Near Canaan

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  “Oh, my God,” I said.

  “She was all by herself on the street. I found her all by herself, Gil.” Her voice was persuasive. “That’s when I knew.”

  “Knew?” I repeated, my voice cracking.

  “She wasn’t being taken care of,” said Joan. “Can you believe, out on the street by herself? Just a baby.”

  “How,” I began. “Where?”

  “She had trouble sleeping at first,” she said, not listening to me, looking down at the shoe I was holding. “She had nightmares. So I gave her some of my tablets crushed up in water. I knew better than to give them to her dry,” she told me, looking into my face now with wide, mad eyes.

  “All that time,” I said.

  “We had fun together,” she said, in a light, happy voice, remembering. “We played games. I never let her wander around alone. She was happy.” Her face hardened. “She never asked for Beth once.”

  Without thinking, without even being aware that I was moving, I was on my feet, shouting.

  “How could you?” I cried. “How could you do such a thing?” I took hold of her shoulders, and shook her back and forth, her hair spilling across her features, brushing like silk against my hands.

  “She needed me,” she said, when I let her go. “She needed someone to look after her.” Her face was red and her eyes wet, but her voice was even. “Her own mother didn’t want her.”

  “How can you say that?” I said.

  “She didn’t,” she said. “Not from the first.”

  “You saw what Beth was going through. And you … consoling her. It’s demented, Joan, it’s—evil.” I was whispering now, my own words terrifying me.

  “Beth never wanted her,” said Joan stubbornly. “I wanted her.”

  “You can’t just take what you want,” I said, but the anger had gone out of me. I was numb, dead in places. I thought of sitting down again, but my knees wouldn’t bend.

  “She was happy with me,” said Joan. “I fixed up the shed like a little house. I brought her all the books she wanted.” Her face lit up. “How she could read, Gil. So much like you. She was reading fifth grade books.”

  “That’s wonderful,” I said, dully. “And now she’s dead.” Joan flinched, as though I’d hit her. “You gave her too many tablets.”

  “She fell,” said Joan.

  “You kept her in a shed,” I said. “She must have been afraid out there. She tried to get up, to escape, to go back home—”

  “She was happy,” said Joan, in a panicky voice. “She didn’t want to go back.”

  “—all those dangerous things in there,” I said.

  “I was careful,” said Joan.

  “—and maybe she lay there for a little while. Before she died.” I looked at my wife; she was crying. “You killed her,” I said.

  “It was an accident,” she whimpered. “I found her—oh God—lying so still. Like a little doll, all the life gone.”

  She could hardly speak through her tears. I felt ashamed. “Joan,” I said.

  “I had to leave her alone sometimes,” she whispered, fiercely. “I couldn’t help it.”

  “Joan,” I said; she looked at me. “Is that where you went … all those times?”

  She nodded, tightly.

  “You weren’t—” I said, then stopped myself. So many clues; why hadn’t I seen them?

  “It’s kind of a habit, now,” she said, smiling a little. “I come here just to sit.”

  “I thought,” I said. She nodded.

  “I almost told you,” she said. “That day.”

  I remembered her tiny voice, the telephone ringing.

  “You could have told me,” I said.

  She shook her head. “You were so worried,” she said. “So worried, about so many things.”

  I thought of something.

  “Does anybody else know?” I asked.

  She looked away.

  “Who?” I urged.

  “He cleaned it all up for me,” she said, still hiding her face from me. “He said he’d take care of everything.”

  “Jack?” I said. “Jack knows?”

  “I didn’t know he’d put her there,” she said, turning back to me. “I don’t know what made him do that.”

  “You went to Jack?” I couldn’t believe it.

  “He’s not so—moral—about things,” she said distantly. “He just does.” She reached out, touched the shoe with a finger. “He forgot this,” she said.

  “Listen to me,” I said. “Joan. Jack is not your husband. Look at me.” She did. “What happens to you, happens to me. Do you understand?”

  She hesitated, then nodded.

  I put out my hand; after a moment, she laid hers into it, unspeaking. Abruptly, I was filled with a new power, filling up my arms and legs, making me bigger than I was, more confident.

  “I’ll take care of this,” I said. She nodded. I led her back to the house, and sat her down.

  “Jack won’t tell,” I said. “I’ll kill him first.”

  I left her there and walked swiftly back to the rose border and then past it, plunging into the denseness beyond. I moved faster and faster, until I was jogging, the creeper pulling at my hair and dangling into my face, the branches slapping at my chest, the vines whipping up to trip me. I reached the workshop, and stood before it, breathing hard; then I pulled the door open.

  One quadrant of the big room, it was easy to see, had been rigged up as a kind of living quarters; the floor there was cleaner and the shelves nearby empty, with sharp dusty shapes on them, as though they’d recently been used to hold books or piles of clothing. I found a little footprint, and winced; then scrubbed it away with my foot. I tumbled through the crowded far shelves until I found a small box; I stuffed the sneaker into it.

  Carrying it, I went back to the house.

  “I’m going to do a little gardening,” I told Joan, who was sitting in the rocking chair by the cold fireplace. “Before it gets dark. A little gardening,” I repeated.

  “All right,” she said, tonelessly.

  I made a good job of it, choosing a patch about twenty feet into my father’s land, chopping and hacking until I had a clear patch of earth. I dug straight down, turning the soil over with the spade, ripping open a seed packet I had taken from the neglected shed. I dug the shoe in, burying it deep. Dust to dust. I scattered the seeds, willing the chives to grow tall in this mild autumn, to blend with the other foliage. I finished the job and put the tools away, locking the shed.

  Back in the house, I told Joan, “I’ve put in chives.”

  “Chives,” she said.

  “It’s a little late, but I never was much of a gardener. Tomorrow I’ll clean out the shed. It needs it, after all this time.”

  “It needs it,” she said, obediently.

  I put my arms around her. Everything I had ever known of ambivalence had fallen away in the last two hours. There was only me and her and my fierce need to protect her. At any cost. She’d done wrong, but it didn’t matter to me; I wanted to wallow into that wrong, join into it with her. I wanted us together in it; I could not leave her alone with what she’d done.

  It didn’t even matter that she’d gone to Jack first for help. Nothing mattered now except the two of us, undivided. Her presumed infidelity had weighted me more than I knew; now relieved of that burden, I was giddy. She hadn’t slept with Jack. It made a rhythm with the digging. In a crisis, she’d hesitated to trust me. But I had been weak then; I was weak no longer; she would trust me now. I took her sins onto myself, unquestioning. And my heart sang. Forgive me, Beth. I closed my eyes tight and sent up a prayer to the woman whose daughter had been sacrificed on the altar of my marriage. Joan and I were going to be whole again now, and strong.

  That was how I learned it, after all. Beth had said choose, and I had chosen, but it hadn’t meant anything until now. All of my life I had struggled with the shadows, avoided them, made fitful attempts to join them. And the shadow had been within me all along; i
t had lain there dormant, waiting. Waiting to show me what a man was for.

  This was what he was for: to protect, to guard, to build his strong house, and keep it strong. In an afternoon, all of my doubt had changed to passion, a man’s dark passion for his home, his way of life.

  My forefathers had carried that passion onto the battlefields with them, a century before; my father and brother had been wounded defending their country. Seeking combat, I had found myself behind a desk; warless, I had spent my life casting about for something to defend, something to belong to. Something worth fighting for, dying for. Now I had found it, my war and my country. Joan. Joan. There was nothing else.

  No one came nosing around my patch of stunted seedlings. The shoe rotted away in quiet; we were safe. But Joan had changed that day, and forever after. Twenty years later, she would still be battling a memory she couldn’t even name. We never spoke about it; I wasn’t sure she understood what she had done, what I had done. I knew, though, and the knowledge made me powerful. In the house I was her guardian, and she took the strength I gave her and went out into the world with it. No one noticed any change in her. It was done. It was over. We had changed, but we were safe.

  The silence between Jack and me had its beginnings in that afternoon. Rightly, I should say it started thirty years before, in a dark moldy barrel in my father’s cellar. I had feared and worshipped my brother these long years; and he had all the time been like me. Not my usurper, not my devil; just a man. Knowing this about him ought to have brought us closer; it ought to have trampled down the barricades between us. Instead it built them up, higher and thicker and absolute. Jack knew too much; he held our secret. Logically I ought to have befriended him, to ensure his complicity. But I was outraged, coldly punitive—he had taken it upon himself to defend my territory, my house and garden; he had appropriated sin which was none of his; I hated him. I was glad for the outbreak of war; it had been too long in the coming. I hoped for the day when we should be pitted against one another, and I should win.

  Joan went off to visit her parents for two weeks in November; I was left alone in the house on Worth Street, cooking for myself again. I had taken to eating my suppers on the porch, looking over the land my great-great-grandfather had marked out for himself when he’d brought his bride to Virginia. The Ridge glowered in the distance, anchoring the horizon. I drank my coffee and wondered what it might be like to grow up in an unmountainous place.

  A footstep on gravel. I looked, and it was Beth, walking up the road toward me. She came into the yard and stood there smiling, the same summer smile, and without a word, I put down my cup and followed her. We walked into the fields which had been fenced off now, and chopped up, and developed. Farming didn’t pay; the pastures of our youth were transformed into subdivisions and rental properties. More buildings, less land. The geography of Naples was changing.

  We walked without speaking, winding our way toward the river. When we got there, I spread my jacket on a flat piece of ground; she dropped onto it, and I sat a little way away, hugging my shirt-sleeved arms in the breeze.

  “Winter soon,” her first words.

  “Yep,” I said. “And then spring.”

  “I wonder if winter’s the same other places,” she said.

  “In Florida it stays warm all year.”

  “I know. I mean up north.”

  I was silent.

  “I’ve figured things out,” she said. “I used to think it was just me. But it’s not—it’s Naples, it’s the life I’ve had here. Somewhere I went wrong, and I can’t go back.”

  “Wrong?” I said.

  “I think they’re right, you know; I really do take after old Lucy.” She smiled. “Never satisfied.” She tossed her hair off her shoulders.

  “You’re leaving?” I said.

  “Not running away,” she said. “Running to.” Then, not looking at me, biting her lip, “G.I., did you ever have something that you wanted, something you wanted so bad? Something impossible?”

  For a moment, I saw her again as she’d been at sixteen—her skirt tucked under her legs, her knees drawn up. The darkness softened the signs that daylight picked out to tell you she was past thirty. The sweater thrown across her shoulders participated in the illusion. Even the air smelled different, the breath of a long-ago wartime summer. She had loved Jack then, I knew, but she had trusted me more. She had made of me a confidant; awkward as I had been, it was the first beautiful thing that had happened to me. I had had fantasies about her—the usual thing, rescuing her from disaster, sweeping in where no one else dared and saving her. Very chaste daydreams they were, involving great danger and bravery and very little sex. After the rescue, she’d turn to me and cry, “I’ve been so blind,” or some such nonsense. And I would give a sad little smile, as if to say, I’ve been here all along. And we’d kiss.

  The fantasies ended there, not from any lack of ingenuity on my part, but because the kiss stretched the boundaries of even my fertile imagination. The notion of Beth Miller placing her lips on my downy, unmoustached own, of her clasping my slight frame to her bosom, were frankly ridiculous, and I prudently stopped my dreaming there, aware that to carry it too far would be to threaten it, to force it to disintegrate into folly.

  “Beth,” I said, at exactly the moment she said “G.I.”

  “You first,” I said, after we’d laughed a little.

  “Well,” she said, looking across the water. “I’ve felt something for a long time—wanted something. For a while I thought it was Jack. I guess I never really believed it was Billy.” She hunched her shoulders, thinking. “I guess I was using him, all right. Trying to get the hell out of here.”

  “But why?” I asked. The world to me seemed just a multitude of strangers.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “The wildebeest. I feel like I have a wild beast inside me, and I have to find something to feed it, to calm it down.” She thrust her hand into the pocket of her skirt, bringing out a silver flask. She uncapped it and drank with a practiced fluidity. “It likes bourbon,” she said, laughing, offering the flask to me. I took a mouthful, and passed it back.

  “So you’re going away to scavenge for the beast,” I said.

  “It sounds crazy,” she agreed. “But I’m afraid that no matter where I go the beast will still be with me. I have to know,” she said. “I have to know if there’s food out there somewhere. I’m afraid I won’t find out,” she looked into the mouth of the flask, “before I die.”

  I shivered. She capped the flask and laid it down.

  “You’re cold,” she said.

  “A little,” I said. She moved closer to me, and for one long moment we saw each other very close, and I smelled her hair. And then we were together on the ground, moving gently like we were in water.

  “That’s right,” she said once, and then was silent.

  Afterward, I was never sure how it happened; it was so easy, like another fantasy, only this one adult and complete. So dreamlike, so fluid, everything accomplished gracefully, and without hesitation.

  “Well,” she said, when we were finished. Her breathing was loud in my ear.

  She sat up after a while, and I pulled myself up on an elbow.

  “I’ll miss the mountains,” she said softly, the implication of her words putting an ache into me, and a fear.

  We didn’t go back right away; we watched the night drape itself over the mountains and the river, sitting close together. I put my arm around her, that delicate possessive gesture so hard won, so important.

  She stayed that night, sleeping with me in the bed I’d had as a child; the mattress barely held us. We curled and lay quiet, her knees bent, holding mine. Sleeping, dreaming nothing.

  In the morning I made breakfast. A kind of jubilation feast—pancakes and eggs and grits. She awoke while I was cooking, and appeared in the doorway in my bathrobe. She wrinkled her nose.

  “What is all that?” she said.

  “Thanksgiving,” I said happily, fil
ling her plate.

  We ate for a while in silence, concentrating on the tastes and smells and the magical process of chewing, the counterpoint swallow of coffee following syrup. There was nothing else for a time, and then Beth reached her hand across to me.

  “Beautiful day,” I said.

  “Uh-huh,” she agreed, gathering up my fingers, leading me from the table.

  I built a fire in the living room fireplace, and we lolled before it, the bathrobe dropping off her shoulders, her white skin revealing itself for my greedy touch. We spent the day there, putting new logs into the grate, laughing over the old photograph albums I pulled down from the bookshelf.

  “And who’s this?” asked Beth, pointing to a pudgy toddler.

  “Jack,” I said. “No, maybe me. No,” peering closer, “it’s Jack.”

  “You all looked a lot alike back then,” she remarked.

  “All children do,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “You and Jack changed later. You went different ways, like a path forking.” She forked with her fingers, to show me.

  “We’re very different,” I said.

  “Who should know better than me?” said Beth, putting her head on one side, her hand mischievous on my belly. The innuendo awoke my desire, and for a while the books of yellowed snapshots went ignored. Beth sat up suddenly after, much as she had done the night before on the riverbank. I looked up at her, apprehensive.

  “Food,” she said. “Food, or I’ll die right here.”

  I laughed, and we helped each other up, and fairly ran to the kitchen.

  It was food and love and laughter for three days; and through them all, my senses were glutted; I felt new.

  “No,” she said, on the third morning.

  “No what?” I said.

  “No, it couldn’t have happened before,” she said. “That was what you were going to ask.”

  Beth, my goddess and my prize. Through some happy chance, I had won her; I was filled up.

  On the evening of the last day, we sat on the porch after supper, swollen with food.

  “Things might have been different,” said Beth, “without the beast.”

  I understood.