The End of Always: A Novel

by Randi Davenport

  I put my face in my hands and sobbed. “I am sorry,” I cried. “I am sorry. I am sorry.”

  “For what?” he said.

  “It is all my fault,” I sobbed. I jammed the heels of my hands into my eyes. The world an explosion of color.

  “Why is that?” said Carl.

  I could not look at him.

  “You do not think the fault belongs elsewhere?” he said.

  I gulped air but all of my breath disappeared. “I am bad,” I sobbed. Then I lay my cheek on the table and cried harder.

  He stood and came to me and knelt down and wrapped his arms around me. I felt wobbly and unstrung, as if I had said aloud the worst truth in the world and now found myself on ground so unknown and unsteady that it could at any moment upend and turn me out and flatten me.

  “You are not bad,” he murmured. “Bad things have happened. The stories they tell about you are bad. But stories are only stories. Things are only things. None of that makes you bad.”

  I cried for a long time and he held me. The smell of coal smoke coming through the window. Behind that, the smell of the lake, watery and wild. The night outside swimming with stars, if only I cared to see.

  When I was finally empty, I sat up. He stood and reached into his pocket for a handkerchief and gave it to me. He told me that it would be better now and I should wipe my face.

  “It is so easy for us to forget that you are still a child,” he said. I opened my mouth and he held up one hand. “I know,” he said. “I know. You are a married woman. You have been out to work. But you are still very young and I think you have found the world to be a different place than you imagined. As we all do. And this always comes as a shock to us but the shock is worst when we are young.” He tapped his fingers against the tabletop. “I thought your beginnings might have given you greater protection from this,” he said. “I thought you might already have seen enough so that things would be clear. But that is not the case. Perhaps those beginnings in fact made it possible for all of this to happen. Perhaps the things you saw made you blind.” He studied me gravely. “You are healing. You are lucky. You are alive. Your face may not show any scars.” He walked over to the window and looked out at the street. “It is a pretty night,” he said. “You can see the lake from here. There is a steamboat out on the water.”

  I did not rise. I sat at the table with my sticky face in my hands.

  “Do you know why I came to this country?” he said, turning back to me.

  “Because my mother and father were here.” My voice broken and bare.

  “Well,” he said. “Yes. Of course. That is what you would know. You know where we come from and you know what things were like there,” he said. He looked at me. “No? You do not?”

  “My mother told us stories about Rügen,” I said.

  “What kind of stories?”

  “About bells in the ocean and a golden seagull,” I said. “Dwarves.” I broke off.

  He smiled. “Elise loved those stories. She had a great feeling of being connected to a long-ago world. Some people get over the hard times in their lives by looking ahead. Your mother was not one of them. She looked behind her to a place she had never herself stood. A time of giants and magicians and talking animals and men roaming the countryside under the spell of a curse. Which could always be broken.” He came back to sit at the table.

  “She was not wrong,” he said. “For a very long time, the land had been a land of haves and have-nots. There were very rich men who owned castles and then there was everyone else. They worked for the rich men in the fields and on the roads. No better than peasants. Not even as good as peasants, if you want to get right down to it. Nearly everyone lived in mud huts with thatched roofs. The water came in and the mud cracked and the floors were dirt or split wood and they cracked, too. You would have children and the children would sicken and die. Your mother lost her first child just that way. A boy. I remember him. He had a narrow face and sunken eyes and he never looked right. His ears were low on the sides of his head. And then they put him in the ground three months later. She was afraid after that, but then Martha was born and Martha was different and she lived. Just like that. One is here and one is not. Elise said there was no explanation, but in fact the explanation was that no one had enough food and the work was hard.

  “Everywhere you went was the mark of the rich men. They lived to keep everyone else down. This is why socialism is so popular in our towns here. The people remember what it means to live in a world where there are those with everything and those with nothing. They ask very reasonable questions, if you ask me. Why is there not enough to go around? Why can’t we share? Why is it that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? But they do not understand that things work differently here. Here a man stands on his own two feet and whatever he has is what he has gotten for himself. So no matter what they think, socialism will never catch on in America. If you are ground down here, it is because you refuse to rise. Of course there are things that conspire against you, and some people have more advantages than others. I do not mean to exclude these things from the picture. But in the end, you do not have centuries of ownership by an aristocracy that believes you are more like a beast in the mud than a man, that believes you have no purpose other than to make the prince rich. Here you are your own man.” He patted his pockets and then stood up and went to a hook by the door, where he had hung his coat. He went through the pockets until he found a tan cowhide pouch and his pipe and his matches. He stood by the window and tamped tobacco into the bowl of the pipe and then lit the pipe and drew a few breaths. Blue smoke wavered in a spiral around his head.

  “The same does not hold true for women,” he said. He turned to face me. “That is unfortunate but true. A woman can never rise. She will always serve two masters. And there is nothing she can do about that. She can join the socialist party and I see them at the meetings but she cannot vote and she cannot hold her own belongings as her own.” He pulled smoke between his teeth and then exhaled.

  “My mother and father—your grandmother and grandfather—had a house just outside of Garz,” he said. “This was near the southeastern coast of the island. It was an old market town. Our father was a farmer. We were luckier than most because we had a long-term lease on the land. We grew fruit. Long lines of apple trees in the orchards. Grapes growing on wooden frames that we built ourselves. This island is in the north so this fruit had to be tough. Like us,” he said, and smiled. He pulled deeply on his pipe and exhaled. “The house was a little bit luxurious because it had two rooms and it had a lean-to in the back for cooking. My mother kept chickens. The foxes got into them but she always had chickens. Your mother slept on a pallet at one end of the main living room and I slept on a pallet on the other end. In between, all the brothers and sisters. Our parents kept the other room for themselves and they kept some animals in there from time to time, too. Rabbits. Other things they were raising to sell. Once a small pig but he did not stay small long.

  “This life was very hard. The apples were hard and green and sour. The grapes failed. The animals were filthy. My mother was very superstitious and kept a place in the main room where she prayed all of the time to some old god who came before Christ and was just as useful to her as I imagine Christ is to those who believe he will make their lives better.”

  He set his pipe down on the table and leaned it against his saucer. “And there were lots of children of course. This is the way, is it not? They say we have them to work the farms. They say we have them because we do not know better. They say we have them because we are no better than animals. Well. I cannot tell you about any of those things. You are free to make up your own mind. But there were lots of children. And some lived and some did not. I do remember that my father took a stick to my mother and because of that, the last baby came too early. My father walked the hill line with that burlap bundle under his arm and a spade over his shoulder. He buried the bundle in the orchard. He told me once that he would have thrown it
down the well but he was afraid it would contaminate the water.

  “My mother died after that one. It took some time, a few days, maybe a week, but she died. And we were sad, but I think we all knew that women die because they cannot fight being women. That is one thing they are helpless to stand against.

  “At just that moment, Elise decided to marry. Herman had been coming around and she had put him off and put him off, but when our mother died, she said yes. She was young. Sixteen. Seventeen. Not old. But old enough to know that she might be better off elsewhere. And I saw the way she changed. She became very serious. She took to walking in the fields. She would stand at the top of the orchard and look back at our house and see our brothers and sisters in the dooryard and the smoke standing straight like a stick out of the chimney. Perhaps she waited to be kidnapped by dwarves. Perhaps she meant to disappear. She never spoke of these things so I do not know. But I think it is fair to say that once she decided, there was no going back. Herman was tall and handsome and he teased her and made her laugh and our father approved of their courtship. So one day Herman came for her and carried flowers and she wore a dark red dress and they walked down into the village and met my father in front of the church and they got married just like that. The neighbors came. They ate cake. Elise had her picture made. And my father paid Herman a dowry in cash, which meant that they could get a start. It was not much of a dowry but it was something.

  “No one thing made them decide to come here. The first baby died. Martha was born. I think they just took the temperature of the place. The winds were blowing. The Germans were not so easy on the Pomeranians. The people of Rügen felt that they had stood apart for many centuries but now they had to knuckle under. And then things had not been happy for the Lutherans for fifty years or more. For many years, whole parishes would pack up and come to start towns in Wisconsin. You would hear the name of the place in the streets and in the taverns. Wisconsin. Wisconsin. No one had any idea what the word meant. But there was the word, wherever we went, and it began to be something real, and of course it told a story in its very utterance. And many people had already gone and that made it seem like anyone could leave. That you could survive leaving.

  “One night Herman met a man who had been to Milwaukee and that man said that everyone spoke German in Milwaukee and everyone was free and all of us would be equal. There was plenty of work and a man could get a house and land without any problem. Money flowed like water in Milwaukee. Not like Rügen, where the only constant was the lack of everything. Poverty and dispossession level the world that way. Herman thought about a farm. That is what I remember. He wanted a dairy farm of his own. That would not be possible on Rügen, I can tell you. So it was all decided. They packed their things. They sold their furniture. Elise took our mother’s watch fob with her and her wedding picture. A man is always what he carries but we usually think the opposite. This makes us feel powerful in the face of our own helplessness.

  “A year later I came, too. My father had died and I felt his death like a door being unlocked. I decided it was time to move from there and I felt that the way someone young always feels that, which is to say, I did not know what a terrible thing it is for a man to leave his own country. A country is something that you do not leave behind. But I came on a ship with a big, promising name, the California, and I watched the ocean as we went. Never had anything seemed so far as land. When I got to New York, I walked up and down the city streets as if I was in a dream. I saw that people here were very wealthy. Buildings like cliffs everywhere around me and women wrapped in furs. After a few days, I took my sack and my case and went to Grand Central Station. I stood in the middle of the marble lobby as if I were in a church, and all the people passed me on the way to the platforms and they were like shadows running away from me, neither here in the present or part of my past. I went to a window and bought a ticket and walked down a set of stairs and stood next to the tracks until it was time to get on a train bound for Milwaukee. When I looked out the windows, I saw farms that were better than the farms on Rügen. And these were the common farms. These were the farms that any man might own. And I saw timber and open land and I had some ideas.

  “When I got here, I took a job as a farmhand. The job came with a place to live and three meals a day. These are not things to be overlooked, as you know. And I liked getting up early in the morning and standing in the yard next to the barn and listening. First you hear the crickets and then they get louder just before the sun rises and then you hear the cows, whose first sounds of the day are grunts and moans, not the sounds you think they will make. And you stand there in the last part of the night and the air is fresh and sweet and none of this belongs to you so you can really just enjoy it. Really just take in all the newness around you.

  “Some people might say we were raised like animals. My father was a very hard man. But in the end, that is your father, too, and you did not live in a house with a pig. And your husband. Very hard, as you were quick to find out. For my part, I thought we might have left this sort of thing behind. I did not think I would see Elise the way I saw her on the day we buried her. I did not think I would see in Herman something I had seen in my father. I do not know what I imagined. That we would get off of a ship and really believe that we were all equal? We say that we do. Do not try to tell any man in this country that he may not do as he pleases. Do not try to take that away. But a man believes in his own personal freedom and he believes in his own desires and in his own rage. He says that we should all be free. But then he goes home and bloodies his wife. If you mention it at all, he will only say that he is outraged by your complaint and unquestionably not to blame. That he has to live hard to put bread on the table and this is what happens when men are held down. He will look at you with the face of an angry child when he says this, as if he has no ability to decide his own actions for himself. He wants it both ways and we usually agree with him. Poor man, we say. He is not to blame. In my opinion he cannot have it both ways. But that is just my opinion. It is not a popular one.”

  He stopped. We sat in a silence for a long time.

  “What happened to my mother?” I said at last.

  He looked at me and then looked at the pipe in his hands. He set the pipe on the table. “What does it matter?” he said.

  “It matters to me.” I felt my words as small things taken by an empty sky.

  He sighed. “What if I told you that I do not know?”

  “I would say I do not believe you.”

  “But belief has nothing to do with it. This is bigger than belief. That is why it is so hard to see.”

  “That means you know.” I reached for his arm.

  He picked up his pipe and pushed his thumb into the bowl and patted his shirt pocket and then picked up his matches from the tabletop. “Well,” he said. “If I were to answer that, it would suggest some certainty that I do not think I have.”

  “Martha said it was a terrible accident.”

  “It could have been.”

  “But was it?”

  I knew I sounded like a child demanding a piece of the adult world, as if I was entitled. But I thought that after everything that had happened, I had earned this one thing, this fact that stood beyond me, that my uncle Carl knew and must tell me.

  He struck a match and held the flame to his pipe and again drew deeply. The window in the building across the street went dark. I rested my head against my hand and watched smoke coil around the lamp.

  “So much damage has been done and yet so little is said,” he said then. “Even at the funeral, he said nothing.” He fiddled with the box of matches and then put the box in his breast pocket. “No one can know for sure,” he said. “Herman would have to say and Herman will never say. Elise never spoke to me of these things and I was not welcome in your father’s house.” He paused.

  “I saw her one day on the street and she wore a scarf tied around her hair the way the women did in Rügen,” he said. “It was a beautiful warm day. Just after a
rain. When I got close, I saw the marks. Those you cannot hide. So I think I knew then. But we stood in the street and talked about you and Hattie and Martha. She thought that Martha would marry that boy and she said she was glad of it because George was so soft. She said he was a good boy and quiet and peaceful. I knew that what she meant was that he was not hard like Herman. Or the rest of them.” He lifted his pipe and looked into the bowl and set it down again and looked at me. “Do you understand what I am telling you?”

  I nodded. There was nothing new in the thing he described. My mother had fallen before my father and he had chased her into the yard. He had held her down and used the buckle end of a belt. He had taken up a piece of firewood from the bucket by the stove and used it on her head. Anything in our house could be used against her. And sometimes in the morning Martha would have a welt on her face. And sometimes I would stand before him in the front room with my throat closed, waiting for my turn. All he ever said was that he had to do this because he loved me.

  Carl tapped the bowl of his pipe against his palm and fine ash fell to the floor. He looked at his palm and clapped his hands together and looked at his palm again. “It was the world,” he said. “Here. There. All the same. It was the world that killed her.”

  I sobbed once and brought my hand to my face and held it palm flat over my mouth, as if sorrow was a thing that once come could never be contained.

  He considered me. “It is a great deal to take in, and you have had a number of shocks already these days,” he said. “But that does not mean I cannot help you. In fact, I think it makes me more inclined. I do not want to see you end up like my mother or my sister.” He turned his pipe in his hands and then unlaced his tobacco pouch and tucked the pipe inside. He sat at the table and fastened the laces, and the leather made a sound as he drew it through the eyelets.

  We sat in the trailing light. Then he slapped his hand against the tabletop. “We like to talk, right?” he said. He stood up. “But what can you do? Still there is the world.”