The End of Always: A Novel

by Randi Davenport

  He took my hand and led me out of the yard and through the trees on our neighbor’s lot. He held my hand with one hand and held the branches back with the other, and I let him lead me into an open space where he put his arms around me. I leaned into him and lay my head against the coarse wool of his coat and stood breathing him in as we swayed in the dark. From far away, the sounds of the night in the city.

  He put his mouth against my hair and said something I could not understand. He tightened his arms around me. I pulled away. My ribs throbbed, the bruise like something that had split open and begun to bleed again.

  He took my arm. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “What is the matter with you?” He looked at my face and then looked closer and raised his fingers and brushed them against my blue jaw. “Jesus,” he said. “What happened?”

  “Where have you been?” I said.

  “What?” he said.

  “You did not come.”

  “I wanted to. I could not.”

  “You could not? Or you would not?”

  “I could not.” He ran his fingers through his hair. He usually wore a hat and one night he had dropped it onto my head when I was cold, and had slung his coat over my shoulders and I had walked next to him, feeling the warmth of him in his warm coat. He had pulled the hat down over my eyes and laughed.

  “Where is your hat?” I said. I reached over and touched his hair.

  “Lost.”

  “Lost?”

  He sighed. The clearing was very small and quickly ran out into the underbrush and beyond that, the backyard of the next house. “We should walk,” he said.

  “No,” I said. I glanced at my house, visible now only as a faint square with dark windows through the trees, a block of light cast from the kitchen window into the yard. I knew that Martha waited for me inside. “I cannot,” I said. “We must stay here.”

  “Then sit down. Here.” He gestured around us and then took his jacket off and spread it on the grass so I would have a place to sit.

  The ground was cool and damp. We sat with our legs crossed. August picked up a stick and dug at the grass and scraped through the dirt by his boots. I sat very still and tried to breathe through the pain in my ribs. Finally he tossed the stick into the underbrush and leaned forward and took my hand. Then he dropped it and put his arm around me. I winced and pulled away.

  “Stop,” I said.

  “You are very mad at me.”

  I lifted one shoulder and let it drop. I was angry but more than that I was ashamed of my pain. I thought it did more than hurt me but marked me and I did not want August to see that I was marked. I did not want him to see me as my father saw me, a girl who could be easily crushed. I wanted August to be in love with the girl I wanted to be, a strong girl who had been made out of the love we shared.

  “You should be mad,” he said, off on the wrong track but he didn’t know any better. “To keep you waiting like that. You are right.”

  I swallowed hard. “You do not understand,” I said.

  “Every day I wanted to come to you,” he said sadly. He leaned forward over his knees, the shadows making his eyes seem dark as sockets, his mouth just a dark slash, his face unknown in its details. In that moment he did not look like August at all but looked like a stranger come to me under the trees. He picked at the grass and then sighed and looked straight ahead. In a very flat voice he said that he might as well tell me the truth. He might as well get the whole thing out in the open. He had not wanted to stay away so long but it was all out of his control. He had been in jail. It was a terrible mistake. The police thought he was someone else. They had been looking for a pair of men who had been seen boosting lumber from construction sites around town. The night after he brought me home they found him walking with his brother Alfred out on the edge of town where some new houses were going up and they took them in for no reason at all, just for walking down the street. He and Alfred had been locked up in the new city jail for days. They had tried to run and they would have gotten away if they had not come up against a barbed-wire fence that some farmer had put up to keep his dairy in one place. When they turned, the police were right behind them. The police had billy clubs. Which they had used and then dragged the brothers back to the road.

  They rode in the paddy wagon into town and stepped out into the light under the street lamp in front of the courthouse and then the head policeman led them into the police station and down a long corridor to the jail. For two days they were the only ones there and August began to wonder if they would ever get out. But finally his father hired a lawyer. The lawyer had come to the jail under the courthouse and the man who kept the keys had unlocked the door to their cell and swung the door open just wide enough to let the lawyer in. The lawyer had sat there with them on one of those hard wooden pallets that pass for beds in a jail and had asked them to tell him everything they knew and of course they did not know anything. All they had done was go for a walk after dark. Just the way he had walked with her. Exactly the same. This was not a crime, was it? And the lawyer had listened and had written some things down on a piece of paper he had clipped to a board, including their names and dates of birth and where they usually worked and their home address, and who their employer was. He told them to be very quiet and not say a word to anyone and to keep their own counsel at all times and to give him a few days and he would see what could be worked out. And that was what they did. They followed the lawyer’s instructions to the letter and sat in the jail cell and did not say a word except maybe thank you when the woman who cooked for the prisoners brought them their meals. Very polite, to show everyone that a mistake had been made. But very restless because they knew their father could not work without them and they were losing money every day. And of course he wanted to get to her. That was the main thing, really. He needed to get to her.

  They did not have to stand trial. And of course there would not have been any point because they were dead innocent. The lawyer talked to the prosecutor and they made a deal. The lawyer paid some money that their father put up. August and Alfred walked out of the jail that very afternoon. The first thing he did was go home and take a bath and find some clean clothes. Then he had a meal. When the sun went down, he sat with his brother on the front porch and watched the neighbors come home from work. He imagined the happy scenes behind all of those windows. Dinner to be eaten. Maybe sister would play piano after the pie. The women would all be fresh and pretty and the men would be turned out in nice clothes. Things like that. He liked to think about things like that. When it was full dark, he left Alfred smoking on the porch and made his way to my house. Watching the window of my house. Watching Martha at the sink. Watching a shadow behind her he thought must be me.

  “And now I see I should have come here sooner,” he said. “Something has happened.” He picked up my hand and put it down. “Did he hit you?” he asked quietly. “Bad?”

  I lifted one shoulder and let it fall.

  “Just here?” He touched my jaw lightly and I flinched.

  “And here,” I said, swallowing. I lay my palm flat over my ribs.

  “He punched you here?” His voice tender, disbelieving.

  “He kicked me,” I said.

  “He kicked you?” He sat up straight.

  I nodded.

  “Because of me?”

  “He said I am a whore,” I said simply. The word the judgment of a prosecutor from a land to which I did not belong, a far distant land I lived in every day.

  “Because of me?” August rolled up onto his knees and put his hands on my legs and looked at me. “Just because of me?”

  “Yes,” I said softly. “Because of you.”

  We sat in the dark. I did not mind that August had been in jail. He had explained it in such a plain and straightforward way that I knew he must be telling me the truth. Another girl might have stopped short and perhaps I should have. But I did not. I held his hand in the dark. I understood prison.

  After a time, August began to wa
lk up and down in front of me.

  “I will go and see him,” he said.

  “You cannot,” I said softly.

  He stopped and stood with his hands shoved deep into his pockets. He looked at me, at my injuries, and he slammed the heels of his hands into his eyes. As if my pain was his pain. As if he could not bear to see me suffer.

  “It is what I have to do,” he said.

  “You will make it worse.”

  “No,” he said. “No. I will make it right.” He held out his hand and I took it and he helped me to my feet.

  “I am afraid,” I said, but I did not tell him what I meant. Afraid of a sun that would explode through the sky and rain fire down upon me. Afraid of a great maw in the earth that would swallow me whole. Of course August would not know what I meant. He thought the world was the same for all people and all of those people were just like him.

  He put his arms around me and ran his hand up and down my back as if he were trying to quiet an anxious horse. “Do not be scared,” he said. “There is no reason to be afraid.”

  I pressed my cheek against his shoulder. I thought of leaving my father’s house and leaving my sisters and leaving the place I had lived with my mother and leaving the things that remained of her, that table, this chair, the pinch-waisted vase on the table in the front hall, her wedding picture in the front room. I felt the ground fall away when I imagined going with August, the ground and the sky and the great turning of the world itself. But he rubbed my back and told me not to worry. He told me to trust him. He said that everything in the world was hard but in this case things were simple. He wanted to kill my father for the things he had done to me but he would not. He would go to the tavern and he would stand before him. He would introduce himself. He would tell him that we were going to be married. And that once we were married, he would be the only man in the world who would be entitled to touch me. By morning, things would be fixed forever.

  13

  The light from the kitchen window cast a dark radiance over the yard. I turned my face away from August’s shoulder and he kissed my forehead the way you would kiss the head of a child. I smiled a little and let my arms fall to my sides and let myself rest against him. I could feel his heart beating.

  He gently cupped my face in his hands. “I would do anything for you,” he murmured. “You know that.” He kissed me again. Then he pulled his coat collar up until it stood around his throat. “I will come back soon.”

  The fire had burned to coals in the stove but Martha still sat in her straight-backed chair. She looked up at me when I came in. “Are you all right?” she said. “Where have you been?” She stood and crossed the floor and brushed the leaves from my hair and crumbled them into the sink. “You think only of yourself,” she said. “Not of us.”

  “I was just outside,” I said.

  “Then you know that boy was here.”

  “August?”

  “No,” she said curtly. “The other one.”

  “What other one?”

  “The lunatic,” she said. She pointed at the back porch. “He came right up onto the steps. He came right up to the door. When he saw me he ran away. I do not know what he expected. But he was out there like the bogeyman, right there on our back steps.” She hugged herself. “He cannot come here,” she said. “We have a child in this house. What if Hattie saw him? What then?”

  “I know,” I said. “I told him.” I reached up and fingered my hair and found a twig and twisted my hair until the twig was free.

  “Make it your business to tell him again.”

  “I will.” I tossed the twig into the sink.

  Martha looked me up and down. “You should see yourself,” she said acidly. “No wonder they talk. Fix yourself. Straighten your skirt.”

  I pulled at my waistband until my skirt was straight and combed my fingers through my hair. I did not want to be fixed. I wanted to be outside with August, running away through the night.

  Martha sat heavily in her chair. “I have to ask you,” she said. “I think I have a right to know. Is it true?”

  “Is what true?”

  “Do you go into the woods?”

  Did I go into the woods? Of course I went into the woods. I went into the woods every chance I got. When I was a child, I went into the woods to find acorns and stones. When I was older, I went into the woods to draw pictures of ferns. Once I caught a tiny dusty toad and let it hop across the palm of my hand, its eyes bulging and its throat fluttering like its heart beat under its tongue. I went into the woods and counted the eggs I found in a robin’s nest and learned to identify the calls of the wood thrush and the oriole. I looked up at the sky and longed to float free with the hawks that sailed in long slow circles above me. I stood in a place that belonged to no one but me.

  “It is not what you think,” I said. I brushed the seat of my skirt and bits of grass fell to the floor.

  “Look at yourself.” She leaned back and studied me. “Covered with leaves and dirt and sticks. No decent girl would allow this.”

  “So you think I am a whore,” I said. I had no idea how quickly and easily my sister would think the worst of me.

  “Do not use that word.”

  “Why not?” I said. “That is what this is all about. You have such a low opinion of me that this is the first thing you think when you wonder what’s going on. That I must be a whore. My God, Martha.”

  “What else am I supposed to think?”

  “I have no idea,” I said slowly. “I guess you are going to think what you want to think. No matter what I say.”

  The embers popped and shifted.

  “Do you want me to count it down for you?” she said. She held her hand up. “One. You disappear from this house at night. Two. You run around all night in the woods. Three. You ask me to lie for you. Four. You make sure that I am the one who takes your punishment when he finds out.” She ticked the items off on her fingers like this was a list she had been keeping for a while, one that was familiar to her and even comforting, like a story she told herself so she would know what to believe. “Five,” she said. “Strange men are coming to our back door. Six. The whole town is talking.”

  “So you side with him,” I said. I thought of the way she stood in the window and looked like my father, with everything about her uncanny, as if he had taken her and shaped her and made her look like himself.

  She picked up the stove poker and hefted it against her palm, testing its weight like she might be considering hitting me with it. Then she put it down again. “I am siding with myself,” she said. “Just as you have.”

  I leaned against the sink. The neighbor’s dog barked. A voice called and then a door slammed. I listened to the sounds of life falling away and breathed in the hush of a solitary cell. My father’s house. My father’s rules. My father’s crime. I could not bear another minute of it.

  “You are going to think what you like,” I said. “I cannot stop you.” I made a big show of casually studying my fingernails, as if what I was about to say was barely important at all. “But right now, August Bethke is at the bar, telling him that we are going to be married.” I looked up at Martha to see how she would take the news. But she just reached over and closed the door on the stove and pushed the latch.

  “He will never say yes,” she said. “He will never give you permission to marry that carpenter.”

  “August is not asking.”

  She glanced at me then, puzzled.

  “August is telling, not asking,” I said. “He is explaining how things are going to be.”

  I felt proud when I said this, and glad of August’s strength, glad that I had found a man who was willing to go up against my father. I did not tell her that I was afraid. I did not tell her about William Oliver. I did not tell her about Edwin. Instead I leaned against the sink and told her that August loved me and I loved him. Yes, I had been to the woods and I had spent nights with him and I would go again and again for there was something there that I could
never find here and that was love and real love and a man who would protect me. I gripped the sink with my hands. We had found our way to each other as if by spell or fate. We would never lose each other. I was to be his forever and he would always be mine.

  I spoke with the conviction of a girl who has never been in love before, never followed its rocky path, never seen that change comes upon each of us, never discovered that sometimes, when a door closes, God does not open a window, nor does he open a door, nor is there a way out. I was massively infected with my own innocence, a disease for which there is only one cure.

  Martha watched me, a peculiar expression on her face. I thought she would say something mean and cruel, which would prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that she had no way to refute anything I had just said. But all she did was give a small bitter laugh. “Marie,” she said, “you are even more foolish than I thought.” And then she stood up and went to bed.

  I sat in the kitchen for a long time. Our house was silent. For all the things I had said to Martha, I had failed to tell her about William Oliver. And I should have told her about Edwin. I told myself that she was being ridiculous. She could not understand if she did not have all the facts and I had stupidly withheld these. I counted up the things I should have known and should have done and wondered if the choking feeling in my throat might have gone away if I had been able to get everything out. Then I wondered if she would have believed me even if I had been able to get it all out. The William Oliver story seemed preposterous but then it did not. In fact, it was no more preposterous than the fact that my father had murdered my mother.

  Rain pelted the windows and I heard a sound that was not rain. When I turned, I found Hattie standing in the doorway to the hall, a phantom child in her white nightgown. She swayed and caught the doorway in one hand. Then she came and stood next to me.