The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  “Hi,” said Sandy, not looking up.

  “We’re in trouble.” Jude dismounted from Lightning. “Will you help us?”

  He glanced at her irritably. “How can I say when I don’t know what it is?”

  “It’d be dangerous for you if we told you.”

  Sandy put his hand on his skinny hip and said nothing, studying the stream of water from the nozzle, the sun backlighting his blond head and casting a shadow over his face, which was freckled like a permanent case of the measles. He had a cowlick like the thumbprint of a giant to one side of his hair just above his forehead, which gave an interesting lilt to his crew cut.

  “Ace might kill you,” added Jude.

  Sandy looked at her. “That fascist? Just let him try.”

  “What’s a fascist?” asked Molly, tying Stormy to a yew branch by the fringe on his handgrips.

  “Never mind. Come up in my tree house, where no one can hear us.”

  Sandy had never before let Jude visit his tree house. It had a retractable stairway that could be locked, and only Sandy knew the combination. It also turned out to have beige carpeting, a shelf of the World Book Encyclopedia, and a shortwave radio with as many dials and switches as Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. Sandy said he’d built it from a kit. The walls were papered with postcards bearing the call numbers of ham radio operators he’d talked with all over the world. Half a dozen chessboards with games in progress were set up along one wall. A telephone sat on the rug.

  “Come over here,” said Sandy. He showed them a telescope on a tripod, pointed out the window. Through it, Jude could see right down into the Commie Killer trenches across the street, a grid of red clay gashes and hillocks stretching the length of the field. When Sandy moved the tripod to another window, she could see Mr. Starnes down in the valley, mowing the alfalfa by the river on his ancient wheezing tractor. He was wearing a battered felt hat low over his ears and was spitting tobacco juice from the corner of his mouth. Downriver, his wife was breaking off blossoms in the tobacco patch, the weathered wooden curing shed behind her. And beyond them stretched the mountains, range after range, separated by deep coves and valleys where creeks were flowing and farmers were mowing and a train mounded high with tree trunks and coal chunks was crawling along like a fat, lazy caterpillar.

  “BUT I CAN’T DO IT myself,” concluded Sandy after explaining his plan to the girls, who were sitting cross-legged on the carpet by the phone. “My mother won’t let me out of the house after dark.”

  “Mine won’t, either,” said Molly, “but I can sneak out.”

  Jude’s father rarely noticed where she was after dark because he was so busy changing dressings on patients in his office, or counseling them on the phone about their sunburns and ingrown toenails, or writing up their records at his desk, or rushing to the emergency room to stitch up their wounds from knife fights and motorcycle wrecks.

  “Maybe you can spend the night at my house,” said Molly as they climbed down the tree-house ladder, “so we can sneak out together.”

  As they stepped onto the lawn, Sandy raised the ladder behind them, like the drawbridge of a castle.

  WHILE JUDE WATCHED FROM the kitchen doorway, Mr. Starnes, in faded overalls and clay-caked work boots, got out of a rusted red pickup truck and lifted a burlap-wrapped ham from the back. Jude grimaced. Clementine would take slices off it and soak them in water to get the salt out, and Jude and her father would have to eat it with grits and biscuits for the rest of their lives. Mrs. Starnes, wearing a floral housedress and leather oxfords with thin, white socks, carried a foil-wrapped cake. Since Clementine had already gone home to Riverbend for the night, Jude went out on the back porch to greet them.

  “My dad’s on the phone right now. He’ll be out presently.”

  “My gracious, Jude, haven’t you grown up, now!” said Mrs. Starnes. Her hairdo looked as though she’d removed her rollers and forgotten to comb out the hair.

  “Yessum.”

  “I declare, if you don’t look just like your daddy,” said Mr. Starnes, propping one boot against the bottom porch step.

  Jude frowned, preferring to look like her mother, since her father was nearly bald. Mr. Starnes’s boot smelled of manure.

  “Where’s your shirt at tonight, honey?” asked Mrs. Starnes.

  Jude shrugged, crossing her arms over her scrawny chest. “It’s too hot.”

  “I’ll bet you a dime you won’t run around without no shirt in a few years here,” chuckled Mr. Starnes. His eyes were as washed-out as his overalls, like clear cat’s-eye marbles.

  It had rained at the end of the afternoon, forked tongues of lightning striking the distant mountaintops as though the sky were a lake swarming with angry cottonmouths. Then, as the sun shone through a gap in the banks of black clouds, a rainbow had appeared, arcing across the river right down into Mr. Starnes’s tobacco shed. At Sunday school, the preacher said a rainbow was God’s proof that, even after trying to drown everybody for being so wicked, He forgave them. Sometimes God acted like a big baby.

  But now the sky had cleared and the sun had set, turning the faraway mountains the color of grape jelly. Bullfrogs had started to croak in the reeds along the riverbank and fireflies were flickering like birthday candles among the leafy branches of the sweet gums in the valley below.

  “That daddy of yours,” said Mrs. Starnes, “we think he’s pretty special.”

  “Yessum,” said Jude. Now she’d have to hear about each stitch her father and grandfather had sewn in these people’s mutilated bodies, each ancestor whose life they’d saved by operating by lantern light with a carving knife on a kitchen table in a remote mountain cabin during a thunderstorm, after a journey across a swollen creek on horseback in the middle of a midwinter night.

  “Yessir,” said Mr. Starnes, “I recollect the day my paw lost his arm in the combine.…”

  Jude’s father appeared in the doorway in his usual white dress shirt, open at the throat, sleeves rolled to the elbows. Sighing with relief, Jude picked up the foil cake from the porch floor. “Thank you, Mrs. Starnes. My daddy and me loves your cakes.” Sniffing the foil, she detected caramel frosting, her favorite.

  Her father looked at her with a raised eyebrow to indicate that she’d made a grammar mistake. As she carried the cake into the kitchen and cut herself a large slice, she tried to figure out what it was. Shrugging, she went into the back hall, where she’d been playing Ocean Liner, which Molly had taught her that afternoon. They’d pasted numbers on all the doors for cabins. Striding down the hallway munching her cake, she lurched from side to side on her peg leg. A storm was brewing in the nor’west and it was time to batten down the hatches, whatever they might be. She steadied herself with her free hand against the cases that held her father’s arrowhead collection. On his days off, they drove the jeep down into the valley and dug up the moist black silt by the river. As they sifted the soil, he told her about the people who had lived in the valley long ago—the Mound Builders, the Hopewells, the Copena, the Cherokees, each tribe replacing the previous one, all the way back to the dawn of time, when the valley had formed the floor of an inland ocean full of bizarre sea creatures. When the ocean dried up, the Great Buzzard swooped down from heaven to scoop out the mountain coves with its wing tips.

  The arrowheads and grinding stones had been made by the Nunnehi, the Cherokee Immortals, Jude’s ancestors who lived underneath the mountains and at the bottom of the river and who came to help their descendants when they were in trouble. In autumn, when the whining winds from the north whirled the leaves off the trees, you could sometimes hear them murmuring to one another in the Wildwoods. And in the summer when you cast your line into the river for fish, if it got snagged, you knew the Nunnehi had grabbed it just to remind you that they were always there. And sometimes when the water was really calm and the breeze stirred tiny corduroy ripples across its surface; you could catch a glimpse of the roofs of their houses on the river floor.

  As the Starn
es’s truck pulled away, Jude’s father took her sticky hand to lead her into the den, unaware that the swells were running high and their ship was about to capsize. “My daddy and I love your cakes,” he said. After turning on the radio, he sank into his brown leather armchair. John Cameron Swayze was talking about soldiers being brainwashed by the Communists in Korea. “Oh, Lord,” her father said with a sigh. “Poor, suffering humanity.”

  “Why do they always bring us those awful hams?” asked Jude.

  “That’s how they’re paying me for Mr. Starnes’s appendectomy.”

  “Money would be nicer.” She stroked the back of his chair. The leather was crazed with age cracks like the inside of an ice cube.

  “No doubt. But they don’t have any. Besides, some people consider country ham a delicacy.”

  “Not me.”

  “Yes, I know.” He smiled.

  “Daddy, why are some people so mean?” Jude straddled the arm of his chair, facing the back. It was her new horse, named Wild Child. The other arm was Molly’s, which she’d named Blaze. That afternoon, they had been lassoing Molly’s boxer, Sidney, in midgallop with pieces of Clementine’s clothesline. Time after time, they played “Git Along, Little Dogie” on the record player—until Clementine marched in and turned it off, announcing, “Miss Judith, if I hear ‘yippy tie yay, tie yo’ one more time, I gonna bust all your daddy’s furniture into firewood and chase y‘all round the backyard with a carving knife.” Impressed, the girls had switched to Ocean Liner.

  “Well, I guess they’re mean because they’re unhappy.”

  “But you’re unhappy, and you’re not mean.”

  He looked at her. “What makes you think I’m unhappy, baby?”

  “Because you miss Momma.”

  He frowned and lowered his head. “That’s true. But I used to be happy when she was here. Maybe that’s the difference. People who’ve never been happy are mean. The rest of us are just sad.”

  She could smell his aftershave lotion, like cinnamon toast. Leaning over, she licked his cheek. The stiff hairs prickled her tongue and the cinnamon lotion tasted disappointingly bitter, canceling out the sweetness of the caramel frosting.

  “Don’t, Jude,” he said, frowning and wiping his cheek with his hand. “That tickles.”

  Wrinkling her nose, Jude tried to scrub the terrible taste off her tongue with the back of her hand. Then Wild Child reared, hurling her off his back and into her father’s lap. Leaning her head against his chest, she shoved a thumb into her mouth and felt his heart thudding against her cheek like a frog’s throat.

  “Baby, don’t suck your thumb, please. It’ll push your front teeth out. You’ll look like Bugs Bunny.”

  Jude giggled.

  “Don’t you think you should wear a shirt?” he asked. “You’re getting to be a big girl now.” He patted her pale smooth belly.

  “I don’t want to be a girl.”

  “How come?”

  “Girls are too boring.”

  “So you want to be a boy?”

  “No. Boys are too scary.”

  “Well, what do you want to be, then?”

  “I want to be in heaven with my momma.”

  He said nothing. When Jude looked up, his eyes were wet and red.

  “I have a friend,” offered Jude. “She lives in the new house next door. She’s named Molly. She’s going to be in the second grade. She doesn’t like shirts, either.”

  “That’s good, baby. I’m glad there’s someone in the neighborhood now who’s closer to your own age. I don’t want you playing with Ace Kilgore and those other big boys. They’re too rough. Promise me you’ll stay away from them?”

  Jude said nothing for a long moment. She didn’t like to lie. But she wasn’t really lying, since she now meant to stay as far away from them as she could. “I promise,” she finally said. “Can I spend the night at Molly’s house sometime?” She twisted around in the chair until she was reclining in the crook of his arm.

  “Sure. If it’s okay with her parents.” He was gazing at a photo on the end table—of Jude’s mother in a low-cut gown, standing inside a wine bottle.

  “Why’s she inside that bottle?”

  “She wasn’t really. It’s trick photography. It was an ad for a winery.”

  “She was pretty, wasn’t she?”

  “She was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.” He was looking at the far corner of the ceiling, where Clementine’s dust mop had missed a spiderweb. “I was an intern in New York. I first saw her surrounded by photographers on a corner near Central Park. She was wearing this big old picture hat the wind kept trying to blow off. I just stood there staring at her until she got annoyed and asked them to make me leave.”

  Mr. Starnes had said Jude looked like her father. Did that mean she wasn’t beautiful like her mother? “Why did she have to die?”

  “Well, I came back home from the war in France, and we were very happy to be together again. So we decided to give you a baby brother. But your mother’s brain started bleeding. She became unconscious and the baby died in her stomach. And then she died.”

  “But I didn’t even want a baby brother.”

  MOLLY’S MOTHER INSISTED THAT Molly say her prayers, even though Jude was there, so the three of them knelt by Molly’s bedside, beneath the pink dotted swiss canopy, as Molly recited her blessing list, which included her bicycle, Stormy, and her dog, Sidney. She concluded, “And God bless my new pal, Jude, and keep her safe from harm. Amen.”

  “Do you want to say your prayers now?” Mrs. Elkins asked Jude.

  “I don’t have any.”

  “But you need prayers, Jude. It’s easy. Just try.”

  So Jude mumbled, “God bless my dad, and Clementine. And Grandma. And my momma in heaven. And Mrs. Elkins. And God bless my new pal, Molly, and keep her safe. But not Ace Kilgore. Amen.”

  Mrs. Elkins looked at Jude questioningly as she smoothed her blond pageboy with one hand. But then she just stood up and folded back the bedspread. “Good night, sleep tight, and don’t let those old mosquitoes bite!” she called as she closed the door.

  Molly and Jude scrambled up on the bed. Each grabbed a pillow. Every time Sidney tried to crawl onto the mattress, they beat him back with the pillows. The bed was a raft, adrift on an ocean full of ravenous sharks with flashing white teeth. Sidney crouched down on his front paws, cropped tail wagging frantically. He began to bark.

  “Oh, shut up, Sidney,” muttered Molly, dropping her pillow. “Sharks don’t bark.” She collapsed with a bounce on the mangled sheets.

  Sidney crept up the bed and slithered between Molly and Jude, where he lay panting dolefully in time to the pulsing locusts outside. Molly’s father had started snoring down the hall, like a monster growling in a cave. He looked like a monster, too, with dark, curly hair all over his arms and eyebrows that stuck straight out like the bristles of a toothbrush. Molly said he drove around to farms buying cowhides that got cut up and turned into belts at the tannery Sandy Andrews’s father owned.

  Molly went downstairs to the kitchen, wearing only her shorty pajama bottoms. When she returned, carrying two bowls, she paused for a moment, framed by the doorway, bare chest tanned and smooth except for two pink nipples like cinnamon valentine hearts. Her black hair, which Jude had never seen unbraided before, was floating around her face the way Jude’s mother’s hair did in a photo on Jude’s bedside table. In that photo, she held Jude’s chubby cheek against her own on Jude’s first birthday. She had a white rose in her hair, perfect white teeth, and pale dreamy eyes.

  “Why are you staring at me like that?” asked Molly when she reached the bed and handed Jude a bowl of raspberry sherbet.

  “I didn’t realize you were beautiful,” replied Jude.

  “I am not,” said Molly, eyes blazing in the faint glow coming through the window from the streetlight. “If you want to be my friend, take it back right now.”

  Crossing her fingers, Jude said, “Okay, I take it back.”<
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  Leaning against the quilted headboard, they licked the tart sherbet off their spoons in a strained silence.

  “Do you like God?” Jude finally asked.

  “Sure. He’s okay.” Molly offered her spoon to Sidney, who daintily poked at the sherbet with his large pink tongue.

  “I don’t.”

  “How come?”

  “He took my mother to His house. She wants to come back home now, but He won’t let her.”

  Molly set her bowl on the bed for Sidney to finish. “Well, I guess I don’t like Him anymore, either, then.”

  Jude decided that Molly was her new best friend.

  Once the lights were off in all the houses down the street, they pulled on their shorts and tiptoed down the carpeted stairs and out the front door. The locusts were so loud that they seemed to be gathered inside Jude’s head. Swarms of fireflies were making the star-specked night sky sparkle like a black diamond. Jude and Molly trotted across the straw-strewn lawn, the dew chilly on their bare feet, Sidney at their heels.

  At Sandy’s house, they found the hose coiled behind the foundation shrubs as Sandy had promised. Dragging it across the street, they stuck the nozzle into a Commie Killer trench. Then they re-crossed the street and turned on the faucet that protruded from the foundation bricks.

  Crouched behind the geometrical yews, ducking a circling mosquito, Jude asked, “Why do you think Ace is so mean?”

  “Momma says people are mean because they get up on the wrong side of bed in the morning,” said Molly, arm draped across the panting Sidney.

  Jude broke a piece off the tall triangular bush beside her and sniffed it. It smelled like the golden liquid Clementine mopped the kitchen linoleum with. She held it out for Molly to sniff. A hoot owl started calling in the Wildwoods.

  Every time sleep threatened, one poked the other with an elbow and they gazed blearily at the constellations scrolling past overhead. Jude pointed out the Pleiades and told about how the Cherokees used to make would-be braves count the number of stars in the cluster. They discussed the difficulties of needing glasses before glasses had been invented. Then Molly explained that stars were actually light shining through holes in the night sky. Behind the black, everything was white.