Sister

by A. Manette Ansay

  “I still got some git left in me,” she told him. “I can run over quick as a rabbit if I must.”

  “You think a rabbit won’t get blown away?”

  “Not this rabbit.”

  Father Van Dan studied her face to see how firmly she’d made up her mind. “Suit yourself,” he finally said, and she watched him dash back to the church, a wayward crow fighting the wind. For a while, she thought she might go on over to the church basement after all. There’d be plenty to do helping Sister Mary Andrew and Sister Mary Gabriel with the clutter of coffee and Kool-Aid and Styrofoam cups, the tangle of children forced to share toys, the anxious parents worrying over fallen trees and flying glass. But now the worst of the storm seemed to be blowing out over Lake Michigan, and her kitchen was finally clean. She was happy she’d stayed at home. She hung a fresh strip of flypaper from the light fixture and made herself a cold supper: sardines and soda crackers, a can of diet cola, and—a treat—two butter cookies from the Christmas tin in the closet. She relished those cookies, allowing each one to melt into velvety slush between her teeth. The heat didn’t bother her much. The lightning was far away, delicate as thread. Harmless.

  A thick fish smell from the lake drifted in through the open windows, ruffling the homemade curtains with their embroidered heart borders, shivering through the leaves of the plants suspended by macraméd hangers, shuffling through the pile of letters and bills and advertisements on the coffee table. The storm was spinning itself into the lake; tomorrow night after work, she might drive to Herringbone Beach to look for the interesting pieces of driftwood and polished glass she used to make Christmas tree ornaments. She settled down on the sofa to finish her niece’s pot holders. The portable radio beside her crackled with bursts of static like laughter. Ninety-two degrees. Humidity ninety percent. Tornado warnings in effect throughout Wisconsin until midnight. She pictured the families in the basement of the church, unfolding the cots, passing out pillows and sheets, snacking on peanut butter and jelly. There was no need for all that; this was clear. You just had to smell the air. She hummed to herself as she worked. The twilight passed into evening.

  What woman hasn’t had the uneasy feeling that she’s being watched, stripped bare of potential and promise, broken down into muscle and sinew, bone and flesh? Mrs. Baumbach was seventy-six years old, a widow, an innovative cook, Father Van Dan’s closest friend outside the clergy. She made toys for the parish children out of toilet paper rolls and egg cartons and glitter; she was admired for her watercolor paintings of lakefront scenes. She kept the books at the rectory, something she’d taught herself to do. Oneisha was a town of less than seven hundred people, a place where people proudly announced that no one ever locked doors. Of course, there were incidents now and then: teenage boys speeding up the Fox Ranch Road; drunkenness; rabid animals; family disagreements; the occasional suicide.

  Now Mrs. Baumbach was finding it difficult to concentrate. She got up to pull the shades, the fish smell oiling the back of her throat, and then—an odd impulse—she walked around the tiny house, latching screens. Perhaps the weather had unnerved her. Perhaps the butter cookies had been too rich. The wind whispered in the bushes as she sat back down to her work. It was after nine by the time the last puckered daisy was sewn into place. She thought about all the years she’d lived alone, how feelings like these had come and gone, leaving nothing in their wake but a vague sense of foolishness. She peeked between the curtains. The town was dark. There were no stars. She got into bed, tugged her white cotton nightgown over her knees, and pulled the sheet up to her lips.

  She would never be able to remember their faces. She would never be able to say, exactly, how many boys there were. Five or six, she thought. Maybe two. She was certain the time was after midnight—or was it? No, she had just gone to bed. It took several days before she could weave a ragged story from the scraps, the false cuts, the oddly shaped pieces: faces like white moons hanging too close; the rough talk; the forced walk to the kitchen as they took turns stepping on the back of her nightgown. Certainly local boys wouldn’t do such a thing. Certainly they must be boys nobody knew. She sat at the table with her head in her hands as one of them opened the refrigerator, pulled the pickle relish and mustard and cherry Jell-O onto the clean linoleum floor. The juice pitcher shattered, and the boys kicked at the pieces, grinding them under the heels of their combat boots. Bitch. We’re hungry. Cook us something. Cook us some eggs. And there was the knife, its question-mark tip: Won’t you do as I ask? She got up and walked on her bare feet through the glass. She collected, eggs, margarine, milk. She turned on a burner, reached for a pan.

  The smell of the margarine melting too fast. The smell of the boys, their sweet cologne, and the cigarettes they smoked as they waited for her to feed them. Sweat. The smell of her lilac talc rising from the folds of her nightgown. The pop and hiss of the eggs in the fat. The scold of the bacon, its irritable writhing. The angry burn of toast left too long in the broiler. The boys’ mouths opening and closing over their laughter. Her own mother’s voice like a faraway dream: The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. They found her Christmas tin of butter cookies and swallowed them, one by one.

  What woman cannot recognize hunger? What woman can live for long in this world without being seen as merely a body, nourishment, egg and margarine, breast and belly, mouth and hip? Sam loved eggs—scrambled, poached, fried, hard-boiled, slathered with ketchup or mayonnaise. His favorite meal was a fried egg sandwich, which my mother often made on weekends, and as children we’d compete to see who could avoid rupturing the yolk, as my father intoned, Don’t play with your food. I was allowed to make soft-boiled eggs for our after-school snacks; I served them in metal egg cups, so we could knock off their heads with a spoon, scoop up the salty yolk with the buttered tip of a piece of toast. Mrs. Baumbach could not remember how many eggs she prepared. She could not remember the boys’ hungry faces. She could not remember how many boys there were. Maybe there were five boys. Maybe there were three. The only thing she was certain of was the knife—its unusual tip, its dark leather grip.

  It was the parishioners coming up out of the church basement, heading home after the all clear had sounded on the radio, who saw the light in Mrs. Baumbach’s kitchen window. Someone noticed a torn window screen flapping like an injured wing. Someone called, “Hello-oh! Geena, are you still up?” while someone else, stepping through the wet lawn toward the back of the house, caught the last rush of a man’s shape disappearing into the tall field of corn. The parishioners gave chase, but corn swallows everything: raccoons, skunks, foxes, dogs, unmindful children. Don’t go into the corn, we were warned every year, but there was always another story of a child who disobeyed, wandering miles into the corn before he or she was found, dehydrated, exhausted, even dead. While the men searched the fields, the women cleaned up the mess in the kitchen and did the dishes and wiped the counters and straightened the house and swept the porch clear of last year’s leaves—whatever they could do to help out, to put things right. The police, arriving from Horton, would find no footprints, fingerprints, no physical evidence of any kind. And the next day, a medical exam revealed that Mrs. Baumbach had not been hurt, though she required twenty stitches in her feet. Surely there had been at least four boys. Surely they were boys nobody knew.

  The sun is coming up now; the tips of the bare trees quiver like the warning hairs along a dog’s curved back. It should not take long for the police to reconstruct the ghost of my brother’s last hours. I called Harv back for the facts, and here, at last, is the evidence I’ve needed. The ruptured well cover. The broken bones: left tibia, right femur, a shattered ankle, three cracked ribs. The knife, by now encased in plastic, labeled along with the other samples: teeth, hair, bits of rotted denim. For the rest of my life, I’ll see Sam walking through the fields, through narrow strips of woods, following the lakefront toward the house where we are sleeping. Coming home. And I’ll wonder, What if he’d made it back?

 
Adam comes into the kitchen, stands behind me, presses his lips to my hair, and I cry harder because this feels so insincere, these tears that he thinks he understands. Last night, after talking to Harv, I called my mother at Auntie Thil’s, wincing at the cheery message on her answering machine: Hi, it’s Mathilde! So sorry to have missed you!

  “Mom?” I said. “Are you there? Pick up. Please, pick up.”

  But no one did.

  “Mom, please,” I said. “I’ll try again later. Call me as soon as you can.” How I want to tell her that Sam was lost long before he disappeared. How I want to tell her what I could not tell my grandmother: It was not your fault.

  How badly my mother wanted to work at the cannery with her sisters, but she was young, always too young. Watch out what you want or you’ll get it, my grandmother said, but my mother stared after them longingly when they left the house, laughing and swinging their lunch pails. Summers they spent sorting vegetables, picking bad beans and stray leaves and dead field mice from a conveyor belt; in winter, they bottled the company’s sweet fruit pop: cherry, orange, grape, lime. Mary, seventeen and known for her capable nature, supervised Elise and the other girls, warning them whenever the man they called The Company was coming by tugging her kerchief low on her forehead. It was noisy work, hot in the summer, cold in the winter, sticky with sugar and dust. The day of the fire, they went to work with scarves wrapped around their noses and hot potatoes tucked in their pockets to warm their hands. It had snowed six inches the day before, and another six inches stretched the faces of the clouds. Keep warm, the mothers murmured as they sent their daughters out to board the company pickup, which went from farm to farm, and because it was a Saturday, the bed of the truck was filled with teenage girls and women, huddled into the straw.

  Keep warm, mothers told their husbands and sons and younger daughters as they split up at the barns to do chores. The mothers milked, pressing their foreheads into the cows’ warm sides, wondering about their daughters who must be standing on those awful wet concrete floors by now, shivering under those high fans, which blew chill air across their shoulders. The mothers calculated again how much the family needed that little bit of money. The mothers worried over frostbitten toes and misshapen ears, poor circulation, wool. The mothers planned what they would fix that night for supper—thick meat stew over mashed potatoes, pepper-and-flour gravy, buttered beans, steaming tea laced with honey and a splash of lemon extract. Lord God, the mothers prayed, keep them warm.

  Eleven

  Sam’s burial must be delayed until after the ground thaws, and so it’s May by the time I fly back to Wisconsin, my first trip home in more than ten years. Adam cannot come with me; spring is his busy time. For the past three weeks he’s been working on an apartment complex going up south of Cobblestone. When the sun sets, the crew works by artificial light, and there are nights when he doesn’t get home until midnight. Sometimes I’m up feeding the baby, and Adam stretches out on the floor beside the rocking chair, still wearing his dirty clothes. “I feel like we’re the subjects of a sleep deprivation experiment,” he says. By seven-thirty, he’ll be on his way back to the site; I’ll have fed Joe at least once more before he goes. For me, the days and nights have blurred: the baby cries and I feed him; I sleep and the baby cries. He has colick, and there are times when nothing will comfort him. Then, I leave him wailing in his crib and walk out onto the deck, and I’ll stand there for a long minute, breathing in the piney scent of the woods, before going back inside. And yet, when I drop him off at the sister’s to go to Turkey Hill, it’s everything I can do to leave him behind.

  He screams all the way from Albany to Chicago, but by the time we board the plane to Milwaukee, he gives up and sleeps until our descent. In the airport lobby, I see my mother first and though, of course, I’m expecting to see she has aged, I’m not prepared for how much she is starting to resemble my grandmother. Her hair is permed tight to her head and rinsed a uniform steely gray. She’s eating an ice cream cone with the same unself-conscious enjoyment that used to annoy my father, embarrass Sam and me. “Mm!” she’d say, biting a piece of fruit, chewing a slice of meat, her eyes rolling blissfully, reverently. When she sees me, she extends the ice cream like a bouquet. “Try this,” she says—her first words to me, in person, since her visit to New York—and what can I do but take a big sloppy bite? Before I can object, she’s given Joe some on the tip of her pinkie finger. “He won’t know why,” she tells me, “but years from now, when he thinks of his grandma, he’ll always remember something sweet.”

  Driving home from the airport, she tells me she’s putting the house on the market, she’s found an apartment near her office in Sheboygan. “I guess I should be more nostalgic,” she says, “but now that I’ve made up my mind, I’m eager to get rid of it.” As we pull into the driveway, I see the exterior has been freshly painted, and all the old car parts and broken appliances are gone, leaving bald patches in the grass. Inside, I admire the new linoleum in the kitchen, the bright fixtures, the wood banister polished to a rich, glowing warmth. But the water still runs yellow in the bathrooms. The fruit trees have grown too old to bear; the barn finally collapsed last year. Sam’s bedroom in the basement smells of mildew, and though my mother has replaced the carpet, it’s already dark along the edges, slick with wet.

  I feed Joe in the living room, sitting in the white wicker rocking chair that used to be in my bedroom. Half-packed boxes are scattered everywhere, and the walls are bare of photographs. Elise’s piano occupies the space where the couch once was; the couch itself is gone. “The new place will be much smaller than this,” my mother says when I ask, and she shows me a picture of the complex she’ll be living in, her unit circled with red pen. “If you want any furniture, let me know.”

  She glances at the piano. At various times, she’s suggested moving it to New York, but I always say she should keep it. My grandmother gave it to me as an instrument, not an ornament, and I don’t want to see it sitting in my house, day after day, a silent reproach. “Why not offer it to Monica?” I say.

  “I promised your grandmother I’d keep it until you were ready to have it.”

  “You did? When was this?”

  “Oh, way back. Before you got married.”

  “It’s been longer than that since I’ve played. I’ve probably forgotten everything.”

  I shift Joe to my other breast, and my mother watches, suddenly shy.

  “You were the only one I breast-fed,” she says. “By the time Sam was born, the doctors had decided formula was better. Now they’ve changed their minds again. You can’t imagine.” She shakes her head. “There I was, taking pills to dry up my milk, and Sam would be screaming his head off because he had to wait while I warmed the formula. It didn’t make sense, that mother’s milk wasn’t good for babies. But I went along with it anyway.”

  “Why?”

  My mother sighs. “That’s just how it was back then. When Doctor told you something, you did it. It was a different generation. We didn’t question things the way you do today.”

  I tense, waiting; it’s the closest she’s come to bringing up the baptism since Sam was found. But she says nothing more. Later, after supper, we play cards at the kitchen table, discussing everyone and everything but ourselves. It occurs to me that tomorrow is Sam’s burial, and yet neither one of us is mentioning it. It’s like something that happened years ago, distant as my father’s leaving or my grandmother’s death. We talk about the rising price of real estate, people moving in from as far away as Chicago, eager for a country setting. “The broker says I can get one seventy-five for this place,” my mother says. “Can you believe it?”

  “You’re rich,” I say. “What are you going to do with all that money?”

  “Some of it’s your father’s,” she says. “The rest—I don’t know. I guess you’ll inherit it at some point.”

  “You should take a vacation. Go on a cruise.”

  My mother makes a face.

  “Or
buy a sports car. Something red and sexy.”

  She laughs. “Maybe I’ll ship you that piano,” she says. “Whether you want it or not.”

  “Not.”

  “You might use it if you had it. Especially now, with Joe. It’s nice for a child to grow up with music in the house.” We’ve drifted away from our card game, and now my mother turns her hand faceup on the table. “Well,” she says, and she stands, yawning. “Think about it. I’m going to turn in; how about you?”

  I’ll be sleeping in my old bedroom; my mother has set up the same bassinet that Sam and I once slept in. She brings me extra blankets, a glass of water for the nightstand. “Sleep well,” she says, but I don’t. I’m restless with half-dreams, unable to get comfortable. The wind picks up. A tree branch thumps the side of the house like an irregular heartbeat. When Joe starts crying around midnight, I’m almost grateful. I change him, prop myself uncomfortably against the headboard to feed him. He’s fussy; he won’t take much. He cries off and on for an hour or so before, at last, he closes his eyes. I ease him back into the bassinet, lie down, and will myself to fall asleep. I’m almost there when I hear the floor creak beside my bed. Old houses, I tell myself. Wind. The floor creaks again. I think of Sam’s friend sitting beside me on this very bed. The gleam of the knife. I open my eyes, and a low sound escapes from my mouth before I can stop it.

  “Shh, it’s all right,” my mother says.