by Megan Kruse
Praise for Megan Kruse
Megan Kruse is a young writer of raw and fearless talent and Call Me Home showcases all she can do. She writes here of harrowing lives — of a family bent and broken by violence, where each person is desperately trying to somehow grow toward light and liberation. In the process, she offers a most unlikely tale of hardness and hustle, of grace and loss, of painful love and tough breaks and the unimaginable paths we must all eventually take toward survival.
ELIZABETH GILBERT, Author of Eat, Pray, Love
Call Me Home is an uncommonly powerful debut novel. Megan Kruse writes with great heart and intelligence as she crafts a gripping story from the shards of a broken family.
JESS WALTER, Author of Beautiful Ruins
I’ve been a big fan of Megan Kruse for a long time, but Call Me Home left me astonished by her talent. Beautifully written, deeply felt and utterly compelling, this story of a desperate family separated and on the run is full of unforgettable scenes and richly imagined characters and heady suspense. It’s so vivid, it feels like my own memory. I recommend it with all my heart.
DAN CHAON, Author of Await Your Reply
Megan Kruse has written a tough, unflinching and very loving story about an isolated family trying to scrape by and find a way, one way or another, to survive. I was deeply moved by the lives of her characters and scared for them right up to the end. Just a wonderful book, in every way.
BEVERLY LOWRY, Author of Crossed Over: A Murder, A Memoir
An urgent, beautiful book about love and its consequences, set against a backdrop of the unglamorized West. These characters will lodge themselves in your imagination, stick with you long after you’re done reading. A fine and original first novel.
KEVIN CANTY, Author of Winslow in Love
I’m not sure how Megan Kruse did it. Her first novel manages to be a swift yet contemplative story of how a family can love each other fiercely even when every heart involved gets broken. Through its cast of characters, she is able to focus on what makes a human life shine with joy or ache with conflict. Her writing is cinematic – going from intense close-ups to beautiful sweeping wide shots. Call Me Home is a multi-layered and deeply felt wonder.
KEVIN SAMPSELL, Author of A Common Pornography
I can’t stop thinking about this book. The tension and suspense had me hooked on page one, and I didn’t want the novel to end. Megan Kruse writes unflinchingly about the terror of domestic violence and its haunting effects on a family. She writes with compassion and grace about how humans fail and betray each other, and also how we find and take care of each other. Call Me Home is a harrowing, beautiful, and tender novel about the meaning of home, loneliness, and the endurance of love. Kruse creates characters so deeply drawn and compelling, they will stay with you long after you close the book, as will the novel’s memorable settings, especially Kruse’s vivid portrait of a dark, mysterious, and wild Pacific Northwest. Megan Kruse is a talented and fearless writer, and the prose is just stunning. Call Me Home is a tremendous accomplishment.
CARTER SICKELS, Author of The Evening Hour
Megan Kruse is a stunning and inspiring new voice in American literature. Her beautiful debut, Call Me Home, proves that even as the violence of our lives invents us, a story can do something like save us. Read it and stick it in your heart.
ARIEL GORE, Author of The End of Eve
Copyright © 2014 Megan Kruse
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage-and-retrieval systems, without prior permission in writing from the Publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kruse, Megan.
Call me home : a novel / by Megan Kruse.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-9904370-3-1 (ebook)
1.Families – Fiction.
I. Title.
ps3611.r856c35 2015
813′.6 – DC23
2014020260
Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts
98765432
2201 Northeast 23rd Avenue
3rd Floor
Portland, Oregon 97212
hawthornebooks.com
Form:
Adam McIsaac/Sibley House
Set in Paperback
For my mother, who taught me to love language; my father, who taught me to love stories; and my brother, who knew those woods even better than I did.
Contents
Introduction: Elizabeth Gilbert
1. The Pig
Lydia: Tulalip, Washington, 2006
Amy: Tulalip, Washington, 2010
Jackson: Portland, Oregon, 2010
Lydia: Interstate 84 East, 2010
Jackson: Silver, Idaho, 2010
Lydia: Women’s Shelter, Alamogordo, New Mexico, 2010
Jackson: Silver, Idaho, 2010
Amy: Women’s Shelter, Alamogordo, New Mexico, 2010
Lydia: Tulalip, Washington, 2005
2. The Dog
Jackson: Silver, Idaho, 2010
Lydia: Fannin, Texas, 2010
Amy: Fannin, Texas, 1990
Jackson: Silver, Idaho, 2010
Lydia: Fannin, Texas, 2010
Amy: Tulalip, Washington, 2008
Jackson: Missoula, Montana, 2010
Amy: Tulalip, Washington, 2009
Lydia: Tulalip, Washington, 2009
Jackson: Silver, Idaho, 2010
Lydia: Fannin, Texas, 2010
Jackson: Tulalip, Washington, 2009
Lydia: Tulalip, Washington, 2009
Jackson: Silver, Idaho, 2010
Amy: Fannin, Texas, 2010
Lydia: Fannin, Texas, 2010
Amy: Fannin, Texas, 2010
Jackson: Silver, Idaho, 2010
Amy: Tulalip, Washington, 1996
3. The Fish
Jackson: Silver, Idaho, 2010
Amy: Watermelon Thump, Luling, Texas, 2010
Lydia: Fannin, Texas, 2010
Jackson: U.S. 30 East, 2010
Amy: Fannin, Texas, 1990
Lydia: Fannin, Texas, 2010
Epilogue: The Bird
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Elizabeth Gilbert
WHEN I MET MEGAN KRUSE, SHE WAS TWENTY-ONE years old and sleeting across America like a storm. I was in Wyoming at an artist’s residency, burrowed down to write a memoir, and Megan came blasting through our world, visiting a fellow artist-in-residence. She stayed for just the briefest moment, and then she sleeted out again, but I never forgot her. There was something both hard and bright about this young woman – something that impacted me greatly. She was brave (traveling alone, sleeping in her car, living without) and she gleamed with purpose. She was here to make things, to learn things, to see things, to write things. She was funny. She was bold. She was in a hurry. She would tolerate no obstacles. I got the feeling that fear – whenever it tried to hit Megan – probably just bounced off her and shattered into a million sparkling, harmless pieces.
For a while, we stayed in touch. Her emails were so smart and entertaining that I wished them to be published. Her writing was great – crazy great. Nobody should be able to write that well so young. She had such talent, such charisma, that I almost feared for her. I didn’t want things to move too fast. I didn’t want her to be swallowed up by the sheer force of herself. I felt matronly and protective toward her – toward her talents, really. I was always warning her to find her discipline, not to spin off on us, to keep at her labors, to steady herself down, to find her foothold. I was kind of bossy and stern about it. I wrote her long lectures about honoring her potential. I couldn’t help myself; I had become in
vested in her.
Then I didn’t hear from her for a long while. I didn’t know where she had gone to, and I worried. I feared she might have quit writing. I feared she had not risen to meet her considerable gifts.
I needn’t have been afraid.
Megan Kruse showed up in my life again just last year with the manuscript to Call Me Home, and suddenly it was very clear what she’d been doing during those vanished years: She’d been working.
What she has produced is this beautiful, haunting, elegiac novel. I happen to know that, in her travels and wanderings over her adult life, Megan has seen much of the world, but to tell this tale she returned home to her origins – to the raw, hard, stark, ravaged environment of rural Washington, where she had been raised. Kruse once described her homeland to me as “the country where the mudslides happen,” which works as a descriptor on many levels. The landscape of this novel seems to be a mudslide in process – people slipping, lives slipping, whole towns on the brink of sliding away forever into poverty, despair, and violence. To return to that sort of world and to try to describe its dark power is to scramble for a handhold in the mud, but she has found that handhold, and her prose holds on for its dear life.
Call Me Home is not merely a story of place but also a story of family – particularly a story of siblings. I would say that, in a way, it is more about kinship than about family (two very different ideas when you break it down). It is almost about twinship, actually. The brother and sister in Call Me Home are not exactly twins but might as well be for all the power of connection that thrums between them. They might as well be conjoined twins for the ways their souls and fears and hopes are bound together. Certainly, nobody will ever understand anyone more than these two understand each other – for better or for worse. In the mudslide, in the miasma, in their own individual distractions of sexual desire and yearning, they reach for each other across the dark and grip tight. When they are separated, the grip still holds. The grip always holds. Their grip held on me, as well, long after I finished reading the manuscript. I can still feel their hands on my wrists.
In introducing her own manuscript to me, Megan wrote, “And so I think that in some ways the novel became a love letter and an apology. An acknowledgement that I am inextricably a part of where I came from, and that you can’t actually weigh what is precious or ugly; it is itself, and so are we. What became important as I grew older was the inventory of what might be lost: the way my father would run backwards through the yard to make us laugh; the steep banks and creeks that filled in winter, where my brother always lost his shoes; my mother’s jewelry strewn across a dresser.”
That inventory is this novel, and it gleams with a dark radiance. It contains everything. Megan Kruse has met her promise, and I am glad.
ELIZABETH GILBERT
Frenchtown, NJ, 2014
CALL ME HOME
1.
The Pig
Lydia
Tulalip, Washington, 2006
THE SUMMER I WAS NINE, MY FATHER CAME HOME WITH a pig in the back of the truck. The pig was big, with thick bristles along his spine, and he scratched his back against the barbed wire. “We’re going to fatten him up,” my father said. He threw food into a long trough and then stood back and crossed his thick arms. I followed Jackson to the pen but I wouldn’t touch the pig. Jackson was fourteen and braver than me. He let the pig eat from his bare hand, but I held tight to a long stick. That night I put a piece of bacon on the windowsill to warn the pig to stay away.
My mother had a broken arm that summer. Each day while my father went to work, she got up and cleaned the house, and I helped her until my hands were raw from Ajax. When I heard my father’s car pull into the drive I would run to Jackson. We would wait to hear our father’s voice, to know if he was angry. Sometimes, if they fought, my mother would come to my room at night, sit on the edge of my bed, and whisper. “You must be brave, Lydia,” she would say. “You must trust me.”
All summer long the pig kept rooting under the fence, and my father kept rebuilding it. I thought it must mean something that the pig kept escaping, that maybe it hated my father. That maybe it had powers. I tried to have powers, too. If I counted my steps in threes, I promised myself, if I saw two birds on the roof of the house, if the rain came by four, then my father would be kinder. My father would be new.
In June, while my father was at work, we put clothes into bags and put them in the car. The pig watched us as we drove away. My mother took us to a hotel, but my father followed us and brought us back. He made dinner and danced my mother around the living room, but I felt afraid to let them be alone. I sat up late into the night with Jackson, listening, waiting. I held tight to his hand and he didn’t let go. The next day, I took one of my father’s beer bottles into the shed and smashed it to pieces with a rock until it was half dust. There was a dark empty hole in the wall behind my bed, down by the floor, where I kept secret things. I kept the bottle back there, or at least what had been the bottle, wrapped up in an old rag.
“You must be patient,” my mother had told me. “You must believe in me.” I was patient and I did, but every night when I was in bed I reached down to the floor, into the dark space, and felt for that rag.
There was quiet for the rest of June. It got to the point where I stopped reaching for the rag in the dark. I let the pig eat a slice of apple from my hand and wasn’t scared at all. On the Fourth of July, we went to Marysville to watch the fireworks. My mother looked so beautiful, and the fireworks were bright blooms in the sky above the water tower. What happened between that hour and the next? My father drove the truck home over the rutted road too fast and when he pulled up to the house he pushed my mother out into the dirt. Jackson took my hand and we jumped out of the truck, ran to the edge of the pasture and crouched there. The pig came to us and pushed his head through the fence, and we all waited in the dark until it was over. I touched the pig’s nose. “Shh,” I said, and the pig stayed quiet.
The air was quiet and mean after that. The longer it lasted, the farther my brother and I ventured into the woods, across the property lines that were deep in fireweed and salal. At the end of July, when the brush was thick and dark, we followed the creek until it ended at a pile of trash. We opened one of the trash bags and things came spilling out – eggshells, torn paper, orange peels. Jackson held up a broken wicker basket. It had plastic eyes and was made to look like an owl. We brought it home, and I kept it hidden under my bed. I thought we might be caught, and so later I walked to the edge of the woods and threw it as far as I could.
We played with the pig every time our parents fought now. His bristled back scratched my palms. I fed him scraps from the table and wanted to be good, to do right. If I could be only be good enough, I thought, surely it would count for something. Surely things would change.
AT NIGHT I lay awake and listened to my parents talking. Not the words, just the sounds: “I love you, I hate you, I’m sorry.” Jackson was in his room all the time, listening to music on his headphones and drawing in his notebook. Now that he was fourteen he kept his door shut all the time and wouldn’t let me hear his music, but still he let me come in and sit by him. I stared into the snowy tunnels of the blankets. On weekends he’d take me with him to Randy’s house, and while he and Randy smoked pot I would hold a lizard, let it crawl up my arms and around my shoulders.
In August, the pig escaped again and my father called the butcher. I was sad but didn’t say it. I stared at the square white packages, lined up like coffins in the freezer. I held one in my hand until it burned with cold. I tried not to look at the empty place in the pasture where the pig had been.
When my father broke my mother’s nose, I made his sandwich out of the bacon I would never eat myself. My hands were shaking to touch that bacon. I carried the sandwich to my bedroom and brought the rag out of the dark space behind my bed. I poured the glass dust into my hand and looked at it shining, and then I laid it between the mayonnaise and the meat. It was the perfect
sandwich. It was the worst thing I’d ever done.
I stood in my bedroom and looked at the sandwich. I tried to pick up the plate, to carry it to my father. I counted to ten, and then I counted to ten again. The plate was heavy as the moon; I couldn’t move. Now, I thought. Do it now.
When I heard my father’s boots in the hall, I couldn’t breathe. He was coming toward me and all I had to do was hold it up. It was a gift for him to take, but I ruined it all. I ran past him with the plate in my hands, out the back door and into the woods behind the house, where I buried the sandwich in the dirt by the creek. I threw the plate into the underbrush and no one ever knew.
Now I think that if I had told Jackson it would have been different. He would have helped me be brave. He would have understood how badly I wanted my father to disappear, and what happened later might not have happened at all. But I thought Jackson already knew. … He was the one beside me in the grass outside trying to keep me from hearing them. The pig was nowhere, but still he held me there in the grass, scratching the dirt, saying low, low, “Listen, you can hear the hooves, listen.”
Amy
Tulalip, Washington, 2010
SHE KNELT BY THE OLD METAL STORAGE LOCKER IN THE torn-up garden plot, and the water soaked the knees of her jeans. She could see the house through the dark winter brush. She could hear the hard crack of the axe and the sound of the rain dripping from the trees, a soft and intermittent staccato. The storm last night had taken down a tree on the slick steep drive. The old winch had jammed months ago, and they hadn’t replaced it, so Gary had gone to town and rented one to drag the tree up to the house, where he was splitting and stacking it for firewood.
He would have to return the winch by eight. She moved quickly, opening the storage locker, pushing aside the rusted trowels and feeling through the loose seed packets until she found the one she wanted. She slipped the cucumber packet deep into her pocket and started toward the house. Her ribs hurt and she held her arms tight at her sides. The wind was whipping her face, cold and wet, and she could smell chimney smoke. January. It had been nineteen years since she’d left Texas with Gary and moved out to Washington. Nineteen years that she had lived with him and raised their two children. She ran her fingers over the envelope in her pocket, emptied of seeds, and packed tight with the money she’d stolen from her husband.