And then come the boxes of paperwork.
Debbie says, “Look for tax forms, contracts, anything related to the farm.”
Joe begins leafing through a pile, dubious. “How far back do we go?”
“Seven years for taxes. Nineteen ninety-two.” She sits on the floor and then scoots back to the wall, dragging a box of papers with her. “Any contracts we should look at—receipts and all that—to see whether they need keeping.” Thank God she’s a lawyer, undaunted by the prospect of spending hours in the labyrinth: small type every way you turn.
But Joe isn’t her, and after a few minutes of passing papers over to his sister, asking trash or keep, his head is waterlogged. Everything is slow. With the light through the window and the papers swimming before him, he feels as if he’s back in school, staring at chalk dust caught in sunbeams and feeling his butt grow numb on the chair.
He struggles to his feet and declares that he’s done.
Eyes raised over glasses, mouth pinched, Debbie puts on their mother’s disapproving expression.
“I’ll make you a deal,” Joe says, putting his hands up in a defensive posture. “You handle the papers, and I promise I’ll get all the rest up here done. Every single thing that’s not folded up and stuck in an envelope, I’ll sort through it.”
A pause as negotiations are considered. “Fine,” Debbie says after a moment, and goes back to scanning the fading print.
In a narrow closet off the landing, a discovery: six old paintings on canvas, mounted on wood. The paint is cracked, chipped, bubbled, flaked. There are tears in the canvas, furling corners. But the images are still clear enough: each one is a landscape, recognizable by certain trees, fences, and far-off farm buildings as barren winterscapes viewed from one or another of the house’s windows. They are not very good paintings. In better condition, they might be sold at a thrift store.
But they are interesting. That night, when they take their mother out to dinner, Joe asks about the pictures.
“Your father painted a little,” their mother says, squinting critically at the hot buffet against the far wall. “I burned most of them.”
After dinner, in the parking lot, Debbie says good night to her brother and Wendy, and to her mother, who frowns when she tells her that Mal is coming the next day. “You’re going to make her go through that house with you?” Hazel asks. This is how she refers to the place now—“that house”—as if it’s betrayed her.
“She wants to see it again,” Debbie says. “And she can’t wait to see you. We’ll be out to pick you up in the afternoon when we’re done. Tomorrow I thought we could go to Graebner’s. We haven’t been there in years.”
“It isn’t open on Sundays.”
Debbie is caught short, Joe and Wendy, too. You don’t expect to be corrected by Hazel, who is sometimes uncertain of grandchildren’s names and can’t always remember which year it is.
“Someplace else, then. Anywhere you’ve been wanting to go, Mom, just say.”
Hazel shakes her head. “Any place is fine.” She moves to the passenger’s-side door of Wendy’s car to wait.
Debbie had planned on staying the night at the house, but the prospect of going back out there now makes the back of her neck sweat. Pulling out of the parking lot, she drives to a hotel and checks in, then calls Mal at home. Her daughter doesn’t answer, probably out at a bar, which is exactly what she should be doing, enjoying her last nights in America: sweet youth, careless in the summer, in the city, alive.
When Mal pulls up to the house the next day, she still has the taste of spit in her mouth, but all visible signs of her hangover are gone. She sees her mom’s car, a moving truck, and a beat-up Chevy with a bumper sticker on the back that reads “Stop Staring at My Rack” beside an outline of deer antlers. Pretty funny, really. Mal has always taken a kind of pride in her country cousins. And her grandma, living her whole life on this farm. Her grandma is so authentic, a stoic German farmer to her core. It’s unbelievably sad that she has to live in an old folks’ home now. Mal’s mother has said the sad thing is that Hazel has never been anywhere else, never been around many people, barely traveled anywhere except for a wedding or funeral, but Mal doesn’t agree. She figures her grandmother is the last of a dying breed, truly tied to the land. She drinks well water, for God’s sake, and has a real cellar, not a basement, but a cellar with a door in the floor, where she used to keep potatoes and onions from the garden. Nowadays you have to go to Africa to find people like that.
Mal parks and crosses the lawn, goes in through the side door onto the screened-in porch. “Hello!” she calls out, and peeks through the window into the dining room, where her two cousins are crouched over the upturned table.
They both look up, and Mal wonders if they knew she was coming. “Hey,” they both say, and Travis adds, “The door’s unlocked.”
She goes in through the kitchen and then joins them in the dining room. “What’re you doing with the table?”
“Taking the legs off,” Jesse grunts, leaning into a screwdriver, “so we can fit it through the door.”
Mal squeezes past to see the living room. The space is empty except for the piano, with indentations in the carpet and brighter spots where the furniture used to sit. She spins around, a slow three-sixty. “God, this is weird. What did you do with everything?”
“Some of it’s at Grandma’s new place,” Travis answers, shaking out his arm as he joins her in the living room, “and some’s in the truck. My mom and dad just drove a load of shit to the dump.”
“I thought we were going to save some of it.”
“They just took the broken stuff, old magazines and whatever.”
A few feet away in the next room, Jesse tunes them out. It’s taking forever to get the legs off this table because the screws are real tight and probably haven’t ever been loosened. It’s not the work he minds, but this whole thing is crap: his parents and Aunt Debbie sticking Grandma in a fucking nursing home when she’s lived her whole life in this house and probably doesn’t even know there’s a world outside where kids his age are opening fire on their schools and the president’s getting his dick sucked by a fat chick in an ugly hat. And if his grandma doesn’t want to know about all that, why is it a problem? If she wants to be quiet and live alone, she should get to do it. She’s never done a thing to anyone, never been anything but nice, doesn’t get on his case or ask what he’s been up to. Pays him twenty dollars to come out and cut her lawn, and afterward gives him a Coke, and if there’s a ball game on, they watch it together and they don’t talk about anything but the pitching and the hits, and whichever commercials she finds interesting. Not that he cares about baseball, but it’s kind of cool that his grandma, who is old as shit, always stays up to watch the games, even when they’re on the West Coast and aren’t over until eleven or twelve o’clock.
He wouldn’t have even come out here to help, except that his dad and Aunt Debbie would probably throw most of her stuff away, and he figures it’s his job to try to save as much as he can. When his grandma was over for dinner a few days ago, he’d asked her what she really wanted to keep, and she’d looked at him and said, “I guess it doesn’t really matter.” Then his mom had interrupted and said all cheerful that they’d keep as much as they could, so one day when Jesse moved out, he’d have furniture for his place. It wouldn’t have surprised him if his grandma had gotten offended, since his mom was basically giving away all her stuff without permission, but she hadn’t. Instead, that little smile she sometimes got came over her face and she leaned over to ask him if he was planning on moving out soon.
He wishes.
Travis and Mal come back into the dining room, and Jesse’s still working on the table legs, but he’s almost done. In a minute they’ll be able to haul the table out to the truck and clear up some space. The house is feeling so weird now, it’s better just to get it done as fast as possible. Mal opens the door to the stairs and calls up to her mom, “I’m here!”
Debbie comes tromping down. “You made it.” She puts her arms around her daughter and grimaces. “Yick, sorry, I’m all sweaty. It’s about a hundred degrees upstairs.”
“What should I work on?” Mal asks.
“Anything you want.” Glancing around the room, she nods at the glass-fronted built-in. “You feel like tackling the doodads, that’d be great. There should be some boxes in the truck. Maybe some shoe boxes for those little things. Wrap them up so they don’t break.”
Mal pulls open the double doors of the cabinet. One side is devoted to scalloped glass plates and coffee cups that she doesn’t remember ever using. On the other side is the collection of salt and pepper shakers and a shelf of other knickknacks, everything crowded together so all that’s really visible is the front row. As a child, she’d stood on a chair and peered in; everything seemed magical then because she wasn’t allowed to touch it. But she hasn’t looked in this cabinet in years, and now some of the figurines jolt her straight back to childhood, without any specific memory attached: that shepherd with the sheep, or the one that’s a baseball fitted into a glove, where the baseball is for salt and the glove is for pepper.
Jesus, this is sad. Like so, so sad.
“I’m gonna go grab some boxes from the garage,” Mal says.
Debbie follows her into the kitchen, takes a glass from the cabinet. Squints at it, pours some water in, and swishes it around before dumping it down the drain and pouring a full glass to drink. “Travis, Jesse, you guys been drinking water?” she calls to her nephews in the next room. “Y’all get dehydrated, you don’t watch out.” Every time she’s around her brother’s family, she finds herself affecting a drawl. She and Mal used to make a joke of it. Driving down together they’d practice in the car: How y’all din? J’eet yit?
Mal comes back with some boxes, grabs the roll of paper towels, and goes to work on the knickknacks. And where did it all come from, this souvenir cable car from San Francisco, this sculpted ashtray that reads “Beautiful Biloxi!” over painted blue waves? There’s a Chinese fan, even, like the one her roommate brought back from her study abroad in Beijing. Mal shows it to her mother, who shrugs and says, “My guess is Aunt Edith.” Meaning her aunt, Hazel’s younger sister, a tall gourd-shaped woman who went to college on the GI Bill and never married, who for years and years owned her own flower shop in town. Who, in the last fifteen years of her life, had suddenly began taking vacations all over with a black woman named Del. Debbie recalls getting postcards and thinking, There’s a story there. But never being told.
“So you’re off to save the world, huh?” Joe and Wendy have just returned from the dump, and when he sees his niece, he slings one arm around her shoulders, which is the kind of hug an uncle gives a girl once she’s older than, say, ten. “Going all the way over to Africa?”
“I guess so.”
“Where at, exactly?” Wendy asks. “I know your mother told us, but I can’t seem to remember.”
“Burkina Faso,” Mal says. And then, patiently: “It’s in West Africa.”
Wendy looks at her, shakes her head, looks at Joe, shakes her head again. He knows she has always been a little unsure about his sister and niece, never quite certain what to do with them. Why, she’s asked him, when they’re asked to bring a side dish for dinner, do they insist on showing up with something that requires a geography lesson? They’re soba noodles, they’re from Japan, or Those are kibbeh, they’re like Turkish meatballs. Joe always ribs them for it, but Wendy gets irked. “You think your mother wants to eat all those spices?” she asks when Debbie and Mal are out of earshot. But Hazel has always seemed to take it in stride.
“Well, we’re glad you came down to see us before you leave,” Wendy says now. “Africa sure is far away.”
“Too far,” Debbie says, squeezing her daughter’s shoulder.
The house is slowly coming apart and in the process becoming crowded: there are garbage bags everywhere, boxes, rolls of tape. It’s dirty and hot and still Debbie hasn’t finished going through the papers upstairs, and though yesterday she’d resigned herself to putting them all in her car, taking the whole load back home to deal with later, now she declares that maybe she will try to get it done today. Who needs that mess? Upstairs she goes, and Wendy and Joe and Mal disperse to various rooms to join the boys in sorting and packing and carrying. And the house continues to get stranger to them all, but it’s work now and they’re just focused on getting it done.
A few hours later the sun is evil, the sky is white, the air is so heavy it seems you should be able to shake it out like a blanket, see if there’s some better, thinner air under it to breathe. In the house, Jesse holds his jaw tight as his mother speculates about whether this lamp is worth keeping. Travis is ravenous, stares blankly at the kitchen sink as he pushes handfuls of chips into his mouth. He’s thinking about the summer class he’s taking at Lewis and Clark, thinking it’s not so terrible to sit in an air-conditioned classroom with his accounting calculator, setting the world right with numbers. Debbie, upstairs, squints at a tax form. Pages through, mouth open. These numbers are a lot bigger than she’d imagined they’d be. Her mother has rented out the land for forty years and never once, she’s almost completely certain, never once until now, has Debbie made the morbid calculations: this is how much she’ll get when her mother dies.
Meanwhile, outside, Joe and Mal are packing up the truck and have, one way or another, wandered into a political argument about the bombings in Kosovo. He doesn’t remember starting the discussion, but he’s gotten her angry, and though he’s not even sure he quite knows where he stands on the issue, instead of backing off, he digs in deeper. It seems to him that since the Peace Corps is a government organization, she must have some stake in what the United States does overseas. Some bit of pride, maybe. It seems to him like things over in Europe were getting bad and looking worse, and now the United States and NATO have turned it all around. “You know I’m not some rah-rah type when it comes to the military,” he says, pushing a dresser against the wall of the truck with a grunt, “but there are times you’ve got to step in and put a stop to things.”
“What does that even mean?” Mal asks. “Because obviously I don’t think it’s good when people are killing one another, but how is bombing innocent civilians ‘putting a stop to things,’ exactly?”
“I don’t know there’s much of that happening,” he says, coming back to the front of the truck. “From what I’ve heard it’s some very targeted bombing.”
“We hit the Chinese embassy.” His niece looks up at him, squinting in the sunlight. She has the square jaw and long German nose that are so strong in the family bloodline, particularly in the females. Right now, she could be his mother at a younger age, or Grandma Louisa staring grimly out from her wedding portrait in sepia. “Some of their journalists got killed in the accident. There were protests in China. Like riots, practically. People don’t do that for nothing.”
He raises his shoulders. “But that’s not really civilians killed, is it? And you just said it was an accident.”
“It was civilians, just not white civilians. Which is a pattern I’ve noticed: we tend to care a lot more about genocide when it’s white people being killed.” She gives him a look, challenging him to come back with something to prove he’s not racist. Once upon a time, it was Debbie leveling these shots when he happened to show some brotherly concern and ask about the neighborhood she was living in, the precautions she was taking, as if there was something not only offensive but totally ridiculous in the idea that a white woman could run into trouble in a black neighborhood, walking home late at night, weighed down by about a thousand pounds of law books. “Like Rwanda?” Mal is saying. “We didn’t ever try to stop things over there.”
And on and on.
He watches her splutter, watches her wipe a hand over her face and leave a streak of dust across her cheek. Mal could never be his daughter, raised in so many ways foreign to him, but right now he’s feeling a pang like wh
at goes through him whenever Travis gets carried away talking about football stats, or when he’s seen Jesse skate—he’s witnessing some passion take over their imagination, sweep them up completely. It’s that moment when you realize there’s some little spark inside them that makes them a real person, that’s just them all alone, formed out of nothing.
When she pauses for breath, he climbs down from the truck. Looks her in the eye, lays a fatherly hand on her shoulder. Her face is flushed with the heat, and it makes her look like an uglier woman than she is. He has a mind to tell her that, but thinks better of it. Instead, he says, “I’m betting you’ll do some real good over there.”
Through the flush, despite the heat, she blushes.
All those years, the Hughes family has paid Hazel a good rent. Better than they needed to pay, is Debbie’s guess. Well, there’s some country neighborliness for you. Poor George Hughes—Debbie really should have come down for the funeral last fall, but what could she do? The weather was bad and she was drowning in work, and anyway, Joe and Wendy were here to accompany Hazel to the church and the graveyard after, so it’s not like she had to go alone. Still, considering things now, Debbie feels bad for missing it. Especially since Gene apparently hasn’t changed the terms of the rental since taking over his father’s affairs. Better Gene than his brother Bobby, who last Debbie heard was twice divorced and wandering the world somewhere.
And so here’s the money in the bank: Hazel’s big secret. Debbie doesn’t have to worry any longer about the monthly bill from Golden Valley. She’ll be having a talk with her mother soon. Not this trip, but soon. For now, she’s staying quiet.
As evening comes on and the lightning bugs begin to blink and hover in the grass, the house offers up another secret. It’s six o’clock. Hazel will be down in the lobby of her building, waiting for them to take her to dinner someplace where the cooking’s no good and the tab, if she saw it, would make her sick. They’re about to head out for the day when Jesse, in the garage, opens the door of the maroon Lincoln and finds a set of keys in the ignition.
Rebellion Page 2