This is all too metaphorical, isn’t it? We two, the ones that went out into the world, wanting something different, wanting exhilaration. Me going first, and you following just after. Yet, dear, this isn’t why I remember that tumble down the hill. It’s because when we got to the bottom and were lying there, panting and giddy, we both heard a terrible noise, a sort of screaming. There was a house cat with her insides torn out. She was lying not three yards distant from us. I suppose she must have been attacked by a fox or a dog—something that got disturbed by the noise we were making and ran off before we arrived at the bottom of the hill. Oh, God, that poor cat, I can still remember her: an orange tabby, slender and sleek, no doubt she had been a good hunter herself before she met that fox or that dog. She wasn’t looking at us, no doubt she was half out of her mind with pain. You started crying, “What do we do? What do we do?” and you looked at me with round eyes because I was the elder and should have known the answer. But I didn’t know, either. So we ran. Back up that hill, scrambling, hands grabbing at whatever bush or stone we could use to make it quicker, fast, fast, as quick as we could away from that cat and her devastating misery. When we got to the top, Flora was angry with us for taking such a risk. You and I looked at each other and somehow agreed without words that we shouldn’t tell her about the cat. As I recall, the three of us went on our way, sobered and shaken, Flora by our behavior and you and I by our encounter with the cat, which was an encounter not only with death but with violence and suffering. Nature red in tooth and claw. I don’t believe we ever spoke of it between us. It was as if it never happened—
—except that in my mind, that cat is still there, in all her wretchedness, forever dying. And we are forever running away from seeing it.
This is what I remember: we ran first for joy, and then later for fear—as I said, it’s all highly metaphorical. I take comfort, Louisa, from imagining you snug in your farmhouse now, out there under the great open Illinois skies. You will stay there forever—or I hope you do, anyway. I understand that after a certain point, staying is the brave and virtuous act, whereas leaving is the cowardly one, and selfish.
All the north of China is dissolving into violence and chaos—do you know this? Have you heard? I don’t know what kind of news reaches you in America, but here the stories are worse every day. I say stories because they are too horrible to be believed, and because I am not there to witness them. I will not explain myself, except to say that I am not a good woman. I left my family and now they are in grave danger and I am safe. That is all there is to know—
I won’t stay to hear what will finally break me. And if all is well, if they’ve gotten out safely and are even now sailing home, then it’s better that they believe I was not likewise spared.
You, who know me better than anyone, can already guess what happens next: I am leaving again, and this time for good. Months ago, when the situation seemed grave, when I was entertaining fear without knowing what it really was, when the true horror of all this had not yet even begun—Poppy articulated two options: to return home or to stay. But there was a third one, hiding, and that is the one I’ll choose. This is my great disappearing act, Louisa. I am going where no news will reach me, and where news of my presence will not ever go out into the world. China has such places—I have a friend here who knows them and has agreed to help. Or I should say that we will help each other, for it seems that my appearance still holds some magic for those who have never seen a foreigner before, and therefore she thinks I can be put to some use.
She will help me, I think, only because she does not know the truth. She thinks I am a widow and cut off from my family. Well, and perhaps I am—
Forgive me for writing this—and also for the fact that you will never get to read it, for I mail it through the flames. Forgive me, forgive me. I find myself asking pardon again and again, though I know I don’t deserve it, from you or from anyone. I deserve nothing but still I ask for one more thing, which is that you remember—not with compassion or pity—but with love,
Your sister,
ADDIE
Driving, 1951
Like an ocean. In autumn, that’s the only fitting description: all the colors of the corn with the light bouncing off the leaves, wave after wave of it coming at you from all directions, and the tractor—out there, to the west or the south—the only ship in sight.
Hazel and Karol have signed the papers; they own the farm. This is their house. And this is their land, and those are their fields stretching out this way and that. At a certain point, they become someone else’s, but from a distance you can’t see the dividing line and so all that corn out there waving and waving, it could all be theirs. An ocean of it, theirs. In the same way two fish own the deep black sea.
It’s the second harvest since Bert and Louisa moved into town, and Hazel’s sisters are talking of sending their parents on a trip to the coast. “Do they even want to travel?” Hazel asks.
“Sure they do,” Iris says. “Every human deserves to see the ocean once in their life. All that mass of sameness puts the soul in a new frame of mind.”
Their parents are doing well enough in their old age. Louisa’s memory has grown patchy, but she is untroubled by the fact or by much else, even if their father is querulous. After a lifetime of hard work, they are owed a vacation, it seems. “Sameness,” Hazel repeats, dipping another beet out of the pot and putting it straight into a tub of ice water. Iris and Rena are helping her can every last vegetable from the garden. Their hands are all stained a beautiful red. “If you want them to feel bowled over seeing a lot of the same thing, why don’t you bring them back out here for the day?”
“They’ve had enough corn for a lifetime,” Iris says. “Let them see the ocean, for a change.”
“That’s right,” Rena agrees. “Them and me both. I’d get away if I could, but those cows don’t take a break, it turns out, and I don’t get to take one, either.” She slices a beet, revealing circles inside like a sawed-through tree. “You know what I mean, Hazel. We can’t just up and go.”
Hazel hasn’t told her sisters about the baby yet; at her age, it’s too ridiculous to get all gushy. It’s enough having the farm that makes her too busy to leave. “Who’s taking them, then?” she asks, glancing at Iris.
“Oh, we’ll figure it out,” her sister says. “This is Daddy’s fondest dream, you know, and he and Ma both deserve to live it.”
The beets are canned: that’s autumn. Then winter comes with its scraping winds and its snow, which melts a little and refreezes into ice. Walking to the henhouse and back, Hazel puts her arms out for balance and feels like she’s dancing. The view is all variations on white, beige, and black. Cans of vegetables are brought up from the cellar most days for dinner. Beets are lucky they have such a pretty color, Karol says, because they sure do taste like dirt.
In the spring, Edith is suddenly among them again. Back from Chicago—for good, she says. Hazel gives her a room at the house, no questions asked, even though her younger sister comes down for breakfast most mornings with a look like she’s taken a hard punch to the gut. Red eyes from crying, but if she doesn’t want to say anything, that’s her business. There’s Edith for you, Hazel thinks: a perpetual mystery.
Biloxi is the closest big water, and so it wins out over the Carolina coast. Anyway, it’s on the gulf; there will be a sand beach and soft waves; there will be seagulls. All this has been debated and settled without Edith’s say, though it doesn’t really matter to her where she goes. “You don’t have to do it,” Hazel says when Edith tells her she’s going to be the one to drive their parents down south. Hazel looks her in the eye as she speaks. “Iris and Rena hatched this plan, you let them figure it out.”
But Edith doesn’t mind. She’s got nothing else going on. “It’ll be fine,” she tells her sister. “Change of scenery and all that.”
Two weeks she’s been back now, staying at the old home place with Hazel and Karol. Everything is familiar and also strange: they�
��ve rearranged some of the furniture and added a few things; the dairy cows are gone; her sister’s on stork watch. Hiding heartbreak has turned out to be harder than she’d counted on. Sleeping in the bed she once shared with Hazel, she’s reminded of how as children they’d whisper together before going to sleep. They used to tell each other everything and now she can’t tell and Hazel can’t see the most important fact about her: that she has loved, and loved hard, and now it’s all done. About a thousand times a day, Edith closes her eyes and is back on Orleans Street, walking home from the bar, with Moira suddenly spinning away from her and declaring that she can’t do this anymore. “I want kids,” Moira keeps saying, raising her hands to her head and grabbing her hair in two handfuls. “I wanna get married and have a husband and kids. I want a life.”
Their life in Chicago is the one that Edith wants back. The third-floor walk-up with the rattling radiators, burned spaghetti, and hangover headaches. After the WAC, on the GI Bill’s dime she went to Harvard on the Rocks, the place so crowded she had to share a locker with two other students. When classes let out, the single long hall was so packed she could hardly turn her head, but out of that crowd came Moira, and that was it. After two years, they went down to Urbana together to finish their degrees and then they moved back to Chicago. Edith got a job as a secretary in an insurance office on the near south side. Moira taught elementary school. She’d thought they would stay there forever, but after her girl said good-bye, Edith knew she had to go.
So now she’s back with her family. Eventually, she knows, she’ll make a life of some kind. She’ll move into town, get a job, a place of her own. But for the moment, all she wants is to be moving again. Give her the open road and a destination. Give her something to keep her mind off the thing that hurts.
Bert’s feet aren’t working right. They go tingly and then numb and no amount of pushing on them makes the feeling return. Lou used to try—she’d sit on the side of the bed and haul his legs up into her lap and beat at the soles of his feet the way, years before, she’d beat the rugs she’d dragged out from the house and slung over the fence—but a few months ago she stopped doing it. One morning she got out of bed and padded off to the kitchen, and he waited a few minutes to see if she’d come back before he finally gave up and struggled to his feet with only the aid of his cane. The next morning was the same; it’s as if all of a sudden she forgot about his feet. Maybe forgot about him. She forgets a lot.
It could be worse, though—yes, by God, it could be much worse. Lou’s seventy-seven, and he’s seventy-nine. Who would have ever thought they’d make it this old? Either of them alone, much less the two of them together? His own pa at seventy-nine had been dead a quarter century. And with how hard he and Lou worked all those years, you’d think their bodies would’ve gave up a long time ago. Every day was a struggle, fighting weeds, fighting the weather, fighting to get a hog onto the butchering bench, to rake a whole field of hay into bales. Fighting sick children and sick cows and fighting years and years of not nearly enough. Up before dawn and falling into bed so bone-tired at the dark end of a day that he never felt any poverty of light in those years before the electrical wires came out to reach them. God said let there be light, but He still kept half the darkness for sleeping, didn’t He.
Yes, considering all that his body has been asked to do, Bert considers himself lucky that the worst of it now is his feet going numb. He only hopes he’s dead before they give out on him completely. In the meantime, he can walk; he can drive. He can do all the things a man’s required to do.
Edith doesn’t agree. “Daddy, your feet,” she says with a shake of her head when he asks for the keys.
It’s morning, early. He’s been up for two hours, sitting with their packed suitcase inside the house, waiting for Edith to pull up in her sister’s car. Too filled with anticipation to eat more than a slice of buttered toast when Lou called him in for breakfast. She’d looked down at the suitcase and asked where he was going. “You know we’re going to Biloxi,” he’d said, angry that she couldn’t remember. Confusion spreading over her face like a cracked egg. Then she’d started nodding slowly and said that’s right, Biloxi, the ocean, it must have slipped her mind.
“You can’t drive with your feet like that,” Edith says now, “if they’ve got no feeling in them.”
“Of course I can.”
She makes a fist over the keys and crosses her arms, as if he might lunge out and grab them from her. The Coronet’s not hers, anyway. It belongs to Iris, who’s been giving him and her mother rides in it ever since they moved into town. Not that they have much need for motor travel: there are stores the next street over, and their new church is only a few blocks away. But he knows this car well, could drive it all the way down to Biloxi, no problem. He’d planned on having his daughter take the wheel only when he got tired, and now here she is, standing by the driver’s side with crossed arms and a narrow gaze, looking like a policeman or a schoolteacher. “Daddy, I’m a real good driver, you know that.”
“I know that? Who told you I know that?” He leans harder on his cane and throws a fierce glance at his wife for support, but she just opens the backdoor of the car and climbs in.
He’s throwing a tantrum, Louisa thinks. Look at him there: old man acting like a little child. He wants his toy. Old man with his floppy mouth and white eyebrows, saying no no no. Never thought her own daddy would get so ornery, so old. Where’s Mother to put him right? Where’s Mother to play “Oh, Promise Me” on the piano, and Daddy to sing with his hand on her shoulder, chin lifted, nose lifted? You sing not with the nose, Louisa, my love. That’s why you must get the nose up and out of the way. The front door opening and there he is setting his hat on the table by the front door, there he is asking, “What dinner delicacies doth my nose detect?”
“Roast,” Louisa says. “We’re having roast for dinner.”
Edith leans in the open window. “What’s that, Ma?”
“Roast.”
Edith squints and shakes her head. When she straightens up again, her father has already opened the front passenger door. He lowers himself into the seat and thrusts his cane at her to stow in the back. Then he sets his gaze firmly on the windshield and spends the next several hours staring at it—not through it, but at it—as if glass is the most interesting substance he’s ever laid eyes on. As if it would never occur to him to look at the things beyond it.
They stop at a Red Fox in Chester to relieve themselves. Bert buys a pack of Camels and smokes one while he’s standing on the porch, then immediately lights up the next once they’re settled in the car again. He doesn’t try to get in the driver’s seat, and Edith chooses not to draw attention to her victory.
Two hours later, he says, “You planning on letting us stop to eat some dinner?” It’s the first full sentence he’s spoken since they started out in the morning.
“I figured we’d stop awhile in Cairo.”
Her father sniffs. “I don’t know where we’ll eat there.”
“They’ll have places, Daddy. Cairo’s no small town.”
“Your ma’s not used to eating in restaurants. She fixes us some chicken on bread, and that’s what we eat.”
Hands on the wheel, Edith concentrates on the gray tongue of the road wagging ahead. “You must’ve figured we’d be eating out while we’re gone.” She steals a quick glance at the backseat and is startled to see her mother looking right at her. Louisa narrows her eyes and says, “I could eat half a heifer.”
At the diner, they sit and a waitress appears to take their order. Bert orders for Louisa. She likes what he likes, which makes it easy. They’ll have one pork chop each. “There’s two in an order,” the waitress says and flicks her pen in the direction of the sign. Are they thin? Bert wants to know.
“Get two orders,” Edith says. She turns to the waitress and says wearily, “They’ll each have an order. Daddy, you want sauerkraut and mashed potatoes on the side? Ma, is that okay?”
Louisa tur
ns a mournful look upon Bert. “Don’t they have fried apples?”
The business of ordering finished, Edith is nearly exhausted. This is day one, and they’ve planned on eight. In her suitcase out in the car are two bottles of bourbon, carefully wrapped in a nightgown. She was never a drinker before she went to Africa, but the war practically required it, and just because they were women didn’t mean they wouldn’t demand their fill. War drinking was done with a grimace. It was many different lips leaving marks on the rim of a bottle. Then, in Chicago, Edith discovered the bar. She and Moira would order Rusty Nails, Manhattans, Stingers, Old-Fashioneds. Edith loved the names almost as much as she loved the taste, almost as much as she loved the way the drinks made her feel—like she was Amelia Earhart in the cockpit, looking down on the world.
Her parents don’t drink, except on Easter when they buy a bottle of wine sweet enough to make your teeth ache, and everyone at the table gets a glass containing exactly two sips. What would they say if they knew their daughter has packed not one, but two bottles of bourbon? Nothing, probably. They would cover their eyes to keep from seeing it, plug their noses to prevent the odor from entering their nostrils. Her parents have led the smallest of lives, which is why that first glimpse of the ocean is worth all this: the long drive down, her father’s anger, the way her mother’s whole face collapses when the pork chops arrive with catsup, and no fried apples to be seen.
Just before they reach Tennessee, Edith steers them off 51 and onto 45. There’s a Highway 45 up near Effingham, but Bert isn’t sure if it’s the same one. He and Karol went through Effingham that day when they went looking for Junior. Can’t remember the town, just that 45 went right through it. He has a distinct memory of crows: a whole flock of them perched in a tree that only had leaves on the bottom branches. Bert had known it was a lost cause driving to Terre Haute, that if Junior had jumped a train coming out of Edwardsville there was no way he’d get off so soon. Why not take it farther east, into new states and territories? Junior’s disappearance was the last straw for Lou, the last tragedy she’d allow herself to suffer, but Bert doesn’t think of it like that. The way he sees it, wandering was the only thing that kept their son from real trouble. The war screwed him up in the brain—whether it was from seeing gruesome things, or doing them, who’s to say. Maybe it was all the noise. In any case, Junior came back from Europe touched in the head, and after that he just had to keep moving. And surely he’s still out there, walking around.
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