by Patrick Lane
Tom could see the pistol in Eddy’s hand and Eddy standing there over the old man’s body as the sounds of the rifle and pistol receded to echoing whimpers, Eddy surely thinking the shots were nothing at the edge of town. A pit-lamped deer feeding on windfall apples or a coyote crept too close to the house in search of rats was just another night-kill. Night shooting just made anyone hearing it from afar huddle down a little deeper in their beds. And then Harry covering the body with a blanket, pulling the bed out from the wall to hide the body, and then going through the chest of drawers, him hissing his excitement, a white pill clenched in his teeth.
Tom knelt on the floor beside the old man. A single splinter of pine leaned into the man’s nostril. It was a small and perfect thing, a tiny, remnant tree sticking up out of the worn floor. A clot of nose hairs curved around the pale of the wood needle. A bloat of blood welled from the hole where the bullet had gone into the old man’s temple. He rested there, one foot on top of the other, the sole Tom could see, a hard orange. The calluses were ridged moons on the bottom of his foot, the one big toe with a nail curved over, cliffs and valleys in the deep lines of horn runnelled with dirt.
He stood up and began looking for the rifle, but couldn’t find it anywhere, not in the bedroom or in any of the other rooms. The flashlight played across the floor as he hunted for the other shell. There had to be one. He got down on his hands and knees, finally finding the last one in a corner. He put it in his pocket with the other one, the clink of the brass a tiny bell. He didn’t know if the pistol Eddy used ejected its shells. He looked hard, but couldn’t find any.
He heard a truck go by on the road. Hands shaking, hurried now, he ran down the hall and grabbed a towel from the bathroom. He lifted the head, a gout of blood swelling in the hole, congealing there. He wrapped the towel around it and dragged the pillowcase down over the face. Then he rolled the body in the bedsheets and the blanket, binding it all with butcher string he found in a kitchen drawer. He tied it tight around the ankles, the soles of the feet sticking out below the knot. He wanted it all to be over. He went to the kitchen and came back with some damp rags and cleaned the floor as best he could, jamming the soiled cloths into the winding sheets. Then he dragged the body down the hall to the front porch. He walked back down the hall with the flashlight, leaning over, making sure there were no smears of blood left there, and then he went out onto the porch and closed the front door behind him.
He backed the truck to the porch steps, turned off the engine, got out, and humped the body down the steps to the truck box. He lifted the head and shoulders onto the tailgate, struggling awkwardly with the hips and legs, finally hefting them in, the body heavier than he’d imagined. He shut the tailgate and covered the body with the tarp from behind the back seat, mounding branches from the brush pile he’d seen at the corner of the house on top of it. He gripped his fist tight as he got back into the truck, his hurt hand pounding.
He drove down the undulating road past the gravel pit, his lights out, navigating by the moon, passing by the boundary lines of fences, and the gaping cellar of a burned-out, abandoned house. He could smell the old man’s body on his hands. He drifted past mown fields with their scattered bales of late alfalfa. The air whistled through the branches piled in the back of the truck. He turned left at the crossroad, taking the back road to Black Rock and home, and then he saw headlights coming up the road he’d just turned off. He wondered who’d be driving that way so late. Uneasy, he pulled over. Through the rear window and the fret of branches, he made out the white and black markings of a police car as it went past the corner, heading toward the hill he’d just come down. He broke into a sudden sweat.
He had to see for himself what he feared. Tom did a fast U-turn and went back the way he’d come, driving by the moon and the feel of his tires on the road, weeds and ditches going by on his left, then the gravel pit with its ghostly vehicles, the red tail-lights of the police car far ahead of him, guiding him back to where he’d been. At the top of the hill, he slowed and watched the car turn into the driveway of the old man’s house, the trees swallowing it.
He coasted partway down the hill and turned off a few hundred yards from the butcher shop where there was a break in a farm fence, rolling through the high grass and coming to a stop behind a pile of ruined apple boxes. Getting quietly out of the truck, he ran across the field and clambered over the fence that bordered on the old man’s property. He crept through the trees off to the side and lay down behind a loose stack of cut wood, the smell of the fox he’d seen earlier redolent on the split rounds, the smell stinging his nostrils, belly churning, his heart pounding against his ribs.
In front of the truck was the police car, and Sergeant Stanley was standing by the front fender. Tom stared at him, this man who had wreaked torment upon his brother. He brought malice with him wherever he went and Tom wondered what his being there would lead to.
Stanley was looking at the house, no uniform on, his off-duty belt buckle shining. He was on his own sweet own with his bare arms, his jeans and cowboy boots, his black brush cut and pencil-thin moustache. Then the dome light went on in the car and he saw Crystal sitting in the front seat fluffing her blonde hair and looking bored. Was it Crystal who’d brought Stanley here? And why? She’d seen Eddy and Harry talking in the gravel pit earlier, but that was all. She hadn’t heard them talking. No, someone else told the police to come out here. She’d just gone along with him for a night ride into the hills. What kind of dream could she have that she’d go anywhere with Stanley?
The Sergeant’s boots stubbed up the porch steps, and he knocked on the front door. He waited a second and then knocked again, his hand on the doorknob. After a few moments he opened the door and went in. Those snakeskin boots were walking the same rooms Tom had walked, but Tom knew there was nothing in the house to tell Stanley any of them had been there. All he could know was that for some reason the old man was gone. Go ahead and poke among pork chop bones and blackened peas, Tom thought. Look under the bed. There’s nothing there to find.
He unclenched his fist, the tear in his palm pulling open a little. Stanley’s flashlight flickered in the window of the living room where the old man had waited for his intruders to come in. And then the light disappeared. Tom imagined Stanley going into the kitchen and down the hallway to the bedroom where the old man had died. Then, for a moment, he saw the Sergeant pass by the bedroom window, a shifting glow and shadows. After a few minutes, the front door opened and Stanley came out onto the porch.
The crickets stilled. Tom glanced over at Crystal in the interior light of the car, looking in the rear-view mirror as she put lipstick on, her blonde hair curled around her face. The Sergeant came down off the porch, and got in the driver’s seat. He said something to Crystal, she laughed, and the squad car pulled out on the road and headed back toward town.
When Tom was finished digging, he rested the blade on the floor of the grave. His hand had started bleeding again, and he pulled the makeshift bandage tighter. The piled dirt on either side rose over his head and shoulders, the grave’s lip at the midline of his chest, his pick part-buried by the last dirt he’d thrown out. He pushed the shovel blade into the side of the pile, pulled himself up and out. The last boulder had come out of the grave like a tooth from a jaw. It teetered on the edge of the hole as the sky bore down on him. Orion hung in the dark, the great hunter wheeling on his back as if he were falling into the southern horizon.
After he got the old man’s body out of the truck and into the wheelbarrow, he pushed him toward the orchard, the iron wheel of the barrow grating on the path. Father floated in the air just beyond his eyes. He tried to banish him with thoughts of anything, the sky, the stars, but when he got to the well he stopped and stared at the spot where Father had lain. Eddy’s words came back to him, Eddy saying over and over that Tom had to stop remembering. He closed his eyes and thought of his sisters. Alice, Little Rose, and his half-sister, the baby he never saw, but for a towel and a fire bur
ning.
He was angry at his brother and the mess he’d got them into. Eddy had lost whatever control he might’ve known. He had passed through some door and there was only destruction in the room he found himself in. He trundled the wheelbarrow over the uneven ground, past the water of the creek to the orchard. When he got to the grave, he lifted the handles high and the old man slid headfirst into the hole.
Tom rolled the tooth stone in, and then the shovelling of the gravel, clay, and clods, and last, the desiccated grass which he had carefully cut square by square, replacing it now in the same design. He tamped the grass down lightly, not wanting to bruise the frail roots. The first spring rains would green the grave.
He put the shovel and pick in the wheelbarrow and started back to the house, stopping at the well. This is where he’d sat after Father died, on a night that felt the same as this night, but for the coolness. There were the same stars in the sky, the same moon. Tom breathed in deep as if there wasn’t enough air in the world to keep him alive. Blood is blood and sometimes better gone. That’s what Mother had said that night.
He looked down at the few apples withering at his feet and remembered how once Father had showed him the star hidden inside the apple’s flesh. He had plucked an apple from a high branch, one that hadn’t been touched by scab or worm. He held it in his palm and took his knife and sliced it across the centre the wrong way. Father parted the halves and held them open, the flesh white against the rim of red, a star in each half, the bronze seeds buried in the heart.
He was walking again, steel handles in his hands, the iron wheel grinding. He rested the barrow against the porch at the back of the house, bracing the handles up under the wind-worn siding. He stretched and looked up at the dark window of Eddy’s room.
At the water drum he took off his shirt and draped it over the end of the dead raspberry canes near the corner of the house, and unwound the filthy cloth from his hand. He bent over and pulled water up in gouts, washing it over his face, his shoulders and chest. On a cedar shingle by the barrel was a chunk of soap, its dried pores scored with dirt. Tom rubbed it into his hand, the bits of clinging grit a scour in the ripped skin where he’d been hurt, a bit of blood seeping there. He leaned deep into the drum, pushing his head under the brackish water. A dead frog drifted by his eyes as he went under, its outspread limbs supplicant. He looked past it and swung his head from side to side. Suddenly, he felt two small hands coming gently around him, circling his waist. They brushed across the bare skin of his belly. He went stiff against the steel of the drum, a wet cold against his heat. The hands moved up, pulling hard on his nipples, then went to his belt. He felt it unbuckle and the buttons of his jeans come loose and then Marilyn’s fist was tight around him. She stroked once, twice, and at the third Tom faded away, his head lifting from the drum, his knees buckling, water in a shower flowing from his thrown hair.
12
who named me?
I named you. Listen, I’ve told you this story so many times. Father came out of the bedroom with you wrapped loose in a towel. He held you high as Mother cursed him. Her outrage was thick in the room. There was a strange woman in her bed. She was your mother. Her brown hair was splayed across the pillow in heavy tangles and her white hand was by the sheet, plucking at the cotton, worrying itself there. Tom was by the door staring at two tiny feet sticking out from the towel. When Father saw him, he herded Tom down the hall with his knees. You were the wrapped baby above Father’s head, a wet thing flying there. He shouted at Tom: Get out! Get the hell outside!
Was she pretty?
Your mother? She was beautiful beyond the pain she had.
Who was she?
She was a woman who lived in an old cabin under the hills below Silver Star Mountain. She had moved to the valley a year or two before she met Father, a woman who’d come from the ashes of Europe. She’d known men before in the war, but here she’d stayed by herself away from others until Father came along with his smile and his red hair. One day he was passing by and offered her a ride in his truck. She was carrying two small canvas bags of eggs and a clutch of wildflowers, all to sell door to door in town. How she got the chickens is anybody’s guess. She told him she walked the five miles every Monday and Friday. The next week Father was there waiting for her on the Monday morning, his truck parked by the ditch, the side door open like a gift. She was dirt poor, but then so many were. I don’t think she had any family here. She never said. The cabin was a deserted one left over from another time, some prospector down on his luck built it, or it was a line-cabin from the ranching days when the miners came south to try their hand at cattle after losing most of what they had in the gold fields of Barkerville. It was pine logs and rotting shakes. She patched the roof with cedar she split with a hammer and froe and put in panes of glass where they’d been broken. There was a two-plate stove bound with haywire and sitting on field stones, the stove fed with dead wood she gathered in the hills. The Indians from the head of the lake had helped her through that first winter. They gave her meat, fish, salt, and flour, and dried Saskatoon berries and blueberries from the meadows. She’d lived there for three years when Father first saw her.
What did she look like?
She was tall for a woman back then, her long brown hair woven into a single braid, the feathered end curved up as if trying to be a wing. Brown eyes set deep, dark as wild chestnuts, and cheekbones so high you’d think there was some Eastern blood in her. She had an easy walk, long-legged as she was in the drifting woollen skirts she’d made from cutup army blankets she’d begged from the Salvation Army down on Tronson Avenue. She was pretty in a country kind of way, her skin fresh as the spring water she washed in. Troubled, yes, for who knew what grief she’d seen during the war. What she saw in Father was only hers to know. Perhaps she thought she’d found some love in herself for a man in what to her was a new place.
And Father?
Maybe she was someone he imagined from the days when he wandered the prairie, living as she did in that cabin up under the mountain. Maybe she was beautiful to him. But what she was doesn’t matter. In the end, Father always broke whatever was close. Men get impatient with things they can’t get around.
I never knew, said Starry Night.
Mother had started to clean the woman, wiping her thighs with a towel she dipped in a basin filled with hot water from the stove. The afterbirth had come, and Mother was wrapping it in a piece of old newspaper. She’d yelled at Father when he put the woman in her bed: You bugger, you damned bugger!
She’d helped in your birthing, all the while cursing Elmer for what he’d brought down on her and her house. To Father, an illegitimate child, a bastard, was a miserable thing, but to bring the very woman to Mother’s bed and ask for her help? And her his wife, the mother of his sons. Still, she was washing the woman clean. She remembered her own birthing, and no matter her anger at such a betrayal, his bringing your mother into her own house and throwing one of his get in her face, she couldn’t leave a woman in a man’s hands. Not at the last. She said that night that Elmer had never helped her once in all the days and nights of their lives. It was such an effrontery, such an insult to her who had birthed her own, Tom and Eddy, Little Rose and me. Yet she’d accepted the woman when he drove in from wherever he’d had her when the pains came. Mother had told him to take her into the house when Father appeared at the kitchen door, your mother moaning as he held her up. Eddy sat in the corner of the kitchen, watching as his father helped her through the door. At the first sound from her, he fled to the stairs and his room. Tom kept asking who she was, and Father, desperate, drove Tom out of the bedroom. He crept back down the hall to watch and listen as your mother cried out on the bed, the pains coming hard and fast.
Father just shifted from one boot to the other at the end of the bed, staring, his cap with the broken bill stupid in his hands, wanting what was happening to never have happened, wanting the birth to be over so things could be as they’d been. It wasn’t so much that he
wanted to be free to gallivant about, but that he knew the woman on the bed loved him and he didn’t understand her wanting him and then wanting the baby too, one of his, and what that would do to them all, to him. No, he wanted the baby gone. He’d learned how to put things behind him the day he walked away from the sister I was named for. He was good at denying things.
When your mother was in the bedroom, Eddy came back downstairs and sat near the front door on the couch in the living room, his fingers twined together in a knot. He wanted no part of what was going on. Your birth was to him yet another madness of his parents’ ways. Eddy was afraid of his own fear. He could hear everything just as Tom could, the cries of your mother as she bore down, the curses from Mother, telling him he had to get rid of the baby when it came. I’ll not have your bastard in this town to shame me. You’ll get rid of it or else!
Did she mean for him to take me to the orchard?
Mother just wanted you gone. She was so angry at what he’d done.
Your mother lay on the bed and told them in her broken English not to take her baby away when it came, but what could she say or do, Mother holding her down, telling her to push. When you came in that blood flow from her womb, Mother lifted you onto a towel, tied you off with a bit of twine, the cord that bound you to your mother cut with a paring knife, and then Father took what she had birthed and left the room. Your mother cried out to him, but Father never turned.
What did she say?
She said: My baby, my baby!
That was me.
Tom ran ahead past the bathroom and out the back door onto the porch. The fly-swatter was on top of the wood-box and he grabbed it as he went by. There were one hundred and eighty-two dead flies lying on the floor. Your brother had counted every one like he always did. Kill the gawdam flies, Father had told him in the afternoon. He had counted them out loud when he slapped with the swatter, sometimes two, three, or five at a time. His record was nine at one blow. Their bodies crunched under his feet as he ran, the fly-swatter in his hand.