by Tom Drury
Mary Montrose and Cheryl Jewell came to see Louise. They pushed her hair gently from her face and held her hands, but were not allowed to stay long. They wandered from the room, lost in disbelief and wonder.
Louise would not leave the delivery room for days, because Dr. Pickett felt the equipment and staff there were better able to deal with her. Her blood pressure remained high. Around the hospital she was a curiosity. Eye doctors and kidney doctors and blood doctors came to examine and question her. One day Dr. Pickett asked the extra doctors to leave because she needed to speak to Dan and Louise alone. Dan thought he knew what this was about, and his heart pounded. Undoubtedly it was among Pickett’s duties to find out why they had not got to the hospital sooner on the night the baby died—to find out who was at fault. But all she said was that they should get counseling.
On the third day Dan was sitting in the sun of the corridor when Joan Gower came around the corner with flowers.
“I’m awfully sorry,” she said.
“Hello, Joan,” said Dan.
“Did you name the baby?” she said.
Dan looked out at a blue sky with small clouds. “Why do you ask?”
Joan was pulling her hair into a ponytail these days, with a few strands left to curl forward. “They have to be named to go to heaven. Otherwise they become a spirit, called a taran, in the woods.”
“Just be quiet,” said Dan.
“It can be a private name, known only to you.”
“Please go.”
“I was so sorry when I heard.”
“Thank you.”
“You couldn’t stop it.”
“Thank you.”
“You couldn’t.”
“We’ll never know.”
“I know you think you could, but it’s not true,” said Joan. “I brought you these flowers. They’re from me and Charles.”
“Get them out of here.”
“Don’t take it all on yourself.”
“Please, will you take them out of here.”
“I will leave them at the desk in case you should change your mind.”
He watched her go. They had named the baby. They had named her Iris Lane Norman.
When Dan went home, he found the beer bottle still in the bathroom where he had left it. He took it out to the kitchen and threw it against the wall as hard as he could. The bottle did not break but put a hole in the plaster that is still there today. Dan went outside and sat on the steps. The white dog ran from him.
Ed Aiken picked him up and they went to see Emil Darnier in Morrisville. Darnier Funeral Home was the biggest house in town, with white columns and red bricks, and when Darnier handled a funeral it was a little like the Holiday Inn handling a funeral. Emil’s daughter met them at the front door and led them down to the basement, where Emil’s son took over, escorting the two men through a long cinder-block hall with metallic purple caskets. Eventually they were face to face with Emil, who had a clipboard in his hand and a hearing aid. The three men sat around a low table. Emil smoked a little cigar.
“I want a simple wooden box,” said Dan.
“For infants there is only one,” said Emil. He puffed, and spoke around the cigar. “It is white and like so.” He showed with his hands.
“What’s it made of?” said Dan.
“Oh, I don’t know. It isn’t plywood. I want to say particle board, but that isn’t right, either. Let me see if I can find one. Tony! Tony! Where is that kid? Usually I have to order them, but sometimes we have them around. Let me go see.”
While Emil was gone, Ed explained how he, Earl, and Paul Francis were keeping the sheriff’s office going.
“That sounds good,” said Dan.
Emil came back with a case that seemed hardly bigger than a shoebox. Dan lifted the lid and closed it.
“Well, I don’t know about this,” he said.
“What?” said Emil.
“It seems flimsy,” said Dan. “I don’t know about this at all. I could make something sturdier than this at home.”
“If you want to use another box, it is all right,” said Emil. “If you want to use this box, that is all right as well. You can use whatever box you are comfortable with. What we need to know is where and when. This is the standard infant casket. There is only one. Our wish is to help. We take no payment when an infant has died.”
Dan and Ed stood and shook Emil’s hand. They left the funeral home. It was cold and windy.
“It isn’t such a bad box,” said Ed.
“Oh, I know,” said Dan.
“I’m not sure you should focus so much on the box.”
That evening when Dan got to the hospital, Louise was lying in the dark in her new room on the sixth floor.
“My milk has come in,” she said. Her breasts were large and hot. But Dr. Pickett had said the milk would go away in a short while when it became clear that no one was going to drink it.
“Isn’t that a relief?” said Louise. “It will go away.” Her voice had taken on a ripe, red quality because of all the crying she had been doing. Dan hugged her, and when he stepped back the front of her green gown was wet.
Dan went home that night and tried to build a coffin. He cut the parts out of pine, but his measurements were off just enough that nothing fit together. He could have assembled the box, but it would not have been right. So he didn’t. He stacked the pieces in a corner of the basement and went upstairs. He drove over to Earl Kellogg’s place in Wylie. Earl sat in a lounge chair. The news had just ended and he was looking at television. His wife, Paula, was on the couch. The walls were covered with her quilts, including the one of Kirby Puckett which had been featured in the Stone City Tribune.
“I’m sorry to bother you so late,” said Dan.
Earl turned down the sound. “It’s a repeat, anyway. How are you, man?”
“We could not believe it when we heard,” said Paula. “We just sat here and looked at each other. How is Louise?”
“She’s going to be all right,” said Dan.
“What caused this?” said Earl.
“They don’t know,” said Dan. “It’s called preeclampsia, and they don’t know why it happens.”
“We burn our lights in a wilderness,” said Paula.
“I still can’t believe it,” said Dan. “I mean, I know it happened, but I don’t believe it.”
“You look pretty bad. Would you like a beer?”
Dan nodded. “Yeah,” he said.
“We’ll get you a beer,” said Earl.
“Thanks,” said Dan.
The child was buried at the cemetery north of Grafton known as North Cemetery. It has another name no one uses, which is Sweet Meadow.
Louise and Dan went down to Darnier’s in the morning. The baby wore a white gown and lace cap. Under her crossed hands they put a locket with Lake Michigan sand from their honeymoon and a photograph of the two of them, taken while Louise was pregnant. Then they each kissed her and closed the lid of the white box.
Emil Darnier brought the infant to the cemetery in the long black hearse. The back glided up to reveal the tiny casket. The walls of the inside of the hearse were burgundy. The grave was under a willow not far from the stone of Louise’s father and grandparents. It was the fourteenth of May, warm and mild.
Emil thought the way to get the box in the ground was for him and Dan to stand on either side and let it down with two ropes run beneath it. But Dan said, “I don’t want the box to tilt.”
“They never do,” said Emil.
“Why?”
“I been doing this a lot of years.”
“I will lower her with my hands. The hole isn’t that deep.”
“It’s deeper than it looks.”
“I don’t want the casket to tilt.”
“That’s how people hurt their back.”
“I’m in pretty good shape.”
“It’s not the weight so much as it’s an awkward reach.”
“Let’s not argue,” said Dan.
“No,” said Emil.
Dan knelt on a towel beside the grave. The hole was not really very deep. It didn’t have to be for such a small casket. He could not help but think of the winter frosts which would go three or four feet down. But now it was warm and the light poured from the sky.
There was a large turnout from Grafton, Pinville, and Wylie, people they knew from town and people they knew from their jobs. Louise had asked Henry Hamilton to read the Scripture, and he had brought his family Bible, an enormous gold book that threatened to fall from his hands. “Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep,” read Henry. “The Lord himself is thy keeper; the Lord is thy defence upon thy right hand; so that the sun shall not burn thee by day, neither the moon by night.”
Louise sat in a lawn chair in the shade. Dan held the coffin throughout the ceremony and then put it in the grave. Louise stood and dropped a white rose on the box. Bumblebees cruised heavy-headed through the leaves of nearby bushes. Everyone lined up to turn a shovelful of earth. This baby is hiding.
Dan and Louise were the last to leave after the service. Louise put dark glasses on. They did not feel like going home, so they drove over to the nature walk by Martins Woods. They made their way through the trees and along the river, coming out in the prairie grass, which was golden in the sun. Then they drove to Walleye Lake and parked on the shore, looking at wind moving across the water. They didn’t say anything, holding hands between the seats of the Vega. The colors were vivid and real, but they felt that somehow they could see these scenes and no longer be part of them.
PART III
LOVE REBEL
FOURTEEN
LOUISE GOT BETTER but did not go back to work. Perry Kleeborg hired Maren Staley for the summer and was teaching her to take pictures. Maren came out to the farm from time to time because there was so much that Kleeborg did not know about running the studio, although it was his name on the door.
Maren would report to Kleeborg that Louise’s coloring was poor and her eyes still seemed puffy or that she was suffering from headaches or that she was still taking blood-pressure medicine. Kleeborg would then order some Texas grapefruits or California oranges and have them delivered to the farm in cardboard boxes that would sit in the garage unopened, bearing bright pictures of their contents.
Louise walked in her sleep. She would go down into the cellar, and wake in the morning with dirty feet. She would take out and rearrange the food in the cupboards. Several times she woke in the middle of the night certain that she had heard a baby’s cry. She was out of bed and on her bare feet before she could think twice. She felt a stirring in her breasts even though her milk had long since gone away.
She did not take the crib down or change the baby’s room back to a spare room. People offered to put the baby’s things away, even people she did not know well—the implication being that whoever was going to do the job, it should be done. She figured it must have been a custom at one time because mothers could not bear to do it. But the quilts and rocker and crib and dresser were the only day-to-day proof that there had in fact been a baby. Louise felt, or maybe imagined, the impatience of the outside world. She and Dan would wake early, as light crept into the room and mourning doves issued their three-part calls in the yard. At that hour time seemed to have stopped, and therefore seemed not to be carrying them any farther away.
Dan always had something to do. He emptied the trailer of her things and towed it behind the barn. Dan said the trailer now seemed like a terrible joke, although the loss of the baby did not seem to have anything to do with the trailer. He put in longer hours as sheriff. He would speak to anyone on any topic. He rewrote the shift system, which had become twisted and ridiculous over the years. Dan campaigned hard for the sheriff’s primary. Some people thought he was a little out of control or had some weird look in his eyes. But on June first he won the primary, and Johnny White, as predicted, filed enough signatures to run as an Independent.
One Sunday not long after the primary, Louise walked around the barn to see the trailer. The air inside was hot and still. She sat there, heat-stunned, sweating, drinking a beer, which she was not supposed to do. A wasp buzzed against the window. As she looked through the dusty glass, a bale of straw tumbled out the door of the haymow. She walked to the barn. It was cooler inside, and dark, smelling of ammonia and old wood. She climbed the ladder past the floor of the haymow, past several layers of straw, and into heat again. Dan was wrestling a bale in the sunlight streaming through the door.
“What are you doing?” she said.
He stopped and rested. “Fixing the straw.”
Louise looked at him. He was shiny with sweat and covered in bits of straw. “What’s wrong with it?” she said.
“It wasn’t stacked evenly, so the corner was about to give way,” said Dan.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” said Louise. “It’s Les Larsen’s straw.”
“I know it,” said Dan. “I know it is. It just bothers me to see something done so badly.”
“Why did you come up in the first place?”
“Who else is going to?”
Louise left the farm in August to go with Mary up to Seldom Lake in Minnesota. Mary went for two weeks every year because her sister and brother-in-law, Carol and Kenneth Kennedy, ran a camp on the lake.
It was late on a Friday when Louise and Mary arrived. The air was cool and they drove a winding dirt lane past tall black trees. Louise had not been here for years. As a child she had regarded Kenneth and Carol as exotic.
The house came into view, big as Louise remembered, lights burning in the windows. Kenneth and Carol rose from rocking chairs on the dark porch. They showed Mary and Louise to their cabins, and the four walked back to the house. Carol, Mary, and Louise sat at the kitchen table as Kenneth handed out cans of beer from the refrigerator.
“Well, it sure is good to see you two,” said Carol. She was tall like Mary, but heavier, and had an oval mark on her cheek from playing with a soldering iron when young.
“You know, I had forgotten a lot of it,” said Louise.
“We’re really not the same place you would remember,” said Carol.
“We built the rec center in eighty-two and the bathhouse in eighty-six,” said Kenneth. “In five years we’ve more than tripled our dock space.”
“Wow,” said Louise.
“I am looking forward to fishing,” said Mary.
Kenneth had been standing with his hands on the back of a chair, and now he pulled the chair out and sat down. He was one of those skinny, aging caretakers you see carrying boxes and rakes and things from place to place at motels and camps all over the country. “We wanted to talk to you about that,” he said.
“What?” said Mary.
“We… How should I say this? We made a mistake,” said Kenneth. “It was in the spring. We’ve always been blessed with good fishing here. Well, you know that, Mary. And I guess we just—”
“I’m sure you noticed there aren’t that many cars for the middle of summer,” said Carol. “This is why we can give you separate cabins.”
“Are you going to let me tell the story?” said Kenneth.
“Tell it,” said Carol.
“We pushed our luck,” said Kenneth. “That’s what we did. We pushed it. As you may know, we went to Finland last year.”
“You sent me a postcard,” said Mary.
“Mary, it was so beautiful,” said Carol.
“Anyway, we went,” said Kenneth. “Naturally we tried the fishing. In fact, we were able to write the trip off. But that’s neither here nor there. So. We were especially impressed by a fish called the bandfish. It’s a real fisherman’s fish, if you know what I mean, and we arranged to have some shipped back live as a transplant.”
“Long story short, they chased the other fish out of the lake,” said Carol.
“That’s right,” said Kenneth. “All that’s left is scrup.”
“Is what?” said Louise.
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sp; “Scrup,” said Kenneth.
“That’s the local scavenger fish,” said Carol.
“Back home, Louise, a scrup would be called a chub or a sucker,” said Mary.
“I got you,” said Louise. “What happened to the bandfish?”
“Well, this is what really makes us mad,” said Carol. “Once the other fish were gone, they left.”
“After we shelled out all that money to bring them here,” said Kenneth.
“Where did they go?” said Louise.
“We don’t know,” said Carol.
“They could be anywhere,” said Kenneth. He laughed and the others joined in. “It would be funny, if we didn’t need the income.”
“Did you know I’m delivering newspapers now?” said Carol.
“You were doing that before,” said Mary.
“I feel bad you came all this way,” said Carol. “Of course, we had thought that by now some kind of fish would have returned. Because they feed on scrup. That’s why we didn’t call you and tell you not to bother.”
“It’s not a bother,” said Mary. “We’re glad to be here.”
“What would you like to do?” Carol asked.
“What would I like to do?” said Mary. “I don’t care what we do. We don’t have to do anything. I want Louise to get some rest, and beyond that I want to do whatever you want to do.”
“There must be something,” said Carol.
“There isn’t,” said Mary.
“Louise, what about you?” said Kenneth.
“Oh, I don’t really care,” Louise said. “I thought it might be nice to do some hiking while we were here.”
“Hiking?” said Mary. “I think you’d better take it easy. I’m not sure how much hiking you should do.”