Near Canaan

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  My father remained a dim figure throughout that time, a greying, smoky giant with callused hands, who hardly spoke to me. When he glanced my way, it was always with an expression of bafflement, as if he hadn’t any idea what agent had dropped me there, into his living room. He was horrified by the slightest show of affection: at Christmas, he retreated to the furthest corner of the room while presents were being opened, as though in our joy we children might forget ourselves and run to embrace him.

  Nonetheless, my father was an important part of Christmas. He made presents for each of us in the privacy of his workshop, and he wrapped them in dull brown paper which contrasted strangely with the gay greens and golds and reds of the wrapping paper both my mother and Santa used. The workshop presents were all the more intriguing for their odd shapes, their brownness. Our other presents were desired but unsurprising, answers to the lists we’d all painstakingly written out at the end of November, but my father never paid attention to these lists, and might have made anything, anything at all. They were slipped under the tree on Christmas Eve, and we were forbidden to touch them. Even though I caught Jack more than once in a trespass—shaking the brown lump with his name pencilled on it vigorously to and fro beside his ear like a maraca—even he never guessed ahead of time what lay within.

  One year, my father fashioned for me an ingenious game, comprised of a series of hinged wooden chutes and a little bag of marbles. A marble dropped into a cylinder at the top emerged from a little doorway, and commenced rolling along the first chute, making a slight clicking noise, until at a certain point its weight caused the chute to swing sideways, delivering the marble to the next conduit. There were seven chutes in all, and at the end the marble fell neatly into a little carved cup. It made a terrific noise when it was really going, all seven marbles dropping, all seven chutes swinging out and springing back into place. My father must have worked especially hard at making the toy, for he actually left the room as I was opening it. He slunk back to his chair a few minutes later, while my sister was pulling the wrapping paper away from a new blouse. I was engrossed with the toy, and could hardly be coaxed to attend to the rest of my presents; I lay on my belly playing with it, and as I did so, I thought I saw my father peeking at me from the corners of his eyes.

  When I was eleven, my mother died, and the Indians came to get me. Wearing shoes, not moccasins, and normal hats instead of feathers, and in place of the chiseled cruel faces I had expected, their features were familiar. Despite their disguises, I knew them; the hand from my dreams fell upon my shoulder as I stood at the gravesite while the mourners drifted away. I knew before I turned: it was the Indians. It was logical, after all, that they should come now. I steeled myself and turned around, and looked into my father’s face. I peered at him, and at my brother Jack behind him, and the delusion which I had carried through my childhood, vague and buried, took its shape. My father and Jack were the Indians, and I would have to go home with them, and live with them forever. Ellen would not protect me; she was going back with her husband to the town they lived in, a hundred miles away. I was beyond her reach now; I was lost, in a foreign wild land, the property of my tribe, who had come to reclaim me after all.

  I went with them, to the house which a few hours had changed to a strange place, and we all sat down, all men now, and helpless in the kitchen. My father, stiff and unrecognizable in his jacket and tie, sat opposite me at the kitchen table and said nothing. He felt around in his pockets for the pipe that wasn’t there: I had watched him take it out and leave it by the sugar canister that morning. Finally, he gave up the search and folded his hands together on the bare wood of the table.

  “Well, boys,” he said.

  And that was all he said; he began the reflexive searching once more, then stopped himself again. Jack glided across the room and took down my father’s pipe from the shelf where he had tucked it. My father accepted it, but didn’t light it right away; he turned it over in his hands, examining it as though he’d never seen it before.

  “Well,” he said again, and picked up the nail-shaped tool which Jack had placed, along with the pouch of tobacco, on the table before him. He set to cleaning the bowl of the pipe, short, industrious scrapings to loosen the dead tobacco, which he then knocked into the callused cup of his hand and fastidiously transferred to a saucer at his elbow. He packed the pipe anew, tamping down the oily brown shreds with the other end of the reaming tool. He drew out a match and prepared to strike it. But then he didn’t; he removed the pipe from his mouth, and cleared his throat. Using the pipe stem as a pointer, he poked it toward the plates and covered dishes ranged along the long table.

  “How about supper,” he said.

  I took this as my cue to unwrap and investigate the various dishes which the womenfolk of the town had left for us.

  “Here’s stew,” I reported. “And yams. And pie. Peach pie, Dad,” I said eagerly, “with two crusts, the way—”

  Snap. The pipe my father was clutching broke, at the narrowest part of the stem. He held the two pieces for a moment, looking chagrined. There was a short silence.

  “That oughta fix easy,” said Jack, edging closer to our father, who looked up at him with a vague, surprised look. Then he looked more closely at the broken pipe in his hand, and gave a little meditative grunt. He set the pieces down on the table and poked them with an index finger, shedding little strands of tobacco across the surface. Then he gathered them up again. Getting up, he seemed to notice us anew.

  “I’ll just,” he explained, and went toward the back door, which led onto the yard. “A minute,” he said, opening the screen door, which flapped to behind him.

  “He ought to change his clothes,” I said. “He’ll get glue all over them, or whatever.”

  “Never mind,” said Jack. He looked toward the table. “Near suppertime,” he said, and his mouth worked into a tight smile. “I guess it’s on you,” he said. “Heat something up. If Dad or I tried, like as not we’d burn the house down.”

  He went toward the door that led into the hallway.

  “Gonna get some real clothes on and go out there with him,” he said. “Give a holler when it’s ready.”

  “You know you can’t hear from way down there,” I said. The wood shop was located at the very edge of the property.

  “Well, come get us, then.”

  “No,” I said, thinking of my new funeral shoes and the long, slippery walk to the workshop. “Just be back by six.”

  “Fine,” said Jack, but he hesitated in the doorway. “Not the yams,” he instructed.

  I twitched the cover off an earthenware dish. “Here’s some potatoes.”

  “Good.”

  “Stew okay?” I asked, like a new wife, greedy for approval.

  “That’ll be fine,” said Jack magnanimously, and swept away, leaving me to my new province. I didn’t mind; I was grateful for something to do; there had been too many idle days recently, days spent sitting and waiting, feeling clumsy and distended with grief. I got to work.

  I cooked for the three of us for three years, until Jack left for the war, and then I cooked for my father and myself. The first meals were haphazard, poor approximations of my mother’s solid Southern fare. The meats were overcooked and the grits gluey, and beneath the credible layer of golden breading, the chicken meat was cold and raw, all of its fascial planes intact, glistening like a traitor under Jack’s scornful fork. But I got better with practice, and my first Thanksgiving table was properly laden, a simulacrum of my mother’s traditional feast, faithful even to the choice of serving bowls. I had toiled for two days, and had a moment of crisis just at the end, frozen in the kitchen. Had our mother used the wheat-speckled crock? Or maybe it was the one with the blue ring. I narrowed my eyes, trying to remember.

  “What’s the holdup?” said Jack, coming in.

  “Did Mama use that bowl for the potatoes?” I asked.

  “Who cares?” he said. “We’re starving.”

  “I can’t re
member,” I said, and to my great shame the tears forced themselves to the very edges of my eyelids and hung against the lashes. I opened my eyes wide, to keep them from spilling down.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jack said, looking at me closely. He seemed about to say something more, but he didn’t; he went over to the table and laid his hand on a bowl. “I think it was this one,” he said. “Yep, I’m sure of it.”

  I nodded, and we stood silent for a moment. I looked at Jack’s hand, where it rested on the serving dish.

  “Now get those damned potatoes in there and let’s eat,” he said, taking his hand away.

  After Jack went to the war, my father and I took our meals alone, and largely silently, my father out of habit and I because I had developed a stutter, which caused me much humiliation. It came on gradually: at first, my mouth merely lingered overlong on certain sounds. By the time I was thirteen, I had a full-blown speech impediment. Hard consonants gave me the most trouble—g’s and b’s and k’s and for some reason, also w’s. The classroom was particularly embarrassing, so I shut my mouth and studied hard. My father, seeing my struggle, was alarmed into speech.

  “Slow down, son,” he’d say. “Let your mouth catch up.”

  Sometimes it helped to slow down, but mostly it didn’t. And so I became a silent teenager, given to nods and frowns and gestures, and I spoke very slowly when I spoke at all, and I avoided strangers altogether.

  With Jack away, I was left alone with the chief, my father; we fell into monkish habits, sometimes meeting only twice a day, at breakfast and supper, which I cooked using the ways I had learned from my mother’s recipe books. I went to school, and studied, and thought hard about what I might become, and about what I wasn’t and about Jack, who was learning to fly an airplane. I read All Quiet on the Western Front, and I worried, and I wrote long, informative letters overseas, which Jack answered very infrequently, short narratives so heavily censored as to be meaningless.

  Those were quiet years. I kept to myself, having no close male friend and certainly no girlfriend. The only girl I saw regularly, in fact, was Beth Miller, who sometimes took Sunday dinner with us.

  Beth was Jack’s girlfriend; during wartime, the status of soldiers’ girlfriends was elevated somewhat to the realm of quasi-wife, and once a month Beth came to Sunday dinner, and once a year our families exchanged Christmas presents. I hated going over to the Millers’ on Christmas afternoon, partly because I sensed Mrs. Miller’s dislike of my father and me, and partly because I shrank from large gatherings of any kind. I hung back, away from the holiday chatter, filling my mouth with punch in order to have an excuse not to talk.

  My father liked going to the Millers’. He liked the jolly decorations and the noise, and he thought the house grand, even while he detested the furniture. I couldn’t understand how he could fail to interpret Lucy Miller’s disdainful glances at his hard, scarred hands, and I gritted my teeth when she spoke to him, raising her voice just slightly and enunciating every syllable, as though he were feeble minded. The Millers had no real right to scoff at us: both families had been working class for generations, constituting part of the good, solid Naples stock that had introduced industry to the town during the last century. But Beth’s father wore a tie to work, and Lucy Miller had a cook and a maid, and hobnobbed with members of the country club. The Millers were nouveau riche, a relative rarity in a town that didn’t offer too much in the way of social mobility. Lucy Miller had done it, though: she had moved up, initially through circumstance and subsequently by design.

  Daughter of a highway worker, she had done the usual thing and got engaged at seventeen to an eminently passive man with a steady income. She had her bridal shower and her church wedding, and then settled down to boss her husband the rest of her life. Dale Miller surprised us all, though, showing a real aptitude for his work, rising swiftly through the ranks of his company, until one morning Lucy Miller née Sturgill, twenty-eight, awoke to find herself a vice president’s wife and a candidate for membership at the country club. In short, a Somebody.

  Lucy, whatever she was, was not stupid. From her new perch in the airy regions of Naples she took a hard look at her husband’s colleagues, realizing quickly that there was a tendency for able men to rise only so high in the hierarchy, but no higher; clearly, ability was not enough for advancement. More was needed, it seemed, to carry a man beyond that invisible ceiling. With a canny eye, Lucy Miller reckoned the possibilities, and determined not to languish in executive limbo, she set out to be the perfect company wife. She began by scrutinizing the other wives, dissecting their characters ruthlessly, adopting what she admired, discarding the rest.

  At first, they say, she was a snob only by association, still unpretentious and close to her old friends. But around the time that her daughter turned five, Lucy Miller began to change. Perhaps it was too much for her: one day making her last year’s coat do for another season, the next dining off country club china. Perhaps it was overwhelming maternal instinct, to provide her child with all that she herself had never had. Perhaps the temptation was simply too great: seeing elegance so near, she strained at it and lost her balance. Whatever the reason, Lucy Miller became irrational in her ambition. In a town where memories are long, she tried to deny her background, delicately pruning her family tree, sanitizing its history, to remove all traces of sweat. She broadened her a’s and dropped her r’s, until she sounded strange, like the women in the movies. Worst of all, she snubbed her old friends, who would have withstood almost any amount of highfalutin behavior but who wouldn’t tolerate being cut dead on the street. They abandoned her; and she found few friends to replace them. The country-club set wasn’t stupid, either; they’d seen a few Lucy Millers over the years; they bore her presence, and that was all. And so she bounced friendless between the two strata, all through Beth’s childhood.

  She set goals for herself, like the athlete who divides up his long-distance run, so that he might triumph all along the course. Most of her campaigns concerned Beth, and one of the earliest involved the female seminary. Lucy was determined to have her daughter admitted there, and for a time she devoted every ounce of her energy to the cause. When finally she succeeded—after scraping acquaintance with one of the more approachable society matrons, after countless prim teas, after leaving her calling card at one esteemed lady’s home six times before receiving a return call—after all that, Beth pursed her miniature lips and said no.

  Everyone heard the story: how Lucy went into her daughter’s room on the first day of school, all a-twitter; how she found nine-year-old Beth neatly combed and dressed, seated on the edge of her bed, surrounded by the remains of the navy uniform she had calmly cut to pieces minutes before. (She had gotten up early to do it, Beth told me years later.) A forty-dollar pinafore, ruined; and all of Beth’s chances at an exclusive private education ruined with it. It is said that, seeing her dreams reduced to an armful of scratchy serge strips strewn across a counterpane, Lucy Miller bowed her head and wept. It is said that an hour later, she was still clutching some of the scraps in white fists. It is known that she lost her temper and that her voice rose harshly, a fishwife’s harangue ringing out in the neighborhood of the hill. She raved for thirty solid minutes, while her daughter sat immovable on the edge of the bed, the storm raging around her. It was an event not soon forgotten, the topic on everyone’s lips for a week. Some said Lucy Miller deserved her comeuppance, and maybe it’d teach her not to scoff at her own family. Some clucked their tongues at the little girl’s insolence and the waste of good cloth. Everyone had an opinion; and the outcome of it all was that Beth put on one of her regular dresses and came to public school with the rest of us.

  Beth Miller, whose reputation was thus ensured before she was ten, grew into something of a town sensation. A popular girl, and an intelligent one; the two don’t always coincide. Early, the boys began to follow her around, hoping to gain her favor; and the girls strained after her, copying her hairstyle, her dress, her gestur
es. She was a beautiful, airy thing, descending from the white stone porch of her mother’s house each morning and floating ahead of me on the walk to school. She was unreal, and she was Something, and that was all I ever knew about her, until she started dating Jack.

  The liaison made perfect sense: Jack was the football star, and Beth his natural partner. They seemed intended for each other; a haze of excellence surrounded them as they walked through the shabby corridors of the school building. Even the most devoted of Beth’s suitors gave up the chase after a while, seeing how the two belonged together.

  Lucy Miller, who had sacrificed a great deal so that her daughter might shun families like ours, was furious. She expressed her anger through gossip, and the unholy alliance lifted the Corbins out of the swell of untouchables. Soon it was my own name about which I heard sly mutterings at the butcher’s, and it was about my father that dark rumors began to pass, concerning my mother’s death and what really went on in that secluded little workshop where Jacky Corbin spent so much of his time. My father was, of course, oblivious; but each Saturday at the market, handing my usual list across to Dean Purdy and waiting in silence for him to fill it, I suffered the tide of whispers. Can’t even talk—idiot—poor Angela, you know, the grief of it killed her.

  It lasted only a little while: then Lucy Miller seemed to appreciate the misdirection of her efforts, and she took the campaign home. She lectured Beth at length; there was no effect. She forbade Beth from dating Jack, and beamed upon the dull acceptable boy who came to call that night at eight o’clock. After they had gone, Lucy Miller looked out of her upstairs window in time to see Beth, now joined by a shadow sauntering down the middle of the street, part from the acceptable boy and bid him good night. She then forbade her daughter from dating at all, and to reinforce her words, she locked Beth in her bedroom at night. Soon, tales were flying around Naples about Beth Miller, past midnight, climbing up the trellis outside her bedroom window and making so much noise that Lucy Miller thought it was a burglar and had Dale up and actually loading his rifle before the truth was discovered. She grounded Beth for a week; and almost immediately we heard how Beth was found swimming in the moonlit quarry, clad only in her slip, and more: how two days later Lucy Miller’s front doorbell rang at 3 A.M., and when she opened it there was Beth, plucked from who knew where, grinning, and an apologetic Luther Coggswell, Chief of Police. No doubt about it, it was a mother-daughter war, and gossip the spoils. The girl’s trespasses grew more flagrant, and the mother’s punishments more severe, until at last she threatened to pull Beth out of school entirely. News of this reached the ears of the vice principal, a most conscientious man, who took it upon himself to visit the Millers one evening.