Three Novellas

by Sandra Shwayder Sanchez

* * *

  When Sara packed her few belongings, she found she had forgotten to pack her bound journal. She didn’t need her handwritten notes anymore: she had typed them up on the manual typewriter and organized them under tentative categories, the better to share them with Professor Cormack. The notes were intermingled with too much personal stuff. She decided to burn all that shit. Reflections on the past took up too much time anyway, and she wanted to find a more satisfying future: some stability, some belonging somewhere: maybe teaching. She began by ritualistically burning it page by page but got impatient and finally she just put the thick bound bundle of paper in the fire pit to smolder slowly while she left to begin yet another era of her life. She thought she might come back someday but had no idea how soon and what the circumstances would be.

  It was already late in the day by the time she got started, and by the time she reached Gap Mills she needed a nap. She pulled over into a rest stop for what she figured would be half an hour, but she slept through what was left of the night.

  She woke up to the noise of a truck starting. It seemed like another noise from her dream, but she lifted her head and glimpsed a license plate with the word JESUS on it as the truck drove away in the morning mist. It didn’t ring a bell with her. She crawled out of the car, peed in the bushes and then started back down the mountain road to the next town. She needed a wash and some breakfast and planned to make D.C. later that day.

  Less than an hour after Sara had started out from the overlook, a farmer’s wife found the bodies of the two dead boys and called the local game warden, who was the woman’s cousin. He came out with the sheriff and was able to identify the boys by their shoes. The Baker boys had been famous for the size of their feet. By the time Sara stopped for biscuits and gravy everyone was talking about the murder. In fact a state trooper was having coffee in the same truck stop where Sara had her breakfast, and without giving it her usual careful ethical and philosophical consideration, Sara told him about the singular license plate she’d seen that morning right about where the bodies were found.

  It was Sara’s circumstantial evidence that led to Henry’s arrest, but the prosecutor didn’t need to make a case: Henry wouldn’t lie and didn’t even ask for a lawyer although one was assigned to him anyway. Henry himself had no use for her apology. That was the long and the short of it.

  “Thou shalt not kill” ... “vengeance is mine sayeth the lord” ... and it sounds easy, but Henry had the ringing in his ears for the rest of his life: the sound of Mary’s screaming never left him. In the hospital they punished her when she screamed, doused her with water until she finally learned something. Mary learned to whimper quietly and to point to what she needed. Generations of mental health workers came full of pity for Mary, determined to teach her a few words, to help her clean up. They hugged her and cut and curled her hair and showed her her own face in a mirror. But Mary defeated them all.

  Henry’s fall from righteousness, though appalling (those mangled, bloody faces), earned him some sympathy in the community. His sentence was four years for voluntary manslaughter, and he understood he would only serve two if he behaved himself in prison. He was regularly escorted across the valley and over another mountain to the hospital to visit his daughter. The hospital was surrounded by farms, small family farms, and after he asked if he could do the milking for a neighbor, the ritual milking happened every Sunday. It was his penance, a humiliation he embraced with pride, to work on Sunday, the one day he was allowed to visit his child.

  They took her from him in orderly steps. He was brought by the sheriff to the hearing with handcuffs on and wearing the uniform of a prisoner. She was brought to the hearing by a lady who worked at the local hospital and wore a suit no matter how warm the weather. A lawyer had been appointed to represent Henry, a different lawyer than the one appointed to represent him in the criminal matter. He only met this lawyer once before the hearing, and the young man suggested he stipulate to the necessity of relinquishing custody to the Department of Social Services. He didn’t know what “custody” meant (confusing it with his own imprisonment) and he didn’t know what “stipulate” meant and he was too numb to listen when the judge asked him if he understood what he was doing and he just nodded yes and then mumbled his assent when the judge instructed him to speak up for the reporter.

  There was another hearing after Henry pled guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter and again the sheriff brought him in his uniform and cuffs and he didn’t pay attention while the lawyers and social workers all agreed the best place for Mary was the state’s facility for the developmentally disabled and that she be continued a ward of the state in order for the payment to be covered. Henry was asked for his agreement and again he nodded and mumbled his assent, having no idea what it all meant.

  The hospital was a rambling complex of buildings that housed the very old and senile, the psychotic and the developmentally disabled. Adolescents had separate quarters. It was set in a pleasant green valley surrounded by small farms on three sides and the red brick gas station/grocery store/post office on the highway on the fourth. The farmers’ children either worked for the PO or the hospital. Sometimes there was a beating but mostly the farmers’ children were kindly, sympathetic young people who were truly frightened at the sight of so much freedom curtailed. At home they had fights that sometimes spilled over into violence. At the hospital patients were not allowed to vent their tempers and they would be whisked off to the “time out” room and held down if necessary at the first sign of outraged feelings. At home, mothers would often cry for days for no apparent reason and maybe their husbands would joke and say they were going to take them to the loony bin and sometimes the women shouted that they’d as soon live there as home where they worked so hard for no thanks, but in the real loony bin people who cried for days were given pills and watched while they swallowed them and then they would just sleep instead.

  In accordance with the law there were periodic reviews of Mary’s status, but she never changed. Various lawyers were appointed to represent her, but they never came to the hospital and knew her only as a thickening file. Henry was duly notified but he didn’t understand any of it and had had enough of courtrooms. Mary’s fate was routinely reaffirmed by a small group of people in business suits who’d forgotten what she looked like if they’d ever seen her.

  Shortly before Henry’s release, early for good behavior, he received a letter saying that the hospital was being closed down and all the patients were being moved to another, new facility in the eastern part of the state, closer to Virginia, in Greenbriar County. It was in a pretty location and the walls were fresh painted in pastel colors.

  As soon as he got out he wanted to visit Mary. First he had to get home to check out his old truck. Miraculously all the parts were on it but most of them didn’t work. The tires were dry-rotted and flat. There was rust of course and the battery was dead. Henry had to go to Houston’s house, that lazy old liar he had never liked, and wait around while Houston finished his dinner of beans and onions and garden greens, and then he had to pace himself to follow old Houston who moved slower than any man Henry had ever seen, around his yard full of trucks in various stages of decay and fossilization, and find the parts he needed, laboriously written out in large lopsided letters on a list. Houston picked up an alternator that crumbled in his hand and started out to look for another. He had all day, he had a lifetime. Henry stifled his rage.

  “So, what’s it like in the pen?”

  “I’m out now. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Old Cecil’s nephew was up there seven years for a killing. Was drunk but of course he was always drunk, whole family’s always drunk. In the genes. He’s back now for somethin’ else I hear. You see him when you was there?”

  “I don’t know Cecil’s nephew. Wouldn’t recognize him if I did see him.”

  “Well, you ’member him? Sure. He used to come ’round here to hunt sang and sell it in t
he towns. Tall, skinny blond fella, hair so blond it almost white. You’d ’member him if you saw him all right.”

  “I don’t mess with the young fellas; don’t care for this younger generation, not one bit, no sir. I never messed with ’em.”

  “Well, you messed with a couple of ’em pretty good.”

  Henry just kept on walking, pretending to be looking for a battery, until his head cleared, and Houston had no choice but to shut up in the face of such indifference. They walked among a veritable forest of old trucks, with grass growing up between the rotted-out boards of flatbeds, even the all-metal bodies of pickups rusting and feeding the life of lichens and mushrooms. Old logging trucks used to grunt under the loads of thick pine trees carried to the paper mills, trucks that carried stock to the auction or the slaughterhouse, clean-looking trucks scratched by all the antique junk that brought such high prices in Charleston and Huntington. Got so a man couldn’t just demolish a house anymore but had to take it apart carefully because he got more money for the colored-glass windows and cast-iron bath tubs, carved oak doors and fireplace mantels than he got paid to tear the thing down. Houston laughed thinking about it. Sometimes there were winos in those houses in the cities; couldn’t sell them, though.

  Now he wasn’t demolishing houses no more, he traded in old truck parts, picking up all the abandoned and wrecked trucks in the county seemed like. Somewhere in the midst of all the colorful and fantastic wreckage there was a white clapboard house with a tin roof where Houston ate and slept but it was hard to find. Everything here, the trucks, the house, even Houston himself, especially Houston in fact, seemed partially obliterated by the green and gray and brown forest; the forest could obliterate faster than Houston could clear. Henry thought that Houston moved about as sprightly as an old tree.

  Fixing his truck was a frustrating business involving two more trips to Houston’s junkyard. But he got it running and the sound of the engine and the feel of the truck moving like an ox up the muddy hill road gave him a young feeling of energy and joy. He wasn’t a man given to shouting but he kind of gasped and clung hard to the wheel and felt his chest expand with too much air and too much pleasure and then he had to cry, couldn’t help it, just cried. He had traded some old tack for the truck parts and gotten a little cash besides; Houston sold all that stuff along with the bathtubs and windows to people who hung it on the walls of their libraries. And he found a butter churn and corn shucker that still had some of the red paint on it in the barn that he could get some cash for. He cleaned up as best he could and put on the clothes he had washed in the creek and dried on a rock in the sun. Then he set out for the hospital to visit his daughter. He picked some laurel flowers and wrapped the woody stems in a wet rag and lay the bundle on the seat beside him. He wanted to bring his daughter a gift now he was free.

  The trip took longer than he expected. The truck could still pull like an ox but an old one—not much speed. Everyone passed him on the highway. Then he had a blowout and was thankful that it was while going through a town. He used up most of his small amount of cash buying yet another reconditioned tire and getting Houston’s old tire repaired for a spare. He had to wait for the young fellas at the gas station to get some other things done; no one ever seemed to be in a hurry, and the whole thing took a couple of hours.

  Then he was back on the road feeling anxious because the sun was setting and he couldn’t push the truck any faster. It was 9:00 p.m. when he finally arrived at the hospital and visiting hours were over at 8:00. They told him to come back the next day and he resigned himself to sleeping in his truck. He had to pee in the bushes before the sun came up and had only coffee for breakfast to make sure he kept some money on him for emergencies. Then he had to wait until 10:00 a.m. to see his daughter, so he pretended to be working on his truck in the parking lot to avoid questions. People kept asking him questions and whatever it was, he didn’t want to talk about it.

  At 10:00 a.m. he saw his daughter and brought her the laurel flowers he had kept alive if not quite fresh with frequent soakings of the rag they were wrapped in. She looked at them briefly and an attendant found a vase for them, made much over them and put them on an unused formica-topped table by the bed. Henry was allowed to take Mary for a walk but there were no cows to milk and she seemed disappointed. He wanted to give her a kiss good-bye but didn’t like to do that in front of folks, so he just left when their time was up. The nurse did let him share lunch with Mary.

  Having accomplished the purpose of his trip, he felt aimless. He started driving back home but after 30 minutes realized there was nothing there for him anymore and he didn’t feel like going back. He began to turn up the back roads that interested him, exploring this new territory. He slept in the truck again that night and in the morning began to knock on the doors of farmhouses, did they need something fixed? Some help in the garden? He could do most anything (but of course so could the people in the houses). Nobody turned him down though. Everyone found a little job he could do for a little money or at least invited him to share dinner.

  Henry moved around, working, sometimes visiting his daughter when he was close, other times thinking about her, thinking sometimes about the city woman who had seen him when he dropped the boys over the cliff, studying on his past and not noticing the present much. Sometimes he saw Robert and Robert always wanted to speak to him and he didn’t want to speak to Robert, but Robert was the kind of man made you stop and listen and Robert told him that woman was back, told him she even visited Mary once. Henry made no response like Robert was hoping for, but Henry studied on it.