Mother Lode

  “What are you doing here, Kaarina?”

  Why did it come out like that? How hard it must have been for her to come. He should be trying to put her at ease; instead he was being brusque with her.

  “I came to see you. Is something wrong?”

  “I’ll take you home.”

  They walked in silence while he tried to think of how he could tell her.

  Finally, he said, “I should have come to you. I’m sorry you had to be the one—”

  “It’s all right.”

  He knew she was watching him, but he didn’t dare look at her. If he did, all his resolve would melt.

  “I’m going back to the University as soon as I get my inheritance.” There was no easy way to say the rest. “Kaarina, we’re both too young to be married, and I don’t want to make promises I can’t keep.”

  “I thought it must be something like that.”

  He heard a catch in her voice. Every fiber in his being wanted to turn and take her in his arms. Instead, he shoved his hands in his pockets.

  “I would have come to tell you before I left, to say good-bye. But it’s as well you came to me.”

  Yes, I want to get this over with.

  He left her at her gate, telling her maybe one day he’d look her up.

  He walked away wondering if anything he’d said was true. Would he look her up? Would he have even been man enough to go to her to break it off if she hadn’t come first? He felt the cad, that she’d had to come to him to get an answer.

  September came and went, and with it his hopes of getting into the fall semester at the University. But he still planned to leave for Ann Arbor after his birthday in October.

  He dreaded seeing his mother, but feared if he said nothing, she would be unprepared to give him his inheritance on his birthday. He hadn’t been to the house since the night of that terrible scene in Eliza’s room. Two weeks before his birthday, he climbed the hill with trepidation.

  He found her in the swing on the veranda, eating a cluster of grapes. The vines covered the trellises, and the autumn rains had brought the Concords to their full ripeness.

  He stood several feet from her. “Where’s Eliza?”

  “With the Stockwell child.”

  He flicked a mosquito off of his arm.

  Her smile was contemptuous. “You still can’t kill them, can you?”

  “Who are the Stockwells?”

  “The family that bought the Kukkonen’s place last year.”

  Well, at least Eliza was allowed friends.

  “She goes there almost every day. At least for the time being.”

  “I’ve come to tell you that I’m leaving right after my birthday. I’m going back to the University as soon as I get my inheritance.” He resisted an impulse to brush away the pesky mosquito trying to land on her face.

  She listened to the drone of the insects. “You know, they never bother me. I rather like the sound they make. Don’t they just pinch the music out of the night?”

  She sucked the grape from its skin, savoring the sweetness of its flesh, discarding the bitter skin. She plucked another cluster, holding it out to him. “They’re more succulent than ever this year.”

  “No. This is not a social visit. It’s an announcement. I’m going back to school.”

  She laid the grapes in her lap and sat up straight. Jorie watched her mouth move tenuously, carefully choosing her approach.

  “Please don’t leave me now, Jorie. You can’t leave your mother up here in this God-forsaken place, without a man to look after her.”

  She was still doing it!

  “You have Mr. Markel.”

  “But I don’t! He’s taken up with another widow. Like a vulture, he circles and waits, picks us off at funerals, when we’re most vulnerable!”

  “I thought he wanted to marry you.”

  “I suppose he got tired of waiting.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. I’m going back to school.”

  He saw her face harden. A ghoulish smile curled one corner of her mouth. The sunlight filtered through the vine leaves, and for the first time he noticed the lines around her mouth. She picked up the grapes and pinched another from its skin.

  “The University of Michigan wants its students to be of upstanding character.” His heart froze. Was she saying what he thought she was?

  “To be plain with you, I am prepared to write them detailing the state of your mind, Jorie. You are mentally unstable, and you will never be admitted. The sheriff can back me up. He was here, you’ll recall, the night you broke down the door down from the inside.”

  She spat the skin out on the ground, and drew another grape from its shell. “We know about your fiasco climbing the shafthouse! The night watchman saw you, and the sheriff has that on record too. I was compelled to report the bruises you left on my arms the night you went crazy with jealousy over my seeing Mr. Markel. And that in my child’s room you stripped me of all covering, and forced upon me shameful behavior no mother should endure.”

  His gaze shifted to the vines behind her. He knew from swinging on them as a boy how strong they were. In his mind he could see them winding around her neck, ensnaring her in their trap, squeezing and silencing every venomous syllable.

  Instead he willed himself to walk away.

  Up in the hills he flung himself on the ground, grasping the protruding toes of the beech tree. Howling his rage and despair, he released his energy to the earth, the great mother, who could absorb all his sorrows.

  He didn’t know which was worse — his dreams of education turning to ashes, or the extent of his mother’s betrayal. Yes, he did know. It was the collapse of all he’d placed his faith in — his madonna.

  In the following days he became calm enough to sort things out. He realized he could probably go to some other college; she couldn’t write to them all. But somehow the dream had died, along with something inside. He just wanted to get away. If he could hold on until his birthday.

  The national park system interested him as much as anything. He’d take his inheritance, if she hadn’t found a way to queer that too, and go out west. Maybe he could even work with John Muir.

  In the early evening he found her in the garden gathering the last of the tomatoes before the frost.

  “Ma, my birthday’s next Thursday. I want you to have the papers ready, or whatever you have to do, so I can go to the bank. Then I’ll be leaving.”

  She turned to him with a little smile. “Perhaps it is time you understood the terms of your father’s will.”

  “Are you going to tell me he didn’t leave me anything?”

  “Oh, no. He did. But you’re making a hasty assumption about when you may receive this money.”

  I knew there’d be something.

  “The terms of your father’s will state that you shall receive a sum ‘upon attaining the age of eighteen, or at such time that your trustee believes you to have obtained sufficient maturity to manage your inheritance.’ I believe those are the exact words.”

  “Who is my trustee?”

  “Why, your mother, of course.”

  Everything was spinning in front of him, including the shovel that lay between them. Then he deliberately went numb, for if he didn’t, he knew he would strike her.

  He walked to the lake, skipped pebbles across the still water, each one disturbing the surface and that which lived below.

  He realized he would never get his inheritance. She had always held the high cards, and today she’d played her ace.

  He traced over and over the steps she’d taken to ensure his servitude. Ever since he’d been small, training him to be her devoted slave, asking him to sacrifice friends, keeping him so isolated he had none but her as ally and mentor. And when he was fourteen making herself seductive with her nude painting scheme. Posing for him. But not directly in front of you, Dear— that wouldn’t be right!

  He thought of all the tricks and lies she’d employed to keep him home from college. Why? Why was she,
whom he had venerated, determined to undermine, sabotage all his dreams? What had he done to cause betrayal of this magnitude? She had even managed to contaminate the first innocent and pure love he had for someone else.

  The truth was that according to the wording of the will, not only could she withhold his inheritance as long as she liked, but she could have given it to him before he was eighteen, if she’d a mind to. There was no financial reason to take him out of school.

  But if she thought she could keep him now by withholding the money, she was wrong. He would just leave town. She couldn’t prevent that.

  He’d promised to stay on the job until the end of the month to cover two stories coming up. Then he would take the train to Chicago and from there west. Until that time, he would stay at Phillip’s.

  She had done her dirty work. There was nothing more she could do to stand in his way.

  PART III

  Chapter 30

  On his second night in the county jail, noise from down the hall roused Jorie from a restless sleep. Foul language and shouting followed. Under sheriff Lockheed was bringing in a prisoner. The turnkey, Hensen, jumped up to help.

  Jorie could hear the men wrestling with the prisoner.

  “Shit! I didn’t do nothing.’”

  “Sleep it off, Jimbo.”

  “What’s the charge?”

  “Drunk and disorderly, vagrancy.”

  “Fuck! Nothin’ happened. Just a good sportin’ fight.”

  “Get your sorry ass in there before I charge you with somethin’ serious.”

  When they had him secured, Hensen stuck his nose between Jorie’s bars. “Looks like you’re going to have company tonight. One of the Groden gang. Nasty lot, that. Good luck sleepin’.”

  For the next hour Jorie lay on his cot listening to the crescendo of epithets and other sounds coming from the next cell. At times the kicks on the wall caused plaster to fall off the lath on Jorie’s side. Finally, his neighbor passed out in a drunken stupor; soon after Jorie fell into a fitful sleep.

  In the morning the prisoner in the next cell was raising a ruckus to get out. When Sheriff Foster arrived, he informed him he was going to be a guest of the county for the rest of the day. Earl wasn't in any mood for the brawling Groden brothers and their lumberjack rabble-rousers. Riding into town, busting up bars and tearing up the place, their cleated boots had left several faces in Copperdom permanently pocked, and more than one young lady a soiled dove. “Butt-cuts of original sin,” he called them.

  “And when you do get out, you’re leaving town, and taking your whole quintet with you. You got that?”

  “Shit! What if I don’t?”

  “A matured and finished sinner, such as yourself, should know the answer to that.”

  Earl opened Jorie’s cell. “You ready to talk yet, kid?”

  Jorie tried to organize his thoughts.

  “Your boss called, said you’d turned in your resignation a month before—before your mother died. Said you were planning to leave town in a few weeks. What do you have to say about that?”

  Earl Foster waited for an explanation. All he got was a puzzled frown.

  “Look, I’m running out of patience. You’re either being a real smart-ass, or you’ve gone loony. Whatever it is, I haven’t got all month to figure it out. What happened that day in the storm?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Earl raised his voice. “You talk now, boy, or you’ll talk in court! One way or another!”

  Earl Foster counted to ten, turned on his heel and left.

  In the afternoon Helena came to see him. During her stay a steady stream of tears coursed down her face.

  "I never thought I’d be visiting you in a place like this, lad. I don’t believe a word of it. As if it weren’t bad enough, you losin’ your ma, now they’re saying—”

  She pulled out a man’s handkerchief and blew loudly into it. When she had sufficiently composed herself, she said, "What do you make of it, Jorie? How could they even think—”

  Jorie shook his head. "How’s Eliza, Helena?"

  ‘She’s a frisky one, she is. Up at the crack every day, laughin’ and gigglin’.” Helena’s smiled faded. “It’s missin’ you, she is. And her ma."

  Jorie swallowed hard. "I think she should know, Helena. That Ma’s not coming back."

  His old nanny’s eyes opened wide. "Is it askin’ me to tell her, you are? That she’s. . . dead?”

  "If you could see your way to doing it, I’d be mighty grateful.”

  “Sure and you can’t be sayin’ that, lad!”

  Jorie remained silent as the woman blew her nose again and squirmed in her seat.

  “I’ll try. With the help of Mary and Jasus, I’ll do it.” She crossed herself, and Jorie watched the gears move. "I’ll explain she died in the storm, which is God’s truth, and gone up to heaven, to be with Jasus.” She twisted her mouth. “That is what happened, isn’t it, Jorie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then that’s what I’ll tell her.”

  The woman wiped her face, then reached down into her basket.

  “I brought you some cookies, lad. The kind you were always after me to bake when you were a wee lad.”

  “How kind you are, Helena.”

  “Soda cookies with cinnamon and sugar on top.”

  “I remember.”

  Helena got up to leave. Jorie started to embrace her, but such a rush of sobs came forth he pulled back.

  “Give Eliza lots of hugs for me.”

  “I will, I will,” she managed as she left.

  He had assumed the prisoner in the next cell was sleeping while Helena was there. He was wrong.

  “Hey, ain’t you the guy what left his ma out in the woods to die?”

  Jorie was silent.

  “I heard about you. Your brother’s tellin’ everybody he saw you do it.” The man waited. “Hey, are you deaf or what? He’s sayin’ he followed you out there—how you planted her in the storm and high-tailed it back to town.”

  Again the man waited for a response.

  “Well, ain’t you got nothing’ to say?”

  “Nope.”

  “That right? Well, the boys in town do. They’re placin’ bets on you — whether you done it deliberate or not. Most bettin’ you did.”

  Jorie tried to tune the man out, turned his attention instead to the munching of the termites. But the voice came through anyway.

  “If you make it out a here, they’ll give you a necktie party fer sure.”

  The next day Earl brought Jorie his supper. The diner near the jail furnished the inmates’ meals, but Earl thought maybe he could loosen Jorie’s tongue with something home-cooked. Besides, he felt bad about yelling at him yesterday.

  He knew he didn’t have to visit the prisoner at all. It wasn’t his job. The real reason he was here was, like the itchy rash on his hand, he couldn’t leave it alone.

  He watched as Jorie attacked the beef pie with gusto.

  “Glad to see you eating, lad. Beginning to think you were set on starving yourself.” As Jorie said nothing, he continued. “Do you know who made your dinner?”

  ”No.”

  “Mrs. Foster.”

  Jorie tightened his lip.

  “You recall planting carrots with her?”

  He barely nodded. Jorie remembered having the same dish at their home, Mrs. Foster insisting he have seconds after all the hard work he’d done in the garden. Then she’d served up the best lemon meringue pie he’d ever tasted.

  Tonight there was no pie.

  Jorie speared the last carrot and ran the piece of bread around inside the pan to scoop up the rest of the gravy. When he was finished he looked up solemnly at the sheriff.

  “Tell Mrs. Foster thank you.”

  The sheriff nodded. “Look, if I’m going to help you, I got to know what happened, and why.”

  “I know.”

  Tell me about this plan to leave town.”

  “I had planned to, y
es.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It didn’t seem important. I decided I couldn’t. Not after. . .”