix. They’re sitting under a tree. Their poles lie listless next to them, and little by little their lines have been pulling out with the current. But now her red and white bobber was hesitant, as if unsure any longer of its direction, and his bobber, which was all white, stalled too. Then they both drifted in the direction of the shore.

  “It’s a crosscurrent that’s got them,” Tim said. “They’re bound to get snagged by the banks.”

  “Let them,” Mary said, pulling him gently by the pocket of his shorts when he moved to get up. “Tell me about this first time you were here, about this woman.”

  “Well, it wasn’t exactly the first. I’d been canoeing here with a friend before. But after that, I had it in my mind that I wanted to bring someone special.”

  “Was she special?” Mary asked, and for a moment she wasn’t sure of her intentions or of her tone in asking. She might have made it seem she was jealous.

  “I thought so at the time.…” Tim put his arms behind his head and crossed his feet at the ankles. This pushed against the backs of his old tennis shoes, which made them splay at the sides and exposed the fairer skin on the sides of his feet. “… In that way you just don’t think many people can be. You know, she wasn’t going to turn around and tell me something I already knew.” Tim was surprised to hear himself put it this way, since this was an expression he hadn’t used in a long time.