Raven pulled a pack of matches from her pocketbook and lit the oil lamps in the living room. Just as it had been in the tepee, light came from candles and oil lamps, heat from the woodstove, and whatever water she needed was hauled from the well by the big barn in gallon jugs and buckets. When she needed to bathe, there was a tub in the big barn, too. It was a self-reliant lifestyle chosen by my mother when she had been self-reliant. It was a life I remembered all too well even after all those years. And I was sure it was the reason for my love of gadgets—my house in Seattle was full of them: blender, food processor, microwave, coffee grinder, espresso machine, electric can opener, Crock-Pot, electric toothbrush, and bright halogen track lighting angled carefully so that every corner blazed.
Raven dug around in the leather shoulder bag again like a magician searching for her next trick and handed me a large metal ring of keys. She showed me how they kept my mother in her bedroom at night with a brass padlock.
“Jesus,” I said, “What is she, one of America’s Most Wanted?”
Raven said if we didn’t do this, my confused mother would wander and get lost. Nighttime was worse. My mother was more clear during the day. Raven promised I’d see a change in the morning.
Another key went to the lockbox on top of the fridge that contained the array of medications that Dr. Crawford had prescribed over the past several months: lorazepam, haloperidol, Ambien, and a tube of burn ointment. Raven explained that they didn’t like to use the pills, they just seemed to dope her up. I tried not to roll my eyes—what did she think the drugs were for? Inner peace? She said that before now, they medicated her only during really bad spells, but since the fire they’d had to increase the dosages. Most days, they had managed to get by giving her only the tinctures Gabriel made. There was a memory tincture with ginkgo that she got in tea twice a day. And at night, a sleeping tonic with valerian root. My mouth went bitter at the thought of it and I made a silent promise not to subject my mother to such botanical torture.
“For now, we’ll stick with the heavy med regime Dr. Crawford prescribed. I’d rather see her doped up than hurt again,” Raven said and I nodded in agreement, making a mental note that we needed a consult with a gerontologist as soon as possible. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust the town doctor, but my mother was on some heavy-duty medication, and I questioned how well it was being monitored.
There was a key to a padlocked kitchen drawer that contained knives, scissors, a nail file, nail clippers, and matches.
“Never, ever, ever give her matches,” Raven instructed, as if the bandages on my mother’s hands weren’t enough warning.
“Right,” I said, picturing again my rabid, foaming mother shooting fire from her fingertips. I shook the nightmarish image from my head.
Raven went on to explain the routine: getting my mother up, cleaned, and dressed; emptying her chamber pot; changing the bandages; serving her breakfast; going for a walk; making her lunch; having her take a nap; and making sure she gets each of her pills. I must have looked a little overwhelmed.
“I know it’s a lot. And I know it must be a bad shock for you to see her like this. But I can’t tell you how glad I am that you’re here. How glad Gabriel is, too. We just couldn’t do it anymore. Not like this. Not with winter coming now. She can’t be alone. Not here.” She looked around the cabin, gesturing helplessly at the woodstove, the oil lamps hung from the ceiling, well out of reach. “See what you think once you’ve been here a few days. God, I’m so glad you came.” Then she hugged me—this woman whom I felt I barely knew, who had been only in second grade when I left home for good—put her arms around me and held tight. I was her life raft. I was the one who was going to come in and make everything okay, even if meant packing my mother off to a nursing home. I let all my breath out as she squeezed. Great, I thought, a life raft without air.
The first thing I did when Raven left was undo the padlock on my mother’s door. I was not going to be her jailer—at least not yet. I jingled the large ring of keys, feeling like a deputy in an old Western: You’re free to roam the open range, partner. Just get out of town before sunset.
I peeked in and saw that my mother was sound asleep on her brass bed. The wind-up clock ticked loudly on the nightstand beside her. Its hands glowed. Only eight o’clock. It was just five back in Seattle. Jamie would be getting home from work soon. Tina or Ann or whoever his latest was might be there now, in his place waiting, dinner in the oven, white wine chilling. I wondered how he kept track of his girl of the month, sometimes girl of the week. He must have to mark his calendar, keep notes. With bitter amusement, I remembered his index card habit. He kept stacks of them in the office, the glove compartment of the car, next to the bed. He had them stuffed in the pockets of shirts and jackets and was always writing little notes to himself on them. Notes that he would promptly shove in some other pocket or between the pages of a magazine, his reminder to pick up stamps or check out a book he’d heard about on the radio, lost forever. Perhaps he now used the cards to keep a girl file: Sasha—redhead w/ appendectomy scar. Likes martinis, dislikes dogs. I chuckled to myself as I imagined the card one day tumbling from the pocket of his blazer when some other girl dropped off the dry cleaning.
I carried the lamp into the room that had been my mother’s painting studio, where there was a cot set up in the corner, piled high with blankets, wheeling my black suitcase, Magpie at my heels. The cat watched with her head cocked as I unpacked socks, underwear, and T-shirts and put them in the battered wooden dresser, no doubt a remnant from a long-gone New Hope resident. I came across my Swiss Army knife in my toiletry bag, among the tea tree oil shampoo and avocado body scrub—I had stuck it in there at the last minute when I realized I wouldn’t be allowed to carry it on the plane. About the only things I ever used it for were opening wine and slicing cheese at impromptu picnics, but I am a woman who likes to be prepared. I considered locking it up in the sharps drawer in the kitchen, but finally tossed it into my purse.
Suddenly, I was exhausted. Not by the unpacking but by the whole afternoon. By being home. More than anything else, it was the guilt I felt seeing how much my mother had changed, slowly slipped away, while I held on to my careful little life back in Seattle—my life of electric appliances and halogen spotlights—oblivious, thinking she couldn’t be that bad, thinking the phone calls from Raven were exaggerated.
I set the oil lamp on the bedside table and lay down on the cot to rest for a few minutes. Magpie joined me, purring like a lawn-mower. My mind was racing and my body thought it was barely suppertime, much less bedtime—I could easily foresee the sleepless night before me, soon to be followed by a blurry-eyed day. What I needed was a drink, preferably something hot, with spiced rum. Then I remembered the locked box of drugs in the kitchen and made my way to it, keys jingling. Now, I am not a person to indulge in the casual use of pharmaceuticals, but one little Ambien never hurt anybody. To be on the safe side, I took two.
While I waited for the drugs to take effect, I studied the shadows of my mother’s paintings as they glowed in the lamplight. They were still lifes mostly, the one on the easel half finished: a bowl of fruit in somber shades of gray. It was an underpainting, a scene stripped of its color, only a shadow of what it promised to become.
3
Late April, 1971
RON MACKENZIE WAS OUR BUS DRIVER back in the fifth grade. He was a bulldog of a man with a thick neck and beady, watchful eyes. He always wore a black knit cap and worked his jaw as he drove as if he were chewing on his own tongue. Looking at him, you would have thought he had always been driving school buses, but the truth was that once he’d worked for NASA. He’d tell the new kids on his route this, letting them think he must have been an astronaut or something, and only when they pressed him did he admit that he had driven trucks and forklifts, not lunar landers. He had moved rocket parts around. Ron Mackenzie had gotten to touch metal that blasted off into space. He moved from Cape Canaveral back home to Vermont because his wife’s mo
ther got sick, and that’s when he started driving buses and working down at the town garage.
On good days, Ron called us his chickadees. When he was angry, when one of the kids had disappointed him in some way, we were monkeys, and you could tell from his tone that monkeys were, in Ron’s mind, a pretty low-life thing to be.
“I’ve had just about enough from you monkeys today!” he’d say through clenched teeth when the noise on the bus got too loud or when kids switched seats while we were moving.
Del and I caught Ron’s bus each morning at the bottom of the hill by her mailbox. Three of her brothers rode the earlier bus that took them to the Brook School, where grades six through twelve went. Nicky, the crow assassin, was fourteen. Her twin brothers, Stevie and Joe, were seventeen, seniors in high school. Mort was nineteen. He had never graduated and was still living at home, helping out with the farm. Her other brothers, Roger, Myron, and Earl, all had places of their own in or near New Canaan. Earl, the oldest, was married with two kids not much younger than Del.
Stevie and Joe kept to themselves and showed no interest in Del. When they weren’t doing chores, they were working on a GTO that they planned to race at Thunder Road. They had girlfriends—pimply, overweight girls who loved to ride in that red GTO, fixing their hair and blowing cigarette smoke through their noses while greasy wrenches and car parts rattled at their feet. They’d drive through town too fast, gunning the engine and squealing the tires at each intersection. Sometimes I would see the four of them riding or back in Del’s yard—the ugly girls sprawled out and smoking on the brown lawn while Stevie and Joe banged around under the hood.
DEL RODE TO SCHOOL in the morning on Ron’s bus, but took the afternoon kindergarten bus home right after lunch along with the three other kids in the Special Ed room. I guess the school figured half a day was about all these kids could handle.
The other three Special Ed kids were boys. Tony LaPearl had Down syndrome. Artie Paris was twelve like Del—they’d both stayed back twice. He was a big hulking kid already growing a scraggly mustache. Mike Shane was twelve also, and the tallest, skinniest boy in our school. He could not speak. No one really knew why, but there were lots of rumors. The most believable was that he’d had some kind of illness as a baby that badly scarred his vocal cords. Mike went around with a pad of paper tied with a string around his neck, communicating by notes.
The morning after our first meeting in the field, while we stood waiting for the bus, I noticed that Del wore the same soiled cowgirl shirt. She had on a clean pair of tan corduroy bellbottoms that hung loose and were cinched above her narrow hips with a thick brown leather belt. The pants looked like hand-me-downs from one of her brothers. Pinned to her shirt was a silver metal sheriff’s star.
Neither of us spoke. I waited and watched, leaving it up to her to make the rules. We scuffed the dirt with our shoes and stared down at the patterns we made. I thought of the crow, the letter M on Del’s chest, covered, now, not only by the shirt, but by the silver star. Just before the bus arrived, I looked up and caught Del smiling at me and knew I had not imagined our meeting. I also knew, as I caught a glimpse of that broken edge of tooth, that I would return to the crow after school to see what might happen next.
When Ron stopped the bus, I got on before Del, just like always, and took the first empty seat in front. I half thought she might take the seat beside me and guiltily prayed she wouldn’t. I said thank you to God when she passed me and went to the back to take a seat alone.
“I smell rotten potatoes,” whispered one boy to another when she passed.
“Potato Girl, Potato Girl, smells so rotten it makes your nose curl,” sang the other boy.
Ron Mackenzie, strict as he was about behavior on the bus, never once stopped the kids from teasing Del. He just gripped the wheel tighter, working his jaw extra hard, like he was embarrassed or something.
“Hey Del, how do spell potatoes?” asked the first boy, looking out at the misspelled sign in her yard.
“Retards can’t spell. Retards just smell,” said the other.
Del just stared out the window, grinning widely, like the joke was really on them.
I SAW DEL ONLY TWICE that day at school, at the same two times I saw her every day: morning recess and lunch. During morning recess I was on the monkey bars when I saw Del go to the maple tree at the edge of the playground. She was alone, as usual. She said something to herself, something out loud that must have been funny, because then she laughed. I watched with curiosity as she picked a twig off one of the lower branches and pretended to smoke it like a cigarette. Artie, the big Special Ed kid, approached her with two of his fifth grade friends.
“What ya got there, Del?” asked Artie. “Wacky tobbaccy?”
Del just kept smoking, pretending not to hear. She tilted her head back and stared up into the branches with their freshly unfurled leaves. I climbed to the top of the monkey bars to get a better view. Two other girls played below me—Samantha Lancaster and Ellie Bushey. They whispered and giggled to each other when I smiled down at them. They were best friends who wore their hair in identical braids, and each had a matching pink windbreaker. They were popular girls, surrounded by a glow of normalcy and self-confidence, the first two to be picked for teams, shoe boxes overflowing with cards on Valentine’s Day. I went back to watching Del, doing my best to ignore Ellie and Samantha.
Over by the trees, Artie was still talking to Del, swaying a little as he spoke, as if he needed extra momentum to get the words out.
“Cat got your tongue, girl? You a mute like Mike now? Mute Mike and the Potato Girl. What a couple. I seen him passin’ you notes in the classroom. Little love notes prob’ly. Maybe you two should get married. Have little dirty mute babies. Raise ’em on raw potatoes. Ain’t that what you cut your teeth on, Del?”
Del said nothing, just sucked hard on her stick and blew invisible smoke rings, still staring up at the highest branches. When she leaned back like that, her sheriff’s badge caught the sun and gleamed like a real star might. I remembered what Lazy Elk had told me about talismans and thought that maybe that silver star was Del’s.
“Where is that Mute Mike, anyway?” Artie wondered out loud. He made a visor out of his hand and scanned the playground like a general surveying the battlefield. He spotted Mike.
“Get him over here, Tommy,” Artie ordered, and off lumbered Tommy Ducette, the fattest kid in fifth grade, to drag poor Mike over. By the time Tommy forced Mike back to the maple tree, a circle of curious kids had formed, including the two girls who’d been under the monkey bars. I climbed down and walked over to get a closer look. Samantha whispered something to Ellie, who then turned to look at me and blushed a little.
“There’s that mute!” Artie grinned. “There’s your sweetheart now, Del.” And there stood Mike Shane, toothpick thin but taller than the other boys by a head. His wrists and ankles stuck out beyond his cuffs. The spiral pad hung around his neck on red yarn. Mike kept his head down, studying the worn rubber toes of his Keds.
I had watched Mike Shane before. He was, like Del, like myself, a kid who stuck to himself for the most part. I’d seen him playing checkers at recess with Tony LaPearl, the boy with Down syndrome, and from what I saw, Mike let Tony win each time. I had also noticed, as Artie had, that he passed notes to Del from time to time and, occasionally, she would lean close and whisper something in his ear that made him smile and look away, embarrassed.
“Now you two are gonna be married,” Artie announced. “Stand together now.” Tommy gave Mike a shove so that the quivering string bean of a boy stood nearly touching Del, who continued to play-smoke like some glamour girl movie star.
“Do you, Del the Potato Girl, take Mute Mike to be your husband, for better or worse, in sickness and health, till death do you part?”
Del blew smoke in his face.
“That was a yes. Sure, sure you do. Now do you, Mute Mike, take this here smokin’ Potato Girl to be your smelly old wife? A nod will do, Shane.
You don’t need to write it in your freakin’ book.”
Mike Shane nodded, still staring at the ground, jittery as a cornered hare.
“I hereby pronounce you man and wife. Now kiss your bride,” Artie ordered.
Mike looked up at this, his brown eyes wide and truly terrified. Del just smiled. Mike tried to bolt, but Artie and Tommy stopped him and pulled him over to Del. He made howling sounds like an animal trying to speak. Spit ran down his chin. The two bigger boys pushed him up against Del, who just stood her ground. She dropped the twig she was smoking and ground it out with her foot, then leaned forward and kissed Mike Shane on the lips. It was a long, soap opera kind of kiss, and when Del pulled away, Mike’s face was no longer pale but a vivid, burning red. The kids gathered around squealed, laughed, said gross.
“Ew! Potato Girl germs,” Ellie said.
“Worse than cooties,” Samantha added.
“Poor Mute Mike,” one boy said.
“They deserve each other,” sang back another.
Then the party was broken up by Miss Johnstone, who demanded to know what was going on.
“Playing cowboys,” said Del. “I’m sheriff,” she added, smiling, pointing to her shimmering badge.
WHY’D YOU LET THEM do that today?” I asked later, when I met Del back by the dead crow.
“What?”
“The way they teased you and Mike. Why’d you kiss him? You didn’t have to.”
“What was I gonna do?” she snorted.
“Go get Miss Johnstone. Holler out. Anything.”
“Yeah, right,” she said.
“You could have tried.”
“It wasn’t so bad.”
“What was it like?”
“What?”
“Kissing Mike Shane.”
“Like kissing any boy, I guess.”
“Have you kissed lots of boys?”
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