Vera Violet

by Melissa Anne Peterson

  Mother could never find it in her heart to turn Daemon away. He was her nephew but more than that. She had raised him since he was a little baby.

  He visited during hard times. He talked about his heartache in drunken slurs—lost love—bad luck—things that just didn’t come easily. He chain-smoked and drank cheap beer from tall cans. He slept on our couch. His laughter shook the walls. He always had presents for me and Colin. He never asked for much. He was happy with food and a blanket. Mother let us listen to his stories—it was how he earned his keep. She huddled close to the woodstove with her books and her cat while he entertained us. She shivered in the cold wind that blew through the cracks in the walls. The house on Cota Street was old and cheaply built. It made her feel like she was back in the hills.

  Daemon’s visits reminded her of the two-room cabin she grew up in—the chinking between the logs—the unfinished wood—the yard without flowers and the seven children she helped raise. It wasn’t that she hated the memory of that cabin so much. What she hated was how hard it was to make that cabin disappear at will. What she hated was how that cabin looked to other people—how they saw it without knowing about the quilts and Christmas presents and joy and hardship and love. She worked hard to sharpen her accent—to forget the words that weren’t in dictionaries.

  Colin and I worked odd jobs with Daemon. We cut firewood on state land. We picked blackberries, blueberries, and huckleberries that we froze to eat later. We picked brush and mushrooms for quick cash and cut boughs during the holiday season. We got rides with Dad when he went to visit Granny O’Neel. We took trips to Aberdeen and Elma with our O’Neel cousins. We wore steel-toe boots and went to live music shows. We were shameless and bold and alive.

  Daemon never stayed long. He drifted off to see other family in California or Oregon or British Columbia. He slung his backpack over his shoulder, revved his motorcycle before waving good-bye. He sped off when the train whistle blew. We all felt suddenly restless, and didn’t blame him for leaving.

  Mima never sat on the back porch with us. She didn’t work odd jobs or go to shows. She was tough in her own way. Her eyes grew tired from reading by the light of kerosene lanterns. She developed splitting headaches and rubbed at her temples in Dad’s easy chair.

  Mother started to not like Cota Street—living so close to the train tracks got to her after a while. It was worse after her parents moved to Montana. Daemon still came sporadically. But Mother started to stare a lot. She looked out the old, single-pane windows with nothing on her face. She thought her sad thoughts. I wanted to shake her. I wanted to bring her back because she was a thousand miles away. She saw terrible things out that window—things that weren’t the neighbor’s brightly colored toys getting wet and moldy on their mud and crabgrass lawn. The things she saw were bigger than all of us—they couldn’t be fixed. Sometimes she was sad for long periods. When she stared out the window with no answers, she made a choice—a dark and hopeless one. I knew she wanted to leave. She stopped sleeping at night toward the end. She had a strained look on her face. She waited. One Friday, Colin and I waited up with her. We all waited for Dad to come home.

  Dad was tired when he walked in the door that last night Mother was home. It was midnight. His auburn beard was listless. His union meeting had depressed him. He took off his tattered wool jacket. He felt worn-out. He wanted to drink his glass of whiskey and be alone for a few hours—nurse his personal wounds.

  But we’d been up waiting for a long time. We tried to show him things. But Dad didn’t want to talk. He didn’t want to come and see the castle Colin had built out of cards. Or the picture of Bob Dylan that I’d drawn on newsprint. Our excitement turned to disappointment. Dad wasn’t impressed. My lower lip pouted out. We acted up. Colin and I argued loudly. Mima screamed at us that she had to “get up in the morning!” Mother cried. She accused Dad of things: seeing other women, not loving her. She wanted him to hold her. He didn’t know if he still could.

  Dad talked of giving up his job at the mill and moving back to the swamp—living off the land like they’d done before they had us kids. Before they got married. He wanted to help Granny out now that his father was dead. He said she was getting older. It was a personal conversation. But the house was small. Colin and I were listening. We piped up that we’d help feed the chickens and milk the goats.

  Mother didn’t like that we’d been listening. She told us to go outside. We stood on the back porch and peered in at them through the window. The single-pane glass let us hear everything. She told Dad the whole idea was stupid. She didn’t want her kids to be “hillbillies with no future.” She reminded him that we would never, not in a million years, be able to sell our house on Cota Street. Tourists were the only ones who bought houses. And none of them wanted to live next to “Cota kids and immigrants along the railroad tracks.”

  Dad spoke gently. He said Granny would let us build our own cabin in her little valley. Mother rolled her eyes. She reminded him that we’d have to pay for permits and our savings were almost drained. School buses didn’t go out that far. Not even the rural routes. The roads closed down “all winter long!” She didn’t want to live with temperamental Granny. She wanted us to make it on our own. She didn’t want Colin and me spending any more time with our O’Neel cousins. She said, “We don’t even have a damn car!”

  Dad told her Colin and I could learn on our own—from books like he had. His nieces and nephews were not bad people—just a little rough.

  Colin and I yelled in excitement that we didn’t want to go to school. We didn’t like classrooms. The kids at junior high were snobby. We knew we could chop firewood, raise rabbits, and pump water. We knew we could help Dad fix cars for money.

  “I could bake bread!” I added.

  “I could hunt with my shotgun!” Colin said.

  We had forgotten we were spying. Mother came close to the window with her hands balled up in fists. We knew we were in for it. She was so mad her knees and elbows shook. “Go to your rooms!” she screamed at us through the window. But Colin slept on the couch. And Mima didn’t want me in the bedroom while she was trying to sleep. We stayed where we were.

  Mother threw Dad’s worn-out work boots at him. One by one. He tried to keep it all together. In frantic bursts he talked about relaxing. Fixing his truck. Going fishing like they used to. They could get a few hens and grow potatoes. His words excited Colin and me. We smelled fish crackling in cast iron. We felt the deep heat of an open fire—freedom and wilderness.

  Mima finally got out of bed and asked what all the yelling was about. She told Dad she would never go back to the family land in the swamp. She reminded him curtly that soon enough there would be no more woods to escape to. Granny would have to come live with us. “You don’t know anything!” she told Dad. She stared smoothly at him—challenged his very existence. She had dark circles under her eyes. She was in her pajamas—short cotton pants and a tank top. “You’re uneducated and stubborn,” she said pointedly. She was past the point of no return. Her nipples poked angrily against her shirt. “You’re just like Granny!” She lost her cool and went after him with her pointer finger. She was poking at his chest and yelling in his face. She was almost as tall as him. Long and tall and thin and redheaded. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but O’Neels are all trash!”

  The word trash hit Colin and me like a punch to the gut. Dad stared at his painting of a ship he had hung carefully on the wall. His shoulders wilted. I couldn’t see his face. I thought about how he camped for days bringing only a knife and a frying pan. I thought about him being so good-looking in the driveway working on his truck. Trash? Colin and I looked at each other in the square of yellow light from the window. Dad didn’t say a word. The world seemed suddenly unstable. Dad told Mima to go to bed and get some sleep. She gritted her teeth and looked down her nose at him before stalking away.

  Mother was sobbing desolately—she’d had a lot of wine. I leaned against the wooden windowsill outside and inhale
d sharply.

  Colin gripped my arm hard and pulled me away from the house. He had the rest of Mother’s wine stashed in his jacket. After sitting down on the railroad tracks and taking a long swallow I calmed down. We decided it was too cold to sleep in the park. We walked up to Monique Potter’s instead.

  Monique was getting a tattoo in her living room. Her mom worked graveyard. Monique was happy to see us. She smoked all her pot with us and made chocolate cake when her tattoo was done. Colin laughed at Monique’s impersonation of the president telling Gulf War veterans they weren’t really sick. I fell asleep on the couch.

  We went back to Cota Street in the morning. Mother was gone. Mima was packing. Dad was sleeping.

  The next couple of days Dad looked bewildered—without a trace of understanding—just a big, dark guilt of things that neither of us could comprehend.

  Mima stuck around to finish high school. But she didn’t live with us. She stayed with a church family. “It’s closer to the high school, and I can have my own room,” she explained.

  Colin and I celebrated his fourteenth birthday by staying home from school and listening to radio news shows in the kitchen. We made Jell-O with whipped cream and listened to a journalist who said US tanks were in Baghdad, unemployed men walked the streets of Iraq, and teenage boys were starting militias. We listened to a journalist who tried to explain “Seattle grunge music” as a political movement. He called it “the voice of a generation.” We thought that was silly. Because we knew that grunge was the sound of a screaming saw blade, a spawning salmon flicking gravel. It looked like a clear-cut. And if you cracked grunge open, you would find a moldy fifth-wheel trailer inside.

  A week later, we decided to go to one of Mima’s soccer games. Colin had a green mohawk. I shaved my head and drew a black star on my scalp. Dad was asleep when we left. We’d been quiet all morning, and we were sick of being good. Colin brought his boom box and his Dropkick Murphys tape. I had a pack of stale cigarettes in my back pocket. I smoked one on the way up the hill just to bother Colin. He told me I was too young—tried to swipe it out of my hand. His fist hit the live cherry. It burned a round welt into his skin. He didn’t flinch. I thought it was a badass thing for him to do: not flinch. I tried to burn my own arm to see how bad it hurt. I flinched. “You can only burn yourself in places where you have calluses,” Colin explained. I listened carefully. I knew Colin was smarter than me.

  We sat down quietly when we got to the soccer field. We were late. The sun was out. We spread our sweatshirts down on the grass and sat on them. We put the silent boom box in front of us. Colin sipped from his water bottle filled with vodka and grape soda. He drank it fast so it wouldn’t get warm. He gave me a few sips. We had all the good intentions in the world.

  Ratboy Evans walked by and saw us sitting in the sun. We called him Ratboy because he had a rattail for a long time after they were popular. He sat down next to us. His combat boots dug into the ground. The smell of his feet mixed with the scent of the cheap military leather. The sun felt hot on my alcohol-warmed face. Ratboy took out his pouch of tobacco and rolled cigarettes. Mima made a goal, and we all cheered. Colin whistled long and loud. He stood up.

  “Woowhee!” Ratboy Evans yelled even louder, trying to outdo Colin. He stood and clapped his hands, stuck his fingers in his mouth, and whistled. His leftover tobacco fell from his blue jeans and mixed with the carefully fertilized grass of the playing field.

  The smoke from the teenage boys drifted down. Parents wrinkled their noses and faked stern coughing fits. I took out my own pack of stale smokes. Ratboy saw me and shoved one of his rolled cigarettes at me. “It’s the filters that kill people,” he told me. I didn’t listen carefully. I knew I was smarter than him.

  Colin gave Ratboy his water bottle. Ratboy finished it in one, long drink. His rattail was gone now. He wore his hair slicked back and a black leather jacket. He belched.

  Mima slide-tackled illegally. She was carded. We booed raucously. For too long probably. People glared at us. Ratboy and Colin ignored them. Both boys were red-faced and laughing. They good-naturedly shoved each other.

  Monique saw us at the soccer field from her house across the street. She came over and offered us beers in her kitchen. We trudged after her across the hot pavement. We walked in front of a car. “WATCH IT!” Ratboy shouted. He yelled it loudly enough so that people from the game turned to stare. It was the church lady Mima was staying with. She’d been driving too fast. We flipped the car off even though it was us who had walked in front of it. We flipped off the people from the soccer field who were still staring.

  We piled into Monique’s dark kitchen and drank the cold beers as fast as we could—sucked down the joint that Ratboy provided. Monique said we had to hurry—she wasn’t sure when her mom was getting home from her boyfriend’s house. She turned up Peter Tosh on her stereo. I was squished against Ratboy Evans in the tiny kitchen—I felt his hard chest breathing. I smelled his hair oil and all his black leather. I smelled Monique’s cheap perfume and her toothpaste breath. I couldn’t smell Colin at all because he smelled just like me.

  We walked back across the street. The game was just ending. Spectators were straggling into their vehicles—the soccer kids were drinking red sports drinks from a blue cooler that one of the moms in designer pants had brought. Mima was standing on the sidewalk with our sweatshirts. She was waiting for us. She had her arms crossed and her lips pursed. Her curly red hair was swept up in a high ponytail and her muscled calves were flexed. Her face was flushed. She noticed our bloodshot eyes.

  For a moment, I thought she was waiting for us because she won her game and was excited to tell us. I had three one-dollar bills in my right pocket. I wanted to buy her ice cream to celebrate. I stuck my hand in my jeans to make sure the money was still there. The bills curled reassuringly against my thigh.

  But Monique and Ratboy knew something was up when they saw Mima standing across the street. Their steps became reticent.

  Mima launched our sweatshirts at us one at a time. “FORGET something?!” Her words were like icy knives in my gut. Colin let his sweatshirt fall to his feet as he looked at our sister levelly. I felt silly for catching mine. So I let it drop from my hand. But it was too late. A car loaded with people inched around us on the street. I wanted to tell Mima that we hadn’t really forgotten our sweatshirts—we had left them because we were only gone a minute.

  I heard Peter Tosh singing plainly from Monique’s house. We’d forgotten to turn the stereo off.

  I didn’t want my sweatshirt now. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I stared at the black cotton at my feet. It was covered in rude patches. It offended Mima, who studied so hard. “Did you forget these, too?!” She threw all our cigarette butts at us—Colin’s, Ratboy’s, and mine. She had dug them out of the grass after we pushed them underneath the dirt. I rushed to pick them up. I wanted to tell her that we had thought about it—Ratboy had assured us that since they were “biodegradable” it was okay to leave them in the grass. We should have known better. Both Colin and I were smarter than Ratboy.

  I noticed a crowd watching. A group of kids from Mima’s youth group and their parents. I looked into their golden faces. I knew the girls’ tan lines followed the contours of bathing suits. And mine were in the shape of T-shirts. I saw their clean shorts and brand-name soccer cleats. They were still breathing hard from their heavenly, decent, civilized exertion. Not a shaved head among them.

  I started to crumble. We were wrong again—kids like me and Colin and Monique and Ratboy were wrong a lot. I was going to cry like a baby. Colin socked my arm hard to make me stop.

  I put the cigarette butts in one hand and carried them to a metal trash can. The lid was chained to the fence—flies buzzed around it. I passed Mima and cringed away from her bewildering energy. She stood straight, and it reminded me of her astrological sign: the archer shooting true.

  Mima sighed. “Can you guys just LEAVE?” She didn’t want us there. She
didn’t want us to drink sports drinks with her soccer friends and their soccer parents or eat ice cream with us in the park. I swallowed hard. I heard Colin saying what Dad said to Mother until she left: “You think your shit don’t stink.” Colin said it like he was far away—like he wasn’t really there. Like he was standing above Mima and looking down from a lofty place.

  Mima could never keep her cool for long. Her voice cracked and went high. She told him to “SHUDDUP!”

  Colin smiled. He walked cockily inside the fence and retrieved his boom box. He looked at every one of the soccer boys in turn, and they stopped drinking sports drinks and talking so lightheartedly. They cast wary glances at him—shifted their weight from foot to foot. They suddenly looked stupid in their shiny, polyester soccer shirts. Their muscles didn’t mean anything. Colin had spent the last month splitting firewood with Daemon for fifty bucks a cord. He was loud guitars and wasted lives and spit on pavement. Things they didn’t know.

  Colin rejoined us and we walked down the sidewalk toward the steep hill that went back downtown. He stuck his shoulders forward intensely—glaring uncontrollably at the hill. He tensed at the vague sounds from the mill and the reverberations of the train whistle.

  Monique said, “What a crazy bitch.”

  Colin stopped walking to look sternly into her eyes. “Don’t call my sister that.”

  “Sorry.” Monique scratched at the back of her neck—her snake tattoo that was healing.

  “She ain’t crazy.” Colin took a deep breath. He smiled a small smile. He pushed Monique playfully. She grabbed on to his arm and held it—gleaned strength from his boyish, offhand violence.

  I looked at the top of the hospital roof where the sun was pink and setting. After sunset it would grow cold quickly. I wondered if we could stop at the city park and swing on the swings while we finally played our Dropkick Murphys tape.