Among the Lesser Gods

by Margo Catts

  When I was little, I had liked to go to the cemetery in Hat Creek. In its weathered abandonment, it was spooky enough for a child, even during the daylight. I would kick the sagebrush and rub the wooden crosses with my fingers to read them better, sorting out where the bodies themselves must be lying, figuring out how old people had been. I clearly remembered my grandfather’s marker. I couldn’t do the same for Benencia’s.

  “Somewhere by Abuelo, I guess. I don’t remember seeing a marker, though.”

  She took the dishtowel from her shoulder and wiped her hands. “No, you haven’t. She’s not there.”

  “But—–why would you bury her somewhere else?”

  “We didn’t,” she said. She tilted her chin toward the window, which looked out toward the mountains that framed Leadville. “She was lost.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean—lost. She got lost. She wandered away, and we never found her.”

  How had I not known this? It should have been important. My father had been eight when she died. Or—became lost. Old enough to remember, and something like that certainly would have hung over the family as he grew up. I could still remember a mother I’d seen at Disneyland who thought her daughter had fallen into the water at the jungle ride. She’d clutched the boat rail and screamed. Like an animal. I couldn’t imagine he was unaware. Why had he never told me?

  “I—I didn’t know.”

  “No, I’m sure you didn’t. I know your father doesn’t talk about her. He was very young. They were six years apart.”

  “But, what happened?”

  “Benencia stayed like a little child her whole life. She wandered off and disappeared as easily as a five-year-old. More easily—she was bolder and faster. On the day it happened, we thought she was playing with other children. We didn’t figure out she was missing until it was almost dark. The whole town went out searching with lanterns, calling her name—” Tuah shook her head. “Nothing. But she had always been afraid of men and especially of anyone yelling. I tried to tell them. I’ve always wondered if she was somewhere nearby and hiding, afraid to answer.”

  “I’m so sorry.” It was the only response I could find.

  She looked back at me with a faint smile. “Thank you,” she said.

  “I should have known—”

  She shook her head. “No. No. It would have been a terrible, hard thing for you. It’s nothing to hide from you, but I never found the right time to tell the story. And it would’ve made staying at the cabin kind of strange, don’t you think? This is better.”

  I looked down at my finger, now outlining a tile at the edge of the counter. My aunt. My father’s sister. I cleared my throat.

  “How long did you search?”

  “Weeks. But it was already autumn, and the nights were cold. No one expected to find her alive after the first few days. We had snow only a week later. But I was her mother. I couldn’t just give up like that.”

  Unfound forever. “Of course not.”

  “No.” Tuah put a hand on her hip, the bunched towel hanging like a tassel. “Now, I want to explain something,” she said. “When I go to the cabin, I’m not waiting for her. She hid, and went to sleep, and froze, I’m sure, and animals found the body. Benencia is gone. And Eduardo is gone. And your father—” She looked down, then out the window. “In his own way, he’s been gone a long time, too.” She was still a moment, then looked at me. “But in the cabin, we were together. That’s why I go back. To me, a house holds memories, keeps them safe for anyone who wants to come back. A place keeps things you might forget yourself, and then when you’re there it gives them back to you. Does that make any sense?”

  When I got my driver’s license as a teenager, one of the first places I drove by myself was to the house where we lived when I was ten, when I’d started the fire. We had moved four times since then. Ironically, unfairly, the wind had swept the infant blaze up the hillside and away from us so quickly that even with the thousands of acres ruined, the homes burned, the lives lost, no firefighter had stood on the ground of our canyon or had to fight to save our house.

  Even at the time, the scorched path it had left was narrow and only lightly gray. Six years later, it had healed completely. I had cut school, and was there midday on a Thursday, when no one was home. With my car idling in the driveway, I forced myself to stand behind the garage and stare at the weeds. I squatted down as I’d squatted over the fire, put my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands and wept. When the school called later that afternoon to check on my absence, I shrugged my shoulders and let my father assume whatever he wanted about where I’d been. The Plaza. Cliff jumping. Taking heroin. I didn’t care.

  Yes. I understood. I nodded.

  “That’s why I go. That’s where we were a family, where all four of us were together. I’m lucky. I can go back to the place that held our family. I’ve never had to leave it without knowing I’ll be back. I’ve never had to leave behind the part of myself that stays there.”

  What had become of the pieces of myself left behind over the years? I could see them clearly—gossamer shreds, snagged like tissue and fluttering faintly behind me. One caught on the corner of the kitchen table at the neighbor boy’s house where I’d been having dinner the afternoon of the fire, just before we evacuated; another on the carpet threshold in the apartment where my mother last lived with us; another on the oleander bush sprawling over the grave I dug for the rabbit my father bought me after she left. If I returned to gather them all, what would I have? Did I even want them back?

  “I don’t go to the cabin to be alone,” Tuah said. “I go there to connect myself with people. Do you understand?” She paused, one eyebrow lifted, then bent to get a plastic basket from the cupboard at her knee and started stacking squash in it. “You need those children as much as they need you. You need to start thinking about other people besides yourself. It’s the only way you’ll ever stop being afraid.”

  “I’m not af—”

  “Stop it. Now blot that spinach and don’t give me another word about what you can’t do.”

  6

  Paul Kofford made small ceremony of saying good-bye to his children the next morning, ruffling Sarah’s hair and giving a nod to Kevin before he pulled his Dodgers cap down low over his eyes. The handling made little difference in Sarah’s hair, which formed a mazy halo as she sat with her head bowed over her cereal, elbow out, spoon clutched in her fist. She swung her bare feet below her nightgown but didn’t look up. Kevin managed a solemn nod of his own before his father opened the front door. Nearly horizontal rays of sunlight cast a blinding rectangle across the floor, which narrowed and then disappeared as the door closed again.

  “Can I please have some sugar?” Kevin asked.

  “Sure. Where is it?”

  He turned and pointed toward an upper cabinet in the kitchen. “In there.”

  I found a mason jar topped with a salt-box top that had been trimmed and secured under the jar’s ring. I put it on the table, where Kevin picked the spout open with his fingernail and started to pour sugar over his Cheerios like sand over paving stones.

  “Easy, there,” I said, reaching to take the jar out of his hand. He stopped pouring and looked up at me.

  “This is how I have it,” he said.

  “It is?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I decided today wasn’t the day to remake anybody’s eating habits. “Are you done with it, then?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh.” He put the jar down and gave his attention to the bowl. I put the sugar back in the cupboard, then stood in the kitchen for a moment, arms folded, absorbing the scene before me: the shade-darkened family room, the dinette table with a few days’ mail scattered around the sleepy children, the muffled sounds of chewing.

  I had no idea how the day would unfold or the three that would follow until Paul returned. Tuah had helped me come up with some ideas the night before. The library had a summer reading program. We could go to the municipal s
wimming pool. We could play Monopoly or the children could build forts. The children could certainly invite friends over, which would help. She did warn me that most children were unlike me, and wouldn’t want to roam aimlessly in the wilderness for hours on end, especially children who lived here and saw no novelty in the landscape. She encouraged me to put them to work—cleaning their rooms, doing household chores, helping to get groceries and cook meals, doing yard work. They needed normalcy and routine. A schedule they could depend on. Discipline. A steady hand.

  “What would you like to do today?” I asked.

  “Shoot cans,” Kevin answered.

  What were the household rules about firearms? I knew nothing about them myself. And I most definitely wasn’t going to have the children handle lethal weapons on my first day, especially when they knew more about them than I did.

  “You’ll have to save that for when your dad’s home. Anything else?”

  Sarah stared at me, chewing, a drop of milk clinging to her lower lip. She looked as confused as if someone had lifted her out of a dead sleep and slung her into the chair only seconds before.

  “Sarah?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “What would you like to do today?”

  A blink. Swallow. “Color,” she finally said.

  “I hate coloring,” Kevin announced.

  “That’s okay. You don’t have to do the same things.”

  My response seemed to catch him by surprise. He looked at me guardedly for a moment, as if waiting for me to say something else, then turned his attention back to his cereal. I glanced at the clock. Five minutes after seven.

  I cleared my throat. “After breakfast, I think we should do some chores, and then later we can go to the library, and you can pick out some books.”

  “What kind of chores?”

  “Cleaning your rooms.” They said nothing, but in the way they both stopped chewing and straightened their backs against their chairs I could feel the resistance. Be firm, I heard Tuah say. Do what you say. But be reasonable. I plowed on.

  “I think doing everything at once is really hard. This morning I’d like you to show me your clothes. We can decide what to wash and what to put away. Then I’ll do the laundry later and you can show me where everything goes.”

  The chewing resumed, though they continued to study me.

  “Okay,” Kevin finally said.

  “Good.”

  I told myself I had successfully navigated the first passage.

  *

  Kevin’s room was fairly easy. He had a drawer of underwear that I confirmed was fresh. Everything else was on the floor, and though he showed me which were dirty and clean, I opted to wash everything. I hoped it would do something about the pet-like smell. I stripped the bed, as well, and left him absorbed in a box of what appeared to be trash that I’d inadvertently kicked out from underneath it.

  Sarah, and Sarah’s room, were more complicated. She seemed to come more fully into herself after breakfast, brightening as I washed the dishes, and by the time we got to her room she had started to chatter. This shirt had kittens on it, see? This one was Lisa and this one was Jenny and this one was Fluffy and this one was Anna-mara-something or other. This skirt could spin, and she pulled it on and demonstrated, whirling on her toes, skirt standing out like a plate, nightgown hiked around her ribs. This was her watermelon top, and this one had daisies. Her jeans were comfy. Her green pants were soft. A glacier might grow more quickly than this laundry pile.

  Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, I pointed to the picture directly in front of me on the wall, hoping to distract her enough to move a few pieces across to the laundry pile without commentary. The picture included four stick figures with large heads. One had no face, and the others had eyes and noses but no mouths.

  “Who are those people?” I asked

  She jumped to her feet to point to each one, going first through the figures with faces. “That’s my daddy. That’s Kevin. That’s me.” Then she pointed at the featureless face. “And that’s my mommy. She died.”

  Oh, God. I scanned other pictures, searching in vain across the wall in front of me for one that included four complete faces. I realized as I did that the pictures all appeared to be of about the same skill level—all included arms, legs, faces, hair, dresses on the girls, some with mountains or houses of fairly consistent geometry.

  I rotated so I could look along other walls. Faces. Finally. “Sarah, did you draw all these pictures just recently, while you’ve been in kindergarten?”

  She shook her head. “I drew some of them at home,” she said.

  “I mean—just, while you’ve been a big kindergarten girl?”

  She nodded. “Since I was a second half kindergartener.”

  Since her mother had died. I would confidently place that bet on all my scant possessions.

  “But kindergarten’s over,” she added. “I’m a first-grader now.”

  *

  My longest day before this had moved at least twice as fast as this one. The level of room-cleaning I’d agreed to was finished by 8:00. The library wouldn’t open until 10:00, though I got no sense that the outing meant very much to them. I had the children sit on the floor with me and help sort the laundry—do you think this is dark or light?—a game Sarah enjoyed, but in Kevin produced mounting frustration.

  “This is stupid!” he finally snapped after wadding a pair of jeans and chucking them into the pile of whites.

  Don’t make excuses for them. They need a firm, calm hand, not pity. I took a deep breath. “That’s a rude word, Kevin,” I said. “You don’t like it, but it’s not stupid. It’s what we have to do to get clean clothes.”

  “I don’t do this!” he shouted, far too loud for the narrow hallway where we sat. Before I could say anything, he pushed himself to his feet and fled outside, slamming the door behind himself so that the glass panes rattled.

  “Kevin’s mad,” Sarah offered.

  “Yes.” I looked down at the heap of jeans and shirts by my knee. “Does he get mad a lot?”

  She shrugged. “I dunno.” She picked up a flowered shirt. “What’s this?” she asked.

  “Light.” So she’d seen Kevin have an outburst of temper more than a few times before. I uncrossed my legs. “I think I’ll go talk to him.”

  “Is he in trouble?” she asked.

  I had no idea what I’d say to him. I could ask questions and listen. That was something I’d wished for, at least.

  “No,” I said. “You wait inside.”

  I pushed through the hallway door, which opened to a concrete stoop only as wide as the door, just deep enough to stand on. Packed dirt marked the spot where the first step afterward would land. The landscape was too bare to hide a sulking boy, so I headed toward the former barn, now serving as Paul’s mechanic’s shop. I found Kevin squatting in the shadows on the far side, out of sight from the house, stabbing a hole in the dirt with a pointed stick.

  “Hey,” I said, seating myself beside him.

  “I don’t want to do laundry no more.”

  “I figured.”

  He twisted the stick to drill into the dirt. Chipped some to the side. Drilled again.

  “I’m sorry I said stupid,” he said, his tone draped with theatric remorse. I doubted he was sorry in the slightest.

  “Where’d you find your stick?”

  He glanced at me, pale blue eyes on either end of a bridge of freckles, then pointed toward a runoff ditch a dozen yards away, choked with branches and debris. I got up, brushed the dirt off my seat, and took my time picking a better digging stick than his. Eventually I returned and started digging beside him. A meadowlark lilted a scrap of song from the top of the barn. I felt chilly in the shade.

  “Are you a mom?” he said after I’d dug out a four-inch circle.

  “Not yet.”

  I deepened the center of the circle.

  “Are you a teacher?”

  “Nope.”r />
  He seemed to need some time to absorb this. Then, “Where do you work?”

  “I just finished college. I’m going to stay here with you and your sister for a while.”

  “Taking care of us is your job?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Is my dad paying you?”

  I was baffled by his line of questioning but couldn’t see a reason to do anything other than answer.

  “No. I’m just helping. My grandma is helping me, and I’m helping you. But I’ll stay here as long as you two need me.” Where had that come from? Ignore it. Plow on. “Your dad is trying to figure out a way to stay home more so he won’t need other people to help.”

  Kevin didn’t respond, but concentrated on working around the edges of a buried rock he’d encountered.

  “What do you do?” I asked. I kept my eyes on the tip of my stick and the bowl of grit forming in front of me.

  “What?”

  “When you left the house, you said you didn’t do laundry. So what do you do?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Did your mom always do the laundry?”

  I kept my eyes down, resisting the temptation to make eye contact as I waited for an answer.

  “I guess,” he said eventually.

  “You know, everybody needs to do the things your mom used to do now.”

  Still I kept my eyes down. So I didn’t see the expression on his face when his stick skipped across the dirt and a kick of sand sprayed my leg before his shoes crunched away from me.

  7

  Anxiety consumed me for the rest of the day. I could think of nothing but anticipating sensitivities. The library, at least at Sarah’s level, turned out to be a minefield of stories about children and animals and their mothers. Terrified of stumbling unawares into something that would upset her, clueless about how to distract her or respond to her flood of What about this one? Or this one? I shifted my attention to Kevin and dragged her with me. He’d found a stack of books about machinery and stood unsmiling beside a table, flipping pages. Despite my insistence that he could take as many books as he wanted, he took a particularly dull-looking title about the world’s biggest engines to a chair and said he didn’t want anything else.