The Middle Ground

by Jeff Ewing

Mad managed a smile. “Thanks.”

  He nodded before hurrying over to the tree and pulling himself up onto the lowest branch. He was a good climber, but she could tell it wasn’t as easy as he tried to make out. His progress was deliberate and studied as he passed the long branch overhanging the water she’d assumed he would launch from and continued up the tree. The branches were thinner up above, she could see them bending under him as he climbed.

  “Be careful,” she said, not quite loud enough for him to hear. He was someone’s little brother, and she felt a kind of proxy concern for him. At a crook of branches he stopped and turned to face the water. She shielded her eyes, smiled up at him, proud as if he were her own brother, or maybe her son. Then she noticed his odd smile, and only then saw that he was holding his penis in his hand and waggling it at her.

  He let out a strange bird-like noise—meant to be somehow suggestive, she imagined—and she looked away. Off across Sognsvann where the wind had started to roughen the surface like old paper; the clouds had moved in, and the trees crowded closer to the bank.

  The branch breaking was almost soundless, but not quite—a little “snick,” then he was falling. Sliding down the trunk, branches breaking and scraping across his chest and stomach. He bounced off the big branch, which didn’t break, and was thrown flapping into the shallows between two rocks. Mad could see the bone of his left arm jutting out through the skin just below his elbow. He rolled onto his back, wailing.

  When she reached him, his little manhood was no more than an exposed stub, flopped to the side and retreating, no longer interested in much of anything. The boy looked up, his eyes wide with pain.

  “Goddamn you,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  He fumbled his shorts closed with his good hand and hissed up at her: “Fucking bitch!”

  The bone of his arm strained against its binding tendons and skin, the ragged break very white in the sun that chose that moment to break through again.

  He was a snake in the garden, and she should have done what farmers did, which is lop them in two. Instead she ducked her head, scooped up her towel and her shirt and pants and hurried up the hill toward the tram. Partway up the rocky slope below the station she realized she’d left her sandals behind, but she didn’t go back. On the train, with the lake left long behind, she touched the bruises brought up by the pebbles, the pricks and scratches the brush had made on her feet and ankles, taking care to catalog them before they faded.

  She wished she’d gone back out for the cake. What would it have cost her, really? Her father was disappointed, she knew, even though he tried not to show it. His expectations were so low, but the delivery on them was even poorer. She’d seen the brief hope flash across his face like a fish darting just below the surface, before his tolerant smile erased it as simply as a breeze passing over the water. He could do that; he’d learned how to live in the world. She wondered sometimes if she’d inherited anything more from him than his wide, blunt chin.

  She found a couple of half-stale cookies, and they ate those with coffee watching a show about sea turtles. Her father dozed off in the middle, the cookie only nibbled at and fallen onto his chest. She took his plate and saucer and washed them quietly, brushed the crumbs from his sweater, then laid the quilt from Belgium across his legs.

  Before she got into bed she made a quick note in the journal she kept on the bedside table:

  Hurt no one. Hurt by no one. A blue ribbon day.

  She wondered if her father ever read the journal when she was at work. She was afraid it might make him sad if he did, so she added: All’s well on land and sea. It was something he used to say, something he’d picked up on the ships he worked before the accident. She wasn’t sure when he’d stopped saying it.

  Just before she fell asleep, the boy at the lake entered her mind once more. His arm was probably healed by now, she guessed. Everything good as new. She imagined taking it and breaking it again, snapping it across her knee like a branch. She thought maybe she could turn this into a ritual, a goodnight story she told herself to feel better, except she didn’t feel better. No matter what she did, he healed and aged into confidence and dismissiveness while she stayed where she was, a minor, pitiful character in his story. He would tell it when he got drunk a few years on (she could hear his words slurring, see his red balloon face), describing her unflatteringly—her embarrassment, her scurrying off without her shoes—or sometimes leaving her out altogether. She would become a shadow, a detail among other details he added or dropped depending on his audience. Eventually there wouldn’t be anything to prove she’d been there at all, except for the little scar by his elbow where the bone had broken through, an irregular patch shaped like Sognsvann itself that never tanned like the rest of him.

  BARN SALE

  TWO BOYS GAPE OUT THE clouded back window of a station wagon, their noses swiping across the glass and leaving two slicks like snail tracks. May watches through the knothole in the wall as the car bounces over the rain ruts in the drive, climbing sluggishly past the barn toward the house. A loose strip of plastic trim slaps against the side panel. The car coughs a couple of times, then dies. A tall man with slow eyes climbs out from behind the wheel and stretches lazily. He walks around the car to where three makeshift tables—sheets of plywood resting on sawhorses and fruit crates—hold the scraps of May Aiken’s life.

  “This must be it,” he says.

  His wife turns sideways in the passenger seat and scowls at the sagging boards. “Don’t we have enough junk of our own?”

  “There’s treasures at these barn sales sometimes,” he says, picking an old rasp up off one of the tables. “Buried old treasures.”

  The rasp handle is cracked from having been let dry out; when he turns it over, the blade falls out and sticks in the ground.

  “Is that one of them?”

  He bends down to pick the blade up, sets it back on the table without answering. May watches him touching her things, leaving who knows what all over them. She feels a vague ache in her foot, looks down to see she doesn’t have any shoes on. If they see that, she thinks, it’ll just be more ammunition.

  The two boys climb out through the back window, plop to the ground, and immediately start fighting over an old metal horse. May can see the horse clearly though the kids and the horse are a good twenty yards away—the black curls of its mane and tail, the sweep of neck turned faintly to the left as though it’s sniffing something on the air. Her sister left it behind when she moved away, married at seventeen. Her mother took it over then, kept it beside her own bed until the day she died. There are things that keep you tied to the world, May knows, things that have that kind of power.

  She presses her eye to the knothole again, blinks twice to bring the little sphere back into focus—brown grass spreading into gray-blue sky—the uniform plainness making it difficult to tell where the ground ends and the sky begins.

  “Look what you did,” one of the boys yells.

  The other boy is holding the horse’s left hind leg in his hand, looking down helplessly at the broken edge.

  “I didn’t. You did.”

  “Liar!”

  “You’re the liar!”

  “Shut up!” Their mother is out of the car now and planted thickly on the ground. “Both of you.”

  She stands like a boxer, her feet spread, balanced. A strand of hair has come loose from its metal clip and falls in a slant across her face. She twitches her head sharply and the strand falls back.

  The boys fumble with the horse, pressing the leg back into place and letting go, willing it to stay, to heal. But it falls off again, bounces once on the table, and rings against the base of a singed oil lamp. The woman turns back to her husband.

  “Your boys,” she says.

  “Now they’re mine.”

  “It’s all right,” a voice says from behind them. “No harm done.”

  May shifts again until she can see Matt standing at the top of the steps, a cup of coffe
e steaming in one hand and a half-eaten piece of toast in the other.

  “We’ll pay for it,” the woman says, with a hint of resentment.

  “Never mind,” Matt says. “It was old.”

  The husband laughs. “That’s the idea, isn’t it?”

  He holds out his hand as Matt comes down the steps. Matt fumbles the piece of toast into his left hand, wipes his right hand on his pant leg, and they shake. The pants are faded just the right amount, with worn patches on the knees and seat that approximate those made by work. Just the way he likes them. Now they’re probably stained.

  “Lot of stuff,” the man says.

  “Yes.”

  “Is it from around here? From on the place?”

  “My mother-in-law’s, mostly. She grew up here.”

  Matt glances toward the barn, and May draws back from the knothole. The sound of her own breathing seems impossibly loud as she presses herself against the wall. Back in the depths of the barn something skitters across the planks. She makes a shooing motion with her hands, then knots them up in her sweater again.

  The man turns a trivet over in his hand. “Sorry to hear. She passed on, huh?”

  “No. No, she’s still—with us. It was just getting a little crowded.”

  “Sure. You don’t have to tell me.”

  At the end of the table, the man’s wife is looking at a metal plate partly hidden by a cast iron skillet. She picks it up and turns it over. It’s split down the middle, with a hinge on the back and bright silver clasps at either end. A price of $1.25 is marked in felt pen on a small sticker on its underside.

  “What’s this supposed to be?”

  Matt strolls over to where she’s standing.

  “It says a dollar twenty-five,” she says. “For what?”

  “You don’t have to buy it,” her husband says.

  “I just want to know what it is they’re selling for a dollar twenty-five.”

  Matt looks at it, turns it over once.

  “You’d have to ask my wife.”

  “If you don’t know what it is,” the husband says, “you don’t need it.”

  “I’m just asking.”

  She snatches the plate back and slams it down on the table. It lets out a ringing that drifts across the yard. The two boys look up as it passes them. May draws in a quick breath and holds it. If she goes out there, she knows, they’ll see her and remember. If she stays in the barn they might forget all about her. But the fixit’s out there.

  Matt and the others turn to watch as she crosses the dry yard, ignoring the pops and clicks coming from her knees and hip and the quick stabs of the dried grass on the soles of her feet. Matt holds out his hands reflexively, but she continues on past him, snatches up the plate and clutches it to her chest.

  “What do you think you’re doing? These are my things.”

  Matt flicks an embarrassed smile toward the man and woman.

  “We’ve been over this, May. We can’t keep it all. There’s no room.”

  “There’s a whole barn.”

  He looks helplessly at the barn, then down at May, at her mottled skin beneath the wisps of gun-gray hair. Then up toward the house, hoping Eve will appear.

  “If you’ve got any questions about anything,” he says at last, “feel free to ask.”

  “We just did,” the woman says.

  “Prices are negotiable, of course.”

  “Sure thing,” the man says.

  May shuffles backward a few careful steps into the shade of the walnut tree. The woman watches her, eyes narrowed. The man takes her by the elbow to turn her away, but she jerks her arm free and squares up to him.

  “Come on, Lee,” he says. “Come on. Okay?”

  She breathes through her nose. May can see her nostrils widening and narrowing like an animal’s. When she finally turns away, May relaxes her grip slightly on the plate. Matt brings a chair over for her. She sits down, sets the plate in her lap and looks at her hand where the metal edge has left a crease in the skin. She opens and closes it, watches the scar fill slowly again with blood.

  On the little hill behind the house a woodpecker has started working on the fire-hollowed trunk of the oak. A month after her mother died, the tree caught fire in the middle of the night with no lightning or anything else to set it off. It smoldered for almost a week. Kids came from all over the area to watch the big tree turn slowly into a black husk, burning from the inside out. Her daddy kept his own vigil, coming in very late at night for a beer and a meager supper. May would hear him downstairs talking to nobody as he dug through the refrigerator or heated some leftovers on the stove. He was like Loft would be later in the way he saw judgments and trials in misfortune. The fire was another visitation, a further example of god singling him out.

  When May came down one of those nights to help him, to keep him from burning the pan or himself, the plate was there on the counter. It shimmered with an otherworldly shine and threw reflected light in miraculous patterns across the walls and ceiling. She picked it up carefully. The clasps were undone and the two halves gaped apart. She pressed them together and fastened the clasps, feeling something pass through her as she clicked them into place. The house gathering itself, a certain heaviness lifting. She wiped some of the soot away and the plate glowed brighter than the fire that had brought it forth.

  Her daddy said that somebody had probably stashed it in the tree, one of the McCutcheon kids most likely. She didn’t know if he was lying or if he just didn’t know any better, but she didn’t hold it against him. It was up to her to wield it anyway, she knew that instinctively.

  Matt squats beside her and rests his hand on the back of her chair. He won’t sit, she knows. Not here, not right on the ground.

  “May,” he says, but she doesn’t look at him.

  He sighs and drums his fingers on the back of the chair.

  “You know about the barn,” he says. “You know it has to come down.”

  Beyond the fence a new development is going in. Huge houses with little squares of bare land around them. Each with a garage as big as her and Loft’s first house, but not a single barn among them.

  “You’ve got no right,” she says. “They’re my things.”

  Matt sighs again and stands up. He walks over to a row of old field lugs stacked on the ground and starts unloading them, lining their contents up on the plank tables.

  They’ve kept some things back, but the things they’ve kept are worthless things that May could have thrown away without a second thought. Books she’s already read they think might be worth something someday, knickknacks and china plates. Old pictures, grainy, unrecognizable likenesses of what was supposed to be her—when she was a girl, a newlywed, a mother. Studio pictures with no life in them. The real pictures, the ones she and her daddy took and developed, are all in the albums in her room. But they’re not interested in those, all they see is empty fields and woods and sky in them—they can’t see the bird hidden in the clump of grass, or her daddy whistling beside her as she aims the camera. There’s so much they don’t understand that she doesn’t know where to start.

  A little hand-carved whistle rolls off the table onto the ground. Loft carved it for Evie when she was just a little thing. Hair falling into her eyes, her dress dusty and wrinkled from rolling with the dog in the pasture. She should have stayed that way, small and sweet and untainted. May laughs to herself. That’s one of Loft’s words, she thinks. Untainted. One of his righteous words.

  The front door creaks open, and Eve steps out into the sunlight, shading her eyes with her hand. When she sees them, she waves and trots down the steps. She comes to May first and kisses her on the cheek.

  “Beautiful day, hmm Mom?” She smells like artificial flowers. May feels a soreness in her chest. She remembers a story on the news once about a little girl who fell into a well. She feels the same thing now, the same tightness. That clench of something about to slip away. But they brought that little girl back.

  “M
orning,” Eve says to Matt. Then to both of them: “How’s it going?”

  Matt looks at May without saying anything, and Eve’s eyes swivel back to her.

  “Mom, are you being good?”

  May is looking at her reflection in the plate and doesn’t answer. Eve’s shoulders slump.

  “Not that thing again.”

  She tries to take it, and is surprised at her mother’s strength.

  “Mom, please.”

  The plate’s surface is covered with little dimples that scatter May’s features like puzzle pieces shaken out onto a table. She is suddenly terrified of what might happen to the pieces if she lets go. She knows she couldn’t collect them all.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Eve sees the man and his wife watching them. She lets go of the plate, straightens up and brushes the wrinkles out of her skirt.

  “Finding anything?” she says.

  “There’s some interesting things,” the man says. “We’re enjoying ourselves.”

  “Good.”

  The two boys have found some metal soldiers and are forming them up in skirmish lines in her flower bed. One of them blitzes across a row of pansies and Eve grits her teeth. She looks up at their mother, hoping she’ll see Eve’s expression and stop them. Instead the woman squints across at May.

  “What is that?” she asks.

  “Hmm?” Eve says.

  “That thing, that plate. Is it something?”

  “No. It’s nothing.”

  May laughs. “Nothing.”

  The woman steps around the table.

  “Lee,” her husband says, holding up a boot scraper with the bristles worn away. “Look at this.” But the woman keeps coming, her legs rubbing against each other with a shrill insect sound. She’s still young, May can see, but not for long. Her face is puffed and neglected, the eyes receding back into bruised folds of skin. Her mouth is a red, crooked line like a cut. Her thick shadow falls over May where she sits in the folding chair, wanting suddenly to be up and gone, back in the barn, behind the knothole again.

  “What you got there?” she asks, bending close to May’s face. “That a prize?”