Near Canaan

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  So I had my eye on him that early morning, when he stopped the backhoe and peered through the glass at the earth in front of him. I saw him climb down from the seat and go over to a spot and push at something with his foot. I saw him back away, and had already started down the slope to him before he called.

  “Corbin!”

  I jogged down to the lip of the hole and then around its perimeter, pushed by an urgency I couldn’t have explained. Skidding down the sides of the hole, pushing my hand for balance into the soft dirt. Reaching Walker and slowing, walking to join him where he stood, pointing down.

  “Look,” he said, indicating an object half buried in the dirt. “I heard the crunch.”

  “Goddamn,” I said.

  I looked at the shapeless, the terrible thing, oddly humped, the red wool dark in places with mud. It was long past odor, but nonetheless a gigantic queasiness started somewhere in the bottom of my stomach. My legs tingled, and my head went light. Little lines and circles danced before my eyes.

  “Aak,” I said, involuntarily.

  Walker stood squinting into the bright morning, watching me. I knew what he was thinking: The fairy’s gonna puke. His face was twisted with scorn.

  I made an enormous effort at control, forcing down my nausea, blinking my eyes several times, breathing hugely in and out. Finally, I trusted myself to speak.

  “Shit,” I said. “This’ll set us back at least a week.”

  Walker looked surprised.

  “We,” I said. “Better call someone.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said.

  We set off up the slope.

  “We gotta get the pouring done before it gets cold,” he remarked on the way.

  “I know,” I said, angrily. “What a fucking pain in the ass.”

  Walker grunted, and spat into the dirt. “You said it,” he said, and in his voice there was a note of approval, of comradeliness, that had never been there before in his tight Mornings and his See you laters.

  The police came, and the coroner’s boys, and then the flock of reporters and photographers. We were questioned at length, and then someone poked a microphone into my face. I turned to the camera, speaking easily, fluently.

  “Anybody coulda put it there,” I told them, truthfully. “Hole’s been open like that, unguarded, for weeks.”

  “They could have slipped in and buried it any old time,” agreed Walker.

  We said the same words over and over, while behind us they were sliding the dusty lump into a zippered bag. A journalist turned his head away. Walker’s gaze met mine, and he rolled his eyes, significantly.

  There were forms to fill out, and phone calls to make. I left a message with Devlin’s secretary. Walter Stirling, the police sergeant who’d taken my statement, tapped me on the shoulder.

  “She’s pretty beat-up about this,” he said. “She could use a friend.”

  Beth greeted me meekly. At first she didn’t say much, but when I put my arm around her she gave in, and wept into my cotton shirt, sitting close beside me. We stayed like that for a while, Beth wailing against my chest, and then she took her face out of my shirt and sniffed.

  “I knew it,” she said.

  “How bout a drink?” I suggested.

  She shrugged. I went to the liquor cabinet and took out the bottle of scotch.

  “Joan kept telling me and telling me, I shouldn’t give up hope,” she said. “But I really knew.”

  “That was cruel of her,” I said, handing her a glass, sitting beside her again.

  “She wasn’t trying to be cruel,” she said. “She just couldn’t face it.”

  “She couldn’t face it?” I asked.

  “It would be like losing her twice,” she said, gently.

  “Emily?” I asked, and my voice was rusty.

  She nodded. “She used to call her Emily when she thought I couldn’t hear,” she said. “It was so sad.”

  “That was so long ago,” I said, but speaking, I felt a deep twinge.

  “It’s never over,” she said, and we were quiet for a while, drinking.

  “I felt so bad for giving up,” Beth said, suddenly. “Like I had abandoned her.”

  “Joan doesn’t know when people stop needing her,” I said.

  “She doesn’t have any practice at it,” said Beth. “Children teach you that.” She began to cry again, softly, and talked through her tears. “The funny thing is, I feel sorry for Joan,” she said. “She’s so unhappy. Don’t look at me like that,” she said, blowing her nose. “She is.”

  “She’s unhappy with me,” I said, bitterly. “I think she’s happy with Jack. Although she’s been home a lot more lately. Maybe they had a fight.”

  “Are you still off on that?” asked Beth, scornfully, her annoyance interrupting her tears. “That’s bullshit, G.I., and you know it.”

  “I confronted her with it,” I said. “She didn’t deny it, and she wouldn’t talk about it later.” I felt the tears pressing against my eyelashes. “Oh, God, I’m supposed to be comforting you,” I said.

  “It’s okay,” said Beth.

  “I want her to need me,” I said.

  “She does, G.I.,” she said. “Or she did. I honestly don’t know anymore. She never talks about herself.”

  “That’s true,” I said, surprised.

  “I think she needs us more than we need her,” said Beth.

  The front door suddenly opened, and Joan walked in. She stood silent in the doorway, her prepared look of sympathy dissolving into blankness. Behind her in the doorway, the reporters from Richmond and Charlottesville and Washington clamored; little bursts of flash went off, sounding like rain. She heard the ruckus belatedly, and closed the door behind her.

  “Gil,” she said, leaning back against the wood. “What are you doing here?”

  “She needed a friend,” I said, not moving.

  But Beth lept up from the sofa, away from my side, and went to Joan. The two women clung together, a soft female mass of shoulders and shiny hair, and when they pulled away from one another, they were both crying.

  I stood and watched them huddle, murmuring to one another so low that I couldn’t distinguish any words. Although just a few feet away from them, I felt profoundly distant, and shut out, like a foreigner at a secret ritual, an intruder. Haggard, like a soldier at a celebration, and unimportant. I recalled my father looking on as my mother and sister surrounded me, comforted me, handed me from one to the other, my feet never touching the ground. Was it the lot of men forever to stand, rugged and yearning, at the edge of tender groups?

  While I watched, they went upstairs together. At the landing Joan turned.

  “I’ll stay here tonight,” she whispered, and I nodded.

  Half an hour later, she came down again.

  “She’s asleep,” she said.

  We sat around the living room and looked at each other for a little while. She switched on the television, turned the volume off, and watched Walker and me talking, the camera swinging from our faces to the hole behind us. Joan’s face was lit blue; when she turned to look at me, her expression was unreadable.

  “You’ve changed,” she said. “I hardly recognize you there.” She gestured toward the screen.

  “Everything changes,” I said.

  She nodded.

  I stood up. She looked quickly up at me, flinching as though I had threatened her.

  “I’m going out for a while,” I said.

  “Will you come back here?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, and weakened. “Maybe.”

  Stokes’s was crammed with people, all of them discussing the news; I pushed my way in among them and called for a beer, but no one heard me.

  “… blunt object,” someone was saying.

  “Whodja think done it?”

  “Nobody from here,” was the answer. “Some sicko.”

  “You mean from the hospital?”

  “Look at him there, looks like he’s gonna puke,” said Sam, p
ointing to the television.

  “Like you wouldn’t,” needled Ned.

  “I saw worse things in combat.”

  “Not little girls,” said Ned. “Not dead little girls.”

  “Whoever it was is long gone by now.”

  “He stayed around here long enough,” said someone. “When’d he take her, April?”

  “Where’d he keep her all this time?”

  “In the hills, probly.”

  “It’d be easy to hide up there.”

  “Sicko.”

  Someone must have spotted me, because there was a sudden hush at the core of the crowd, travelling outward to where I stood on the fringes.

  “Hey, G.I.,” said someone.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Tell us about it,” said a youngster, but he was shushed.

  “Musta been awful,” said Sam, wheedlingly.

  “Well,” I said.

  They waited, an attentive circle around me. From them rose the familiar, the characteristic scent of men in quantity. To me, it had always been the liquor of warning, but now it invigorated me. My voice was husky, full in my throat, uninterrupted.

  “Hell, what can I say? We found her,” I said. “I need a beer.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Conflicts and Allies

  SHE HAD NEVER been this close to him. Now, from the little, protective distance which her desk afforded her, she regarded him carefully, and had, surprisingly, a fierce sense of recognition.

  “What can I do for you?” she asked.

  “You knew my mother,” he said, abruptly.

  “Your mother,” repeated Joan.

  “Beth Crawford,” he said, impatient. “Beth Miller, if you like. You knew her.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “A long time ago.” She wished that she could smile; a smile would be an excellent weapon; but she could do no more than keep her voice steady and her brow clear. She could not imagine how her face might change if she tried to smile.

  “You’ve heard I’m making a film?” asked the boy. “Or trying to,” he added.

  She put her head on one side, carefully, and frowned a little.

  “I heard something like that,” she said. “I think you mentioned it at the Bruckners’ the other night?”

  “Right,” said Buddy. “I’d like to interview you,” he said. “With the camera.”

  She felt a sudden anger: how could he be so direct, so unabashed? He was worse than many of the teenage rebels she met in here.

  “Why me?” she asked, and was pleased to hear in her own voice a perfect puzzled tone, a gentle bafflement, no more.

  “I heard you were good friends with her,” he said.

  “Oh, well,” she said. “We knew each other. But I don’t know that you’d have called us close.”

  He looked surprised.

  “I heard you were best friends,” he said, but there was a hint of uncertainty now. She heard it, with relief.

  “I don’t know who said that,” she told him, lightly. “I guess it might have looked that way, once. But your mother was born here; she lived up on the hill. I only came here for college. She had a lot of other friends. We ran into each other by chance, and I think she felt sorry for me—I was so much of an outsider. A kind of charity case, you might say.”

  “That isn’t how I heard it,” he said, dubiously.

  “That isn’t how I thought of it then,” she said. “But that’s how I’ve come to think of it.”

  “What was she like?” he asked. “Do you remember?”

  “Of course,” she said, a little irritated: he acted as though she were a thousand years old.

  “What was she like?”

  “Well,” she considered. “She was pretty, of course. And popular. Intelligent, although she didn’t care much for school.”

  “I’ve heard all that stuff from other people,” said Buddy. “I want to know other stuff. What she was like.” There was a kind of desperation about him now.

  “I never really knew her,” said Joan, firmly.

  He looked at her stonily; again she had the strange impression of intense familiarity.

  “I feel like I’m in that stupid children’s book,” he said.

  “Which one?” asked Joan. She was used to frequent changes in subject from the children she counseled, some of whose attention spans were unbelievably short.

  “This one I used to have a long time ago,” said the boy. “It was called Are You My Mother.”

  “Sounds familiar,” she said.

  “It’s about a duckling,” said Buddy. “He’s alone; I can’t remember how he got that way. Anyway, he goes around to all the animals and asks them are they his mother. He asks a crocodile,” he said, with a sour break in his voice. “He asks a hippo.”

  “I remember,” she said.

  “This whole town,” said Buddy gratingly, “is a zoo.”

  They looked at one another in silence. Joan felt a strange sensation beginning deep within her, and with surprise she recognized it as laughter. She tried to squelch it, but it forced itself through. She put her hand over her mouth, the sounds spilling out.

  Buddy stared, and his mouth twitched, and then he was laughing, too. She took her hand down, and for whole minutes they did nothing but laugh, simply and openly; and then their laughter died away and they sat silent, still looking at one another, but without malice.

  “I’d still like you to be in my movie,” said Buddy, while the echoes rang around them.

  “I don’t think so,” said Joan. “It’s not a good day for me.”

  “It doesn’t have to be today,” he said. “It doesn’t have to interfere with your work, either. I’ll be around for a few more days—we could set up at your house, if you’d be more comfortable.”

  “No,” she said, gently. “I really have nothing to say.”

  Outside, he looked at his watch. Eleven in the morning, and the sun was already making itself felt through the wind. Up north, the weather would be uncompromising, cold with no hint of the brief forgiveness of the spring to come. He took the car to the river; parking and getting out, he took nothing with him but the tape recorder he took sound with during the interviews, and his box of cassette tapes.

  He felt naked without the camera. Going barefaced into the ranks of townspeople was a very different proposition, that comfortable heavy bulk gone now from his right shoulder. It had protected him, its great glassy eye recording everything, remembering what he might not; and people had spoken to it, not to him. There had been nothing of him during those interviews; he’d liked it that way. Why, then, had he taken the camera down?

  It had stopped protecting him, that was why. That afternoon with the nanny it had seemed to melt away, another traitor, crouching conspiratorially on his shoulder one minute, vanished the next. For the first time, he’d heard a voice above the machine’s hum; what he’d heard had alarmed him. Taunted him, even: Are you ready for this?

  He settled himself on the grass at the water’s very edge, regarding the scenery without surprise. I’m already getting used to it here. Twelve days ago, he’d been amazed by such beauty, flowing unheralded and quiet through this modest patch of civilization. He’d known only cities or suburbs in his lifetime. Nothing like this.

  He knew you couldn’t swim in the river—or at least that you weren’t supposed to. There was a dangerous undertow in the narrows, and soft deep mud in the widest places. His mother had talked about the river a lot: about the courting couples who lay by its banks in her youth, the murmuring of the water, the answering murmurs of love.

  “You all think we were so chaste back then,” she’d said. “Ha.”

  “What did you want?” Buddy asked now, aloud. “What was it?”

  So newly sprung from adolescence, he found it hard to credit an older person, a mother, with the passions and ferocities he himself felt; but he knew that she must have wanted something. Something that she’d died from not having. Love? But she’d had that in Connecticu
t. A career? She could have had that if she’d wanted: she’d been intelligent enough, and had never lacked motivation. He couldn’t imagine her languishing at the foot of a hill, fearing the climb. She was much more likely to have toiled to the top, and then been disgusted with the view.

  Peace. The word came to him as though it had been spoken by the waving treetops. Peace. But hadn’t she had that here? The place seemed peaceful enough, even drowsy. But there was a dangerous element cutting underneath the sleepiness; even Buddy had caught on to it, during his short visit. He did not know enough to give it its name.

  She hadn’t told him everything, not by a long chalk. That was obvious, from what he’d been told. What had he been told? The film was locked into the cans now, along with its secrets. He reached lazily toward the box of tapes and chose one at random, slipping it into the tape recorder clipped to his belt. He fitted the earphones on his head, rewound the tape some, and let it play.

  “Not that she was a bad mother.”

  He thought of the nanny, her squinting eyes and rough skin, her innocent witnessing, telling him things he’d never imagined.

  Now he began a game with himself, pulling tapes from the box, putting them into the machine and fast-forwarding. Stopping, letting them play for a few seconds; stopping again and ejecting, changing the tape without looking, hearing only snatches.

  “I guess it made us feel alive.”

  His mother, terribly young, running down a long hill; the canny nurse-to-be, probably plump even then, behind her.

  “There’s a use for everything.”

  The flea-market man, pulling himself up out of his cheap plaid suit, trying to look tall for the camera.

  “Sadder, and deep, like a bell tolling.”

  Tess, the old woman, wrinkled, her left arm crooked across her body, her voice fading in and out.

  “It was the only thing you could do.”

  He was hearing his mother, in the country voice of a man past sixty, made lyrical with the power of memory.

  “You pick the strangest damn times to pay attention.”

  He smiled. That was certainly true.

  “She was dead serious.”

  He opened his eyes.