It was only five minutes to the rough roadside eatery, a repurposed farm building in the adjacent hamlet. Fresh hay bales tied in rounds and stacked under black tarps in the parking lot. Once again, Irene was sniffing the air. Watching her, Faith realized they could be turning a corner soon. Her erratic, exasperating, troublesome mother really might be leaving her, if only in fits and starts. The possibility opened heavy in her chest. And Faith shoved it down. Not today.
Inside the barn, Irene settled low into her chair, head craned forward, sniffing, sniffing still. And Faith sighed and studied the handwritten menu. She’d have a black coffee, the tomato soup, maybe a toasted-cheese sandwich for Irene. Local cheese, local bread. And for you, sweetheart? she said to Cece, then she looked up. Cece was staring at her.
What is it? Faith knew this look, but she hadn’t seen it in a while. What’s the matter?
When Cece was about ten, a bit younger, too. Those delicate years, Hadley would go much too far with the teasing, say things to Cece that had a sting and worse. Often about her appearance, her body, and Owen did nothing. Nothing.
What is it, sweetie? Don’t you feel well?
Cece slid her eyes toward her grandmother for a half second then back to Faith.
What?
Irene’s eyes were startled wide now. Her craning neck, her open attentive tender gaze riveted by Cece, she began stroking Cece’s hand, then reaching up to brush at the shaved neck, the chestnut stubble, to trace with a curled stiff hand the silly green snake. Irene was whispering now. Honey? Can you hear me?
Cece kept her eyes locked on Faith.
There, said Irene. I’m here. I’m here now. Then one side of her seemed to melt a tiny bit toward Cece.
Mom? Faith said, frightened now, too.
But only for a moment. She decided to keep this day, which was almost over, about Cece. And she thought it was a good decision at the time—for Cece—the right decision, but later she’d have to explain it over and over to the doctors, to her brother, most of all to herself. Even Courtney Ruddy would hint she’d been wrong. Very wrong. She’d have to explain again and again what later were called clear signs flashing brightest red and what she’d done. Or hadn’t done. Like race to the closest ER. When they did finally reach a hospital late the next morning, only a passing nurse would take pity on her. Happens all the time, she said. We stop seeing them, right? We’re just too close. And Faith asked, Your mother? No, no, said the nurse. She’s fine.
But Faith did see Irene. And she believed that Irene, as usual, was playing for attention, for the spotlight. It would be the last trait to go, she’d told her brother not that long ago. Irene, star of every show. But it was Cece’s day, so Irene couldn’t have it. Period.
When are they moving you out of those silly dorms? she asked Cece, nodding, letting her know how they’d be handling this. But Cece didn’t catch on. She seemed to freeze, maybe with embarrassment, Faith thought. Freshman year is an impossible time. Cece kept her eyes on Faith as Irene edged in closer, the two of them arm and arm, Irene reaching up again to stroke Cece’s head. Irene was silent now. Looking up at Cece with strange devotion. Okay, thought Faith. Okay, she’s being a kook. But here we are.
This would be her motto now. Going forward. Here we are. And here. Soon enough they’d gather themselves up and go home to whatever tricks and surprises were coming next. Because Cece needed to be back on campus by nightfall for whatever.
Everyone ready? Faith would pay the check and bring the car around front. You okay for a half minute? she said to Cece. Irene’s cheese sandwich was untouched, but Cece had eaten two apple cider donuts and a rice pudding. Irene was dozing, again, nestled against Cece’s shoulder. She was often sleepy these days, so Faith missed what should have been clear. And the quiet three-hour drive back to the Jersey Shore would prove to be three hours too many. But for now, Faith went up to the register and when she was finished paying she looked back at the table and caught Cece whispering to the top of Irene’s head and from long experience she knew exactly what Cece was saying. She could see the small pink peony mouth clearly shaping the words: I love you. I love you. Faith knew because it was what Cece had always whispered to Hadley. When she was too young to know better and she thought Faith was out of sight.
The Elixir
Of all the tasks her new sister-in-law, Ell, had assigned, the eggshells were the most difficult. The hens laid eggs with thin brown shells with a greenish cast. Annie suggested the fatty mash her mother had favored, stove drippings in the feed, nothing that would cost anything, to thicken the shells. And her sister-in-law said she appreciated the ingenuity. She supposed that’s what came from living wherever Annie had been for so long, but on the farm there was a different kind of thinking now and if she watched and listened long enough she’d learn.
One thing Annie understood immediately was that her presence strained the economy of the household. But what else could Ben do but take her in? She heard her brother out in the yard near the pipe pergola he was constructing telling Ell once more that he couldn’t have made a different choice. They were speaking outside for a private conversation because Ben was mostly deaf, but he still had a bit of hearing in the left ear. So Ell stood there shouting close to his face though her tone was practical and considerate. She’d give Annie two months past her delivery, then she would need to find work or another home. Ell was being generous, Annie thought, and she was grateful for the kindness.
Still the eggshells stuck to the sink and mingled with the oatmeal scraps in the trap and made a glue, and she’d used up the paper towel roll chasing it all out. When Ell came into the kitchen and saw her clutching the cardboard tube, she sighed and said, I’ll take that. It’s useful. And Annie understood. She herself was not.
Annie left the kitchen and wandered out toward Ben. She knew not to disturb his work, but she floated near him and caught his eye and he smiled at her with such sweetness it slowed her steps. Some thought that Ben was backward in his mind, and she supposed in some measure it was true. He’d gone to special schools when they were growing up and then no school at all. By the time Annie was in kindergarten, Ben was learning, slowly, what he could do on the farm. Their father never beat him, which was an exception in the household.
Now their father was a stump of his old self. He’d fallen under the tractor in ’42 right after Annie left home. Lost the use of one leg and one arm and half his wits to boot, their mother wrote. It mowed the temper right out him, said their mother in a letter begging Annie to come home and try again. And then she died. As if relaxing the need to evade her husband after all that time had stilled her heart. Annie came home for the funeral and then disappeared for good. Gypsy girl, said Ben when she turned up again all these years later. He was so happy to see her. She knew that.
Ell and Annie had already brought their father his breakfast. After the wedding, Ell had the old chicken coop fitted out with a bathroom, flush toilet included, and a wood-burning stove. A rocking chair porch right off the new front door, like it had always been a little tiny house. She spared no expense, she’d told Annie. And their father seemed to like it. He had his big brass bed under the eaves. And a television next to the wood stove. He sat in the easy chair that had been reupholstered in something that could be scrubbed clean, because even with his usable arm he was a sloppy eater. He liked to sit in his easy chair and eat the hot donuts Ell made and watch her bend and stretch pulling the sheets up on his bed, tucking them in. She sniffed and gave him a knowing look over her shoulder, and he smiled and then turned to Annie, like she was the snake in their happy grass, and said, Who in hell? Who in their right mind?
And Ell said, Now Papa, using her special voice, the soothing voice that Ben would never hear. She’s company. You be sweet to our wandering gal.
Ell needed to make the point, Annie understood. She didn’t want Annie getting any thoughts in her head about family and letting her baby grow up
here.
On most mornings, Annie would collect the eggs, help make the breakfast, then Ell would carry a tray out to their father, come back after a half hour or so, and supervise the important cleaning of the kitchen. So much happened here now: the sausage making and the jams and jellies, the putting up of vegetables. And Ell was a bit of a self-made apothecary. She’d invented an elixir that cured a list of ailments. She brewed it in the basement, away from prying eyes. But up in the kitchen the jars were boiled and sealed. Every day, jars were boxed and stacked. The first Saturday of the month, she’d set up a stand by the post office and after an hour, all her goods were sold.
Annie knew just from the smell the central part of Ell’s secret recipe was the grain alcohol naturally needed to preserve the herbs and barks. That it was an elixir for those suffering from rheumatism, migraine, women’s troubles, rabies, dropsy, and heart, for starters, any manner of skin rash or chest congestion, marital problems or blood ailments, and that its medicinal value trumped even for those who had taken the pledge explained some of its popularity. The town doctor didn’t care. Nothing but a bit of old parsley and pine bark, he said. That’s my guess. No harm done and quite possibly some good. And Ell took that to be an endorsement. That most of her customers spent Saturday afternoons half-conscious was considered part of the cure.
Annie was five months gone when she arrived at the farm and seven and a half when she started to feel the fluttering pain down low in her belly. It was like something hot and vicious was threading itself through a big vein that traveled from just under her heart to the place where the baby nestled so quiet now. She waited for the tossing and turning that would come. She kept to herself about the needle of pain until one day she was carrying a tray of jars and nearly fell over, shocked by the sting within her.
Put them down. Right now, said Ell. Loud and practical like she was speaking to Ben. Now sit yourself there, and she pointed to the chair by the door. A gathering spot for things going outside. Clear those tools, she said. Sit down so I can see you.
Well, you’re nearly blue, said Ell. Look at me. Look me right in the eye.
Annie glanced up, but she was tracking the slithering pain inside. She knew from town gossip that Ell had tried three times to have a baby and each pregnancy had ended abruptly. This was understood as Ben’s deficit. A magnificent woman, said the doctor. A cruel irony, he said, and most agreed, though thought he was being a bit poetic. Others thought he was talking about Ell like she was a prize animal needlessly wasted. And now her predicament was considered historical and set. So she made remedies instead and ran an admirable farm with two men who scarcely made up one between them. That the seasonal hands were frightened of her was just as it should be. Can’t be too kind and keep things going if you’re a woman. Everyone takes advantage given the chance.
Annie tried to calm the baby deep inside as if the baby was upset by her pain, and maybe that was true. Hush now, she thought. Hi-dee-ho, and she didn’t really know she’d closed her eyes until Ell was saying in her loud Ben voice: Take a drink of this but drink it slow.
Annie looked at her. Ell’s face in the shadow in the kitchen that had once been her mother’s looked tender. Like she was ready, as her mother had always been, to nurse a problem away, no matter where it came from. The source isn’t my concern, said her mother. You are. So matter of fact. So good. That Annie had still run away and not even fifteen had caused her mother unnecessary heartache, she knew. But in every letter her mother wrote she began by saying: Sweet girl, I understand.
Ell was holding out a cup and saying in her loud patient voice: Don’t let this baby tell you what to do. Take a slow long sip, hold it in your mouth, then swallow. Then do it again.
Annie felt her mouth burning and the fumes like tar on a hot day soaking up into her brain and melting it. Ell kept the cup in front of her until it was drained, then she helped her by one arm, gently, as if Annie were their addled father, to the little storeroom off the kitchen she’d cleared out for Annie’s cot.
All afternoon and into the evening Annie’s body shivered and burned half-dreaming. At midnight she started giving birth and that woke her up.
Please, please, she cried out when she could speak. Call the doctor. But when Ell finally came, sad and slow, she said the doctor couldn’t be reached, but there was nothing to worry about. She’d be right back.
Annie tried not to shout out when the pain surged though only Ell could hear her. It was already curbing when Ell pulled up a stool beside her and offered more elixir.
Just water? said Annie. Please, please, I’m so thirsty.
This right here is all you need, said Ell, and in the dark room Annie saw kindness and took the cup.
When she woke up, the daylight filled the window but scarcely lit the room. There was an early spring rain, and Annie could hear Ell shouting to Ben in the kitchen about a double workload. He shouldn’t think for one minute this would be the situation for long. And Ben shouted that he understood all that. Annie had always been a good strong girl, and as soon as she was healed—
Don’t talk to me about healing, shouted Ell. And the baby mewed in a dresser drawer on the floor. Annie looked down and saw her son in full for the first time. His sealed eyes, his scalp bright red, as if only a moment ago he’d made his way from her. She bent down out of the bed and felt the shock of pain between her legs, a wet howl of pain, but she kept going, holding her breath until her hand could reach his mottled belly. Hi-dee-ho, she whispered. Hi-dee-ho. And she touched his perfect waxy skin.
Ell was right. It took a very long while for Annie to heal from what the doctor said after the fact had been a serious life-threatening situation of the womb. She still wasn’t out of danger. And the baby was named Roger for their father one day when Annie was sleeping. And when she awoke she couldn’t unstick it. The pastor had stopped in and that was that. Baby Roger was even slower to find his strength. Born early, said the doctor, and to a sickly mother at that.
Ell was eager to offer herself—despite the inconvenience—to feed baby Roger, to take him out into the fresh air and off to the chicken coop to visit his grandfather. She even took him swaddled in an egg basket and sat him on the sales table in front of the post office from the first Saturday morning after he was born. She wore a thick covering apron and a pleased open smile. When her customers peaked in at the tiny face poking out from his new crocheted baby cap and said, My, oh my, Ell sighed and nodded. And when asked his opinion of all this, the doctor shrugged and said something about God’s mysterious ways.
But when Ell moved baby Roger up to her room to sleep at night, Annie began to pine and falter. The doctor prescribed a strict diet of blood fortifiers, something to put some color in her cheeks. And Ell gave her the first-made sausages each week. And plenty of her elixir, which the doctor hadn’t commented on one way or the other.
Spring finally came in full. The wisteria bloomed outside Annie’s window and the lilac buds darkened before the burst. Her window was open to the possible breeze and she heard her father crying out, yelling curses. She sat up to try to catch the words.
Bastard, rat, weasel, freak, forked menace, creepy-crawling slug. Just a howling, hideous maw. Annie couldn’t find the sense. The kitchen was quiet, and she put on a robe and pulled herself upright to her feet. Slut. Scum. Demon filth. Why, the sweat from my cock could do better.
Baby Roger was nowhere in the kitchen and Annie was frightened. His dresser drawer with its little nest of blankets was on the chair by the door. Outside the farmyard went still.
There’d been talk in town about what might happen to the farm after the old man died. Though Ell was capable as a subsistence farmer she wasn’t an owner, and long ago, the old man had disinherited Ben on principle, and Annie never had any kind of standing. Everyone understood that. So the farm would revert to the town, and there were exciting things that could happen then on all that fertile land. Nearl
y everyone had a plan. Some smart planting techniques could be tried. New ways to increase production and cut out the usual pests. But best of all, a livestock-processing plant, erected on the stream, away from the town center, would keep all that work local and bring in a wider revenue base than ever before. The town would burst into its rightful rebirth and leave the ranks of the withering behind.
Now, listen, all this progress is inevitable, Ell said to the old man. We can be mowed right down, or we can take matters into our own hands and ride high.
She’d been saying this for a while on a regular basis. Sometimes she would sit on the mussed soured sheets and part her legs and talk about the mighty tax write-off of a meat plant and all the best cuts sure to land first on their table. And if the old man closed his eyes she’d whisper about the one thing that tractor never found, thank the good lord. And he would hop across the room, not bother with any crutch or cane and give her the business she was begging for before Ben or any other busybody came popping in to the chicken coop looking for wisdom or sympathy.
But now he said Ell was trying to trick him, calling the puling scrap of a baby his seed. I may be slow, and I may be lame, but I’m not Ben, and don’t think you can weasel me.
Now, Annie could hear her father call out for her to be his witness. She knew this sound in his voice. Her mother would always meet her halfway in the kitchen garden and say, Go slow, angel, and don’t say too much. God’s hand right there on your shoulder.
So she’d wind down her gait, lift one heavy foot after another until she was finally in the barn, poor Ben with his head trapped as usual between the stall boards and their father all tired out, saying, Give me your hand, gal. He’d grip her hard and wipe whatever mess was on his palm down the front of her dress like it was a bib she wore for him and his needs. Then he’d walk out of the barn, leaving the door open so she could see to jimmy Ben’s head out from between the timbers and help him back into his clothes.
The Ocean House Page 9