Old leaves rolled over a roof and fluttered silently to the ground.
“She had a terrible accident,” I said at last.
“What kind of accident?” Inge leaned toward me. “What happened?”
I did not reply.
People used to hang glass chimes from the eaves of their porch roofs, just by the front door, and in the evening when the breeze blew, their tinkling sound was everywhere.
Inge peered at me. “I do not know what to think of you,” she said.
I stepped into the street and she followed me, smoke billowing behind her until she pitched the last of her cigarette into the gutter. Down the road, the lamplighter made his way toward us. He carried his wick on a long pole and paused at each of the gas lamps, where he touched flame to pilot and the glass bloomed with yellow light. I could not see his eyes for the deep shadow cast by the brim of his hat, and then he disappeared behind us as if passing into darkness. When we got to the far corner Inge put her hand on my arm and stared at me, her gaze intense. Then she shook her head and put her hands in her coat pockets and said good night. I made my way along the road that ran above the river. A shadow flickered along with me, keeping pace through yards and streets and pausing at the corner where I stood to let a drayman’s wagon pass. Up ahead, the street was a long dim chain of thin-pooled light.
5
My mother always made sure we followed the old ways. She walked into the woods early in November to find a Yule log. On Christmas Eve she put this in the fireplace and kept it burning all night. In the morning, she sprinkled the ashes around the house to protect us from those who would do us harm. She decorated the tree by herself and kept it hidden in the front room until late in the afternoon on Christmas Day, when she rang a special bell to summon us. We filed into the room and saw the tree for the first time, as if she alone could summon magic. She told us that when she was a girl she could hear the silver church bells from the great town of Veneta, which had been lost when a flood came over the Baltic and everything had been submerged. All that was left were the smooth sands without a stone bigger than your fist, and the color of seawater as it washed over sand, and the weeds and the biscuit-colored sails of the boats, or the red sails of the little clippers that plied the harbor, and the beaches with their pebbles and crushed shells, and a stone pier decorated with flags and lanterns that stretched far out to deeper water. On Christmas Eve, she stood on the edge of the white cliffs in the complete darkness of early night, waiting for the golden seagull, which was said to sparkle even more brilliantly than the stars in heaven.
Now Hattie and I stood shivering in the front room and watched Martha hang nuts and apples on a spindly tree with thread from the mending box. I thought we should build up the fire in the stove but Martha said no. She always took my father’s side. I imagine she felt that the weight of trying to be a mother to Hattie and me was a considerable weight indeed.
I picked up a walnut tied in a bow with a twist of red yarn. “Here,” I said. But she put one finger up and glared at me and said, “Put that back.”
Morning light came up around us and ice lay in long glassy black stripes on the road where the wagons had passed. As I watched, a car glided slowly past. I did not know who would bring an automobile out in this weather. Cars did not have heaters and you had to drive with a robe over your knees for comfort. Or this is what I observed. I had never yet ridden in a car.
Hattie turned her back to the tree and wished out loud for mittens. Martha told her she had better be careful when she went out, because the ash man dressed in his animal skins and plaited straw might find her and demand whatever she had. If she did not give it to him, he would steal her away to his house of twigs and leaves and she would never be seen again. But Hattie made a face and told her to shut up because this was Wisconsin and there were no ash men here.
We celebrated that night without a goose. My father had gotten an old hen from Mrs. Muehls. I singed its pinfeathers and washed it and stuffed it with bread and a little sausage and onions and a few mushrooms I had picked in the woods and let dry on a twine I strung up in the mudroom. The bird was surprisingly passable to eat. There were many things Martha and my father might say about me, but they could not contest that I could cook.
After supper, my father handed each of us a brown packet containing a fresh pair of black stockings, a paper with a new needle pushed through it, and a new spool of black thread. He seemed very pleased with himself, even if my sisters and I were disappointed with his choice.
He reached for his cup and looked into it and then let the legs of his chair drop back to the floor. He stood and went to the mudroom and came back with the newspaper and a bottle, which he uncorked with one hand. He sat down and leaned forward and ran whiskey into his cup. He lifted the cup and drank.
I sat very still in my chair. Martha glanced at me quickly and then looked away.
My father read the paper quietly for a time. Then he said, “This man Ira Miller was arrested last night on the charge of killing his own horses. Not two days ago this same man went to his barn to feed his horses and found two of them dead with their throats cut. He also found a note saying that there are too many horses in the world and all of Ira Miller’s horses were going to have to die. He has fifteen horses, so this must be the work of a madman. But now we know better. Now we know Miller was insured. All he wanted was the money.” He paused. “Only a very stupid man will kill for money,” he said. He took a drink from his cup and cut his eyes at me. “That is the best way to get caught, and when it is over and you are sitting in your prison cell, what do you have? Nothing. It is better to kill for principle because principle will never leave you. Twenty years later, you will still know that you did the right thing.”
He lifted the bottle and poured a little more whiskey into his cup. He had turned his shirtsleeves up to protect the cuffs and his arms were large and well muscled. I looked at his wrists and at the width of his hand, the breadth of his palm, his unmarked skin. Always the same, one thing laid over another until the one fact that I had was too big for me to ignore.
I never doubted that he killed my mother. I had no question of it. I had seen him beat her so badly that she had to stay in bed for days afterward, her face split like an overripe peach. I had seen him kick the chair out from under her. I had seen him crack her over her back so hard with a piece of wood that splinters flew through the air. It was not at all hard to think that on the day my mother died, my father had just gone too far. Pushed her into the sharpened end of an upended spade. Plowed into her with his knife. He tossed that knife around often enough at home and never failed to get my attention when he did so.
I stood and picked up his plate and dropped it into the dishpan and watched it sink like a flat stone.
“Second,” my father said. His voice drilled into my back. “You need witnesses if you are going to take a man’s freedom. Without proof they don’t have a thing. This is the way things are in America. A man’s life is his own. It don’t belong to anyone but him.”
He stood and dropped the paper to the table. “I’m going to work,” he said. He shrugged into his coat and looked around for his hat. And then he snapped his fingers as if he had just remembered something and put his hand on Martha’s shoulder.
“I saw that boy, that George Kolb, on the street,” he said. “He was coming this way. I told him not to bother. I told him your place is here. So we have seen the last of him, good riddance.” He narrowed his eyes. “I make myself clear?” he said. “You understand?”
Martha nodded but she looked like someone had kicked her in the stomach. And when my father was gone, she sat at the table with her hands over her cheeks and eyes so I could not see her face, but I knew that she was crying. George Kolb had been her beau for almost a year. He was a mild-mannered young man who worked in a bank and wore tiny gold-wire spectacles and carried a leather case that contained nothing but his lunch but which he was sure would one day contain the important papers that bef
itted an important man. It did not seem possible that anyone would love a boy with such a high hairless forehead, but Martha said she did.
“George will never put up with this,” I said. I did not believe that but I had to say something. “George will be back. You know George will be back.”
She cried harder.
“It will be all right,” I said.
She lifted her chin. “How?”
I could hear Hattie murmuring a song in the front room: My handsome winsome Johnny. “He would not have to know,” I offered. “You could meet him on the sly.”
But Martha just cried harder and reached over and gripped my hand. “I cannot!” she said. Then she fell to sobbing again.
Hattie came down the hall. Her braces made the squeaky sound they made when they had gotten wet and were beginning to dry. She looked at Martha and then she looked at me. “Why is Martha crying?” she said. But of course there was no explaining it. Martha and I might talk about our father, but we never talked about him with Hattie. I suppose we wanted to protect her. Now I think she knew as much as we did all along. She lived in his house after all.
“Shush,” I said. “Bring the cards.”
When Hattie came back with the deck, Martha sat up and blew her nose on one of my mother’s handkerchiefs, which she took from her pocket. Her eyes were liquid and her cheeks were red but she told Hattie to deal her in.
Our Christmas supper dishes went unfinished. Darkness came up around the house and the kitchen window went black. We played Old Maid, passing the single queen among us like a ghost, until it was well past Hattie’s bedtime. Outside, the wind moved through the evergreens, their dark boughs rustling and rustling like the waves of some shoreline long forgotten. The pale stars surrounded and surrounding them, the stars.
The next day I left the laundry at lunchtime and walked into the center of town, where the new courthouse stood in an open square. Its huge tower resembled a spire rising into the blue Wisconsin sky, as if justice was a kind of heavenly supplication to the things we all thought we believed in and could count on. This is an American concept. We pray for justice above all else, even if we do not love the law and do not love our lawyers or our litigation. We like to think that everything we do is based in fairness. This is our most dearly held illusion.
On the day we buried my mother, the grave diggers set up an awning over the open pit and we waited in the shade. My father stood with his back to us. Martha stood silently behind him. Hattie wept and touched her braces through her clothes. Down below the bluffs, the river burned silver in the sun and cut between the dark trees of the woods and then disappeared under the limestone cliffs that ran to the east of town.
The preacher read from a book he took from his pocket. Halfway through, he stopped and took his coat off and laid the coat on the ground at his feet. My mother told us that one day God would call us back to Him and we would live as angels amidst the finery of the sky. But there was nothing uplifting or beautiful about the open pit in the sun-parched ground, the dry grass unbending to the shovel’s touch. You might imagine that I felt this way because I had grown skeptical of reverence, but I think anyone standing on that hot piece of ground on that blistering day would have felt the same. I do not think my lack of faith is all that unique. We all have our reasons.
Toward the end, towering thunderheads began to build on the western horizon. A wind came up and lifted our clothes, and the canvas awning flapped and rippled. My sisters held their dresses down with their hands, and my uncle Carl held the brim of his hat.
My father leaned over and took a rusty spade from one of the grave diggers. He lifted the spade and moved the first clods of dirt into the darkness. When he handed the spade to Martha, tiny shards of red paint from the spade’s peeling handle stuck to his hands.
Around us, a rolling field of basalt angels and blocks of granite and stone. Carl stood the spade in the earth and the grave diggers came up behind him with their shovels. My father put his arm around Hattie. He put his arm around Martha. They leaned into him and he dropped his chin into Martha’s hair. Then he stepped back and walked down the hill. The sun passed behind the great slope of clouds and the grass flattened and the first large drops of rain came.
Now I walked up and down in the street in the cold shadow of the courthouse. It had courtrooms above and offices below. Down a set of gray granite steps that must have been quarried just west of town where the earth gave up stone in slabs, the words Police Station were painted in an arc on a set of frosted glass doors, Police on one side, Station on the other. I watched a thickset man in a black coat come up the steps and square his hat and then unwrap the reins for his horse from the hitching rail and lead the horse down the street.
I turned my face to the sky. “Help me,” I said. Someone passing by might have thought I was talking to myself or to no one in particular or maybe even to God, since my words sounded so much like a prayer. But of course none of that would be true and certainly not the idea that I would talk to God. I was talking to my mother, whom I imagined stayed somewhere where she could see me still. I did not really believe this but I told myself it was true so that I would not feel so alone.
My father killed my mother. I tried the words out under my breath, as if I already stood in front of a policeman behind a counter, as if he had a pencil in his hand and was ready to take down the things I said. I had to imagine myself speaking at all, for I was not sure I would be able to say anything, even if I was sure I knew what the words should be. All at once I imagined my father in his jail cell, weeping. I thought of the terrible pain I would feel, to see him there and in his suffering know that I was the cause. Even in the bright light of day, that picture caused a searing sensation in my chest. I wrapped my arms around my waist and felt tears start behind my eyes. I angrily brushed them away. Girls were taught to appeal to men in all things, but I could not be two things at once, not the angel of justice of whom I dreamt, and not my father’s daughter to boot. No one could do that.
Men were out having lunch and some of them looked curiously at me as they passed by. I slipped on a slick of ice and steadied myself.
Up on a hill, men climbed among the raw yellow beams of a new house, knocking boards together. The coppery smell of snow came on the wind and the choked rumble of the interurban unfurled across town and blue clouds incandescent in a wash of sunlight brightened overhead. I was surprised to see construction going on when the day was cold and the earth was frozen, but I realized the foundation had already been set and the men worked in the rafters. Walking one of the planks, a boy with dark hair and light eyes, who balanced perfectly and then jumped from the joist to the ground.
He wore the same canvas pants he was wearing the day he carried my mother into the house. I tried to recollect where he had touched her, whether under shoulder bone or hip bone, her body a parcel that did not belong to him. But all I remembered was the way he turned to look at me as he backed out through the door, the last of the men to disappear in the shimmering heat.
Now some trick of sunlight made his face seem luminous. The wind ruffled his hair. He looked up from his board and patted his pockets as if he was searching for something. Then he caught sight of me and a look of surprise came over his face. He held up his hand. “Fräulein,” he called. “Wait.”
No one called me fräulein. Not even my mother, who otherwise thought it might be useful for me to learn the ways of an island I had never seen and that had already passed into history. I lived in America. I was born here. This was a place where all men were said to be created equal and therefore entitled to be free. I took these ideas seriously. The word fräulein belonged to some other girl, and I looked over my shoulder as if I expected her to come up behind me.
The boy trotted down the hillside and stood in front of me. He pushed his black hat back on his head and grinned. He was a little out of breath and his eyes shone and his cheeks were covered with stubble.
“Fräulein,” he repeated. “What’s your name?
”
“Marie,” I said, but I spoke so softly that I thought he would not hear me. He nodded.
“I am August Bethke,” he said. He pronounced his last name the old German way, so it sounded like Bait-ka. “Pleased to meet you.” He picked up my hand, limp as a dead fish at my side, and pumped my arm up and down. My hand went with his in a way that made me feel that it no longer belonged to me. He laughed and squeezed my fingers.
What love feels like is no secret, but it is hard to put into words. You will know this to be true if you have ever fallen in love, and who among us has not? Girls are trained to fall in love. This is the one thing at which they must not fail. Failure means they are doomed to become mannish, with brusque phrases and sharp tongues and weary clothes that have been passed down to them by their married sisters. I was reared to distrust a mannish woman. In fact, I was reared to distrust all women, with no woman more untrustworthy than the woman who has failed at love.
August dropped my hand.
“Where are you going?” he said.
“Nowhere,” I muttered. My face felt hot. My tongue felt thick. I blushed again. I thought of Martha, turning beet red whenever George thrust some stupid bouquet of daisies at her. We were surely cut from the same cloth.
“Nowhere? Out here by yourself? You are very brave.” Once again he touched his fingers to my hand. The nape of my neck tingled and a wave of sparkles rose behind my eyes.
The sound of hammering came from the house.
When I was seventeen, the things I knew about boys came from the boys I knew in school where they stayed among themselves and only ventured close to girls when they had something disgusting to drop down our dresses. I had that experience myself, visited on me by a heavyset boy named Charles Miller, whose family came from Bavaria and ran a butcher shop in the center of town. Charles divested himself of a frog and was disappointed when I was happy to find the thing in my chemise. I did not mind frogs and thought to make a pet of this one.
The End of Always: A Novel Page 5