by Rae Meadows
It seemed the temperature fell with every step up, every step away from Mulehead. Annie felt she would never stop walking, no matter how many hours it took to reach the top. My child, my child, my child. All alone. And where was I? Her foot slipped on a crag, and her ankle twisted at an odd angle, but she didn’t stop. A coldness had come into her. Her limbs, her head. Cold like the marble floor of her father’s church. Her ankle hurt but she wanted it to hurt more. Nothing, she feared, would ever be enough to distract from her despair. She deserved everything.
“Hey,” McGuiness said. “Sun’s dipping. Don’t want to get caught too high in the dark now.”
“It’s no matter to me,” Annie said, surprised by the sound of her own voice, gravelly and low.
“Hard to tell how much longer to the top. With these steppes and ridges and all.”
Her ankle was hot and wobbly. Annie paused to turn it this way and that, before taking in the man’s dirty girth, the missing part of his tooth, his huge pawlike hands. A current ran through her, a quick and uneasy zip. She deserved whatever came next, too.
“Whew. You like a man to chase you, huh?”
She stared back blankly, her eyes puffy and gray. I should be afraid, she thought, as though she were watching herself from far away, but fear had lost its power. There was little left of her to take.
“Why don’t we have a seat on that outcropping,” he said.
Then his hand was on her back and he was guiding her off the path, into the scrub, and Annie knew things had taken a turn. She could run, she thought, or call for help, not that anyone would hear her, but she walked on. She would not scream, she knew. Do what you will with me, she thought. Make me disappear.
McGuiness wiped the dirt from a stone ledge, clearing a place for her to sit. Even he could be a gentleman, he thought.
Annie sat, her hands gripping her knees, every muscle as stiff and brittle as kindling. He scooched closer until their thighs touched, but she didn’t move away. What awfulness happens next, she wondered. Disgust rose up in her at the man’s smell, his dirty pants. He draped his arm over her shoulders and she had to brace herself for the weight of it.
He leaned into her. It felt so easy and right, as it had never felt for him, and he thought maybe this was what he needed all along to make a real go of it. A woman by his side.
“I’ll take you for a steak later,” he said.
She felt herself get smaller and smaller, a cold hard pebble. She wouldn’t flee but neither would she make it easy for him. He rubbed her shoulder, but she sat still, watching the pale sky, the clouds going pink, wishing it were a week ago, a month, years.
She did not soften and McGuiness couldn’t even feel her breathe. She was stone, and he felt like a dog sniffing after something and that familiar shame, that fury came creeping back into him at this woman who would not yield. We’ll see, he thought. He twisted toward her, so he might squeeze both of his meaty hands around the delicate bones of her deserted face.
There was a clattering above them and two khaki-clad figures stepped down from a ledge. McGuiness dropped his hands, startled, and then he lumbered to his feet.
“Howdy, folks,” one of them said. “Surprised to see anyone up this way.” His glasses were dusted and he carried a small box under his arm. The other man held a burlap sack straining from the weight it held.
At the sound of voices, Annie felt a trickle of relief from some distant point outside herself for just a moment until Fred, oh Fred.
McGuiness spat into the dirt. “Who are you?”
“We’re up there digging,” one said.
“We’re the dinosaur people,” said the other.
“The fuck you talking about?” McGuiness said.
The man pushed his glasses up, looking from Annie to McGuiness and then back to Annie.
“Found a tibia,” he said. “Looking for the rest of her. Forty feet long. From the Jurassic period.”
“Bones,” Annie said.
McGuiness relaxed his stance a little at the sound, at last, of her voice.
“Bones?” he asked.
“That’s right. Dinosaur bones, fossils,” the other man said.
“What kind of fool job is that?” McGuiness asked.
“You can see footprints,” the man in the glasses said. “Not far from here. From an Antrodemus. Preserved in the creek bed about ten miles west.”
Annie almost smiled. Fred would have loved this most of all.
“Best be careful this time of night,” the other said. “The rattlers are out.”
“Jesus,” McGuiness said, eyeing the ground around his feet. “You all got any whiskey on you?”
“Are you okay, ma’am?” the man with the glasses asked quietly.
“’Course she’s okay,” McGuiness said, spitting again.
Annie thought of Birdie and Samuel and how they would be needing supper, the tiniest speck of light somewhere that signaled she was still a wife and mother. It was happening again, all the little things to do, which would get her to another night and then another morning.
“The light’s almost gone. Don’t want to lose it entirely.”
The other man shifted his heavy bag to his shoulder, eager to get going, but the man with the glasses stood waiting.
“We were just heading down,” she said. “Done admiring the view.”
McGuiness had lost his edge; his shoulders slumped in defeat. The moment was over. She rose and followed the men down the path. It was a choice, she knew, going back to the family that remained, back to who she had been.
McGuiness felt himself deflate, unable to rescue his mood. His stinking boots couldn’t find good purchase on the descent, and he tripped, landing hard on his knee. She did not stop.
They drove silently back toward Mulehead in the indigo twilight; an orange glow still clung to the horizon. As they neared the end of the driveway Annie finally spoke.
“I’ll get out here.”
* * *
THE HOUSE WAS quiet. The kitchen counter was crowded with food: casseroles, breads, pies, baked squash, canned pickles, strawberry preserves. Annie had forgotten about how the town mobilized for a death. The generosity automatic and unobtrusive. We do for you and you do for us, because out here we only have each other. She probably wouldn’t have liked the anonymity of Chicago, anyway. Fred is gone, Fred is gone. She would not let herself remember him yet. Find room in the icebox, turn on the oven, churn some butter. It was easier to do than to feel.
She could hear pounding coming from the barn. Of course Samuel would be out there working on the boat, and it made her want to take a lead pipe and smash it to pulp. The goddamn boat. She splashed water on her face and pressed her eyes with a towel until the tears passed. A sliver of a thought—Jack Lily, Chicago, a seat on the train. It was light and air and forgetting. She knew he was already gone.
She went out the back door, stepping gingerly on her tender ankle, but couldn’t bring herself to go to the barn. The air had a freshness that she’d been seeking for months. Summer was over. Birdie was going back to school and Fred was not.
“I hate you,” Birdie said, kicking the coop door shut behind her.
“Did you eat?”
“Oh. I didn’t see you there in the dark,” Birdie said.
“I’m warming something up.”
“Where’d you go?”
“I put a chicken-and-noodle dish in the oven.”
“Mrs. Stem. Mary brought it in.”
“I bet your father hasn’t eaten anything today.”
“Who’s hungry, anyway?” Birdie shrugged and let her gangly arms fall.
Annie still had a child. She reached her arms out and cupped her daughter’s face with her hand. That young and lovely face. Her hair was unbrushed and sun-lightened, as it had been every summer since she was small.
“Why don’t you go and lie down, Mama,” she said.
But Annie couldn’t lie down.
“I’ll set out plates in a bit. You can
help yourself.”
Annie approached the barn and listened to the lull of sandpaper against wood. She stood just inside the door, her eyes adjusting to the low light, and there it was. The boat. It was a sight to behold, dwarfing the barn around it, solid and noble and true. Patchwork colors like the casket, but sanded clean with just a hint of hues in stripes along the body. Samuel was bent over the hull of the boat. He looked old to her, weathered and worn, smaller. He wore his sorrow in his hunched shoulders, the near fevered intensity with which he worked the wood.
“I haven’t seen a boat since Kansas,” she said.
Samuel stopped and stood up, but didn’t turn around. He swiped at his eyes with his wrist.
“Nowhere to launch it since O’Malley’s dried up.”
There had been a night in their first year on the plains, the dugout dug, the stars in July as bright as the lights of Kansas City, the heat like melted butter. They rode the wagon out to O’Malley’s pond, a good five miles bumping over a rutted road, the horses clattering their bits, unsure of the night ride. She’d gone in the water in her dress, too shy to take off her clothes even though there was no one else for miles. The water was as warm as the air; she could barely tell the difference. Samuel had pulled off his shirt, but waited till she turned to take off the rest. He waded in and held her, her head against his shoulder, while she floated.
“I’ll bring a plate out for you.”
“Okay.” He leaned against the boards scaffolding the boat, unable to fully look at her.
“You want bread with it?”
“I don’t care about the food.”
“I know.”
“Fred used to sit on the crate there. Pretend to row.”
“I’ll leave you to your work,” she said.
“Annie.”
Her name in the barn dusk was the most plaintive of sounds.
“Are you still going to go?”
Annie felt like a marble falling, falling, falling into the blackness of a well.
“It might do you good. To see your folks.”
Kansas. He was talking about Kansas.
“No. It was a dumb idea to begin with.”
“You left today.”
“I couldn’t watch the dirt going in.”
He nodded.
“How come we’ve never gone up to Black Mesa?” she asked.
“Black Mesa?”
“You can see a long way from up there is what I hear.”
His eyes squinched, quizzical, but she held them with her own for the slimmest of moments. I am still here, she thought.
“We can go sometime if you like.”
She nodded, the smell of sawdust too strong, and she felt the need for air.
“I’m going to go check on Birdie.”
Without waiting for what Samuel might say, she walked out of the barn.
* * *
THE BABY MOVED. Birdie didn’t think about whether it was a girl or a boy. She didn’t care either way. It was her body, but it already felt like someone else’s. She picked at the biscuit, pressing her finger on the crumbs to pick them up. The house was quiet save for the clock and the occasional settling beam. She thought of the funny papers yellowing on the floor of Fred’s room.
Her legs were moving before she knew where she was going. She had to run. She burst through the kitchen and living room, banging out the front door, a stitch already in her side before she’d even reached the locust tree grove. Every direction was the same. Flat, colorless, known.
That left Woodrow’s. Maybe she could do the job that she and Fred had started. Take down the whole damn thing, window by window, board by board.
She took the long way, by road, walking right in the middle, the shoes she’d worn to the funeral rubbing her heels bloody. It felt better to walk, to grind her feet against the pavement, to be headed somewhere, even somewhere as dismal as Woodrow’s. The sky was a cauldron of purple and orange with the last remnant sunlight.
One of the headlights of the truck was burned out, the other a dim yellow, so it was right upon her before she noticed and skittered to the edge of the road. The truck slowed next to her as she walked, pumping her arms. She could feel it creeping alongside her and when she turned it was McGuiness, the scavenger whom she and Fred had encountered so long ago. He was here and Fred was gone. She could see the side of his mouth tug up even in the growing darkness, and she looked ahead and kept walking, rage in her mouth like metal.
“Want a ride?”
“Not from you.”
He laughed. “Well, ain’t you a spitfire.”
He did not scare her. She felt as impermeable as a river stone.
“I won’t bite.”
There was some dank crevice of her mind that wanted to say yes, to ride the current all the way to the bottom. She felt the baby kick. The moon was waning, sickle-shaped with piercing ends.
“I know it was your brother,” he said.
She would not look at him.
“Sorry. All’s I’m saying,” he said.
She turned and walked straight into a stubbled field.
“Suit yourself,” he called after her, before rattling away toward town.
* * *
IT WAS SO dark at Woodrow’s, she had to feel her way along the walls, the wallpaper ribboned and curled up under her palm, planks rough underneath, up the stairs to the bedroom. Glass sparkled on the floor beneath the windows. Sweaty from the walk, Birdie peeled off her mourning dress, glad to be free of it, and lay down in her underwear. Her abdomen swelled in a small taut pot where she rested her hands.
She was plain tired and closed her eyes.
Maybe her mother had needed a hiding place, too, and that’s all it was. She’d taken off her apron—a break from rendering lard, canning tomatoes, washing trousers—to just sit for a minute by herself. She knew her mother’s life was hard, never gave her credit for it, and now Birdie felt a black nugget like coal, sharp-edged in her throat, with the thought of that life closing in on her, too. She had been a silly girl to think she knew better.
The wind was calm tonight and brushed in through the broken-out windows. Are you up there, Freddie? she thought. And for a moment the loneliness ebbed and her thoughts drifted and she was floating in blue salty water, bobbing and buoyant, and it didn’t matter that she couldn’t swim because it was like she was suspended by a giant invisible hand.
* * *
ANNIE BROUGHT A lantern, not trusting the slim moon. When Birdie had not returned by nightfall, she set out to look for her, bleary with sleeplessness and grief, crazed by the thought of her one remaining child out there, at the mercy of every evil thing. She walked, her ankle throbbing, toward Woodrow’s, the thought of which brought a gust of sorrow for what she had done there, but she pressed on through the chaparral that grabbed at her legs, the surprising cry of a coyote—she thought they had all vanished—a sad moan in the distance. Fred had died all by himself. That little boy she would have kept little forever. Please let him not have felt scared. But with whom was she pleading? Annie’s toe caught an old root and the lantern bobbled, sending its halo of light in a dance across the dune along the fence. She would wake up every day and think, He is gone, and feel that gutted feeling anew. Can the strawberries, He is gone. Hang the sheets, He is gone. Lie down for sleep, He is gone.
The old house leaned like a beached ship, the front door half buried. How fast it had become a relic, a ruin. Here she had been with Jack Lily, and now she felt as dull as clay. Inside she held the lantern high.
“Birdie?”
She listened for noises, but heard only the insects, the cricket song anemic and spotty. When she had come here with Jack, she had never looked around, and the forlorn kitchen was now barely recognizable. Thick webs traversed the sink; one broken teacup upside down on the counter. She wondered if the Woodrows dreamed of coming back here one day, and what would be left if they did.
Annie walked to the staircase and climbed slowly, the steps sagging under
foot.
“Birdie?” Her voice sounded foreign and strained in the darkness.
And there in the silvery light was her daughter, her head on her bunched-up dress, stretched out like a resting nymph, and Annie’s first terrible thought was, She’s dead too, until she saw her chest rise and fall. Annie sank to her knees and blinked against the image of this body in front of her, more womanly than she had realized, her daughter’s hair spilling over the side of the mattress where she herself had been loved by Jack Lily, and where, Annie knew, Birdie had lain with Cy Mack. Oh Birdie, she thought, and before she could reach out her hand, she saw the belly, unmistakable in its firm, smooth insistence. Annie knew on this day that had gone on forever, a day that had sliced her thin, that her daughter was carrying the most profound of secrets.
There would be a baby.
CHAPTER 15
What happened to fall? Samuel wondered. A few weeks at the most. Some tillers came up from the planting, but they went dormant too early. At least the growth gave the cows something to eat, better than the dregs they were going on before. The snow came in gray gusts, too little to prime the soil. Thin light, early dark, penitent cold.
He knew they were all waiting for the big snow that would help the crop that was in. No one said it out loud, yet everyone thought it, prayed for it, believed it.
Samuel sat apart from the other men at Ruth’s, siphoning a beer. His eyes were downcast, his hands heavy on the wooden bar. Since Fred, he found solace here sometimes where the others, with enough life trouble of their own, left him be. It calmed him to hear them talk, their broken-in voices. He listened to two men sitting one stool away, farmers he’d seen before but wouldn’t say he knew.
“I hear they got an X-ray machine over at the shoe store in Beauville.”
“X-ray machine?”
“So they can see where your toes are at in your shoes.”
“Why in hell they want to do that?”
“To get a perfect fit.”
“Must be the strangest thing to see all those bones of your feet.”