My mother stood up on the bench, dusted off the seat of the jeans she’d started wearing. She climbed to the tabletop and stood there, scanning the flat, snowy countryside as if she thought something might be coming toward us—an unfriendly dog, a storm. The sun was already starting to set. “Your father will tease him,” she said.
I shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “That’s just how Dad is. He makes fun. Like the nose-to-the-wall test.” My father had found me reading the classifieds, imagining myself as a waitress or a teacher, a salesman or a clerk. The jobs were divided into sections, one for women and one for men. I’d been scanning the men’s section because it looked more interesting, but when my father came in, I dragged my finger over to the women’s so he wouldn’t be able to tease me. “Looking for work?” he said. “Good God. A career woman just like your mother.”
“I guess,” I said, which was what I always said. It was neutral, unassuming, dull, which meant my father would lose interest and go away. But that day he sat down on the couch beside me.
“You got the right qualifications?”
I shrugged.
“Let’s see,” he said. “There’s only one test a girl has to pass. Stand up,” he said, and he led me over to the wall, his hand on the back of my neck. “Put your nose to the wall,” he said, and when I did it, bending forward over my breasts, he laughed, shaking his head. “Nope,” he said, “not quite. They’ll have to hire someone else.”
My mother came into the room and saw us standing there. I pressed my nose to the wall again; it was cool, unyielding, a good place to rest. I didn’t understand. “Don’t worry,” my father said, still laughing. “Your mother wouldn’t get the job either, that’s for sure.” My mother took me by the hand and led me from the room. “Don’t listen to him,” she said. It was Sam who finally explained the joke to me: If a woman’s nose could touch the wall, her breasts were too small for the job.
“I’m so sorry about that,” my mother said now, as if she had done something wrong. “That’s why it’s important for you to think about going to college, to have the skills to look out for yourself, even if you don’t think you’ll need them. I have no education, only three years’ experience. This business is a huge risk, and it can’t support two children. Your father and I both know that if it were just my income alone—” She stopped, then shrugged, and I briefly saw myself in that futile gesture. “It’s not good to be too dependent on anyone,” she said.
“Except God,” I said.
“Well, yes,” my mother said. “But God helps those who help themselves.”
“If it’s His will, God can help anybody.”
“But don’t you think it’s His will that you go to college, make something of your life? Let your light shine instead of hiding it under a bushel basket?”
“I want to keep on living in Oneisha,” I blurted. I hadn’t meant to say it like that, and my mother gave me a hurt, surprised look.
“I know we’re going through a tough time right now, but we’re a family, Abby. We belong together.”
“But I feel good here. I’m not sleepy anymore.”
“You’re still sleeping,” my mother said, “only now you don’t even know it. Abby, there’s a whole world out there!” She waved her arms at the horizon, but all I saw were the Yodermans’ cows standing shoulder-to-shoulder at the feeder like a black and white bracelet, Jakey’s yellow tail poking up from the weeds, the small cross of houses that was Oneisha, Wisconsin. The world ended where the sullen winter sky met the stubble of fields not quite completely covered with snow. The world was the smell of frozen apple crushed beneath my heel, the wet black bark of the apple trees, my mother’s voice saying, “I want you to come home. Maybe in another week or so.”
For the next few nights I had terrible dreams, and in them I was running from a man who I knew was going to catch me and do unspeakable things. Sometimes the man was chasing Sam too, and then I had to make a decision, because he would be able to catch only one of us and, being older, I could run faster. Should I save myself? Should I fall behind, saving Sam’s life with my own? Night after night I woke up on the floor, twisted in the blankets, with my shoulder or hip or head stinging from the fall, and always I was the one still alive, intact, safe, facing the open arms of Jesus. Let My Light Guide You.
When I told my grandmother about the dreams, she spoke to my mother, and after that there was no more talk of my going home in the near future. And soon the dreams were forgotten in the rush to prepare for Christmas. My grandmother and I spent entire days baking for the children living in the trailers south of Farbenplatz, the elderly in the nursing home in Holly’s Field, the sick sentenced to Christmas in the hospital. I supervised the younger children on a hayride sponsored by the church. I helped make the queen-size hand-stitched bear paw quilt that would be raffled away on Christmas Day. I made ornaments for our Christmas tree—walnuts rolled in glitter, clothespin angels, paper snowflakes, tinfoil chains.
Father Van Dan arranged for me to sing the Ave Maria at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, and I rehearsed with Eva and Serina Oben, Eva conducting me with one long finger. Afterward, they gave me sight-reading lessons, loaned me armfuls of music I could study on my own. How easy it was to make music! I’d accidentally found a language I could use to express absolutely anything I wanted, even forbidden, sinful things like anger and desire. It was the first time I could remember feeling as though it was all right to speak my mind, and suddenly I was never at a loss for things to say. I practiced on Elise’s piano two hours every day, and then I walked over to the church, where I experimented with the organ. Now that I knew the notes, I could sound out everything I heard. I could even transpose things into different keys without fumbling. My mother had heard about a Milwaukee Conservatory teacher who came to Horton twice a month. She got me on a waiting list for lessons, paying the reservation fee out of her own business earnings when my father insisted fancy lessons were unnecessary, that if I had to have lessons at all, a local teacher should be good enough.
“Are you nervous about Christmas Eve?” she asked. It would be the first time I’d performed for a real audience, including my father and Sam, who were also planning to come for the service. But that didn’t bother me. I intended to sing for God and God alone. I’d been praying for a vocation, the absolute knowledge that my life was meant for Him. It was a feeling that, according to Harv, was unmistakable when it came. “I guess it’s like the way you describe music,” he told me, during another one of our conversations that left Monica rolling her eyes. “Understanding without words.” I wanted to understand. I wanted to be chosen.
At eleven-thirty on Christmas Eve, my grandmother and I walked over to the church, and I was grateful for the stinging snow, the bitter wind chilling me awake. My parents and Sam were already there, and at first they looked like any other family, lined up in a pew, Sam’s blond hair cropped so short I could see his scalp shining underneath. Then, as we got closer, I saw what my mother hadn’t described, what I had not imagined: deep clotted nicks where my father’s razor had bit in. There was a noise in my head like bees. Suddenly I was remembering all the times my father held Sam and me down, one at a time, rubbing his coarse whiskers into our necks as we screamed and begged him to stop. When he grabbed me first, Sam could have run, but he never did, pummelling my father’s shoulders, trying to set me free. My father laughed and pummeled him back, too rough; did he think it was all just a game? Sometimes he would take us for drives, letting the car swerve over the median or off the shoulder, accelerating so our stomachs lurched and our heads snapped back against our seats. He would tell us he was going to drive into Lake Michigan, and he’d edge the car inches from the drop-off. Nobody sneeze, he’d say.
My grandmother called my name; I was blocking the middle of the aisle. I stepped quickly over my father’s knees, kissed my mother, sat beside my brother.
“Hi,” I whispered.
“Hey,” he said. The worst of the cuts was behind his ear; he noticed me stari
ng, sank lower into the collar of his coat.
Offer it up to God. When I rose to sing at Communion time, I stopped seeing Sam and my parents and grandmother. I didn’t even think about the rest of the congregation. I walked to the altar, and as soon as Eva began to play, I opened my mouth and let my voice fill the church like a choir. As I sang, I prayed for God to accept the offering I made of myself, waiting for the feeling of absolute understanding that Harv had described. But I felt nothing except my own want, heard no voice other than my own—and then not even that. The song was finished. Eva swayed to stillness. In the long moment before the congregation burst into spontaneous applause, I knew I had been refused. Harv was assisting Father Van Dan; at the Communion rail, he slid the gold platter beneath my chin. I saw my reflection there, terribly distorted.
“The body of Christ,” Father Van Dan said.
“Amen.” I could barely say it. I believe.
After Mass, people nodded to me, pressed my arm; a few of them said shyly what a pretty voice I had, how much like Elise. My grandmother nodded proudly, accepting compliments on my behalf; my mother scooped me into a hug, and even Sam said, “That was pretty good.” We’d been fasting since sundown, and when Harv emerged from the sacristy, we all walked back to my grandmother’s house for pancakes and sausage and sweet fruit preserves, the same early breakfast we ate each year before everyone finally went home, stuffed and exhausted. My father put his arm around my shoulder, leaning too hard, the way he always did. “Congratulations,” he said, and I offered him my hand to shake. But when he tried his usual trick of squeezing too hard, I bent his thumb back as if I were snapping a carrot.
“Don’t do that,” I shouted, “I hate it when you do that,” and then I started to cry.
“Did you hurt her, Gordon?” my mother said.
“Who’s the victim here?” my father said. “Christ, look what she did to my thumb,” and he held it out, already swelling; I could see it under the dim light of the moon. But nobody was listening to him. Instead, my mother was rubbing my hand, my grandmother was patting my shoulder, Harv and Uncle Olaf were searching their pockets for Kleenex, and Monica was saying in her affected way, “Why does everything have to be so melodramatic?” I cried all the way home and into the bright warm light of the kitchen, where the cats climbed into my lap and my grandmother fed me whiskey tea. I cried while my grandmother fixed an ice pack for my father’s thumb, and later while Uncle Olaf secured it with tape from the first-aid kit, teasing him about the dangers of thumb wrestling with a daughter. It was clear to me now that I belonged in this world. There was nowhere else for me to go.
On New Year’s Day, I told my grandmother I wanted to go back to school in January. She surprised me by giving me Elise’s piano; Uncle Olaf had agreed to haul it in his truck. “For your lessons,” she said. “It will fit nice in your mother’s living room, and I’m sure Elise would want you to have it.”
“Thank you,” I said. I couldn’t believe it. “Are you sure?”
My grandmother took my hand, rubbed her thumb across the top of my knuckles the way she did when she was pleased with me. “When God shuts a door, He opens a window,” she said, “or, in your case, perhaps, another door.” I’d told her about how much I’d wanted a vocation, how hard it was not to envy Harv. “Keep the piano and practice your lessons and remember Elise in your thoughts,” she said. “If God wills it, you’ll have the lifetime of music she always wanted.”
Sam’s fourteenth birthday was coming up on Saturday, the sixth of January, and we decided I would move back home then. My father hadn’t spoken to me since Christmas Eve; I’d sprained his thumb badly, and for the next six weeks he would have to wear an embarrassing white splint. He told people he’d slammed his finger in the car door, but there was something about the way he said it that made them ask more questions. Eventually, someone heard the story from someone who knew my uncle, and my father was teased without mercy. Sam told me about it the next time I called. “Serves him right,” he said bitterly.
The night of the fifth was bingo night, and for the first time, I won twenty dollars. Auntie Thil won next, then, amazingly, my grandmother. People were laughing and rubbing our sleeves for luck, and we drove home happy and warm with our good fortune. As we walked into the house, the squat, old-fashioned phone was ringing, and I knew by the way my grandmother reached for the receiver that she also sensed something was wrong. It was my mother; Sam had been hurt in a car accident that involved two other underage drivers. She’d thought he was at a friend’s house, doing homework, and when the police called, she was so certain they had the wrong number that she told them so and hung up. They called her back. She called us. The car, an old Pontiac, had spun out of control on Highway J, bounced through a ditch, and hit a tin shed. My father was already on his way to the hospital. Would we meet her there?
My grandmother phoned Auntie Thil, and within minutes we were on the road to Saint Nicholas Hospital, our twenty-dollar bills still crisp in our pockets, our coats giving off the festive smell of the KC hall. Auntie Thil dropped us off at Emergency, and for the first time I was scared. The receptionist knew my grandmother; she smiled kindly and gave us the number of my brother’s room.
“Quit,” my grandmother said when she noticed me sniffling. We stepped into the elevator, and she punched the floor button. “Abigail, use your head. If it was serious, they wouldn’t have him in a room so quick.”
There was my mother at the end of the hallway, talking with two police officers in their stiff uniforms. I knew the younger one. His daughter was my age. I went to her birthday parties when we were in grade school, and her father always helped us play Pin the Tail on the Teacher. Officer Holtz. He recognized me and smiled, but his uniform made me shy, and I did not smile back. The other officer had a pen and a pad. He seemed eager to finish and go.
“He has a broken collarbone, some stitches,” my mother told us. “The other boys were sent home already.”
“So you’ve never noticed any sign before this that he’d been consuming alcohol?” the impatient officer said. My mother looked at my grandmother, and her face darkened with shame. “No,” she whispered. “I’ve already told you.”
“We’ll give a holler if we need any more information,” Officer Holtz said quickly, and the two of them left in a jingle of keys.
“The other boys were older,” my mother said, as if she were speaking to herself. “They gave him the beer. It was their car he was driving.”
“Can we see him?” I asked, and my mother nodded. My grandmother took her by the arm.
“You go on ahead,” she said. “Your mother and I need to have a private talk.”
There were two beds in the room. The one closest to the door was empty. The second one was hidden behind a loose white curtain, but I knew it was Sam’s because I recognized my father’s shoes. I hoped that my father wasn’t scolding Sam, but as I listened, I didn’t hear either my father or Sam saying much of anything. What I heard were ragged gasps, like the sound of someone in pain, and for a moment I wondered if Sam was hurt worse than my mother had said. But when I peered around the curtain I saw that Sam was asleep, his face a white ghost mask except for his lashes and brows and the faint gold hairs that lined his upper lip. His shoulder was covered in plaster; he had stitches in one ear, black and spiky-looking, like a row of ants feeding there. My father was sitting beside the bed, one long arm thrown over Sam’s chest, and the splint on his thumb seemed huge and glowing. His shoulders moved, and I heard that gasp again.
When he looked up, I recognized the man from my dreams, and as I stared at the shine of tears on his face, I understood why God had refused me. I had run with all my strength, as fast and far as my selfish legs would take me. The man had caught my brother instead. Now he’d never let go.
Poison Creek
* * *
(1995)
Six
I’m not ready for fall: the long, chilly evenings, the morning frost shining on the last of th
e peppers and tomatoes, the yellowing squash, the tattered pea vines still clutching their stakes. Despite its late planting, the garden has flourished; my cupboards look as full as my mother’s ever did, and I’m proud of the rows of canned vegetables, the neat labels: pole beans, pickles, salsa. Yesterday I dug up the lavender potatoes Adam ordered on a whim from a catalog. I figured they’d be bitter, but they were light and sweet, and we ate a small mountain of them, boiled, with butter and salt. This is why we left Baltimore, where we shared an apartment for over five years, eager to exchange the city for small pleasures like these. “A good fall taste,” Adam said, and I wondered how I could have dug onions and beets, caulked the north windows, walked beneath maples filled with leaves the color of fire, and all without realizing summer had tapered to a brief warmth somewhere in the afternoon, dried up, blown away. Too late, I’m wishing I’d savored it more, our last summer alone. Next fall, we’ll have a nine-month-old child. I remind myself of this every day, trying to make the idea seem real.
How will we find time to plant another garden? How will we keep up with the house, the yard, oil changes and dental appointments and regular exercise, the day-to-day maintenance that already demands so much room in our lives? It seems as if we are already as busy as we possibly can be, Adam with his carpentry work, me with my job at the Turkey Hill Nature Preserve, no parents close by to help out in a pinch. “There’s Pat,” Adam reminds me—another reason we moved to New York State. And already she’s volunteered baby-sitting, but her house is a disaster, her little girls wild, and I’m not reassured when she tells me, “When you’ve got three, what’s one more?” Of course, my mother would love to stay with us for a while after the baby is born, but she’d mine the house with green scapulars, prayer cards, and bottles of holy water, the way she did the time she came to visit just after Adam and I were married. It had been a long week for all of us. On Sunday, she went to Mass with a neighbor—I’d arranged that in advance. Afterward, over the brunch I’d made, my mother spoke of nothing but the graffitied state of my soul—one black mark for each missed Mass—while Adam ate in silence.
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