by Patrick Lane
15
i’m only Marilyn Bly, she said, the valley below her like a dress thrown off, unfolded at her feet. It’s who I am.
Tom laid his head on her thigh, his eyes closed, Marilyn’s voice a small, sure thing.
I’m from up the lake. All my life we’ve been poor. Sometimes my mother would bring home clothes from the houses where she cleaned, stuff the rich women gave her that their daughters didn’t want any more, sweaters and dresses, things like that. I wasn’t like those girls. When they were out swimming, I was working at the packing plant. I was twelve when my mother got me a job there. I swept floors and helped old Mr. Gondor mix glue at the box labelling machine. I worked in the fields and orchards too, and my mother let me keep some of what I made.
Early evening light glanced off the lakes in the distance, a trembling as of glass moving, the wind touching the bright mirrors between the hills. Marilyn took a deep breath. No one ever saw me before, she said. Not like you did. I’m not pretty, not like other girls, and when Tom looked at her, she took her hand from his cheek and struck him lightly on the chest. Don’t you laugh at me, she said. I know I’m little and I’ve only got one eye, but I can see things as clear as you. I’m ordinary, you know. She leaned back against the outcrop of stone. I think what I’ve been doing is waiting, she said, but Tom wasn’t sure if she’d said it to him or to herself.
He stared past her quietness, wondering at how she seemed to have entered his life. He could see her standing in the back of the house gazing down at Norman lying on the ground, her face flushed. What he remembered most was that she didn’t seem afraid, and how he knew that her fearlessness would need watching over. The breeze lifted off the fields below and rose against the cliff, a Red-tail hawk circling in the updrafts. He thought of Eddy leaping through the door into that bedroom at the end of the hall as the old man shot at him, the bullet passing through the air he’d just been breathing.
He closed his eyes again, staring into the blood of his eyelids. What was Joe doing hanging around with Wayne, anyway? he wondered. He’d finished the shift and had driven to town. He’d been buying groceries at Olafson’s and was about to head out when he stopped and told Olafson to throw in a can of tobacco for Mother, and that’s when he saw Joe through the window of the Venice Café, standing at the counter talking to Lucky Johnson. Beside Joe was Wayne, eager, laughing. Tom got back in the truck, watched as Joe lifted out his wallet and leafed a bill from it, Lucky nodding his head at something he’d said. The two of them had come out then, Joe pushing his wallet into his back pocket. They turned away from where Tom was parked and went down toward the Okanagan Hotel, Wayne shifting beside Joe as if unsure exactly where he should walk. Joe’s collar was turned up under his duck tail, his shoulders hunched. He was kicking at small rocks, chipping them off the fenders of cars, the small shards glancing into the gutter. Tom could see the anger in Joe and wondered how far it led.
When Tom had got back to the house, Marilyn set about preparing the food. While pork chops crackled in the fry pan, she took him to the bathroom, cleaned his hand and put on a new bandage. Then, sitting at the table he’d felt feverish, his mind fuzzy. When he finished eating, he took a plate to Mother who’d said she hadn’t felt well enough to eat. She sent him away from her room, telling him her stomach was upset.
When he returned to the kitchen, Marilyn had the dishes stacked in the sink.
I’ve got to get out of here for a while, he said, and so they’d headed up the road to the fields, stopping at the bend of a little creek where wheel ruts wound toward the mountain. He stepped over a low fence and turned to Marilyn, who was close behind, and he lifted her above a strand of barbed wire, gripping her under the arms so she flailed her legs in the air, laughing, Tom not wanting her to be severed from him even as he slowed and she descended, her feet brushing a cluster of dry grass, until finally her toes found the ground.
The day was sliding away. It was well into autumn, apples starting to fall from the trees, most of the gardens and fields they passed picked or mowed clean, the butterflies and dragonflies vanished, their eggs hidden in creeks or in the wedged crevices of trees. In another month the last frogs would bury themselves in the mud to live out the cold. He and Marilyn had continued on into the land, their trail through the grass a steady, progressive wandering. They stopped here and there, to watch a rabbit slip into the brush, to look at a rattle snake’s shed skin, the abandoned nest of a pheasant, ivory-green egg shells like fractured pottery. They waded through an untended field. The farmer who lived there had been sick these past months, a man who’d let Tom hunt his land in past years. Elsie, his wife, sat in a rocker on the porch, waiting patiently as she had every day since early spring. Marilyn waved at her and Elsie lifted her hand as if to wave back and then dropped it into her lap, the rocking chair under her moving slowly on the porch boards.
The grass had dropped its last seeds, the summer pollen long gone, leaves and stalks dry and withered. Marilyn said: Listen to the grass, and Tom swept his arm through the bent heads, a faint crash of sound swimming around them as of glass falling in an accident far away. Herefords stared at them from the shade of a chokecherry bush, a horse whinnied as they passed by.
They’d crossed through a Lombardy poplar line between two fields where a few last apples blinked in the trees. Streaks of red draped down the sides of the Foxwhelps and Northern Spies. The Gideons and Redchiefs were past ripe, a few trees unpicked, fruit hanging heavy in their autumn skins. They were old trees that had somehow escaped the great freeze a few years after the war, when so many orchards had been destroyed, like the fruit trees at home, their blossoms that spring wrapped in ice. A farm dog barked under a barnyard pole and Tom stopped Marilyn, holding her to his side as he waited for the dog’s rush. The brindle hound with its scoop belly and barrel chest raged at them from the end of a tether. I love dogs, said Marilyn. Yeah, Tom said, that one looks like it’d run for a year if you ever let it go.
Your mother told me you used to have one, Marilyn said.
Yeah. Docker, Tom said. His name was Docker. I found him at the dump.
How come you called him that?
Eddy did. Because Father docked his tail. He cut it off with a hatchet so it would look like a real spaniel.
That’s terrible, Marilyn said.
Tom pushed his hands into his pockets and kicked at a clump of grass, then started walking, Marilyn running a little in order to keep up. They passed along the edge of a hay-field, the low brush on the side leaning away from a line of trees as it tried to reach the light. He stepped over a fallen poplar limb and told Marilyn to be careful and she was, when suddenly a cock pheasant exploded from cover, the rush of its wings startling them both. Marilyn sat down on a rock jutting from the grass, tied her shoe, and began picking burrs from her socks. He followed the flight of the pheasant as it coasted on its wings down the field and then swerved away into the trees.
Father could not abide killing a pheasant. Tom remembered one winter morning when he and his father went out to feed them, Father scattering grain across the crust of hard snow. The pheasants came up from the creek thickets, tentative, delicate, the cocks with their red-feathered eyes, moving like jewels across the ice and the golden hens close behind, clucking nervously, chittering their way to the seeds. They’re like no others, he’d said. Tom had always remembered that, and his father’s huge hands strewing seeds on the white snow. His father had touched him only once with what seemed care and that too late. That early winter morning, with the pheasants pecking the wheat off the ice and snow by the frozen creek, he’d come up behind him and placed his hands on Tom’s shoulders. Look at the birds, he’d said. They are rare beauty.
Rare beauty!
What did you say? asked Marilyn.
It was something my father said once. It doesn’t matter now, and he took her hand and helped her up, the two of them going on.
When they got to the cliffs at the foot of the mountain, he’d turned her towa
rd a rock chimney where they climbed the laddered stone. They had come out on a ledge and looked at the valley, the fingers of trees jutting into the edges of the fields and farms like pieces of a puzzle fitted together, thin lines of road binding them like stitched wounds. Beyond was the town, buried deep in the valley bottom, three lakes pointing their heads toward that hidden place.
The hawk floated above them now, its small shadow an eyelash on the woven grass of the fields. They gazed up at its soft, grey belly almost lost against the sky. The far hills gone behind a stray cloud, its shadow on the lake drifting. The wind blew Marilyn’s hair back, a tangle across her forehead. He looked up at her leaning against the rock, her small face peering at him. You never told me how come you’re blind in that eye?
Marilyn cupped her hand over that side of her face. What’s there to say? My father used to get angry at me when he was in one of his dark moods. I don’t know what I did one time to make him so mad, but he rolled up the hall on his chair with his cane across his lap. I remember my mother screaming at him not to hit me. But he got up and balanced himself as best he could, and tried to strike me with the cane. He slipped when he was swinging and it hit my eye. He never meant to do it. After that I was different than other girls.
Tom reached out to her.
Don’t you go feeling sorry for me.
Most everyone’s got some kind of sorrow, Tom said slowly. But what can be done about it?
She pointed at the smoke rising from the dump on the hill to the north of town. I’ve lived up the road from that smoke most of my life, she said. Just for a second, I thought I could see the light bouncing off the side of our trailer.
He followed her pointed finger, but couldn’t find what she was looking at. Look harder, she said, and he squinted his eyes, but still couldn’t find the spot Marilyn wanted him to see.
He woke startled in the middle of the night, a sound breaking into his dream of being in the dark root cellar searching for his dog, rummaging through old potato sacks and crates, and not finding him. It was a recurring dream, each time leaving Tom awake and sweating. Night sounds came through the window screen, the far-off roar of a distant truck, a Pygmy owl with its soft double hoots, and then quiet again. He heard the faint scratching of the wasps as they crawled on their dusty trails between the studs of the walls and into the room. The old house was full of cracks and patches, splintered holes. There were breaks in the stucco and fascia boards, splits in the roof shakes. The great hives in the poplars and cottonwoods had felt the long sleep coming, the nights cool lately, the wasps crawling into the south wall where the stucco held the heat. The wasps were sluggish now, hungry, weary from a season of scraping wood from the grey boards of fences, chewing it into the wet pulp that they’d built their nests with.
He remembered sitting on the well-head earlier that summer, rubbing the palm of his hand over the wooden cover. The boards had glowed, having been flayed by the wind and sun into a soft fur the wasps harvested for paper. He’d watched them so many times, their jaws carving thin alphabets in the wood, insect words they took back to their home. In the apple tree above the well now was an empty nest. It swayed in the breeze, a deserted nunnery, the last untended grubs in their covered cells, withered.
With little or no food, the wasps were slowly dying inside their armour plates. There was little left to hunt, too many to feed, and they’d abandoned their hives. In the hours while Tom and Marilyn slept, wasps had crept through the interstices in the donna-conna wall-board of the bed room, and clustered now in clumps and complex chains on the walls, each wasp hooking herself sister to sister in a delicate wattle, as he’d seen them do every year since he was a child. In another few days there would be a great death, but for now they crept on stiff legs toward anything that gave off warmth.
Moonlight flooded the room. Marilyn lay sleeping beside him, the sheet loose on her collarbones, her one arm across the worn cotton, her hand gripping it as if by holding it she could protect herself from whatever nightmare loomed. There’d never been a girl in his bed before and now there was. She could stay for a while, he decided. It looked like she needed to. She seemed fragile there, dreaming he knew not what.
They were lying under one of Mother’s quilts. Marilyn said she’d found it in the wooden chest at the back of the closet in the room with the crib. It was the Heavenly Puzzle quilt. He hadn’t seen it in years. The quilt was one Mother had made when she was a girl. He’d tried to imagine such days, a kerosene lamp burning at the kitchen table and his grandmother, Nettie, teaching his mother the different stitches, the way to lay out the squares and triangles, the evening radio playing its tinny songs.
Sometimes, when Father was out of the house and she was in one of her moods, Mother would tell him and Eddy one of her prairie stories. One time, she sat him and Eddy down in the crib room and pulled from the closet her knotty pine chest. She told them that it had taken her years to fill what was going to be her gift to her future home and the man she would marry someday. She said she was only a little older than they were when she began to fill the chest. He had felt he had to listen even as Eddy squirmed, his brother wanting to break free on his bike and go to town. There was a sadness in her at those moments that drew Tom to her, as if in witnessing these stories he could make something up to her. She called it her Hope Chest and gathered him in with her words.
He’d seen the chest before in the back of the closet, scratched and worn from the years. Mother told him how she’d carried it with her from town to farm to ranch during the wandering years with Father. In the chest were two nightgowns, the smocking stitched by hand, and underwear she said she’d bought with egg money back home in Nokomis, one pair made from red silk, too pretty to ever wear. She told them she used to love to pull the silk over her hand so she could see the sun through its thin weave. She had stretched it over her spread fingers and showed them by holding it in front of the sun coming through the window. Look how pretty, she’d said, and Tom remembered seeing her fingers struggling as if inside a flame. Eddy had asked her to let him do it, but she shushed him and put the red silk aside. Pillowcases, sheets, and towels were there too, some of them given to her by a neighbour who was leaving the land and going back home to England. There were doilies and antimacassars, things with names he’d never heard before, things he didn’t know: taffeta, appliqué, bodice. There were two teacups with flowers painted on, and a single saucer, the other broken, she’d said, years ago. Father had dropped the chest when they were moving out of Medicine Hat and driving south into Idaho, heading to some logging outfit up the Teton River near the Wyoming border. Some job that never worked out, two weeks, a month, and then catching a ride on some passing truck, back on the road with Father’s promises of better times to come.
She told them how she’d sat in a painted pine chair in the clapboard house by the correction line and stitched the patches together on what she called her Heavenly Puzzle, one of many quilts she’d made in those years. In the bottom of the chest was her special quilt. She said she’d made it from bits of cloth she’d got from women on the outlying farms where there were still a few people left. When she told the women it was for her Trousseau Quilt, they gave her what they had, velvet and satin and silk, little scraps they’d saved. The women wished her luck, though Mother said there was a look behind their eyes as if they knew something they weren’t telling.
The nearest house to their farm was an old soddie where a man lived alone, the wife he’d sent for from some coal town in Ohio never arriving. Mother said the roof and walls were made of dirt and grass, and that she’d gone inside with her father one day when he’d been dickering with the man for a brood sow. All she’d remembered breathing in there was darkness and dust. Tom tried to imagine his mother in such a room, or walking the narrow prairie roads, going from farm to farm in search of bits of pretty cloth, but all he could see was the thin silhouette of a girl walking against the light.
Some of the wasps had now crawled up on the bed or falle
n onto it from the ceiling. They drifted across the quilt like beads of amber. The heat of his and Marilyn’s bodies had drawn them, or it was not their heat, but only that they were living things like they were, breathing. Perhaps they remembered their earlier life when in their hexagonal cells they’d slept as the wind moved their nest. He’d seen the huge, grey brains dreaming in the trees.
He turned over onto his side and settled the quilt over his shoulder, the wasps holding on, the tiny hairs and hooks on their legs fixing them to wisps of thread rising from the pattern of complex stitches. He felt hot, and sleep wouldn’t come. He couldn’t get Stanley out of his mind. Why did the bastard go to the old man’s house? He wasn’t there just for the hell of it. He thought of Eddy in Harry’s shack with who knows what going on in his head about what had just gone down and probably not caring.
God damn you, Eddy, he said out loud.
Marilyn stirred beside him. What?
Open your eyes, he whispered, sitting up, turning on the bedside lamp. She opened them and looked down at the quilt with its spots of yellow and black. He felt her startle and told her not to be afraid.
Where did they come from? And as if to answer herself, she said in a small voice: There were only a few when we went to sleep.
She held herself tight to his arm as he turned her head to him.
Each year they come into this attic room, Tom said. It’s the warm side of the house. They come when they’ve run out of food. It’s like they know the cold is coming down from the north. He pressed on a square of colour that rested on her belly and the wasps shifted as his hand slid under them, their hooks loosening momentarily until they grasped each other tight again on top of his hand. Slowly, he raised his hand and laid it on his skull, then drew it carefully from under them. Marilyn took thin gulps of air. She clinched her eyes and stared through her lashes.