by Paula Guran
What made me think of this is the singing part. Gran said they’d hear her singing sometimes, nights mostly. She used to know this type of song called a cattle call and said it was kinda like that, only she couldn’t imagine it bringing the cows in. She said a voice like that would be more like to scare them away.
There’s more, but I don’t know what’s important to you and what’s not, and I’m not much for long emails even to people I know. But I love to talk!
He dashed off a reply, then looked up Ulysses on the map and poked his head into the steam of the bathroom to tell Will that, come morning, they would be going south instead.
They met her at a barbecue place in Ulysses, her suggestion. It smelled of hickory smoke and fryer oil, and they got there first by twenty minutes because she was fifteen late. Clarence knew she was the one the moment she walked in. She wore boots with shorts, carried a handbag big enough to brain a horse, and moved with precisely the kind of energy he’d expect out of someone who says “But I love to talk!”
She sized them up instantly, too. “Hi, I’m Paulette,” she said. “Paulette, Johnetta, and Raylene . . . can you tell our dad had his heart set on boys instead of girls?” She slammed the handbag into one of the two vacant chairs at their table and herself in the other. “You’re buying, right?”
She shot up then and went for the counter to order for all of them, insisting she knew what was best, and best avoided. Paulette was both stocky and shapely, like a six-foot woman squashed down to a compact five-four, and Clarence eyed his brother as he watched her go. Not again.
“Already?” Clarence said. “Not three dozen words out of her and you’re already there?”
Will scowled as if he resented the interruption. Somewhere along the miles and years he’d picked up a fixation that he was going to meet the love of his life out here on the plains. Some Kansas farmgirl, all about family, whose commitment would be as certain and uncomplicated as the sunrise over the wheat. Did they even exist anymore, if they ever had?
“You don’t match. I’ve seen couples who match. They don’t look a thing like you and her.”
Will balled up a napkin in his fist. “Maybe I should handle this while you go back to the motel and take your anti-asshole pills.”
As they waited for their food, Paulette wanted to know all about them. If they were still from West Virginia, and what it was like there, and when she found out Will was now living in Boston, wanted to know what that was like, too. When she learned he was a cloud architect, she made a joke about castles in the sky, and Clarence could see him turn that much more into putty. She wanted to know what their parents were like, and when she learned they had a sister, wanted to know which of them Dina was more alike, and what came out of that was a surprise, because each of them had always assumed he was the one, a revelation that made Paulette laugh.
“I figure you’re safe,” she finally said, “because that ad of yours, that’s just not the kind of story someone would make up to draw somebody out on her own. So break ’em out, let’s see these pictures of yours.”
They laid out Will Senior’s portrait first.
“That version you had on Craigslist doesn’t do him justice,” she said. “Grandpa was kind of a hunk, wasn’t he?”
“And here’s the one we don’t know where it was taken,” Clarence said. “But it was the final shot on his camera. It was a twenty-four-shot roll of film, and the last eighteen were never even exposed.”
Paulette stared a long time, the way people always did. It slowed her down. She forgot her jittery habit of every few seconds pushing her sun-streaked hair back from her face, behind her ears.
“Well,” she said at last, “this looks about like what I would’ve imagined from those old stories Nana Ingrid would tell to scare me into minding her.”
Black and white in a thousand grainy shades of gray, the last photo on the roll of 35mm film in Willard’s Leica appeared to have been shot up a slight incline, a wide dirt path bordered by two ragged rows of stout sticks, as long as spears and nearly as straight. They’d either been branches or saplings, cut and stripped, then jammed into the earth like a loose palisade wall. In all their searching, the purpose of this remained a mystery. Beyond these sticks, and through them, in the middle distance, was a glimpse of what he assumed was a farmhouse, and a pair of trees in summer bloom.
But in the foreground, she stood. She stood on a ladder of shadows that the low sun of morning or evening threw from one row of sticks across to the other, something strange in her stance, as if she had to lean back from her own wide hips. She wore an apron around her middle, ill-fitting, refusing to lie smoothly, and a scarf around her head, knotted at her throat.
“Here’s the blow-up detail, just her,” Clarence said.
Now her true wrongness began to emerge. Her face was mostly shadowed, just enough visible to make you wish you could see either more, and know what she really was, or less, so you didn’t have to entertain doubts. The only features that caught the sidelight were a bulbous nose and a blocky chin that appeared to thrust forward from a lantern jaw. The rest was suggestion, and all the worse for it. Something about the way the features all fit together seemed . . . off. Like something carved from wood, and badly. The mouth looked grim and straight across, wider than wide. And given the scarf and direction of the sun, he could think of no reason her eyes should gleam with glints of light. Will Senior had been photographer enough to not bother using a flash outside like this, if he’d even possessed one.
Paulette was still shuffing from one print to the other. “Last shot on the roll, you said. What were the others?”
“Just landscapes. Nothing distinctive about them.
Paulette tapped the blow-up. “Well, Nana Ingrid used to say she wasn’t really a woman at all. Or maybe not anymore, or maybe she told it both ways. Just something that dressed like one. To hide. Stories like that, you believe them when you’re little. That’s why they work, you don’t want her to get you. Then you get a little older and you think it’s just talk.”
“What kind of stories?”
“Oh, you know, the usual threats. How if I didn’t behave, she was going to come steal me, cook me. Or throw me down her well. Which of course was bottomless. Or use my bones to make a nest for her vulture. Nana could be creative sometimes.”
“What did she call this woman?” Clarence asked. “She had to have a name.”
“Old Daisy. Never just plain Daisy. Usually Old Daisy. Sometimes Crazy Daisy, if she was going for a laugh.”
“Daisy? Seriously?”
“I know,” Paulette said, and tapped the detail photo again. “That’s the most undaisified woman I’ve ever seen.”
Will leaned toward her from across the table, and she mirrored him right back, as if the two of them were already excluding him. “How old was your grandmother when she first knew about Daisy?”
“She grew up around her. So, from the time she was a little bitty thing until she was close to my age.”
“What happened then?”
“She got hitched and moved a few miles away and squeezed out my mom.” Paulette swept the photos together and shoved them at Clarence. “Better put these up for safe keeping. We’re about to get nine kinds of messy here.”
He slipped them into their folder as the food arrived, beef ribs and pulled pork and slaw and onion rings made with jumbo Vidalias. A couple of bites in, he was willing to admit that, okay, Paulette knew her barbecue joints.
“How close did Ingrid live to her?” Will asked.
Paulette shrugged. “Down the road, is all she used to say.”
“How far does that mean?” Clarence said.
“I have no idea. You know country people. ‘Down the road a piece’ . . . that can mean just about anything.”
“But your grandmother saw her, right? These weren’t just stories to her, too?”
“Saw her all the time. Never up close, though. Nobody ever saw her up close. There’s some people, you know,
they’re just not neighborly, so you let them be. Back then, I guess it was seen as more peculiar than it is now. Now it’s just a way of life all over. But even then, there had to be people like that, and I guess they didn’t push it. She did fine on her own, puttering around that old place.” Paulette grinned, recalling more. “That didn’t stop the area boys from trying to look. Nana Ingrid’s brother was one of them. They’d dare each other to sneak up close to Old Daisy’s property and try to get in a peek, and they’d get a good scare. Before they got too close, she’d spot them and screech at them and they’d scatter. In fact, that’s what some people thought that crazy singing she did was all about. To keep people away. Same as a rattlesnake shaking its tail.”
“A threat display.”
“And I guess it worked,” she said. “Have you got it? Can I hear it?”
She wiped her fingers with a Wet-Nap as they handed over the Walkman and the earphones. The tape was already cued up, and unlike many people, Paulette didn’t shut it down early. She hung in there until the end.
“I gotta say, that’s not what I was expecting,” she said while stripping away the headphones. “That doesn’t sound like a crazy person. It hardly sounds like a person at all.”
Clarence had always thought the same thing, but never liked to lead people to the conclusion. It was always more validating to see them arrive at it on their own.
“Maybe I’m just dense, but there’s one thing I’m not getting here,” she said. “If nobody ever saw your grandfather again, then how do you happen to have his last pictures and recordings?”
“The greed and kindness of strangers,” Will said.
“The camera was something he got while he was in the army. He epoxied a nameplate on it, so it wouldn’t be as easy for someone to steal,” Clarence said. “Three or four months after he went missing, our grandmother got a call from a pawn shop in Hays. The family had raised all the hell they could out here, her and our uncles . . . filing missing person reports, and they got it in some newspapers, and on the radio, a little TV. So the pawnbroker recognized the name when some vagrant brought in the camera and tape recorder in the same bag our grandfather used to carry them around. Oilskin, so it wouldn’t soak through if he got caught in the rain. The story the pawnbroker got out of him, once he got him past the bullshit about how they were his, was that he found the bag on a junk heap along the side of the road someplace west. By that time, he’d been carrying them around a couple weeks or more, until he could find someplace to sell them, so he couldn’t pin it down where he found them. Nobody got a chance to press him on it, because once he realized he wasn’t going to get any money for them, and maybe there was a murder investigation in it too, he was out the door and gone.”
Will cut in to finish as if he were feeling sidelined. “The pawnbroker wasn’t a big fan of the cops either, so he got in touch with our family directly. Said he’d get our grandfather’s things to them and let them decide what they wanted to do about that.”
“Decent of him,” she said. “What’d they do?”
“They had the film developed, had prints made, and copies of the tape. They sent them out to different departments. It didn’t help. Since there was no body and no car, I don’t think they were taking it seriously, once they understood that these trips of his weren’t anything new. I think they just figured he liked it that way and decided to stay gone. Start over somewhere else. He wouldn’t be the first.”
Paulette narrowed her eyes. “Wait a second. Nobody ever found his car, either?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t that seem weird to you that both him and his car vanish, but his camera and tape recorder get found?”
Will appeared mystified she would even ask. “That’s just what happened.”
“Yeah, but . . .” She pecked at the folder holding the photos. “Say Old Daisy is responsible. Somehow, some way. Somebody is, so let’s say it’s her. She gets rid of him. Obviously. She knows enough to get rid of his car, too. That’s pretty cunning. You can’t drop a car down a well. But then this bag of other things that could be tied to him, she’s so careless with it she just tosses it aside like it doesn’t matter? Even though she stood right there facing him as he took her picture? Does that make sense to you?”
Clarence stepped in, locking ranks. “Like he said. That’s how it happened.”
But Paulette was right. Sometimes it took an outsider to point out the obvious. It had never gnawed at him until now. He’d known the story since childhood. Had grown up taking every detail for granted without appreciating what some might actually imply.
“Daisy didn’t know what a camera was?” he mused. “She knew what cars were, she could see that, even if she didn’t drive one herself. But the camera and tape recorder . . . no. She didn’t know. In 1963, she didn’t know. How is that possible?”
“Like I said. She kept to herself and they were glad to let her do it.”
Clarence moved the decades around in his head like blocks. “How far back are we talking about with your grandmother, anyway? How old is she?”
Paulette did some quick calculating. “She’d be seventy-five, seventy-six now.”
“So if she grew up around Old Daisy, that’d be as far back as twenty years before our grandfather disappeared. Give or take. And she was old then?”
“That was the story. It sounded like she was one of those people who’d always been around, as far back as anyone could remember. But you know, some people, they look and act older than they really are, so that’s how it gets to seeming that way. And if you don’t see them up close . . .”
“Did you ever see her?”
“God no. I never wanted to. Nana Ingrid talked like she was still around, but this was at her married home, miles from where she grew up. She must’ve been making it up. She’d step out on the porch sometimes and stare down the dirt road like she was watching for the old hag, like she might spot her passing by and call her over if I didn’t behave. But that was just part of the threats. This was, what, thirty, forty years on from when she was living out there, so the woman had to be dead by then.”
Had to. Yes.
“It’s a hard old life, out like that.”
Had to. Unless a woman wasn’t what she was at all.
“You say Ingrid’s still with you?” Clarence said.
“She’s in a home now. Good days and bad days. But yeah.”
“Could she tell you where Daisy’s place was? Exactly? And how to find it?”
Paulette hesitated before answering, like someone who hated to let people down but would do it anyway. “Look, I was glad to help if I could, if it didn’t take too long, but I’m not looking for a new project to take on. And that Wal-Mart produce aisle isn’t going to run itself.”
“We’ll pay,” Will blurted. “We’ll make it worth your time.”
Clarence wondered how obvious it would be if he kicked his brother under the table.
“‘Worth your time’ is like ‘down the road a piece,’” Paulette said. “There’s lots of wiggle room in what it means.”
Two days later, on the word of Paulette’s grandmother – on one of her good days, he hoped – they headed out into the prairie wastes again, deeper than they’d ever had reason enough to go. There had never been much point to going where people were so few and far between that the land hardly seemed lived in at all.
It had once, though. The rubble and residue lingered. Along roads that had crumbled mostly back to dirt, they passed the scattered, empty shells of lives long abandoned. Separated by minutes and miles, the remains of farmhouses and barns left for ruin seemed to sink into seas of prairie grass. The trees hung on, as tenacious loners or clustering into distant, ragged rows that betrayed the hidden vein of a creek.
“I think this might be it. Where Nana grew up,” Paulette said from the back seat. “Can we stop?”
She’d been guiding them from a hand-drawn map that took over from where the printed map left off.
Clare
nce nosed the car toward the side of the road, sniffing for where the driveway used to be, and found it – a weedy land bridge between stretches of clogged ditch. He didn’t go far past. Any debris could be in that grass. He killed the engine and they got out to stand in the simmering silence of the day as Paulette compared the place as it was now with a photo borrowed from an album at her parents’ home.
“Is this it?” Will asked, and he sounded so tender.
“I think. I don’t know. But it should be. It’s just hard to tell.”
Of course it was. The picture showed life. However hardscrabble, it was life: a troop of skinny children, boys in overalls and girls in plain dresses, clowning around a swing fashioned from two ropes and a slat of wood. That could be the same oak, right there, sixty-odd years bigger. The sun-blasted, two-story farmhouse looked as though it could be the corpse of the one behind the children. It seemed to be the same roof, even though half of it was now gone, exposing a framework of rotting rafters. Unseen in the photo was a windmill out back that must’ve pumped their well. It still stood, a rusted, skeletal tower as tall as the house and crowned with a giant fan. A few of its sixteen blades had fallen free, while the rest ignored the wind, the gears too corroded to turn.
He reconsidered. There was still plenty of life here. It was just nothing human.
“It would kill her to see the place like this,” Paulette said. “Literally kill her.”
Which could have been an act of mercy. Yesterday’s trip to the nursing home had left him with a new appreciation for living out like this until the end. It had to hasten things, a swifter demise than being warehoused in a stinking building devoted to death by increments, surrounded by people whose bodies and minds raced to see which could deteriorate faster, and the cruelest thing was having enough of a mind left to realize you were one of them. Out like this, fall and break a hip? He’d take three days of dehydration on the floor over years of the other.
Paulette had wandered ahead of them in a daze, as if time had slowed, exploring the trunk of the oak, the front of the house, pieces of the past hidden in the weeds.