He wonders if the new worm remembers the part that died. He thinks again of Amy’s bruised cheek, how the bruise stands out on her pale, thin face. The thought of her being hurt, bruised, makes him queasy. He loves Amy, loves Bert. He cannot bear the thought of anything happening to either of them. Sometimes, when he sees them watching TV, or sleeping, or playing quietly at some game, he imagines their frail skeletons beneath their skin and is seized by the sudden fear that they will die. One slight bump, one false step, the screech of a car or the thud of a falling tree branch—this is all it would take. If it happens, when it happens, he doesn’t know what he will do.
Better to choose the time, the method, yourself. Better to come home, like the man from Milwaukee, and get it all behind you once and for all, instead of waiting, helpless, for it to happen, the car, the branch, the illness, the closed casket. Better to break into your house with a gun: a violent lullaby.
He goes into the children’s room, paces between their beds. The mice watch, their eyes fixed and mean. He remembers the smell of the bedroom he shared with Mitch when they both were in their teens, a smell that was far more Mitch than James: Mitch’s deodorant, Mitch’s shirts which he kept packed in cedar, Mitch’s cologne, and at night, Mitch’s onion sweat. The smell of Mitch when he was angry. The smell of Mitch when he turned mean. The smell of the sock, the smell of the barn. The weight of the grain.
James lifts Bert’s pillow to his face, sniffs the way one might sniff at food about to spoil. He sniffs Amy’s pillow. A shirt left on the floor. The curtains. He sniffs the mice. Relief floods his mouth with wet. Nothing smells familiar.
That night, he cannot eat. He sits at the table, passes the roast, the margarine and bread, the wrinkled peas. Across from him, at the head of the table, Fritz eats without looking up. Mary-Margaret, already dressed for bed, takes sips and little bites, each time shaking her head, for Ellen has spread a white cloth across the table and lit the candles that stand by the fruit bowl in the center. Putting on airs. James can feel the way this thought travels back and forth between Fritz and Mary-Margaret. The flames blink at him like hard, watching eyes; Ellen’s eyes, flickering too close.
He knows she is waiting for him to speak. She has gone through all this trouble for him, because it’s his last meal home for two weeks; the nice dinner, the candles, the white tablecloth which she’s told him is hard to clean. He should say something, to her, to the children.
But what?
He watches the children, their small mouths opening and closing over their pointed teeth. It is seven o’clock; at eight, there’s a good movie, plenty of action, something set in the Old West. He forces himself to take a mouthful of peas; the frail skins pop against his tongue as he chews. He fights to swallow. He should say something. He checks his watch; 7:02.
“So, what did you do today?” Ellen asks him, and for a moment the children freeze, forks in the air, eyes on James’s face. What did Daddy do? they are thinking, he knows they are thinking that. They are thinking he is dull, peculiar, unlike themselves and their mother. Fritz snorts, bites savagely into his bread.
The movie starts at eight, a western, a good one.
“I don’t know,” James says.
“You don’t know,” Ellen says. “You must have done something.”
“Don’t bother a man while he’s eating,” Mary-Margaret says.
Ellen ignores her, keeps her smile fixed on James.
“I read the paper,” James says.
“Then you saw about that man, the one from Milwaukee? Barb told me about it at lunch.”
“What man?” Amy says.
“A very sick man,” Ellen says, and her voice shakes, just slightly, but enough for him to think for the first time that, perhaps, she too looks at the children and is frightened by all the things that might happen, the cars and branches and caskets; that, perhaps, she too is afraid. He sees in her eyes a flicker, a flame, something he can almost recognize.
“A very sick man!” he says eagerly, but it comes out too loud, too strong, and she looks away. Mary-Margaret wipes her lips.
“This ain’t proper table conversation,” she says.
“That’s right,” Ellen says quickly, “you should be eating, you should eat more,” and she abruptly stands up and heaps his plate with peas and bread, roast, a pat of margarine, a piece of fruit from the fruit bowl. The children watch with round, ghost eyes as she pushes him the salt and pepper. She gives him another piece of fruit. She fills his glass with milk. James fingers his knife and fork. There is something she wants from him, something he must do.
You should eat more, she had said.
He drops his head, and begins to eat. The roast, now the bread and margarine. The peas. The fruit.
“Wonderful,” he says.
“I’m sorry,” Ellen says quietly. She does not sit down. She is standing between the children. “I’ve given you too much.”
“Delicious!” James says fiercely. He chokes down another bite of roast. He smiles at Ellen, smiles at his parents, who are staring, silent, at his plate. He will eat everything. It will be his gift to them all.
Knowing
8
Amy crouches outside her parents’ bedroom with her ear pressed against the door. Inside, James sleeps fitfully; she can hear his breathing, rough as a cat scratching wood. The smell of his illness drifts through the house, clinging to the curtains, slithering along the walls. Pneumonia. Bronchitis. Beautiful words like the names of dolls. Natalia. Clarissa. Pleurisy. But Amy is almost eleven, too old for dolls. On New Year’s Day, she gave her own dolls funerals and buried them in cardboard boxes in her closet. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Now they are sleeping in the arms of God.
“Where are Eliza and Missy?” Ellen asked when she tucked Amy into bed that night. Usually the dolls slept between Amy and the wall, their perfect heads propped up on the pillow. They looked sweet in the matching nightgowns that Ellen had sewn for them, yellow, with lace stitched to the collars.
“They are dead,” Amy said in the deep voice she had copied from Father Bork at school. “Do not speak of them again.”
Now Amy imagines James’s lungs like two pink mittens, swelling with air, rising up out of his chest, towing his soul to heaven. Dead people turn into guardian angels. Amy imagines James whispering advice into another girl’s ear. Wash your hands. Cheer up. Children should be seen and not heard.
Perhaps he would like being a guardian angel. Guardian angels get to travel all the time, and whenever James comes home, he is eager to get back on the road. When he leaves, Amy forgets about him quickly. When he’s home, she thinks about him all the time, and this is the second week he’s been home sick, lying in bed, struggling for air.
Wash your hands. Don’t chew with your mouth full. Turn out the goddamn lights.
Amy is certain Eliza and Missy have become her own guardian angels. Unlike James, they are practical angels, with practical things to say. Your grandmother hates you. Your dad’s really weird. If you imagine something hard enough, you can make it come true. Because of Eliza and Missy, Amy knows things other girls her age do not. Eliza and Missy give Amy special powers, magical powers, that warn her of the many secret and terrible things that are hidden in this world.
Before Eliza and Missy, there was no one to look out for Amy, no one to protect her from those secret, terrible things. Last summer, she was walking in Autumn Lake because she had not yet learned to swim. The water was cool and tasted of iron. Ellen swam alongside her, graceful as a seal. “If you kick your feet, you’ll float,” she said, but Amy walked, step by cautious step—
Up to her hips—
Up to her waist—
Up to her chest and then her foot came down on something soft. There were sharp knobs buried within it. Amy grabbed one of those knobs with her bare toes and pulled the thing to the surface.
It was a drowned dog. The knobs were bones. The flesh was rotting, and it dissolved in oily pools on the surface of the water.
“Drop it!” Ellen shouted, and Amy kicked at it and screamed, because she had never thought of a dog that way, as a thing made of bones and juices and skin. As Ellen guided her back to shore, Amy could see what the dog had been in life, a little terrier, white and brown, barking and circling and barking, just like Lassie always did when something was wrong.
What is it, girl? What is it?
The sound of James’s breathing has stopped. Is he dead? Should she call her mother? Amy puts her hand on the doorknob, and imagines James’s long, narrow body sinking into muck, knobs for bones, dissolving. When the doorknob twists beneath her hand, she jumps back, slamming herself hard against the wall. A man is standing in the doorway, clutching his bathrobe to his throat, his hair a rumpled halo. Is he dead? Is he real?
“What do you want?” the man says sharply. “How come you’re pestering me again?”
Amy runs down the hall to the room she shares with Bert. She slams the door, gets in the closet, and hides behind her dresses. It was here that Ellen found the cardboard boxes that held the bodies of Eliza and Missy. On the cover of each box, a cross was drawn in heavy black magic marker RIP 1967-1972. The eyes of the dolls were taped closed.
“They are deceased,” Amy had said in Father Bork’s deep voice. “Do not disturb their rest.”
Ellen sat down on the floor of the closet with the shoes. Her shoulders moved up and down. “You’re just a little girl,” she said, and she stroked the matching nightgowns the dolls wore, smoothing the rumpled lace. “What is happening to you?”
That day at Autumn Lake, Amy had been furious with Ellen, a wild, helpless fury that left her shaking and cold. “Why didn’t you tell me it was there?” she said, as the other children and their families stared. “Why did you let me step on it?”
“I didn’t know,” Ellen said.
“Yes you did, yes you did,” said Amy.
But now she is older, and she knows better. When her mother explains, she nods and waits.
“You didn’t know,” she agrees.
At supper time, Amy comes out of the bedroom to help Ellen fix the meal. The kitchen is dimly lit, close, smelling of grease. Tiny yellow flowers watch from the curtains. Yellow eyes, patient, like the waiting eyes of dogs.
“Hey, Mom,” Amy says. “What are we having?”
“Meatballs and rice,” Ellen says. “Set the table and fix up some Jell-O for dessert.”
Amy chooses lime Jell-O, careful with the boiling water, and then sets six places: Fritz at one end of the table, James at the other; Mary-Margaret to James’s right, Ellen to James’s left; Bert between Fritz and Mary-Margaret, and her own place beside her mother. Napkins. Salt and pepper. A serving spoon for the meatballs. In the living room, Mary-Margaret is playing the piano, and Fritz is watching TV. Fritz turns up the TV volume. Mary-Margaret begins to sing.
“So much for your father getting any rest,” Ellen says. “I don’t know why he’s getting better between their noise and you pestering him all the time.”
“He pesters me,” Amy says.
“That’s not what I am told.”
“It’s weird, having him here.”
“Wouldn’t it be nice if he could be here all the time? If he could find a job close to home?”
Amy knows Ellen wants her to say how it would be nice.
“It would be weird,” Amy says.
“Maybe we could move into a place of our own. Like in Illinois. You remember Illinois?”
“That would be okay,” Amy says, although what she remembers best about her father in Illinois is him sending her from the table whenever she picked up her fork incorrectly. You don’t want to grow up like a hick, he said. Or There’s a right way to do everything.
“Wasn’t it nice then, spending time with Daddy when he came home from his trips?”
He liked Amy and Bert to sit side by side on the couch, doing nothing, saying nothing. Then he’d stare past them as if they weren’t even there. Once, he pulled an envelope out of his desk, and showed them how much it had cost for each of them to be born.
“It was okay,” Amy says.
You didn’t know. You didn’t know.
At school, beautiful Sister Justina tells them to start a journal. When Sister Justina talks, her hands shape the air into pictures for everyone to see. Her voice is something Amy can taste, something so good she can never have enough. All the girls in Amy’s class want to enter convents when they grow up and wear the lovely deep blue Sister Justina wears and speak in Sister Justina’s delicious voice.
“What should we write in it?” somebody asks.
“Thoughts, wishes, hopes, dreams,” Sister Justina says. Her hands sweep together, collecting and polishing the words. “Things that have happened. Things that you want to happen. Anything you like. Take fifteen minutes now to begin.”
Amy writes JOURNAL on the cover of her notebook, then opens it and stares at the first blank page.
I have nothing to say, she writes. My dad is home sick, but he is better. Soon he can go back to work. I want to have a cat, but he says no because of fleas. I have a brother, he is six.
When Sister Justina bends over Amy’s shoulder, her dark blue habit sweeps Amy’s cheek. “Was your father very sick?” she asks. Amy nods, blissful, too shy to speak.
At recess, the girls cluster by the fire hydrant, pretending to smoke cigarettes, exhaling puffs of warm air into the cold March wind. Kimmy Geib has a Magic Eight Ball, a round black globe with a clear window in which brief messages appear. Yes…Maybe…Most Definitely. The girls stand close together, making their backs into a wall that shield the Magic Eight Ball from the jealous gaze of Saint Michael’s Church across the street. Occasionally, somebody twists her head to watch the boys, who are playing kickball in the dirt field next to the school.
“Isn’t this a sin?” Jennifer Robbie says.
“Not if you don’t really believe in it,” Kimmy says. “Who wants to ask it something?” but everybody knows she’ll pick Amy, because Kimmy wants Amy to be her best friend. Amy takes the Magic Eight Ball, closes her eyes.
“You have to tell us your question,” Kimmy bosses, “and it has to be a question that can be answered yes or no.”
Amy cannot think of a question. She waits, rubbing the cool, smooth surface of the Magic Eight Ball. She listens to the shouts of the boys, the thunk of the red rubber kickball. On Valentine’s Day, the boys had tricked a first-grader into licking the metal hydrant. The first-grader hung there helplessly, making low, grunting noises, like a pig or a cow. His tongue had been the exact same color as the kickball. At home, when Amy told them about it, Fritz had laughed. Stupid one, just like Jimmy, he said, and she’d understood that, once, her father had been that boy. The questions Amy has cannot be answered yes or no. Secret and terrible things are hidden everywhere in this world.
“Give it to me if you’re just going to stand there,” Lynne Peters says, and she grabs the ball away. “Magic Eight Ball, does Clayton Gordell like me?”
“The answer is no,” Amy says, but Lynne shakes the Magic Eight Ball and peers eagerly into the window. Then she blinks and her mouth folds in on itself; she shrugs, pretending it doesn’t matter.
“I told you,” Amy says. “Clayton likes Jennifer Robbie.”
Jennifer Robbie blushes; the other girls stare at Amy curiously. The bells rings, and Kimmy hides the Magic Eight Ball beneath her coat. “How come you didn’t ask it a question?” she says, matching her step to Amy’s, allowing the other girls to pass by so the two of them can walk alone.
“I already know everything,” Amy says.
Kimmy shakes her head. “Saying that is an even bigger sin than this Magic Eight Ball,” she says, and she reaches out to touch Amy’s coat eagerly, reverently. It’s an ugly coat with worn rabbit fur around the hood, a hand-me-down from one of Amy’s older cousins. “Trade coats with you next recess?” she says, as Amy knew she would.
Amy walks home from school dragging Bert by the hand, her ears pri
cked to catch the slightest whisper Eliza and Missy might send from the air. Bert hangs back, sucking his chapped thumb. His nose is running from the cold.
“Don’t walk so fast,” he says thickly, but Amy jerks him along, a fish on a line, and he follows her because he loves her and because he is the sort of little boy who always does what people tell him to do. When they get home, Mary-Margaret lets them in and wipes his nose with a handkerchief. The handkerchief is scented with gardenia and makes Bert sneeze.
“You didn’t dress him properly,” Mary-Margaret says. “Schrecklich.” She is still wearing her bathrobe, and the ruffled belt pinches her thin body almost into two, like the body of a large, pale insect. The house smells of gardenia and Vicks. Peering down the hall, Amy can see the gray outline of her father, sleeping upright in front of the TV.
“I dressed him fine,” Amy says.
“He’s catching cold, just look at him.”
“No, he’s not,” Amy says. She hangs up their coats, stretching high on tiptoe to reach the wooden bar. “Ask me any question you can answer yes or no, and I bet I’ll get it right.”
“Smart-pants,” Mary-Margaret says. “You wouldn’t give me sass if you was my gal.”
“Ask me a question,” Amy says to Bert.
“Let’s watch cartoons,” Bert says, and he goes into the living room and switches the channels, quietly, so James won’t wake up.
“Smart-pants,” Mary-Margaret says smugly to Amy. She sits down at the table, where she has a game of solitaire laid out, and carefully arranges the hem of the robe to cover her feet. “You don’t know anything.”
“You’re going to lose,” Amy says. “I’m sure of it.”
But Mary-Margaret peeks beneath the turned-over cards, then shuffles through the extras until she finds the one she wants.
“That’s cheating! You’re cheating!” Amy says.
Mary-Margaret laughs. She peeks under another card. “You’ll wake up your father, yelling like that, and then you’ll catch it good.”
Vinegar Hill Page 9