by Alan Ryker
Katherine stood at the counter chopping vegetables. It looked like she was making chicken and dumplings, one of Pete’s favorites.
“Hey, hun,” he said.
“Hey…oh my God, look at you. You’re filthy.”
Pete looked at his arms. His hands were dirty, but his arms were clean and pasty white down to where his shirt cuffs had been. He imaged she was aghast at his face and neck. “It’s dusty as sin out there. Especially with the plow.”
Katherine pressed her lips together, and they went thin and sharp. Pete shouldn’t have mentioned the plow.
“So you turned it all under?” she asked.
“The wheat. Yep.” He tried to sound casual, and looked unconcerned as he stepped over and grabbed a round chunk of raw carrot and started chewing at it. “What’s for supper?”
“Chicken and dumplings.”
He almost got out, “That’s what I’d hoped for,” when she said, “That’s a lot of money gone we don’t have.”
“Hun, I told you, if we didn’t plow it under the top soil would have blown clean away. It couldn’t take three years like this. Besides, it would have made barely enough wheat to worry about.”
She nodded. “How’s the cotton?”
“Still alive, but I’m afraid we’re gonna hit the bottom of the water table soon.”
“And then you’ll plow that under, too.”
“No, it’s got good roots. We’ll get something out of it. Might be a meager something, but...” He shrugged.
“What if you’d put the wheat in the irrigated field?” she asked.
Pete knew what she was getting at. “The situation would be flipped.”
“Except we wouldn’t be about to hit the water table because wheat takes less water. So we could have kept one crop instead of losing both.”
Pete breathed in and closed his eyes for a moment, then spoke calmly, “No one could have predicted three drought years in a row. The price for cotton is sky high. I’d hoped to make back some of the money we lost last year. It was a gamble.”
“Well, you bet on the wrong team.” She turned back to chopping vegetables.
Pete stared at her back for a moment, but he decided to bite his tongue. First off, she was right. He could have played it safe and had one good crop. If he’d made a killing on cotton he would have taken credit for making the right choice, so it was only right he took the blame for making the wrong one.
Second, he knew that her anger came from fear for her family. She was an angry mama bear. Kathy wasn’t the easiest woman in the world, but he’d never wanted a pushover.
“Dad!” Teddy shouted as he tore around the corner and into the kitchen. He flew through the air and collided with Pete in his stomach and groin region, almost doubling him over. Pete managed to catch him though, just under his armpits, and tossed him up. Teddy had taken after Pete’s Polish side, his dad’s side, and though he was only four he was about as strong as a bear.
“You let your dad wash up,” Katherine said. “He’ll get you filthy.”
Teddy stuck out his tongue. Pete laughed silently with his back to Kathy, but couldn’t keep his wide shoulders from bobbing.
“You want another bath?” she asked.
Teddy pressed his feet into Pete’s stomach and leapt down, then ran screaming away.
“You should back me up,” Katherine said. “It’s like having a third son.”
But Pete could hear the affection in her voice.
“I’m gonna go take a quick shower.”
* * *
After supper, Pete gathered the Tupperware Katherine had filled for his mother and stacked it inside the picnic basket.
“Can we go?” Junior asked.
Pete looked over his shoulder. Peter Junior stood leaning in the doorway. He was seven, but sober for his age. Not at all like Teddy. Also unlike Teddy, Junior hadn’t gotten much of Pete’s solid Polish build. Junior had taken after either Katherine’s side of the family or Pete’s mother’s, who were both dark Irish and tough-as-nails, but slight.
Teddy peered around his older brother with a hopeful expression on his round face. He often let Junior speak for him so that at four, Teddy barely talked at all, while Junior had held adult conversations at the same age.
Pete turned back to the counter. “Not today. I’m too tired to stay long.” He took two slices of white bread from the bag, wrapped it in a paper towel and sat it on top of the Tupperware.
Even with the dumplings, he knew his mom would want white bread for sopping. Katherine said it didn’t make sense and didn’t include it. Pete just did it himself, because he didn’t particularly need an earful from either of them.
“Come on, Dad. Teddy really wants to go.”
“I’m sorry. Not today. I’m not even going to walk. I’m going to take the truck.”
Teddy loudly booed him. When Pete turned around, Junior had already slipped silently away. He wasn’t sure which he liked less. “Hey, I’ll play that new video game with you guys when I get back. I won’t be long.”
Teddy set off for the living room like a shot.
Pete couldn’t do anything but shake his head and smile as he gathered up the picnic basket and headed out the back door.
He started off in the direction of the truck, then stopped. The late June air certainly wasn’t cool, but compared to the way it had been earlier in the day, it was pleasant. Regardless, something in Pete wouldn’t let him drive the quarter mile to his mother’s house.
So he set off on foot across his reserve pasture, which was still filled with tall grass. Almost no amount of drought could kill the prairie grasses, and though it was dry and yellow, it was nutritious. On a good year, Pete wouldn’t let his cattle into that pasture. He’d hold it for hay. This year, the lack of moisture had kept the grasses from recovering after the cattle ate it down, and he’d have to let them graze in his reserve. It wasn’t a disaster. Pete would just sell more cattle than usual. He didn’t like to, because it would make next year less profitable, but it would get him some much-needed extra cash before the holidays and would cut down on feed costs over the winter. Good Lord, feed was going to be expensive. Everyone was in the same boat as he was. Some worse.
Pete’s mother’s house came into view. He’d grown up in the house, but hadn’t seen the inside of it for quite some time. His mother didn’t let him inside anymore.
When he was young, it had been packed full of fragile things. When his mother wasn’t looking, he’d take the delicate figurines and painted plates and such from where they sat on doilies on the dark, hardwood furniture, and feel them. The house had been packed full, more than his father would have liked, but it was clean. His mother had grown up very poor, and the objects had brought her pride and happiness, and she’d cared for them well.
But since his father’s death, something in her brain had short-circuited. She kept everything. Literally everything. If you tried to remove something as worthless as an old newspaper she’d fly into a rage that Pete forgave because he knew it masked her panic. Newspaper could be used to wrap dishes and stuff boxes. Paper towel tubes could be stuffed with plastic grocery store sacks, combining two useless items into one. Styrofoam food containers from the café in town could be used for storing leftovers.
There was nothing for which his mother couldn’t think of a use. And though it never came to that use, its potential made it worth keeping.
Pete unlatched the gate that separated the pasture from her yard. It was large enough to drive a combine through. He had to hold the hanging end as he pressed it forward, had to lift it from the divot it had dug into the earth. His sons didn’t have the strength to open it properly, and had carved a deep rut.
He sat down the picnic basket and looked at the fence pivot post. He pressed it and it moved, and then tilted back in when he let go. The plug of concrete at its base had begun to crumble, and sat loosely in the dry, shrunken earth.
The silver lining of the drought was that it gave him time.
He would no longer be tending to or harvesting the wheat. He made a mental note to start a list of repairs to perform around the property. Lord knew the place could use some TLC. In fact, maybe his mother would let him in. There must be a million things that needed fixing in that old place.
He looked towards the old house. His mother didn’t seem to be waiting for him on the porch. Three seasons out of four, she’d taken to sitting on the porch in the evening with some crocheting or a library book—which he picked out for her, since Katherine couldn’t be trusted not to attempt to inflict her taste upon the poor old woman—and waiting for him to bring her supper. She always had the previous day’s Tupperware washed and stacked up beside her.
As he came around from the side of the house to the front he saw for certain that she wasn’t waiting outside for him. He wondered at it, but climbed the three steps up to the covered porch and knocked on the front door. She didn’t answer. He waited for a minute then knocked again.
He tried to peek through the windows, but his mother had started keeping the blinds shut. She’d caught him peeking before, trying to assess the conditions of the house she didn’t allow him into. He knocked again and listened for movement or her voice. Nothing. That worried him. He’d thought maybe she was in the bathroom, but she should have responded by then.
He tested the knob then fished his keys out of his pocket. Before he put the key in the lock, he hesitated. He only had one key to her house, and she didn’t know he had it. She’d be furious if she knew. He should have had a copy made, because she’d likely take this one from him if he used it.
Before committing to entering his mother’s house uninvited, he circled around to the one window he knew didn’t have blinds: the one over the kitchen sink.
It was too high for him to look in. A five-gallon plastic bucket lying nearby became a stepstool, and he cupped his hands around his eyes to cut the glare.
What he saw nearly knocked him off the ladder. He felt as if he’d been punched hard directly over his heart.
Garbage filled the kitchen to a height that he thought must be as tall as his mother. A narrow path cut through the trash.
It didn’t resemble the kitchen he’d known as a child in any way. Yes, the cupboards had overflowed with pots and pans. Decorative brass tins and other tchotchkes had crowded the walls. But his mother had cooked there, delicious Irish food and even attempts at Polish cuisines like pierogi and borscht from recipes taught to her by her mother-in-law, his grandmother. She had baked, pickled and preserved. None of that was even thinkable in the trash heap before him.
The house was dim. Pete couldn’t see very well beyond the light going through the grimy window. But he noted that the tunnel seemed to end just beyond the door into the dining room, which didn’t make sense. And atop the pile, he saw movement. He focused harder.
Cats. They stared at him with their eyes wide and their ears flat against their heads.
Jumping off the bucket, Pete ran around to the front door and opened it.
The smell hit him as hard as his first view had.
His mother had a smell. He knew it. He’d smacked the boys for saying so. He’d come close to telling his wife off for insinuating it. But he knew it himself.
Still, he hadn’t estimated how bad a house would have to smell before the scent permeated a person’s flesh.
At first, he couldn’t pick out any one aroma. The air was thick with dust, mold and dander such that he could literally taste it, somehow dry and dank at the same time. Then the smell of cat piss overwhelmed him. Then the smell of wet garbage, like the trash juice at the bottom of a garbage can.
With the blinds all drawn, it took a moment for Pete’s eyes to adjust. Then he started along the path that cut through the chest-high piles of junk.
From the door it twisted between an old divan and a big wooden television set atop which sat a smaller television with foil-flared rabbit ears. The couch had space for only one person. Random clutter filled the other cushions. There was so much to take in—so much visual noise—that Pete could only see a solid pile of junk. The pile was ringed by another solid wall of junk, or, depending how you looked at it, a narrow tunnel wound through the pile, a canyon worn down by daily passage.
He continued to follow it, until it ended abruptly.
Nasal growls emanated from the heap, and half-feral cats hissed at him from the kitchen, menacing at face-height. But he couldn’t see any way into the kitchen other than the way they had gotten there: climbing.
“Mom!”
At the core of the pile, things scurried. In the kitchen, rubbish tumbled from where Pete could only assume the countertops probably still stood as cats hurled themselves through the air in panic at his sudden speaking.
But his mother didn’t reply.
Maybe she was in her bedroom, sick. He’d just seen her the previous evening, but the flu could strike an old woman down in hours. To get to her bedroom, he’d need to climb over the pile and turn right just before the kitchen. The hallway to the bedrooms had junk piled on either side, but it appeared that she’d maintained a path.
Pete leaned onto the pile and almost took a step, before the obvious struck him. A seventy-three-year-old woman didn’t climb to get to her kitchen and bedroom every day. As bad as her knees were, she took half a minute to go up or down the three porch stairs.
Pete scanned the living room, then looked back at the pile blocking the kitchen. Though a minute ago he wouldn’t have believed it, there was some kind of mad order to most of the room. It was full of trash, yes, but trash stacked with obvious human intent. The pile in front of him, though…
And then he understood.
Pete began to sweep aside junk, then lift and toss it. Beneath, he found his mother lying motionless. Unconscious, but breathing. He slid his hands beneath her, but hesitated. He didn’t know how badly she was hurt, or what more damage he might do by carrying her. He’d have to go get a vehicle.
As he stood, though, he saw the cats. They peered from their hiding spots, ready to dash away at any moment, but also ready to approach as soon as he left. Why had they been perched above her?
Pete didn’t trust cats, and he trusted these little feral monsters less than most.
He couldn’t leave his helpless mother with them. He picked her up. She was so light. He always tried to ignore her frailty, focus on her toughness, but right then it wasn’t possible.
He cradled her as best he could and walked quickly home.
* * *
Because Katherine insisted on driving, they left the kids with the neighbors. Pete sat in the back seat of their SUV and held his mother’s head in his lap. She didn’t awaken. Katherine made the twenty-minute drive in fourteen.
The only other person in the emergency room of the Lockton City Hospital was the young mother of a boy who’d fallen out of a tree after refusing to come down for a supper of sausage and cabbage, she’d explained. Lockton, Kansas had a population of about 17,000 people, so the lack of emergencies on a sleepy summer evening wasn’t surprising.
Pete stared at a television hanging from the ceiling in a corner. Some game show was on. It didn’t matter what was on. His eyes went to the television automatically, but in his mind, he’d returned to the house. If for some reason he hadn’t brought his mother supper that evening, she’d be dead. She would have died beneath a stack of trash and probably been eaten by mangy cats. She would have ended up one of those freak stories on the news where you wonder, “Didn’t anyone care about her?” and, “What kind of person could let a parent live like that?”
“You should have seen the house,” Pete said. “I figured it was bad, but you can’t imagine.”
Katherine glanced up from the magazine she was flipping through. “We’ve offered to help her. We’ve tried to help.”
“There’s obviously something wrong in her head. We can’t let her go back there.”
“So—what—the rest home in Wichita?”
Katherine had take
n it upon herself to research old folks’ homes. The best possible afforded by his mother’s savings was located in Wichita. It wouldn’t be like the ads that showed the elderly dressed in polo shirts and puffy khakis flirting with each other in the spring sun, but it was a couple steps above the places where they stole your candy.
But Pete knew that her savings didn’t reflect what his father had earned in his life. A farmer’s wealth was tied up in land and equipment. In all fairness, if she had to live in an old folks’ home, they should sell everything to get her into a deluxe setup.
“Sometimes I think you’ve got a city mentality,” Pete said. “We’re not going to ship her off and forget about her because it’s convenient. We’ve got the life we do because of her and my dad.”
Katherine looked a bit stunned. Pete knew she wasn’t used to seeing him riled up, but she should know that his mother was one subject to be careful with. Their last discussion of the matter hadn’t gone well.
“So what do you suggest?”
“Well, I think—”
“And let me remind you that her moving in with us is absolutely not an option.”
Most of Pete told him to back down. Most of him considered the weeks and months of her anger he’d endure if he kept pushing. But the small, furious part of him couldn’t stop.
“Then we can sell the farm, and the tractor, and the combine, and she can live the retirement she deserves.”
“Keep your voice down.” Katherine flicked her head at the nurses behind the reception desk, who were indeed staring.
“My mother should be relaxing and enjoying the fruits of a hard life. Instead, she’s sitting in an old dilapidated house. For our sake. And our sons’.”
“No, no, no. Don’t try to put that guilt on us. We’ve offered to help her keep that place up. There’d be nothing wrong with that house if she’d let you in to do repairs. She will absolutely not be moving into my house and doing what she’s done in her own.”