Twisted Tree

by Kent Meyers

  Need? I said. I thought—

  I almost finished, I came to give you what you need, but his confidence stopped me.

  I just got here, I said. I don’t know what I need.

  His smile was a string of pearls sagging behind a screen, suddenly tightened—that bright and astonishing.

  Of course, he said. All is too new.

  His English was so perfect it sounded like speech mixed in crystal jars and measured out in doses.

  When you do know what you need, you must ask me. It is how I help.

  I found it after my shift ended—two inches of print in the Rapid City Journal. I sat inside my car, in sun hot enough to set the paper ablaze, and thought: No more squads of killer boys or machine-gunned villages. Audrey Damish drifted past my windshield: granola, yogurt, tofu. With no husband or children, she can eat guided only by her own obsessions. Until she retired she taught high school science in Lone Tree and now is at loose ends, spending a lot of time tending her father’s grave. The major event in her life may have been witnessing Hayley Jo Zimmerman’s birth, and she never tells that story anymore. When she checks out she takes her glasses off and holds them to her open mouth, as if she’s going to devour the lenses, some brittle hunger or magic act. But she merely moistens them with her breath, then wipes them clean, gazing about with an owly look before she returns them to her face. Her mother’s at an assisted-care in Lone Tree. She’s still sharp, Audrey tells me. For ninety-two, she’s still sharp. That’s the extent of our conversation. I’m tempted to sneak a candy bar into her bag someday when she has her glasses off, to see what might shake loose. She’s not exactly a Shane Valen, who never even entered the store, but she’s at the fringes, living almost beyond my reading. I fluttered my fingers at her through the windshield, but she ignored me, her eyes on something else.

  I turned to the tiny headline again. I thought of the highway running south, out of the state and into Nebraska, across the Platte River down into Kansas, and then other roads, other states, into Mexico. Jonathan, my sixteen-year-old, had a baseball game that evening. By the time he reached the plate, I could be halfway through Nebraska. Balls punching white holes in the sky—holes I wouldn’t see. Instead, the sound of tires, and all-night gas stations, and coffee, and whatever was beyond Kansas before me in the dawn.

  The sound of crumpling brought me back. My fingers had devoured the page. My hand was stained with ink, as if the heat inside the car had melted news and flesh together. The whole world wax, the Easter candle melting, the Alpha and Omega. I recalled my mother’s voice when I returned: You’ve got to talk to someone. Whatever happened down there, talk to someone.

  Over and behind the abandoned bowling alley I could see the Catholic church steeple, freshly painted: volunteer work last summer, potato chips and bratwurst and baked beans on picnic tables set up in the shade, to which the men descended, to speak about wind shaking the ladders and how they couldn’t look at moving clouds, the cross on top of the steeple sweeping vertiginously backwards. Under that steeple, I knew, Father Obermann waited inside the confessional, doing his duty whether anyone came or not.

  No one knows he smokes. He never does in public. But occasionally, when he’s been unable to get to Rapid for a while, he’ll buy a carton of Lucky Strikes at the store, wandering around with them hidden under cereal boxes in his cart, until no one else is checking out. You’d think it was pornography. He’ll make small jokes to let me know I’m part of the conspiracy, which I’ve always honored. He’s such a devoted, pious man, and the vice so minor, I wonder why he bothers to hide it at all.

  I drove to the church and parked. I squinted at its white facade, almost too bright to look at. I thought of the cool interior, which would not have changed in twenty years: the blond wood pews, the worn wood kneelers, the mournful wooden Christ.

  While my classmates talked of boys and clothes, I admired St. Teresa of Avila and dreamed of acquiring the stigmata. My final year of high school I told my parents I was going to be a lay missioner. I’d already talked to the former priest, Father Caleb, saved my money, prepared. My mother was aghast, her face white and spare as snow drifting over rooftops. She turned her back, her spine showing through her dress like rosary beads of bone.

  Don? she said. Will you say something?

  My father sopped gravy from his plate with bread. A missionary? he finally said. Can’t say I’m for it. But we been raising her Catholic, Erica. Never thought it’d haunt us.

  So I went, neither blessed nor cursed, to teach English under the stern gaze of Sister Xavier, the mission’s founder and director, in a tiny village I thought cut off from the world.

  The first time I saw an army truck appear there, everyone in the village seemed connected by threads which the truck’s grille grabbed, turning faces toward it. Men in olive green stood in the truck, cradling rifles as mothers cradle infants. Dust rose from the slowly turning tires, smearing drying clothes. I taught classes outdoors. I followed the children’s gazes as the truck moved toward us. Then I shook myself, thinking it mere distraction.

  Back to lessons, I said. Eyes on the board.

  I swept the eraser over my chalked words. The board teetered on its wobbly stand. I reached for it as it fell away from me like a large, stiff wing. And there behind it was the truck, full of soldiers. And me with my arm out as if to beckon them.

  They were boys in soldier uniforms, all staring at me. I felt as if I glowed there, an icon, unattainable as the saints in paintings: their passionate bodies, their eyes on God. The sun warmed my hair. I was probably the first white woman in that village whose body wasn’t neutered by a habit and whose hair wasn’t covered with a veil. I wasn’t prepared for any of it—not the trucks or the boys’ eyes or my body’s reaction.

  Roberto had become my confidant. He was a few years older, without Sister Xavier’s seriousness. I asked him about the trucks but couldn’t say what was troubling me: all those eyes seeing me and how it made me feel.

  They come sometimes, Elise, Roberto said. They do not trouble the mission. It is not something to concern you.

  But it is, I said. This is my life.

  His dark face, shadowed under his hat, looked at the barren mountains. I felt I’d said something inappropriate. But he remained polite, restrained. If it hadn’t been for his hat brim magnifying the movement, I wouldn’t have known he shook his head.

  He looked at me and said, very gently: This is my life, Elise.

  I was hurt. I wanted him to know what I’d felt when all those young men stared at me. I wanted him to admit for me what I couldn’t admit myself. We stood there awkwardly. He looked at the mountains again, the distant men gripping the earth with bare toes to keep from falling out of their steep fields as their hoes rose and fell. Then he met my eyes again.

  The fighting has not reached us here, he said. So you—

  He stopped. I thought he might say more. Instead, he turned his palm upward, swept it slowly in a circle, showing me the pale sky, the adobe village. A small green parrot flew past, swooping on pointed wings as if to say: Even the birds fly differently here.

  Then Roberto turned his hand to himself, and with his index finger circled his dark face to frame it for me and then—such lovely, elegant gestures—he stretched his palm out to my face: my pale skin, my golden hair. He knew.

  But what he said was: How could it be your life?

  For years Sophie Lawrence has insisted on taking her invalid stepfather with her when she shops, even in the worst weather. She buys more salt than anyone I know, and great amounts of Lipton tea, and at least once a month suggests that we import a genuine Chinese brand. In winter she parks her stepfather’s wheelchair next to the road salt and snow shovels near the doors. Every time someone enters, the poor man shivers. It seems an odd negligence for a woman this town considers a saint.

  But people’s business is their own. When Hayley Jo Zimmerman was about fifteen, she came in one day on an errand for her mother. She laid the grocerie
s down the way a priest might lay a Host in a communicant’s palm. One by one she placed her few things gingerly on the belt, then stepped away from them, a tiny half step within the confines of the aisle. She had an air of reverence and distance. I saw myself when I was her age—that sense of martyrdom and purity, of watching others’ needs, convinced I needed nothing. I had the sense she was disclaiming the entire store—all its brands and choices, their profusion and anarchy, carving out who she was by negation and denial.

  And I knew. She wasn’t yet so thin she couldn’t hide it. She was even beautiful in a crystalline, breakable way. But I knew. I thought to myself, Girl, you’ve got a secret. Before she quit barrel racing she’d been, not plump, but almost—a vital look, full of health. As I swept her groceries through the light, I saw she’d cut her hair. And her breath, even across the belt, even way back then, contained the stink of willful dying.

  When I told her the total, she fumbled in her purse, then dropped money on the belt as if discarding it. I picked up the wrinkled bills, stretched them across the edge of the cash drawer, laid them neatly inside, knocked the clip down. I held her change out until she raised her arm, then counted it slowly into her hand. Deliberately, I touched her palm. People sometimes wince when I do that, so I’m skillful at exchanging money without touch. But I wanted to go further with her, grasp her wrist, and speak to her.

  But the moment I pressed the last coin against her skin she closed her fingers and snaked her hand away, leaving my arm hanging in the air. She hurried from the store, her running shoes squeaking on the tile, the plastic bag noisy against her knee.

  An hour after Marge Germaine left, with her questions and her HoHos, Hayley Jo’s mother, Kris, pushed her cart up to my belt. She used to cook and bake, buying nothing but fresh ingredients, but since her daughter’s death her carts contain nothing but frozen pizzas and processed cheese and meats. She and Stanley used to love to tell of Hayley Jo’s birth: they were on their way to the hospital in Lone Tree, but she wouldn’t wait, so they stopped on the shoulder of the road and by God had a baby. Stanley joked that getting a new back seat for the car was cheaper than doctors’ bills, and maybe they’d do it that way again. Kris would swat him, and they were both completely proud.

  As I closed my shift, counting the till, I kept seeing Kris lifting her paltry groceries from the cart and dropping them on the belt, not looking at them or me but at the floor. I thought how easily, that time, I could have grasped Hayley Jo’s hand, or called Kris and spoken my suspicions. But one hates to be a Marge Germaine. After Kris left, Sophie Lawrence had been in, and we’d had a strange conversation about the possibility of saintliness. Remembering it, I shuddered. Then Sister Xavier’s face flashed before my mind, her mouth moving in prayer, her forehead’s skin twisted like the clouds within a hurricane around a hollow eye.

  The children were innocent spies, ubiquitous. But Roberto’s command of English was astonishing. If I wanted to talk to him alone, I could say igneous mass, and he would know I meant the big rock outside the village. Place of pedagogy was the school supply shed. I became careful not to teach the children certain words. Conifers and deciduous was a grove of trees still standing in that all-but-barren landscape where everything else had been cut for firewood—a virgin place where the native small green parrots appeared out of green shadows and disappeared back into them.

  For Roberto and me, language became a game. We learned to speak of anything with the children crowding around, sharing laughter at their puzzled faces. I didn’t realize that nothing is more intimate than a private language. It creates its own world. Even now if someone says deciduous I slip back to a place real and illusory, rich and barren, that was and never was.

  We were always short of chalk. Sister Mary Beth ground it into the board in long swoops of letters that were never fully erased, ghosts of former lessons when I taught. I took to hiding chalk from her. When I needed more, I asked Roberto. It was easier than asking Sister Xavier, who would fret about waste and then make the chalk communal.

  Chalk again, Elise? Roberto made his voice stern, imitating Sister Xavier. He pulled his face into a frown. You must use fewer letters.

  I burst out laughing. He’d taught me that sternness could be laughed at.

  He maintained the imitation: I counted the broken chalk last night. Considering how many letters you were allowed this week, there were fewer pieces than there should have been. Now, Elise, what do you have to tell me? Have you been writing larger than you should?

  He flourished his arm, his finger and thumb together in an exaggerated imitation of writing on a board, his hips swaying, his whole body engaged.

  I confess, I said, pretending seriousness. No more extra tails on my letters.

  But I couldn’t maintain it and laughed again.

  You know what I’d really like? I said. Not chalk at all. I’d like a purple ribbon for my hair. Something different than this.

  I pulled the red ribbon that held my hair out sideways so we could look at it together.

  The laughter in Roberto’s eyes changed to something else.

  A ribbon, Elise? he said quietly.

  I’m tired of this same old red, I said.

  For your hair.

  Of course for my hair. What else would I use it for?

  It was, I thought, the smallest thing. But he lifted his eyes to mine, and my laughter ended.

  Oh, Roberto, I said. I’m not really asking. If you can’t find one, it’s all right.

  But I was asking, and you cannot take an asking back. Especially when it’s a personal gift you’re asking for, even if completely frivolous and barely intimate.

  No, Elise, he said gravely. It would not be all right. I could never forgive myself.

  He disappeared from the village. He was always off on errands. Five days later he found me in the storage shed where I was putting things away. He must have waited for the children to leave and for me to go inside. My back was to the door when I heard his voice.

  Your ribbon, Elise.

  I started, turned. The clean light outside created his dark shape.

  Roberto, I said. You’re back. Come in. I can’t see your face.

  He moved into the room, his hand outstretched. A ribbon dangled from it.

  Was it hard to find? I asked.

  I hope it is purple enough.

  In the light coming through the door, it was the prettiest pale lavender.

  It is. More than. Was it hard to find?

  I wanted to know where he’d gone, what he’d done, to get it: the narrow streets of the city, the old women selling cloth, their speckled, rummaging hands. I wanted to know it all: the words he’d used to describe what he was looking for, the colors he’d rejected, a dozen ribbons dangling from a fist, his finger pointing to one, the chickens squawking in a cage nearby, the huddled rabbits, a donkey walking by. I didn’t want to accept the ribbon until I did know. But he merely shrugged and kept his arm extended. I played at waiting—cocked my head, pouted—but then, unable to resist, took the ribbon from his fingers. I untied the red strip from my hair and handed it to him, then gathered my hair in both hands, elbows high, and turned the lavender ribbon around it. Then I stopped and stood completely still.

  Roberto? I whispered.

  He made a gesture toward me. I thought he would touch my face. My cheek burned. But he checked the gesture.

  How could it be hard, Elise? he asked.

  He brought the red ribbon to his lips and pressed it briefly. Barely grazed it. Let it be accidental. If I chose to see it so.

  The most dangerous secrets hang like spider webs in the structure of things. We inhale them in our sleep and pretend ignorance of breathing. Otherwise we couldn’t sleep at all. And the little, private secrets we so treasure? The ones we box and fondle? They’re nothing at all.

  I sat in a pew, hearing Father Obermann’s hoarse breathing behind his door. There used to be booklets in the pews, sins catalogued. They were no longer available, but ev
erything else matched my memories.

  Angela Morrison—fresh fruits and vegetables, or TV dinners, on a mysterious, irregular cycle—entered and knelt behind me. She was beautiful and black-haired and aloof when she first came here from Sioux Falls. Everyone thought she would abandon Brock, but somehow he managed to hold on to her as she aged into her present, elegant, streaked-gray state. She and I have little in common. I hadn’t been inside a church in twenty years, and she was once the church’s secretary, involved in everything. Though she quit soon after Father Caleb left the priesthood and Father Obermann, with his Jesuit sensibility, arrived, she maintained the rituals.

  I motioned for her to go ahead of me. She clunked her kneeler up and rose. I saw how her shoulders slumped: her daughter was Hayley Jo Zimmerman’s best friend. Faint, unintelligible murmurs came from behind the doors. Then she came out to say her penance. For the past month she’d been in a TV dinner, bloody mary phase. When I saw the resolve on her face, I had a revelation: tomorrow she’d buy fresh fruit and vegetables again. I hadn’t known this sacrament was the fulcrum upon which the change was balanced.

  I can’t help but notice. Even if I shut my eyes, I’d feel the lives I scan: a blind and voiceless oracle. It’s why I love baseball. Even if the ball is hit, there is a mystery. You can’t be sure how it will be handled or how fast the runner is. It may be only white holes fleeting in the sky. But it makes me catch my breath, not knowing.

  I opened my compact, gazed into my eyes, devoid of any prophet’s flaming, then snapped the case shut, rose.

  The words I’d memorized when I was young were there.

  Twenty years is a long time, Father Obermann said. Welcome back.

  I didn’t expect such kindness. Thank you, I responded.

  I heard you out there. I wondered if you’d come in.

  It isn’t easy.

  No.

  Take all the time you need, he said. The demand, you notice, is not high.