100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  “Why didn’t Ma come?”

  “I didn’t want her to,” he said.

  Helen swallowed, without meaning to. His shoulder was thin and hard against the side of her face. Were those same muscles still there, or had they become worn away like the soil that was sucked down into the river every year, stolen from them, so that the farm Helen’s father had bought turned out to be a kind of joke on him? Or were they a different kind of muscle, hard and compressed like steel, drawn into themselves from years of resisting violence?

  “How come?” Helen said.

  He did not answer. She shut her eyes tight and distracting, eerie images came to her, stars exploding and shadowy figures like those in movies—she had gone to the movies all the time in the city, often taking in the first show at eleven in the morning; not because she was lonely or had nothing to do but because she liked movies. Five-twenty and he would come up the stairs, grimacing a little with the strange inexplicable pain in his chest: and there Helen would be, back from downtown, dressed up and her hair shining and her face ripe and fresh as a child’s, not because she was proud of the look in his eyes but because she knew she could make that pain of his abate for a while. And so why had she left him, when he had needed her more than anyone? “Pa, is something wrong?” she said, as if the recollection of that other man’s invisible pain were in some way connected with her father.

  He reached down vaguely and touched her hand. She was surprised at this. The movie images vanished—those beautiful people she had wanted to believe in, as she had wanted to believe in God and the saints in their movie-world heaven—and she opened her eyes. The sun was bright. It had been too bright all summer. Helen’s mind felt sharp and nervous as if pricked by tiny needles, but when she tried to think of what they could be no explanation came to her. She would be home soon, she would be able to rest. Tomorrow she could get in touch with Paul. Things could begin where they had left off—Paul had always loved her so much, and he had always understood her, had known what she was like. “Ma isn’t sick, is she?” Helen said suddenly. “No,” said her father. He released her fingers to take hold of the steering wheel again. Another curve. Off to the side, if she bothered to look, the river had swung toward them—low at this time of year, covered in places with a fine brown-green layer of scum. She did not bother to look.

  “We moved out here seventeen years ago,” her father said. He cleared his throat: the gesture of a man unaccustomed to speech. “You don’t remember that.”

  “Yes, I do,” Helen said. “I remember that.”

  “You don’t, you were just a baby.”

  “Pa, I remember it. I remember you carrying the big rug in the house, you and Eddie. And I started to cry and you picked me up. I was such a big baby, always crying . . . And Ma came out and chased me inside so I wouldn’t bother you.”

  “You don’t remember that,” her father said. He was driving jerkily, pressing down on the gas pedal and then letting it up, as if new thoughts continually struck him. What was wrong with him? Helen had an idea she didn’t like: he was older now, he was going to become an old man.

  If she had been afraid of the dark, upstairs in that big old farmhouse in the room she shared with her sister, all she had had to do was to think of him. He had a way of sitting at the supper table that was so still, so silent, that you knew nothing could budge him. Nothing could frighten him. So, as a child, and even now that she was grown up, it helped her to think of her father’s face—those pale surprised green eyes that could be simple or cunning, depending upon the light, and the lines working themselves in deeper every year around his mouth, and the hard angle of his jaw going back to the ear, burned by the sun and then tanned by it, turned into leather, then going pale again in the winter. The sun could not burn its color deep enough into that skin, which was almost as fair as Helen’s. At Sunday school she and the other children had been told to think of Christ when they were afraid, but the Christ she saw on the little Bible bookmark cards and calendars was no one to protect you. That was a man who would be your cousin, maybe, some cousin you liked but saw rarely, but he looked so given over to thinking and trusting that he could not be of much help; not like her father. When he and the boys came in from the fields with the sweat drenching their clothes and their faces looking as if they were dissolving with heat, you could still see the solid flesh beneath, the skeleton that hung onto its muscles and would never get old, never die. The boys—her brothers, all older—had liked her well enough, Helen being the baby, and her sister had watched her most of the time, and her mother had liked her too—or did her mother like anyone, having been brought up by German-speaking parents who had had no time to teach her love? But it had always been her father she had run to. She had started knowing men by knowing him. She could read things in his face that taught her about the faces of other men, the slowness or quickness of their thoughts, if they were beginning to be impatient, or were pleased and didn’t want to show it yet. Was it for this she had come home?—And the thought surprised her so that she sat up, because she did not understand. Was it for this she had come home? “Pa,” she said, “like I told you on the telephone, I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know why I went. That’s all right, isn’t it? I mean, I’m sorry for it, isn’t that enough? Did you talk to Paul?”

  “Paul? Why Paul?”

  “What?”

  “You haven’t asked about him until now, so why now?”

  “What do you mean? He’s my husband, isn’t he? Did you talk to him?”

  “He came over to the house almost every night for two weeks. Three weeks,” he said. Helen could not understand the queer chatty tone of his voice. “Then off and on, all the time. No, I didn’t tell him you were coming.”

  “But why not?” Helen laughed nervously. “Don’t you like him?”

  “You know I like him. You know that. But if I told him he’d of gone down to get you, not me.”

  “Not if I said it was you I wanted . . .”

  “I didn’t want him to know. Your mother doesn’t know either.”

  “What? You mean you didn’t tell her?” Helen looked at the side of his face. It was rigid and bloodless behind the tan, as if something inside were shrinking away and leaving just his voice. “You mean you didn’t even tell Ma? She doesn’t know I’m coming?”

  “No.”

  The nervous prickling in her brain returned suddenly. Helen rubbed her forehead.

  “Pa,” she said gently, “why didn’t you tell anybody? You’re ashamed of me, huh?”

  He drove on slowly. They were following the bends of the river, that wide shallow meandering river the boys said wasn’t worth fishing in any longer. One of its tributaries branched out suddenly—Mud Creek, it was called, all mud and bullfrogs and dragonflies and weeds—and they drove over it on a rickety wooden bridge that thumped beneath them. “Pa,” Helen said carefully, “you said you weren’t mad, on the phone. And I wrote you that letter explaining. I wanted to write some more, but you know . . . I don’t write much, never even wrote to Annie when she moved away. I never forgot about you or anything, or Ma . . . I thought about the baby, too, and Paul, but Paul could always take care of himself. He’s smart. He really is. I was in the store with him one time and he was arguing with some salesmen and got the best of them; he never learned all that from his father. The whole family is smart, though, aren’t they?”

  “The Hendrikses? Sure. You don’t get money without brains.”

  “Yes, and they got money too, Paul never had to worry. In a house like his parents’ house nothing gets lost or broken. You know? It isn’t like it was at ours, when we were all kids. That’s part of it—when Paul’s father built us our house I was real pleased and real happy, but then something of them came in with it too. Everything is spost to be clean and put in its place, and after you have a baby you get so tired . . . but his mother was always real nice to me. I don’t complain about them. I like them all real well.”

  “Money people always act
nice,” her father said. “Why shouldn’t they?”

  “Oh, Pa!” Helen said, tapping at his arm. “What do you mean by that? You always been nicer than anybody I know, that’s the truth. Real nice. A lot of them with those big farms, like Paul’s father, and that tractor store they got—they complain a lot. They do. You just don’t hear about it. And when that baby got polio, over in the Rapids—that real big farm, you know what I mean?—the McGuires. How do you think they felt? They got troubles just like everybody else.”

  Then her father did a strange thing: here they were seven or eight miles from home, no house near, and he stopped the car. “Want to rest for a minute,” he said. Yet he kept staring out the windshield as if he were still driving.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Sun on the hood of the car . . .”

  Helen tugged at the collar of her dress, pulling it away from her damp neck. When had the heat ever bothered her father before? She remembered going out to the farthest field with water for him, before he had given up that part of the farm. And he would take the jug from her and lift it to his lips and it would seem to Helen, the sweet child Helen standing in the dusty corn, that the water flowed into her magnificent father and enlivened him as if it were secret blood of her own she had given him. And his chest would swell, his reddened arms eager with muscle emerging out from his rolled-up sleeves, and his eyes now wiped of sweat and exhaustion . . . The vision pleased and confused her, for what had it to do with the man now beside her? She stared at him and saw that his nose was queerly white and that there were many tiny red veins about it, hardly more than pen lines; and his hair was thinning and jagged, growing back stiffly from his forehead as if he had brushed it back impatiently with his hand once too often. When Eddie, the oldest boy, moved away now and lost to them, had pushed their father hard in the chest and knocked him back against the supper table, that same amazed white look had come to his face, starting at his nose.

  “I was thinking if, if we got home now, I could help Ma with supper,” Helen said. She touched her father’s arm as if to waken him. “It’s real hot, she’d like some help.”

  “She doesn’t know you’re coming.”

  “But I . . . I could help anyway.” She tried to smile, watching his face for a hint of something: many times in the past he had looked stern but could be made to break into a smile, finally, if she teased him long enough. “But didn’t Ma hear you talk on the phone? Wasn’t she there?”

  “She was there.”

  “Well, but then . . .”

  “I told her you just talked. Never said nothing about coming home.”

  The heat had begun to make Helen dizzy. Her father opened the door on his side. “Let’s get out for a minute, go down by the river,” he said. Helen slid across and got out. The ground felt uncertain beneath her feet. Her father was walking and saying something and she had to run to catch up with him. He said: “We moved out here seventeen years ago. There were six of us then, but you don’t remember. Then the boy died. And you don’t remember your mother’s parents and their house, that goddam stinking house, and how I did all the work for him in his store. You remember the store down front? The dirty sawdust floor and the old women coming in for sausage, enough to make you want to puke, and pig’s feet and brains out of cows or guts or what the hell they were that people ate in that neighborhood. I could puke for all my life and not get clean of it. You just got born then. And we were dirt to your mother’s people, just dirt. I was dirt. And when they died somebody else got the house, it was all owned by somebody else, and so we said how it was for the best and we’d come out here and start all over. You don’t remember it or know nothing about us.”

  “What’s wrong, Pa?” Helen said. She took his arm as they descended the weedy bank. “You talk so funny, did you get something to drink before you came to the bus station? You never said these things before. I thought it wasn’t just meat, but a grocery store, like the one in . . .”

  “And we came out here,” he said loudly, interrupting her, “and bought that son of a bitch of a house with the roof half rotted through and the well all shot to hell . . . and those bastards never looked at us, never believed we were real people. The Hendrikses too. They were like all of them. They looked through me in town, do you know that? Like you look through a window. They didn’t see me. It was because hillbilly families were in that house, came and went, pulled out in the middle of the night owing everybody money; they all thought we were like that. I said, we were poor but we weren’t hillbillies. I said, do I talk like a hillbilly? We come from the city. But nobody gave a damn. You could go up to them and shout in their faces and they wouldn’t hear you, not even when they started losing money themselves. I prayed to God during them bad times that they’d all lose what they had, every bastard one of them, that Swede with the fancy cattle most of all! I prayed to God to bring them down to me so they could see me, my children as good as theirs, and me a harder worker than any of them—if you work till you feel like dying you done the best you can do, whatever money you get. I’d of told them that. I wanted to come into their world even if I had to be on the bottom of it, just so long as they gave me a name . . .”

  “Pa, you been drinking,” Helen said softly.

  “I had it all fixed, what I’d tell them,” he said. They were down by the river bank now. Fishermen had cleared a little area and stuck Y-shaped branches into the dried mud, to rest their poles on. Helen’s father prodded one of the little sticks with his foot and then did something Helen had never seen anyone do in her life, not even boys—he brought his foot down on it and smashed it.

  “You oughtn’t of done that,” Helen said. “Why’d you do that?”

  “And I kept on and on; it was seventeen years. I never talked about it to anyone. Your mother and me never had much to say, you know that. She was like her father.—You remember that first day? It was spring, nice and warm, and the wind came along when we were moving the stuff in and was so different from that smell in the city—my God! It was a whole new world here.”

  “I remember it,” Helen said. She was staring out at the shallow muddy river. Across the way birds were sunning themselves stupidly on flat, white rocks covered with dried moss like veils.

  “You don’t remember nothing!” her father said angrily. “Nothing! You were the only one of them I loved, because you didn’t remember. It was all for you. First I did it for me, myself, to show that bastard father of hers that was dead—then those other bastards, those big farms around us—but then for you, for you. You were the baby. I said to God that when you grew up it’d be you in one of them big houses with everything fixed and painted all the time, and new machinery, and driving around in a nice car not this thing we got. I said I would do that for you or die.”

  “That’s real nice, Pa,” Helen said nervously, “but I never . . . I never knew nothing about it, or . . . I was happy enough any way I was. I liked it at home, I got along with Ma better than anybody did. And I liked Paul too, I didn’t marry him just because you told me to. I mean, you never pushed me around. I wanted to marry him all by myself, because he loved me. I was always happy, Pa. If Paul didn’t have the store coming to him, and that land and all, I’d have married him anyway—You oughtn’t to worked all that hard for me.”

  In spite of the heat she felt suddenly chilled. On either side of them tall grass shrank back from the cleared, patted area, stiff and dried with August heat. These weeds gathered upon themselves in a brittle tumult back where the vines and foliage of trees began, the weeds dead and whitened and the vines a glossy, rich green, as if sucking life out of the water into which they drooped. All along the river bank trees and bushes leaned out and showed a yard or two of dead, whitish brown where the waterline had once been. This river bent so often you could never see far along it. Only a mile or so. Then foliage began, confused and unmoving. What were they doing here, she and her father? A thought came to Helen and frightened her—she was not used to thinking—that they ought n
ot to be here, that this was some other kind of slow, patient world where time didn’t care at all for her or her girl’s face or her generosity of love, but would push right past her and go on to touch the faces of other people.

  “Pa, let’s go home. Let’s go home,” she said.

  Her father bent and put his hands into the river. He brought them dripping to his face. “That’s dirty there, Pa,” she said. A mad dry buzzing started up somewhere—hornets or wasps. Helen looked around but saw nothing.

  “God listened and didn’t say yes or no,” her father said. He was squatting at the river and now looked back at her, his chin creasing. The back of his shirt was wet. “If I could read him right it was something like this—that I was caught in myself and them money people caught in themselves and God Himself caught in what he was and so couldn’t be anything else. Then I never thought about God again.”

  “I think about God,” Helen said. “I do. People should think about God then they wouldn’t have wars and things . . .”

  “No, I never bothered about God again,” he said slowly. “If he was up there or not it never had nothing to do with me. A hailstorm that knocked down the wheat, or a drought—what the hell? Whose fault? It wasn’t God’s no more than mine so I let him out of it. I knew I was in it all on my own. Then after a while it got better, year by year. We paid off the farm and the new machines. You were in school then, in town. And when we went into the church they said hello to us sometimes, because we outlasted them hillbillies by ten years. And now Mike ain’t doing bad on his own place, got a nice car, and me and Bill get enough out of the farm so it ain’t too bad, I mean it ain’t too bad. But it wasn’t money I wanted!”