Packing Up
Kate wakes up in full darkness, at the first snap of a flame. It can’t be a fire—the house is built of the same stone as the crumbling walls that stretch into the hills around it; it leaks, ivy creeps in through the chinks to grow up the window frames, but it is hardly likely to burn. Kate can never sleep in a strange place, for fear of fire. She has kept away so staunchly, studying over vacations, taking distant summer jobs, that home seems unfamiliar, full of perils now. Sleep, she says to herself, nearly aloud. She has to be sharp with herself, or she’ll be all sloth and fear. Listen. She hears nothing but the slow pulse of tree frogs over the marsh. Dread will not yield, though, and she holds her breath, dares not move lest she miss another sound.
There have been fires: chimney fires, a lightning strike, coals burst free from the hearth. But after the first fright, the frantic phone calls and firemen swarming, all ends in laughter, gin on the porch. Nothing ever really burns.
Even the divorces have been false alarms. Pop, woken from his customary daydream, would be shocked: was something wrong? Ma was always magnificent in rage; she’d take Grace, sweep Chucky from his playpen, buckle them into the Jeep, and escape. A few lost, surreal days at home, Kate and Audie tending to Pop, until the phone rang. Then the tears and apologies, and Pop, restored, full of faith, would see infinite promise in … soybeans, or winter wheat. Someday, he said, the market would change their lives. Calling from his office, one eye on the board, he would spin out his plans: a few months of good fortune, and they would sail for the Maldives, buy their own island, live in the trees. Kate and Audie would be set studying Swahili while Ma learned to pound her own flour. Only the market was unwilling. Suddenly they’d be broke again, the dream exploded, the house remortgaged, and Ma, betrayed, off again on the road.
Now the bank is repossessing the house. They—Ma and Pop and the younger children—have known it all spring, though they didn’t tell Kate till today. After twenty years safe in the path of disaster, it must have been hard to believe one had come. They continued their perpetual rhythms: feeding the sheep, planting the garden, meeting Pop’s train from New York, waiting for the usual reprieve. Now the peas are blooming, the spirea blooms in cascades, and in four days they will have to leave.
Kate has been finishing her last year of college. She’s grown too far from them—she vowed long ago to go step by step ahead, not round and round in their little mire of dreams. When the bottom dropped out of beet sugar, she did not quit school; she found, instead, a job, a scholarship, a loan. Every semester had been shaky (the exorbitant school had been chosen in a boom-time mood), but between luck and labor she had got through, and as she waited her turn that morning, in the line of graduates filing from the stage, she half-expected Fate to lift her up in His strong arms and carry her away. Yes, she could see it: a stiff wind would come up under their robes, wafting them up together like a flock of birds, carrying them on various currents into their various lives. She would land far, far from her parents’ preserve—in Paris, she thought, defiant in her triumph, and not just Paris but the Paris of Baudelaire.
She had felt as if she would fly, down the lawn to the great striped canopy that billowed over the gathered throng. Instead, though it hardly befitted her new status, she ran, one hand holding the mortarboard steady, the other keeping hold of her robe.
But they were broken into factions already. Pop, pale and grave, kept to the edge of the crowd, while Ma, holding Chucky by the hand, had appropriated its center. Among the other, decorous mothers, she burned with electrical intensity, leading Audie and Grace in a wave of proud, indiscreet laughter, staking a rebellious claim. Away from their domain, they seemed like night creatures exposed. Garish, alarming, they blinked and clung to each other, fending off the unfamiliar world.
“Here we are, Katie!” Ma called.
“Pop’s over there!” Kate said. She stood midway between them, thinking they’d been separated by accident, but nobody moved. The sun cast wide stripes of light through the tent top, kindling a thousand cups of red punch.
Finally Grace broke from Ma’s side. She was fourteen, taller than Kate now and gangly as telescoped Alice, but she had a new delicacy too: she took Kate’s arm more in solace than in celebration.
“I’ll talk to Pop,” she said, “and when you’ve been with Ma awhile we’ll trade.”
“What’s wrong?” Kate had asked, impatient, wondering why they couldn’t let their angers rest just for the day.
Grace was so accustomed to dividing herself equally between her parents, passing their messages back and forth at the dinner table, that she hardly noticed they never spoke to each other, only to her. She was a mass of scruples, part of her adolescent independence. Everything must test for loyalty and good intention, and Kate’s vexation failed.
“What do you mean?” Grace asked hotly, and fell under her own censure: this was Kate’s day. Kate watched her cautious face relax until the child appeared again, shy and smiling. “Congratulations!” She threw her arms around Kate’s neck and sent the mortarboard flying.
Audie, of course, was the one to explain. Married, like her parents, at nineteen, she had become everyone’s confidante and could speak—winding her program around strong, uncertain fingers—of deeds and litigations, Ma’s accusations, Pop’s rebuttals, the process server, and the price of land.
“So,” she said finally, “we have to be packed in four days. It’s hard to believe it. It’s hard to say it out loud.”
“Four days?” said Kate, but checked herself. “Fine.” She would refuse even to pity them this time. She was in the hands of Fate. Everyone must blaze ahead today.
Audie took a moment to come around. “I suppose…” she said. Then her trusting, rascal’s smile, her little sister’s will-to-agree. “They are impossible.”
Grace, baffled by this wicked camaraderie, had set her face. From behind them, a squeal: “Oh, Dad-ee!” as some beaming father dangled a new set of keys.
* * *
Grace’s room is still neat as a jewel box in the midst of the muddled house, and Kate imagines she is sleeping soundly there. Audie, who is home to help with the packing, is across from Kate in her old bed, an ark of stuffed animals, her hand closed tight on a velvet opossum’s tail. If she would wake up, they could whisper as they used to, watching a jar of fireflies on the sill. Ma used to let them stay up as late as they liked: she was afraid of the night with Pop away. In the morning she’d say school wasn’t important—they should turn over and go back to their dreams.
Kate dreamed of a larger world than this! She would struggle awake and run up the dirt road out of the valley to catch the school bus: that vessel might teem with threats and humiliations, but it carried her away. In these last years she had come home only for Christmas, and when she thought of the place she saw winter: the house gray as the sky, the brook a sharp black schism through the white land. Summer at home, picking chokecherries for jam—stained fingers, hawkweed soft on her legs as she waded toward the bushes at the edge of a field—still seemed too seductive, a memory they would use to hold her here with them while the weeds grew in the gutter and the willow roots wound up through the pipes. She had planned, after Commencement, to stay for two weeks only, drinking coffee on the lawn with Ma. Then she would lift her arms and let Fate carry her away.
Now she has four days. Driving home after the ceremony, she tried to make new plans: she had three hundred dollars and could double it by selling her car; she could drive to New York, land on a friend’s doorstep, go from there. At every fork she considered, but she always turned for home. Highways became streets, the town dwindled, and finally she turned down the narrow road so little traveled that lilacs and elderberries arched over the stone fences alongside, almost touching overhead.
Audie and Grace, ahead of her by only an hour, were packing already, the blond and the dark heads leaning from the upstairs window, long arms throwing blankets out to Pop, who caught each bundle and tossed it into the J
eep. Something had stung them into action, and Kate realized, just from the daze Ma always left behind her, that she must already be gone. The girls seemed unwilling to break their rhythm of labor even to welcome Kate, and she stood before the massive stone porch pillars, uncertain as an immigrant: she was no longer one of them. When they left the window for more, Pop came to embrace her.
“We’re so proud,” he said, looking through her. He was never one to fix on the present, and Kate was used to checking over her shoulder only to realize he was picturing the curve of a rising market, or a sail on a distant sea. Now he was seeing the past, some hallowed recollection—this farm, the first of his dreams. Kate touched his shoulder, to make herself real.
“Where are we moving?”
Before he could shake himself into the present, Grace was at the window again. “We don’t know!” she said. “Catch!” Like parachutes, like wide white wings, the sheets unfurled overhead.
* * *
Drifting, half dreaming, Kate pieces the day back together. Sheets and scholar’s robes; then a maple leaf floats down on a fishhook; a little cracked pitcher Ma always loved appears, full of terror suddenly, Made in Hell. “Sleep, dopey,” she tells herself, in her mother’s voice. “Tomorrow you have to pack all day.”
Once, Ma had waked them at midnight and taken them out to watch a comet from a blanket on the garden lawn. She and Pop had been fighting all day while Kate and Audie dodged around them, tiptoeing down the back staircase, devising secrets under the porch while Ma, above them, yanked the clothes from the line. Dinner passed in livid silence until one of the sheep nosed open the screen door and tottered toward them, its feet clicking and sliding on the linoleum tiles. Confounded, unable to turn, it gaped at them in dumb sheep-horror and wet the floor.
This had been Ma’s last straw: she sprang up in fury, but she was full of love for the sheep.
“Here, baby,” she said, sinking her hands deep into its wool, laughing as she coaxed it outside.
“Eat your dinner,” she said to Pop. “I’ll be mopping up sheep piss.” She threw the faucets wide open to fill the bucket, then, overcome, hurled it to the floor, splashing them all with a sudsy wave. She smacked the swinging door open with one flat hand and escaped, sobbing, Pop behind her, while the children sat still as statues, watching the door flap back and forth in their wake.
Waiting for the comet, leaning back against Pop’s knee, Ma had laughed easily again, low and confidential, blowing smoke as mosquito repellent into Kate’s hair. Another storm was past, forgotten. Grace in her sleepsuit pointed to a blinking jet, but Pop had ruler and compass to show where the star must emerge.
“Three minutes,” he said, “two and a half.”
The peonies glowed in the garden. Kate didn’t remember the comet, only the flowers, when she woke in her bed the next morning. Someone must have carried her in.
* * *
She expects grapefruit for breakfast, as if grapefruits grew on the trees outside the kitchen window, weighing them down. Pop, unrolling his nautical charts at the table, had prophesied such things. But there is no grapefruit, nor bread, nor even coffee. Leaks have buckled the oak floorboards in a high ridge the length of the room, and Kate trips, though she means to step over. In the sink are three cups and one tea bag, which she steeps and squeezes to a pale brew, carrying her cup to the lawn. Solitude was always the real luxury here.
Shouts, clattering, laughter, and something comes bumping down the flagstone path, pursued by Audie and Grace and their two shaggy, prancing dogs. It is a wheel come loose from the pony cart, and when the path turns in front of the house, it continues straight along to Kate and thuds down. Audie, breathless, flops beside it while the dogs set upon Kate, licking her, sniffing her, spilling her tea.
“Go away!” She strikes blindly, in a flash of rage, and the blow shames her. Both dogs go yelping, one in pain, one in fear.
“What’s the matter with you?” Grace is standing above her, more confused than aggrieved.
“I’m covered with tea.”
“We’ve been working for two hours…” Grace’s voice thins in plaintive anger: What’s wrong with everyone? Why doesn’t Kate just pitch in?
“I was asleep,” Kate says. Let them pack. This isn’t her home anymore. These kitchen plays grow ever more reckless, but soon Ma will be back, the mortgage will miraculously be paid. They’d be luckier if they really could leave.
“Pop needs us,” Grace says. “How could Ma go now? She says it’s all Pop’s fault.” She gives a little, stifled cry—this tangle of injustice will not yield. “She took Chucky, and she wanted me to go too and just leave Pop alone.”
Audie will go home to her husband, and Kate is long, long gone. Grace is the only one left.
Grace sees their silence as censure. “Pop doesn’t have anyone at all. She shouldn’t have gone. And she shouldn’t have taken his car.” She gives a hopeless glance at the Jeep, the enormous old getaway car, which does seem a droll excess, rusty at its edges but still a brilliant emerald-green. The contents of the linen closet have filled it completely; the frayed tires compress beneath their load.
“We’re renting a U-Haul,” says Audie. “Forty dollars a day and five hundred miles free.”
“Five hundred miles? Where’s he going?” Kate asks. And where is she going? They all just assume she has plans.
Audie, from the habit of forbearance, has become the very Dr. Johnson of gesture: her face purses with worry and amusement while her hands fly out to the winds.
“He doesn’t know,” Grace says. “We should all be together now. It’s not fair.” She covers her face, which is suddenly distorted by tears. It’s not long since she swore she’d never leave her mother, even for school. “I don’t mean…” she goes on. She takes a deep breath, reining herself in, kneeling down between the two dogs, who have settled a safe distance from Kate. “I know Ma’s upset. We all are.”
Kate tests herself for upset, but it’s as if she’s only watching. “I am imperturbable,” she thinks. Her education will act as a shield. This is just a loss, after all, like other losses. They don’t even have to look beyond these fifty acres to find sorrows greater than their own. The first owners, planning to farm, had pulled these stones—enough to build the house and miles of walls—out of a soil so thin it never supported a crop. In the pasture behind the house, boulders larger than men still stand, while the fields are grown back to forest, still marked into squares by stone walls. The old road up the hillside is lost in brush and woodland. At the top there’s a log cabin built by a soldier shell-shocked in the First World War. No one knows what became of him. When Kate and Audie climbed in through the ruined window, they found the torn curtains still blowing, a teacup broken in the sink. A birch tree has grown up through the chassis of the soldier’s Model T.
Now the forest will cover their traces too. The historians must submit to history. Kate wants to see this day clearly, through scholar’s eyes, but last night’s snarled dreams hang over her like a caul.
“Yes, honey,” Grace says, kneeling between the dogs, stroking one, then the other. “Yes, everything’s all right, everything will be just fine.”
Silent, side by side in the living room, they load books into boxes and carry them out to the porch.
“We have to go faster,” Audie says. Pop, adrift in the muddle, is carrying a kerosene lamp back and forth, looking for the perfect box, rejecting them all. Kate, at the bookshelf, reads random passages, testing her new wits. These books have always seemed just part of the wall, their titles—Far from the Madding Crowd, The Gathering Storm—promising revelations; it is surprising now to find they yield up secrets plain as jinxed love and war.
“Like this.” To demonstrate, Audie pulls out half a shelf at once, dumps it into a box, and goes back for more. Nothing is in order. The house smells of mildew and neglect, as if it had long since been given up for lost. The attic, the cellar, the barn are jammed with things like automatic chicken-feed dispensers,
old ticker-tape machines. By midafternoon they have packed one room. A spider tends its thick web in the corner above them, and Kate brushes the back of her neck, feels through her hair.
“These old tools were here when we bought the house,” says Pop from the hall closet. “Look, Grace, this works with a spring action, do you see?” He brings out an enigmatic contraption and takes it apart. Grace tries to look interested, though she’s reaching deep to the back of a shelf to pull out a nest of rags.
“An apple corer. We found it in the henhouse with the old sharpening wheels,” he says. “You weren’t even around then, Baby Sister, and Audie was just about to be born.”
Audie telegraphs a warning to Kate. If he sinks into nostalgia now, there’ll be no retrieving him. Before they can change the subject, though, he has opened the cupboard of Christmas ornaments. He turns from it as if from a rebuke and sits down.
“You know,” he says, “there was enough land here that you could each have had a little parcel. We could have built two houses up by the waterfall and one over on the hill. It wouldn’t have to be elegant, we’d be together. I’d visit my grandchildren…”
Audie and Grace leave their work to comfort him, repeating the gentle phrases “Don’t worry … we love you,” like a rosary, one on each side of his chair. Kate opens the book in her hand and vows to live by whatever sentence she finds, but it’s an investment adviser. She has just fitted a tiny leather volume of Shakespeare into an empty space, and she plucks it up again, closing her eyes to choose a page.
The Rose Thieves Page 6