by Craig Shreve
Ontario, 2008
The guard at the border told me that I would know how far north I had driven by the size of the animals on the roadside signs. I had never liked highway driving, and I was in no hurry to reach my destination. I stuck to regional roads. My route took me east first, through small towns straddling the Thames River, its surface a jumble of cracked ice. There were yellow diamond-shaped signs warning drivers to watch for ducks crossing.
When I did merge onto the 401, the yellow signs changed to deer. I drove past towns with European names — Dresden, London, Paris. I spotted one deer, chewing grass at the edge of a copse of trees, but it looked uninterested in testing the road.
By the time I reached Hamilton, I was tiring. I pulled off at a truck stop that sold T-shirts and stuffed beavers and offered the use of shower stalls. I ordered smothered chicken and ate in silence in a corner booth. It had started to snow. The men there were mostly what I thought they would be — gruff and weary and alone, sitting each at their separate tables with their heads hung over their meals. I stayed for coffee, then checked into a hotel a little farther down the road. I paid upfront so that I could be off early in the morning.
Past Toronto, the route turned north. After a hundred miles or so, the highway narrowed from six lanes to two, the radio stations switched from rock to mostly country, and the billboards began advertising snowmobiles, ATVs, and small boats instead of cars and trucks. I passed an eighteen-wheeler overturned in the ditch, its trailer ruptured, its back wheels still spinning slowly in the wind like the legs of a turtle on its back.
The highway was exposed on both sides, and the wind whipped snow from the fields across it in thick sheets. I pushed on through Barrie and Orillia. The warning signs changed from deer to moose, and I knew I must be getting close. I slowed crossing a bridge to look at the shacks set up on the lake by ice-fishermen, so many that it looked like a village. The car slid beneath me, but not dangerously so.
When I finally reached my exit, the snow had stopped, but enough had accumulated that the words on the sign were obscured, and I had to look closely. I entered the town of Amblan, then pulled off to the side of the road to check my directions. Etta had arranged for a room for me, even though she hadn’t wanted me to go.
It was Etta who had tried to bring me back into the family. Shortly after Graden’s funeral, I’d left Mississippi. I was twenty-five and out on my own for the first time in my life. I made my way north slowly, going as far as I could with the money I had, then settling in a place just long enough to earn what I needed in order to move on, travelling sometimes by bus but more often in the back of a truck. In Chicago I met a school teacher who suffered from a mild palsy. I cooked and cleaned and ran his errands, and in return he let me have the apartment in the basement of his house. He began teaching me history and literature and science in the evenings. I earned my high school diploma at the age of twenty-nine and was accepted at Loyola University. The old man passed shortly before classes began and I struggled, but continued. It was the only way I knew.
Eventually, the man’s daughter came from Washington to claim the property, and I moved into a hostel. I hadn’t spoken to or heard from my own family in four years, but in my second year I found a postcard in my campus mailbox. It was from Philadelphia. The picture on the front showed the Liberty Bell, reflecting the colours of sunset. The note on the back was brief.
Am married now and living in Philadelphia. I tried to invite you to the wedding but had considerable difficulty finding you. I was excited to hear you are in college! You have been hard on yourself. Much time has passed. I hope you are well, and I hope you find your way to visit us. Love, Etta.
A few simple words wiped away the years and distance, but only for a short time. After rereading the postcard several times, I began to take note of the things not written. “I was excited to hear you are in college!” “I” not “we.” No mention of the rest of the family sending their regards or of being missed. Etta had scribbled her address and phone number in a corner. I didn’t reply, but I kept the card. It took the better part of a year before I finally called her.
The first visit was brief. I stayed only four days, meeting her husband and her two-year-old daughter. They welcomed me warmly, but I spoke little. Neither of my sisters had been beautiful, but Etta had grown into an understated elegance that made people look past her features. She was educated and cultured, but still occasionally revealed her roots with a country phrase that brought disapproving looks from her husband. I stayed in their house as a stranger. I left from there for Kentucky, knowing her less than when I’d arrived, but I wrote to her nonetheless and with the safety of several states between us, I opened up.
When I eventually moved to Philadelphia, into an apartment above a flower shop, I thought that I might have found a place to settle. It was the spring of 1980, and I was a forty-year-old man who had not planted solid roots anywhere. I began eating supper with Etta and her family two nights a week and accompanying them to church on Sundays. Gradually, I became friendly with the shop owner, who would give me my pick of the flowers that he couldn’t sell. I brought them to Etta on each visit — lilacs that were cut too short, tulips whose petals drooped slightly, blooms with tiny flaws that were otherwise unapparent, picked up by the shop owner’s trained eye.
We rarely talked with each other about family. Etta kept in constant touch with Mama and Glenda, and whenever the subject did come up, she would reel off updates about their lives while I sat and listened in silence. They knew that I was living nearby, but if they ever asked about me while they were talking to Etta, she never mentioned it.
Sitting on Etta’s porch one night, sipping lemonade and looking out over the front yard, I was reminded of the night before Graden’s body was brought home, both of us sleepless and sitting out in front of our old place in Mississippi.
“I wish I could have been at Papa’s funeral.”
“We couldn’t find you. I tried, but that was before I was able to track you down.”
“Thing is, I never was trying to hide. Just didn’t think anyone was looking. It must have been awful hard work keeping the farm going those last few years with both Graden and me gone.”
“You sound like you’re fixing to blame yourself for that.”
“Blame has a way of finding the right place.”
“Well, that place ain’t with you. Papa lived a hard life long before any of us came along. There’s plenty of fifty-three-year old farmers with two healthy sons that never lived to see fifty-four. You gotta stop putting all of this on yourself.”
“I should have been with him.”
“We still talking about Papa?”
Etta set down her lemonade and reached for my hand.
“Papa’s not your fault. Graden’s not your fault. It doesn’t matter that he was out there to fetch you home. Those men had their eyes set on him, and they would have gotten him anyway, if not that night then on some other.”
I stared at the street running past Etta’s house, half-expecting to see that dusty white pickup come trundling along with its horrible package in the back. I leaned over and kissed Etta on the forehead, then stood to go back in the house.
“There’s plenty of blame for me to take, Etta. There’s all of it. Seems like you’re the only that don’t see it.”
◀︎ ▶︎
Glenda visited a few weeks before Thanksgiving. I dressed in a heavy brown cotton suit that had been given to me by the teacher in Chicago. It was the only suit I owned, and it fit poorly. I struggled to button my shirt with my crippled right hand.
I didn’t know if Glenda would greet me as long-lost family or as an unwelcome presence. She did neither. She was cool, polite, and cautious. She’d grown heavy since I’d last seen her. Her legs and arms were thick, and her hair had turned to grey, but her face was mostly unchanged — her cheeks dark and leathery, her forehead wrinkled at the brow, her eyes set in a squint that made her look perpetually annoyed except on the rare
occasions when a broad smile broke out and transformed her entire face.
We hugged each other stiffly inside the doorway and did not touch again before leaving. Our words to each other were guarded. It was that way between Etta and me at first as well, and we had worked through it, but this was different. There was a stillness on both sides, whereas with Etta, the awkwardness had been all mine.
After dinner, Etta’s husband and daughter went for a walk, and Etta, Glenda, and I remained at the table. Etta served coffee and peach pie. The conversation started and faded and started and faded again, each change of topic preceded by a weighted hesitation. They spoke mostly of cooking and farming and marriage. Etta tried to draw me in, urging me to tell them where I had been, what my life had been like at school, and what I’d done since then. I began slowly, leaving myself out of the story, talking only of places and dates. I directed my words at the crumbs on the saucer in front of me. Years went by in a matter of a few sentences. Glenda merely nodded. Etta excused herself to clear the dishes, and when she left the table cradling plates and cups, Glenda looked passively through the spoiling chrysanthemums I had brought for the centerpiece and said quietly, “You’ve been gone a long time.”
“Yes.”
“You know Mama’s in a home?”
“Etta told me, yes.”
“She misses him, still.”
“I do too.”
Glenda scoffed. “That why you ran off and left everything behind?”
“No, I just … couldn’t stay there.”
“You think you’ve suffered more than the rest of us.”
I couldn’t look up at her. I rubbed the remaining fingers on my hand. “I was supposed to take care of him.”
Glenda pushed back her chair and collected the remaining plates. I could just hear her over the clatter of utensils.
“Maybe you should have stayed gone.”
I didn’t reply. She walked into the kitchen, and I stayed at the table alone. After church on Sunday, I said goodbye to Glenda as formally as we had said hello, then returned to my apartment to write a letter to Etta. By Thanksgiving I had moved out of the apartment and was on my way out of Philadelphia.
◀ 5 ▶
Mississippi, 1961
My father was the toughest man I knew. Graden and I often complained to each other on plucking days and flagged during the brutally hot afternoons, but Papa worked mechanically from dawn until dusk, ignoring blistered palms and the blood seeping from his fingertips. He’d torn toenails and fingernails clean off without so much as pausing, and he’d come into the house some nights with strips of skin hanging like tatters from the bottom of his feet, his flesh so hot that the water-soaked cloths that Mama placed on his forehead were dry within moments, but I couldn’t once remember hearing him complain.
He was not a large man, but muscles knotted his arms and legs like twisted tree trunks. He’d often told us that he could strap the rusty plough blade to his back and work just as fast as any mule, and we were never sure whether to believe him or not. He had scars that none of us ever asked him about — raised lines of purplish skin criss-crossing the midnight of his forearms and shoulders. He had dark skin, even by Mississippi standards, and his eyes and teeth were a sickly yellow. When he closed his eyes and mouth, his face was an impenetrable black from which no angles or features could be distinguished. He was kindly to us, but he rarely smiled. We had learned to judge his moods by his hands. They were active when he was angry, either clenched or flexing, and hidden when he was happy, either behind his back or in the folds of his clothes, as if the rare joys he experienced were things that he could grasp and discreetly tuck away.
One day in late September, he did not get out of bed. We all sat at the table spooning a slatelike mix of oatmeal and grits into our mouths while Mama had already set to work behind us, scrubbing away at the pan. Glenda and Etta swung their legs beneath the table, excited because Papa was planning to go to market later that morning to sell the cotton that he had been storing in the shed. Sometimes he would return with a gift for the girls — a hair comb or a bow or once a tin bracelet that they took turns wearing.
“Isn’t Papa coming to eat?” Etta asked.
“Never you mind,” Mama responded, not bothering to turn around. “You finish up your breakfast and be on about your chores.”
They did as they were told, gathering up the clothes bundled on the floor and carrying them out to the tub for washing. Graden and I lingered on, eating more slowly, and questioning each other with glances. Papa was always the first one up in the mornings, and some days when I couldn’t sleep, I could hear my father moving around the house before the rooster called out the day. The fact that Mama had not even set out a bowl for him was worrisome. Graden picked up his own bowl, with a few meagre spoonfuls left in it. He headed towards our parents’ bedroom, and I quickly rose to follow.
It was the first time we had seen our father sick. He had thrown off the bed sheets and he lay there, sweating profusely and staring at the ceiling. He turned his head to look at us in the doorway, but his eyes were unfocussed. His breathing was gravelly and weak and a trail of spit glistened across his cheek.
Mama was right behind us and slapped at the backs of our heads, screaming for us to get out. She was fiercely protective of Papa, and I suppose she didn’t want us to see him in a weakened state. Graden dropped his bowl and it clanged off the floor and rolled as the two of us hurried out of the house.
We went straight to work. We walked through the rows in unusual silence, picking handfuls of dew-heavy cotton and keeping mostly to ourselves. When we broke at midday, we returned to the house. We ate potatoes and thin strips of fish while Mama glared at us. When we were finished, she nodded at me.
“Your father’s been asking for you.”
I went back to the bedroom, but would not advance past the doorway. The room smelled of filth. Papa was sitting upright in the bed, swaying slightly, his skin a palish grey. When he spoke, he used as few words as possible.
“How many sacks?”
I tried to picture the sacks of cotton already sitting in the shed, plus the few we had been able to gather that morning, but I didn’t know how many.
Before I could answer, Graden appeared at my shoulder.
“Fourteen, sir.”
I kicked Graden’s ankle sharply in the hope he would leave, but he barely flinched.
Papa continued, “You know the way to town?”
“Yes, sir,” Graden and I answered in unison. I jabbed Graden with a quick elbow, then added, “I can drive the truck, sir.”
In truth, I had never taken the truck off the farm and had only driven it a few times at that, but it was still something that I could do that Graden couldn’t. His interruption irked me. Papa asked for me, not Graden. I wanted to show Papa that I could handle the responsibility, and maybe I wanted to prove that to Graden as well. Papa lay back down and pulled the sheet around him. It was settled.
Graden would not be talked out of going to town under any circumstances. We argued the whole time that we loaded the bed of the truck with the sacks of cotton, and in the end I relented. I could not go alone, and Graden, despite being only fifteen, had already grown to be strong and tall enough that he would give pause to anyone thinking of starting trouble.
Our truck was a 1941 Ford that had been all but left for dead by a grocery store owner in town. During the winter months Papa took on whatever odd jobs he could find, and after repairing the roof of the grocery, he negotiated for the truck in lieu of payment. Papa had driven it, rattling and sputtering, up to the house with a grin on his face like he’d found gold. He spent the next few weeks cleaning and tuning it, and it had served us well since, although it could be fussy at times.
The engine turned over easily, but I stalled it twice just backing away from the shed and easing it out past the front yard. Graden had the good sense not to say anything, but I knew he was watching closely and thinking that he could do better. The truck boun
ced and lurched along the rutted track. It rolled along more smoothly once I made it to the road, but I kept my grip tight on the wheel, regardless. Graden sat beside me on the bench seat, his head bobbing with each jolt from ridges in the hardpan of dried clay. I was focussed on the road, but I checked over my shoulder often, making sure that the sacks were still securely in place.
The engine whined and occasionally coughed smoke that wafted up from the front grill. I’d told Papa I could drive the truck, but I realized that I had no idea how to fix it if it broke down, which he said it was sometimes wont to do. I wondered what would happen if we found ourselves stranded on the side of the road, but I knew Graden was watching and so I tried not to look concerned.
We’d both been to town before, but never without Mama or Papa. I’d helped my father unload last year’s cotton and had met the merchant, Mr. Stevenson, but I’d waited outside the store while the men went inside to complete the sale.
“I can take the wheel for a spell.”
I glanced at Graden. I was sweating and my arms were sore, but I didn’t want to look weak in front of my younger brother.
“Papa told me to take the truck.”
“Papa’s not here. I was just offering to help.”
“Don’t need your help,” I said. Then embarrassed by the harshness of my tone, I added, “We ain’t got much longer. Town is just up ahead.”
In truth, I was not sure how much farther it was, but the patches of trees along the side of the road had started to thin, and we’d already passed a few isolated houses carved out from the land, so I felt sure we were getting close. I’d thought the road might get smoother as we got closer to town, but in fact it got worse. The heavier traffic caused deep furrows on wet days, which then dried into a criss-crossed series of ridges that I had to navigate carefully to avoid getting stuck.
I had never driven in traffic, and I panicked when the first car came rolling slowly towards us, also carefully picking its way along the road. I turned out of its way too sharply, taking the right front wheel off the road, then had to fight to keep the truck from rolling into the ditch.