The Qualities of Wood

by Mary Vensel White

  ‘Your mother likes to help people.’

  ‘Helping and being taken advantage of are two different things.’

  The woman, Nona, told Beverly that she needed a place to stay for a month while she got back on her feet. She had a little boy, three years old, who was completely undisciplined, almost wild. Nona was slovenly, lacked motivation to do anything but watch soap operas, and late at night, her estranged boyfriend would climb through her window.

  Nowell grabbed a slice of ham from the counter and chewed it loudly. ‘One time my mom gave away my dad’s golf clubs for a charity auction. I don’t think he talked to her for a week. I never saw him golf, not once. My mom called him selfish.’

  Vivian brought the food to the table. ‘Your dad had a strong personality, didn’t he?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know, controlling?’

  ‘No,’ Nowell said. ‘He was opinionated. I remember eating out at restaurants and being embarrassed sometimes by the way he talked to people. That’s all. He was strong and he worked hard. He always encouraged me, told me I could do anything I wanted.’

  They were quiet for a few moments as they ate. Outside, the sound of the asphalt truck droned. Remembering what Katherine had said, Vivian asked, ‘Did your dad come out here much to visit your grandmother?’

  ‘No. My mom and grandma didn’t exactly get along, and Dad was always so busy. After he entered into partnership with Mr Ward, he started doing some traveling for the company. He kept himself pretty busy.’

  ‘How often do you think he visited her?’

  Nowell set down his sandwich. ‘Why?’

  ‘Katherine thought he came out pretty often, a couple of times a year.’

  He shook his head. ‘He hardly ever took a vacation or a sick day.’

  ‘But you said he always took care of your grandma.’

  ‘My grandfather died when he was only fifteen – the hunting accident – and he became the man of the family. My aunts were older, one in college already. For a while it was just my dad and grandma out here. He stayed until he was almost twenty-two.’

  ‘Why didn’t he go to college?’

  ‘Felt like he had to work, I guess. My mom says that my grandma had a strong hold on him. She says that when he finally left, he moved four hours away to put some distance between them.’

  Vivian thought it sounded similar to Nowell’s relationship with his mother. She said, ‘It’s strange that he wouldn’t visit more, after they had been so close.’

  ‘He still took care of her,’ Nowell said, a bit of an edge creeping into his voice. ‘He called her and helped her with things.’

  ‘Didn’t you ever come out here when you were little?’

  ‘A few times. Lonnie loved it. He’d spend hours in the woods. He had a Davey Crockett hat back then, raccoon skin with a tail. One time, he got lost back there and when he came in, he wouldn’t admit to it. I thought my dad was going to beat the hell out of him. I think he was scared, my dad. I never realized that until later.’

  Vivian thought about the family photograph that Beverly still kept on the mantle of her fireplace. The two brothers, Nowell and Lonnie, were tall and gangly teenagers, with large Adam’s apples and protruding collarbones. Lonnie looked robust in a plaid shirt with silver snaps and embroidered pockets, while the deep blue of Nowell’s velour sweater made his complexion seem sallow. They stood on either side of their father, surrounding their mother, who sat with her legs primly crossed on a high-backed, ornate chair. Sherman looked into the camera lens with an intense expression. He had broad shoulders and thick gray eyebrows that almost met in the center. Both of his large hands gripped the back of his wife’s chair, and each of the brothers had one hand on the chair, on the engraved mahogany finials with their bulbous ends. Lonnie grinned affably, but Nowell’s expression was forced, his close-mouthed smile threatening to turn into a frown. Beverly’s grin was the brightest and most genuine, her lips curving up to tiny red points that dug into her heavily rouged cheeks, her gums showing pink above her teeth. But Sherman was the centerpiece of the photo. He was a striking man.

  Nowell packed a few things for his trip and telephoned his mother to let her know he was coming. Vivian decided to work in the attic. When she had safely climbed the narrow stairs, she stood and surveyed her previous work, a feeble effort to form three large stacks: things to discard, things to keep, things to ask Nowell about. These stacks spilled and crowded into each other and she had to concentrate for a moment to remember which was which.

  She found a box of board games, many of which she recognized from her own childhood: Life, Risk, Sorry. She put the box in the pile with the other things to ask Nowell about. In the top drawer of a short dresser, she was surprised to find folded clothing, a man’s white undershirts. She held one up, noticing its size, extra-extra large. Behind the shirts was a stack of boxer shorts. She opened a garbage bag and scooped the underclothes from the drawer. The second drawer held stale-smelling linens – Grandma Gardiner never threw away a cloth napkin, Vivian thought – and she threw those in as well. The third drawer was empty. The bottom drawer held a few scarves and a variety of boxes. One was a series of boxes, one nested into another. She thought of her mother, who also saved any jewelry box she was ever given. One leather-covered box held a tarnished watch, another a set of cuff links. She set those aside to show Nowell. And when she had cleared out the boxes and slammed the drawer, she heard something clatter and had to go back through, opening and closing drawers until she found what was making the noise: a gun. Carefully, she picked it up. Like the other items, it was old. Probably doesn’t even work, Vivian thought. Nevertheless, she was careful to keep it pointed away from her body. She set it on top of the dresser. She wondered if it had been Grandpa Gardiner’s. Lonnie would probably want it, she thought. She’d have to ask Nowell what to do with it. Hanging from the back of the bureau was a bag, which held the blue suit she had seen before, two pairs of blue jeans, a pair of olive green dress slacks, all men’s, and three shirts that were similar to each other, short-sleeved with collars. Everything was pressed nicely, hanging in thin plastic bags.

  The clothing was too modern to have belonged to Nowell’s grandfather. Were they Sherman’s? Vivian wondered. And why are these clothes here? If, as Katherine had claimed, Sherman visited often enough to warrant use of a dresser, why didn’t Nowell know about these visits? Was the gun his?

  She decided to take a board game downstairs and finish the attic later. Maybe Nowell would play Life with her. Diane, her best friend in grammar school, had a Life game and whenever Vivian stayed for a sleepover, they played. Vivian seldom had anyone to play games with; her parents usually suggested that she read a book instead.

  In Life, she always hoped to land on the square that awarded graduation from medical school, because being the doctor paid the most money. After obtaining a profession, she and Diane moved the plastic cars around the board, filling them with little pegs when they landed on the squares for children. This was the most elaborate part of the game, because they would name their pretend children with first, middle, and last names, and keep them all in order, often going around an extra time and filling a second car with progeny.

  Vivian thought about Nowell’s desire to have a child. He hadn’t brought up the subject again since her first night at the house and she was glad. She didn’t comprehend her position enough to defend it. She imagined having a family in the future, in an abstract manner much like putting little blue and pink pegs into the plastic Life cars. She didn’t think she was ready, but she couldn’t really understand or explain why. Nowell, on the other hand, presented having a child as the next logical step in the order of their lives, and she couldn’t compete with him, couldn’t argue her way out of it. At best she could stall him while she figured out what it was, exactly, she wanted to say.

  She decided to take Sorry downstairs instead. Nowell was sitting in the living room, watching television. ‘All pa
cked?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah. What do you have there?’

  ‘Sorry. Wanna play?’

  ‘Maybe later.’

  She put the game on the coffee table and sat next to him on the couch.

  Nowell said, ‘I want to give you a couple of chapters from the new book to read while I’m gone. The first two chapters. I’m trying something a little different this time, and I want to see what you think of it.’

  ‘It’s another mystery, right?’

  He nodded. ‘Mostly, I’m experimenting with point of view. I mean, with who tells the story, whose insights and thoughts you get.’

  ‘I think I know what point of view is. First person, third person, right?’

  ‘Exactly. I don’t want to tell you too much about what I’m doing because the readers will have to make certain discoveries as they go along. For instance, you may not know who is speaking at first, but I want to make sure it’s not too evasive or confusing.’

  ‘The last novel was from the detective’s point of view?’

  ‘Pretty much. It was third person, but the emphasis was on the detective. You got mostly his thoughts, but some insight into others. I thought it would be interesting to limit perspective even more, to really get a look inside what’s going on with one person. Anyway, read it and let me know what you think.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said. It seemed to her that all you could ever truly get was one person’s perspective, your own. But she’d read it and hopefully, see what Nowell meant.

  He asked her to wait until he was gone, but after he went to bed that evening, Vivian read the first chapter in the yellow glare of the kitchen. The writing had the same doomed tone as the piece she’d found on the printer, the short paragraphs describing a young girl walking with purpose, beckoning, and the restless man who watched her. These pages told a similar story, but the circumstances had been altered.

  Each day as she walked over the hill toward the house, she hoped that the man would be waiting. Some days he was there, pacing through the empty rooms and others, he wasn’t. But she could feel him on the days she couldn’t see him, watching her as she moved her hips from side to side and swished her hair over her back, bare under the thin straps of her blouse, concave between the shoulder blades.

  Each day she grew bolder, coming closer and closer to the picture windows until finally one day she was peering through them, her hands pressed against the cool glass and her slim nose leaving the slightest smudge mark. She wondered what she would do if he came out, if he answered the unspoken challenge of the past few weeks.

  She started to think about going in. It wouldn’t take much, just a screwdriver applied to a rusty lock or pressed into the crack of a window. It infuriated her that he watched her as she watched him. After several days of thinking along these lines, she knew it had to end.

  The chapter included fragments of the girl’s troubled childhood, the mistreatment by her parents and her virtual abandonment at the age of fourteen. As Nowell had feared, Vivian was confused by the perspective. The girl’s voice was unsettled and seemed to have too much insight. She was glad she’d have some time to decide what to tell him. She hid the pages in a kitchen cupboard and went to bed.

  The next morning, Nowell went into his study for a few hours before he left. Vivian was sitting with her coffee when someone knocked on the door.

  It was the road crew worker again. He looked at her boldly. ‘We’re all set to lay asphalt. I wanted to let you know. I noticed that you didn’t go anywhere yesterday, so if you need to get out today, we’ll leave a narrow path you can use. Your truck should handle it fine.’ He motioned towards the red truck. Emphasized against his tanned face, his teeth were bright white.

  Vivian’s eyes adjusted to the morning sun; she noticed the direction of his gaze. ‘When do you think you’ll finish the road?’

  ‘We still got a ways to go. The end of summer, I guess.’ He pointed with his hat toward the south side of the house. ‘Would it be alright if we used your faucet out here for water? Gonna be hot as hell today.’

  Vivian remembered the hook-up under the kitchen window. ‘No problem.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He looked again at her legs then paused on the bottom step of the porch. ‘Will you be going out then?’

  ‘My husband may leave for a while,’ she said, ‘but he’ll be back.’ The man’s bold look disconcerted her. The way he’d monitored her actions yesterday, his notice of the truck and the faucet. It all seemed intrusive.

  ‘See you around.’ His eye teeth caught sunlight like mirrors as he gave her one last thorough look.

  Vivian irritably shut the door. She poured the rest of her coffee down the sink, her face burning hot from the encounter.

  Katherine had invited her to dinner when she heard that Nowell would be gone. Vivian thought that Nowell might have called her. ‘I’ll come and pick you up,’ Katherine had said when she called. ‘You don’t have to worry about a thing.’

  After lunch and a sweaty session in the back bedroom, Nowell left. As promised, the men working on the road stopped to direct him out of the driveway. Vivian watched from the kitchen window as the brake lights of the truck flickered then extinguished; the tires kicked up a haze of dust.

  She stayed in most of the afternoon. In Nowell’s study, she ran the vacuum cleaner, something she hadn’t been able to do since her arrival. He had left everything orderly and neat. On the corner of the desk, clean white paper was stacked next to the computer monitor, but there was nothing on the printer tray.

  The antique secretary didn’t allow much space to work. Four small drawers with keyholes and little ivory handles were set above the desktop; two of these were partially obscured by the computer monitor. Vivian touched the smooth handles. They were all locked. The drawer beneath the desktop was locked as well. She could hear its contents shift as she pulled on it. She realized that Nowell must have the key.

  There were things that Vivian didn’t understand about Nowell, like his craving for privacy and his occasional secrecy. Sometimes his periods of withdrawal were followed by an outpouring of confidence that dazed her. One winter evening, early in their relationship, he had talked to her about his father’s death and cried. It was the first time she had felt that they might have a future together. He told her about his fear that he had disappointed his father, and she felt an overwhelming urge to comfort him. At other times, he left a distance between them that howled like wind, an empty chasm she was often too stubborn or too preoccupied to cross. She consoled herself with excuses like sometimes people have to work things out alone.

  Besides, she had her own secrets. Whenever she began resenting Nowell’s guardedness, she thought about how it comforted her to think of her own private self, buffeted and protected and perhaps mostly unknown even to herself. If Nowell were to tell her everything about himself, what would that leave to discover, to talk about?

  One weekend he showed up at her dorm room at seven in the morning, and they drove most of the day to a small town in the mountains, to the site of a wine festival he’d heard about on the radio. They washed their feet and jumped into the big vats; fleshy grapes pressed between their toes, staining their feet purple to the ankles. There were baked goods and ham cooked over an open fire, and the fruity wine sticky in their throats. Nowell was the type of person that everyone in a group strained to hear speak. It was only with Vivian that he was quiet. The more time they spent alone, the more she missed the public side of him, the engaging person he could be in social settings.

  She decided to go out and get the mail. The men were working past the house now, but directly in front of the driveway, the road was finished. The fresh asphalt glittered in the afternoon sun, smelling like oil and sweat. Vivian was determined to let the man know that he hadn’t bothered her that morning. He was assigned to sign duty again and when he saw Vivian’s wave, he raised his hard hat. She got the mail and turned back, feeling his eyes over the tall, wild grass, over the waves of heat rising from t
he new black road. But she had made her point.

  The day was a scorcher, as he had predicted, and Vivian decided to clean herself up before Katherine arrived. In the midst of her shower, the water suddenly turned scalding hot, and she hopped around until she could turn it off. As she reached for a towel, she heard the squeaky sound of a faucet and remembered telling the man that he could use their water. He had ruined her shower.

  12

  The road crew had quit for the day. The hot smell of the new asphalt infiltrated the car, but the road was dry and usable. Katherine wore a bright yellow blouse trimmed with white lace. Her house, also yellow, had brick accents and stood at the crest of a circular driveway. Roses bushes framed the cement steps leading to the front door.

  ‘Max planted those,’ Katherine said when she saw Vivian linger. ‘I don’t have much of a green thumb.’

  In the sunny living room, Max greeted them. Slightly shorter than his wife, he grasped Vivian’s hand in both of his, grinning widely. ‘So nice to finally meet you,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks for inviting me,’ Vivian replied.

  His reddish hair was starting to recede and he had the slight paunch of middle age, but Vivian could envision his younger self in his clear blue eyes and the firm muscles of his arms.

  ‘Sit down, please,’ he said. ‘You too, honey.’

  ‘Let me show Vivian around the place first,’ Katherine said.

  There were three bedrooms, each neat and modestly decorated. At the back of the house, the kitchen was large and airy. The rear door led to a screened patio cluttered with greenery. Tall plants in clay pots stood in each corner, and against the house, smaller plants in painted ceramic containers lined two long shelves. Many of the plants were flowering; blooms of purple, pink, and white stood out against the buttercup-yellow paint of the wall.

  ‘It’s like a greenhouse,’ Vivian said.

  ‘This is Max’s area. My only contributions are some of those pottery pieces.’ She motioned to the shelves. ‘Before that quilting class I told you about, I learned how to make pottery down at the arts and crafts store. I bought my own wheel and a small kiln, but I haven’t used them much lately.’