by Elaine Ford
After boot camp, in October of ’57, Dana came home for two weeks’ leave. They’d both graduated high school in June, and Carlene was attending teachers’ college in Machias, commuting the thirty miles each way, working odd hours in Bradbury’s Pharmacy to help pay her tuition.
On his first Saturday morning home Dana stopped by Bradbury’s to pick up his mother’s prescription for heart pills. They got to talking about this and that, and since it was a nice day, unseasonably warm, he invited her to go for a ride. “I don’t get off till noon,” she said, but he hung around, thumbing through magazines from the rack, until old Mrs. Bradbury told her she could go. In his mother’s two-tone green Oldsmobile he took Carlene out to Fiddlers Point, going fast on the rough road, the two of them laughing as the tires jounced over the ruts and spat gravel in their wake.
They sat on granite ledge, talking, watching sea water flood the rocks below them and then be sucked away. Or anyway Dana talked, mostly about his adventures at boot camp, and Carlene listened. They’d been classmates since first grade, but she’d never before been alone with him: Dana Cox, basketball wizard, clever if not very ambitious student, class president. They stayed on the rocks so long that the breeze turned chilly, and she shivered. Dana reached out to touch her long, thick brown hair, gently winding a lock of it around his finger. He looked at her in a way that no one had ever looked at her before, and in that instant Carlene knew she’d fallen in love with him.
The next day he led her to an old cabin in the woods near the Point. Over the plank floor he spread a quilt he’d brought with him in the trunk of the Olds, a ragged quilt smelling of mildew. He was sweetly and comically awkward, fumbling with the rubber.
They returned to the cabin nine times. She cut classes, called in sick, lied to her parents to be with him. And then he was on the bus, off to Norfolk, Virginia, where his ship awaited.
Dana’s letters were full of funny stories about his life on board—he was doing something with electronic navigation, and he joked about plotting the ship’s course off the end of the earth—but not one word about any future for them. She knew her letters were dull compared to his, though she did her best to make entertaining her ed classes and Mrs. Bradbury’s crotchets and the tame town gossip. When she signed her name “with love,” she hoped he realized how much she meant it. He sent a snapshot of himself taken in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, which she studied for insight into his feelings for her. As she stared his face would drift out of focus, and she’d be left with the sensation that what she held was the photo of a tall, good-looking stranger in a sailor suit. Gradually his letters grew shorter, less frequent. The last was a picture postcard of a camel in front of a palm tree, dated March 11, 1958, with the scrawled message: “No time to write. Take care of yourself.”
With Dana away in the navy, his mother lived alone. Her husband had been killed in the Battle of the Coral Sea shortly before Dana’s third birthday, and she didn’t remarry. Mrs. Cox would drive into town in the Olds and come into Bradbury’s for a tube of zinc ointment or a bottle of rubbing alcohol or to have her prescription refilled. She was a slight woman, with blurry eyes and graying hair. She’d smile vaguely at Carlene, having no idea who she was. Carlene longed to ask, “What do you hear from Dana?” but never dared, in case she’d find out something she didn’t want to know.
The day before Thanksgiving, Carlene’s daughter-in-law telephones and announces that something has come up with Ron’s job, an emergency having to do with upgrading his firm’s computer system in advance of something called Millennium Fever. That’s what Carlene thinks Jill said, anyhow. Something to do with the advent of the new century fouling up computers. Carlene doesn’t understand a word of it. Anyhow, the point is that Ron has to work on Friday, and they won’t be making the trip up from Massachusetts after all. “I hope you aren’t too disappointed,” Jill says. “I know you’ve gone to a lot of trouble.”
“No, no trouble.” Carlene has a twenty-pound turkey defrosting in the sink, three kinds of pies cooling on the sideboard. “How are the kids? Danny still enjoying kindergarten?”
“The kids are great. Hey, I have to run, I’m late for my yoga class,” Jill says, hanging up.
Carlene goes upstairs and strips the sheets off the beds in the two front bedrooms, folds them, stows them in the linen closet. Chalkie will have to dismantle the crib and lug the parts back up to the attic. He’ll be crushed, though he’ll try to keep that to himself, and she feels bad for him, but there isn’t a thing she can do about it.
She and Chalkie started going out in the summer of 1960. Nobody had thought he’d amount to much, but he’d done well enough. He’d taken over his uncle’s failing garage in town and installed gas pumps out front, overhauled the accounting system, erected a big new sign. “Grease monkey” were the words that came to Carlene’s mind when she thought of him, his hands always stained black. He was wiry in those days, before he began to put on the pounds.
The next spring, teaching certificate almost in hand, she applied for a job down in Brunswick, just north of Portland. She thought getting out of town would be good for her; she imagined herself going to concerts, art museums. The school invited her down for an interview, and everything seemed set. But then her father collapsed on the carpet of Quirk Insurance, where he worked, knocking over a vase of dried hydrangeas as he fell. The doctors’ tests were inconclusive, and her father suffered no more strange attacks. However, her mother asked Carlene if she—the only child—could put off her plans for a while, well, just in case.
She’d found herself going to one friend’s wedding after another, and Chalkie began to sound as though he assumed they’d get married, too, and she never got around to saying otherwise. He was good-hearted and reliable, and her parents liked him. Carlene had come to understand that Dana Cox was gone from her life for good.
She taught English for two years before the June day when she and Chalkie stood up in church and promised themselves to each other. What she’d pictured was a place of their own, two or three rooms, starting out simply. In April the apartment above Leighton’s General Store became vacant, and she thought it would be fun to see what she could do with it. However, over a Sunday lunch her father proposed an arrangement—Chalkie would do handyman jobs around the house and the newlyweds could live rent-free—and the bargain was sealed in a moment. After the wedding Chalkie moved into the house Carlene had grown up in, the big old Stanley farmhouse on Bay Road stuffed to the gunnels with five generations’ worth of shabby furniture, mismatched china, and dust-catchers. Of course the plan made good economic sense, so how could Carlene object? Chalkie was turning the money he earned back into the business, didn’t have any extra to throw around.
In the spring he dug up the weed-choked field next to the house, worked a truckload of cow manure into the soil, planted a garden. Every waking moment that he wasn’t at the garage he’d spend grubbing in the dirt; he grew sweet corn, tomatoes, spinach, several varieties of potatoes, pole beans, bush beans. At harvest time he cradled squash and melons in his arms as tenderly as babies. Carlene’s mother told everybody in town her son-in-law was bringing the farm back to life—though of course, it could never be a real farm again, most of the land sold off long ago.
Carlene’s life was not an unhappy one. However, something kept her from throwing away the black and white snapshot of Dana. If Chalkie ever opened the Bible she’d been given for Confirmation he’d find it, but she knew he was about as likely to do that as march down Bridge Street in his birthday suit.
Ron was born in 1965 and Matthew in 1967. That same fall, when Matthew was a newborn, Carleen heard that Dana’s mother had succumbed to the heart trouble that long plagued her. What a shame, people said, that she passed with no kin at her bedside. Carlene was sure Dana would come home for the funeral, but he never showed.
Back downstairs, in the kitchen, Carlene finds Bob perched on the edge of the sink eyeing the t
urkey. Its grayish goosebumpy skin is punctured with holes where feathers once grew. “I’m going out for a bit,” she tells him. “Don’t you dare touch that bird while I’m gone.”
Carlene climbs into the pickup and heads out Fiddlers Point Road. “It’s only the neighborly, Christian thing to do,” she tells herself. The Point is at the end of a six-mile-long peninsula that elbows out into the sea northeast of town. The last two miles of the road are unpaved, since it’s mostly summer people who have houses out that far.
Carlene yanks the lever into four-wheel drive and lurches along through muddy slush, bouncing from pothole to pothole, branches slapping the windshield. A queasiness in her gut tells her this is not a good idea and there’s nothing Christian about it. If there were a good place to turn around she’d do so, but she’s not very expert at driving the big old pickup. Projects that need to be done in four-wheel drive are Chalkie’s bailiwick, and she’s afraid of getting stuck.
Near the Point the road divides. She takes the left-hand fork, the road no more than a path now. Around a bend is a ramshackle building with smoke wafting out of the chimney pipe and a tinny little car, rusted-out red, South Carolina plates, parked next to it. No four-by-four in that baby, Carleen thinks. He’s going to have fun when it really snows. Not to mention mud season. She leaves the pickup behind his car and wades through the snow to the door, which is already opening.
The place is hot and smells of wood smoke and snow melt, damp wool, kerosene. There’s a camp cot piled with blankets, an ancient wood stove, a lantern hanging from a rafter and casting a reddish glow on the walls. “I came to invite you to . . . ”
Dana closes the door behind her, reaches forward and unzips her coat, as if she were a child coming in from playing in the snow. He hangs the coat on a nail by the door. “I knew you’d remember the way,” he says, kneeling and unlacing her boots. His hands are large, with neatly trimmed fingernails. There are brown splotches of freckles on his bald spot. She doesn’t ask why he seems to have been expecting her.
“Your hair,” he whispers. “You never wore it braided then.” He unpins it from the crown of her head and lays the fat gray braid on her shoulder. Softly he brushes her cheek with his beard. His eye sockets, now in shadow, are deep in his skull—the irises, she knows, are a very dark blue, like the sea on certain fine days in winter.
She feels dizzy from the heat, thinks she’s going to faint. He’s unbuttoning her cardigan. She closes her eyes. Soon he will see the empty breasts slung low on her ribcage, the too-soft belly, the stringy thighs and gnarls of her joints.
Naked, they lie together on the camp cot, under a heap of blankets. Their bodies are slippery with sweat. Her heart beats frantically. She has not felt like this in more than forty years.
“Henry saw you on Fiddlers Point Road yesterday. In the pickup.”
“Things must be slow at the garage these days,” Carlene says, “if the boys have time to talk about who saw whose wife going about her daily rounds.”
“He just happened to mention it.” Chalkie spoons some creamed onions onto his plate, which is already heaped with mounds of vegetables and slabs of turkey in a sea of giblet gravy. Grew them little pearl onions himself, he’d brag to Ron and Jill, if Ron and Jill were here to hear it. Nothing tastier than home grown. “Problem with the Escort?” he asks.
The lie unwinds itself from her tongue as smoothly as if she’d been keeping secrets from Chalkie all her life. “I was delivering Thanksgiving boxes for the church,” she says. “One of the families on my list was those Mexicans, I think they are, in a trailer out past Kennedys’. I thought their driveway might not be plowed, so I took the pickup.”
“Why do the Mexicans get a Thanksgiving box?” A forkful of mashed butternut squash goes into his mouth. “They don’t even have Thanksgiving in Mexico.”
“Because it’s the neighborly, Christian thing to do.” Carlene wonders whether the Mexicans, who work in the sea cucumber plant and may or may not possess immigration papers, actually received a box. She wonders also what lie she can concoct for next time. But of course there isn’t going to be a next time, because God might be asked to overlook one moment of weakness but not a whole string of them.
Chalkie picks a biscuit out of the electric bread warmer that Matthew sent for her birthday—the cord dangles treacherously from a wall outlet to the kitchen table—and breaks it open. “People ought to stay put,” he mutters, “where they belong.”
A few days later Carlene sits amid a heap of bedclothes on the camp cot, braiding her thick gray hair. Dana, wearing only his unbuttoned shirt, opens the wood stove door and shoves in a couple more logs. Sparks shower into the air.
As in his youth, Dana’s legs are long and lean. His buttocks have lost some of their flesh, and the skin is faintly wrinkled, reminding her of an apple that’s hung onto the tree over the winter. Yet she likes his body even better than she did all those years ago. The mysterious, oddly shaped scars, the ropy veins, the butterfly tattoo on his left biceps, the flat brown patches suggesting exposure to the sun. He has not been shut up in a garage from one end of his life to the other. He has not run to fat.
Dana clangs the door shut and sits next to her, wrapping a blanket around them. Outside, the wind howls. “Sounds like a pack of wolves,” she says.
He takes her hand, the one bearing the gold band that nowadays wobbles loose as far as the knuckle.
“Dana,” she says softly, “I need to know why you came back.”
Inside the stove the logs shift. Steam rises from a pan of melted snow on the surface.
“Oh . . . I had some things to attend to.”
If only he’d come right out with it, I love you, Carlene, I’ve always loved you, but she guesses that would be too much to ask. She unfolds her hand from his and pulls an elastic from her wrist, wrapping the band three or four times around the tail of the braid. “You hurt me, you know.”
“Seems you got over it.”
She never did. Never never did.
His spine against the plank wall, he says, “I started a million letters, Carlene. I didn’t know how to find the right words back then.”
“You were always so good with words.”
He smiles. “Not the hard ones.”
“Okay, then, tell me now.”
“I just couldn’t see myself settling down here, scrounging up some lame way to make a living.”
“Chalkie managed.”
“I wasn’t Chalkie.”
She listens to the cabin’s windows, loose in their frames, rattle violently in the wind.
His voice gentle, he says, “How could I have dragged you around the world with me? You wouldn’t have wanted that kind of life.”
“You never gave me the choice.”
“I thought the kindest thing was just to leave you be.”
“You left us be, all right. You didn’t even come home for your mother’s funeral.” That fall she’d sat up in the night nursing her voracious newborn, glad of the soreness in her nipples, glad because the pain of cracked nipples almost killed the pain of longing for a man who was not her baby’s father.
“I was out on the West Coast. By the time I heard, she was a week under ground.”
Carlene gets up from the bed and retrieves her clothes from the floor. “I have to go.”
As she’s backing the pickup around, her eyes fall on some boards stacked against the woodpile. They are pale, raw, newly-planed. He must be intending major renovation, she thinks, her heart swelling.
No, she thinks, no. She’s not going back there.
Five o’clock and the dark closing in already. In the next room Chalkie, in his easy chair, turns the pages of the weekly newspaper, patiently awaiting his dinner.
That ratty old chair, the threadbare upholstery stinking of cigarette smoke and decades of cooking smells and body sweat and cat hair and
engine grease soaked out of Chalkie’s pores. She’d dearly love to haul the chair and all the rest of the junk in that room straight to the dump. No such luck. He’s wedded to that chair.
Lumps in the milk gravy, she sees, poking at them dismally with a wooden spoon.
Forty-odd years ago, or even twenty years ago, Carlene realizes, she would have been planning curtains for the cabin’s windows, rugs for the floors. She’d have wanted to make the place homey for Dana and herself, a nest. Now the emptiness there is what she craves, the stripping away of the burden of possessions. It seems important to her to find out how simply one can live, how little one needs to survive. The pleasure is in the rubbing of joint against joint, bone on bone.
Three days a week she drives the pickup out to the end of Fiddlers Point Road. Her recklessness amazes her. She tells Chalkie she’s tutoring the Mexican children who live in the trailer beyond Kennedys’, so they can catch up with their appropriate grade levels by September. Although this is a lie of breathtaking proportions, since she knows no Spanish beyond Si, Señor, Chalkie doesn’t ask the kids’ names or anything about them. As long as his dinner’s on the table at 5 p.m. sharp and there are clean socks in his drawer and a full tank in the pickup when he wants to use it, that’s all he cares about, she figures.
In the cabin Dana tells her stories about his travels, his various jobs. For the past few years he’s been constructing miniature golf courses, mostly down South. “Each course has its own theme,” he explains. “Treasure Island. Destination Moon. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.” She imagines him directing, with the artistry of a symphony conductor, a fleet of backhoes—his arms and chest bare to the sun, dirt and trees and boulders yielding to his will.