by Jeffrey Lent
Next day midmorning under a dense low sky folded upon itself like beaten tin, holding snow, Norman was out around the barns when he heard the hard chuck of buggy wheels rising toward the farm and before it cleared between the dull barren trees he had one of those moments where he knew not only who was coming but why: more than guesswork but as if it had happened before. And so met them in the yard and lifted his son down, the boy with his head turned down and away but not so much that his father did not see the blackened eye and blood-crusted nose and Jamie fought against his father’s lift and so broke open the scabbed nose and stood then on his own, glaring up at his father, blood running down over the etched thrust lips with his hands curled to fists at his sides as if ready to fight again, making no effort to wipe the smear clean from him. Norman stood looking down at him, not yet looking to his sister at the reins and said, “I expect the other feller’s marked some.”
“There was three of em.”
“Unhh,” Norman said. “That’s a bunch.”
“Bastards.” The boy turned then and walked toward the house. Most of the way there the entry way door opened and Abby stepped into it and watched what was coming on steady toward her and only when he drew close did she stoop and spread her arms and only then did he break stride and run into her. Six years old in six weeks.
Norman turned to his sister. The woman he loved so dearly, with least encumbrance. Only, he thought, because they held enough remove between them. Which started with the war, that absence that allowed them both not to know each other in ways that would lead to less than cherishment. She was wrapped in wool with her lips and cheeks chapped. He said, “You beat the snow at least.”
She looked down at him. “Boys are vicious creatures.”
“Yuht.”
“I feel to blame. I raised them to know better.”
“I know it.”
She studied him. Paused with that. Then, “I did you know. Maybe I would’ve anyway but what caused me to, was you. You and Leah.”
“I know that too.”
“But it didn’t do any good.” Her eyes like stone still hot out of the ground.
He nodded as if agreeing. “Boys run to a pack. Nothing so much as like good house dogs run off and joined up with one another. The ones’ll run deer in the winter just to hamstring them. Boys don’t know what they’re doing. But they get older you know. Life moves them along, like it or not. Seems to me it’s too soon to say if you did any good or not. I expect you did. Why, just bringing that little feller back here this morning, taking him away from them, I bet they already learned something.”
“Goddammit, Norman. I meant to do a good thing when I brought him home. Not just for you three here but for him too. I didn’t want more hurt onto him than he’s already had.”
He nodded. Then he stepped up to the buggy side. Steam was coming off the horses in the cold. He reached a hand and placed it on top of her gloves holding the reins in a tight bunch. He said, “Lately, I’ve come to believe we can’t know which will end up as which when we do it. All we can do is try. That’s all we get.”
“You’re entitled to it but that’s a terribly sad view of things.”
He took his hand away and nodded. “The view from here.”
“I wish I could tell you it’ll get better.”
“Oh,” he said, “maybe that’s the saddest part. I know it will.”
Now she reached and touched him, her hand on his shoulder, laid onto him a long moment before she took it away. He looked off to study the sky. She said, “I so wish I could help someway.”
“There’s no help.”
“You’ll see,” she said. “You’re too much a man to stay like this.”
He looked at her now. Her anger so clear, contained, poured onto him. The great endless anger of love. He smiled at her. “That’s half the problem right there. Being a man. I don’t even know what it means anymore.”
She kept her eyes on him until he looked away. Then she chirped up her team and swung the buggy around and went out of the farmyard and down the track. He watched her go. Before she reached the hillcrest one gloved hand came out of the buggy to wave at him. Crooked at the wrist like a bat in the gray air. He knew she would do this. He knew she’d know he’d be watching. He waited until she was out of sight and then turned to the house.
So Abigail waited with her story. She felt no urgency, was almost languid with it, as if emerging into a deep and true calm as to a condition essential to her nature. Took the boy inside and cleaned his face and packed it with last year’s remnant ice and slowly allowed him to tell his story, the same old story just fresh and bright with pain and realization for him, listened to this and soothed him as best she could. And then sat and listened to her father try and do the same thing, the rough texture of his tenderness making the one low flare of burn in her that she could almost see, a dim knot of washed-out orange sputtering in endless neutral darkness. Something that if she could reach she would lift up and set away from her, the hands that might do that reaching thick with scar tissue, impervious to the dilute caustic acid of it. And instead rose up and began to put supper together over the stove, simple fried potatoes with onions and bacon, tomatoes stewed and put up by herself and her mother the summer past. And Prudence home then from school and so the whole thing over again with its new variations and then the three left for the barn, the evening chores, and left her alone with the supper. And if she was not happy she felt herself well past sadness. She was an engine, stilled but not stalled, running a long track that looped over itself again and again, circling always back to herself because it was the only where to run. She alone owned her life and was not cold to it; it did not matter how others saw her.
So she waited through three more days. She did not expect her story to change anything as much as to have everything that could be known available to her father. And herself. And no longer believed in perfect moments so only waited for something easier to spot: quiet, the two of them alone, a breadth of time. So Thursday evening sat alone in the living room, her sister and brother both in the kitchen, Prudence using the table for her homework before the warmth of the range and Jamie working over the sheets of addition his sister wrote out for him and then corrected and handed back to him. He had short patience with it and Prudence alone could ignore this and simply keep him working. Norman was in the small office down the hall doing his weeks books, and after a time she rose up and went down through the darkness to the line of light under the shut door and knocked and waited his command to enter and did, shutting the door behind her. He waited wordless, as if knowing something of why she was there, and she lifted the stack of ledgers off the single spare ladderback chair and dusted the caned seat with her palm and sat. And with her sitting Norman laid down his pen and pushed back from the desk to turn his chair three-quarters to face her and laid one knee up over the other, tipping the chair back onto its hind legs just enough to give him the appearance of ease. And she knew he too had been waiting for her. She needed no preamble.
“I came upon her talking to herself. Not just mumbling. Like she was answering somebody. Or more like she was making an argument.”
“You mean like there was somebody there when there wasn’t anyone but her?”
“No. I mean like after something’s happened and you figure out what you really could have said at the time but didn’t.”
He nodded. “When was this?”
“After she came back up here from going south.”
“Yes,” he said. “I figured that. I meant when after?”
“I don’t know.”
“I want to know,” he said, “if it was recent.”
“You mean just before she hanged herself.”
“Yes.”
“Why’s it important when?”
“I’m trying to learn her state of mind.”
“You think you can understand it then?”
“Perhaps. When was it you heard her talking?”
“I think it’s
more important what she was saying. It was maybe only a week or two after she got home.”
“I see. Where was everybody else?”
“Out the house. She had no idea I was around. And I didn’t show myself. I just listened.”
“You weren’t trying to sneak around other times hoping to catch her at it?”
“It was an accident. And just because I didn’t tell her I’d heard her going on when there wasn’t anybody there doesn’t mean I was being a sneak about it. I thought it was private to her. Also, it a little bit gave me the willies. And I don’t understand all these questions. It’s like you think you already know what I’ve got to tell you. But I don’t believe you do.”
He looked at her, a level gaze. Then took his pipe up, filled it and scratched a match against his bootsole. Worked at the pipe a moment to get it going and then said, “No, I don’t expect I do. I asked those questions because I want to know as much as I can about what was around your story before you tell it. Do you understand that?”
She shrugged. “None of it’s going to change anything.”
“Nothing that matters.”
“Nothing that matters.”
“All right. Tell me then.”
“On one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“You tell me how what I’ve got to say fits with what you know. I heard you talking to Pru the other night. And I knew some of that before. But some of it, some of all what I know, doesn’t square with things I heard you talking to her about.”
“I won’t promise anything. Seems to me perhaps you spend too much time overhearing other people.”
She shrugged. “There’s nothing you can protect me from.”
He drew on the pipe and clouded the room. He nodded. “No,” he said. “I guess there’s not.”
She said, “I don’t trust my memory to repeat her word by word. And it would get all jumbled up, even more than it was. So all I’ve got is what remained with me and what I’ve made of it. It’s the best I can do. But I’ve got a pretty good memory.”
“Memory’s what you make of it.”
“I wish,” she said, “for once you’d be quiet.”
He nodded and laid his pipe in the thick cast brass tray he kept for it on the side of the desktop. They both sat silent a time. From up the stairs came the thin sounds of Prudence putting Jamie to bed, going to bed herself. They had not come to speak goodnight, even at the door. Abby did not confuse this with respect, for privacy or any other thing. Norman put his thumbs under his braces and studied the floorboards. After a while she knew he was done, was now truly waiting for her.
“It was two of them she was talking to. That’s what confuses me. Because with both it was argument, like I said. But the tone was different. Like the one she was adamant with, clear with hatred, and the other almost as if cajoling. Or pleading. That’s a better word. As if explaining herself away, some guilt. I felt she was talking about the same thing, something that happened. Something bad it was, too. And I felt she was talking to the one person it happened to and the other that caused it to happen to the first one. All right? I felt like she was speaking to a dead person and one still alive.”
“Yes.” Norman interrupted. “The dead person would be her half brother, a white man. The other I guess would be her mother. Your grandmother.”
Abby shook her head. “I don’t believe so. I think that’s wrong.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because both people were men. I’m sure of that. What was the half brother’s name?”
“Alex. Alexander Mebane.”
She shook her head. “No. The dead person she called Peter.”
He fingered his trousers over his thigh. “Peter,” he said. “You sure of that?”
“I’m sure.”
“You know who Peter was?”
“Yes. That old colored man helped her when she ran away.”
“And what did she call the other one? The one you felt to still be living.”
“You. She called him You. She never used any name.”
“All right,” he said. “Now you’ve got me confused. Tell me what she said.”
“Best I can do. The first one, the one she wouldn’t call by name. She lit into him, up one side and down the other. I never saw her mad like that. And it took awhile listening to even know how angry she was. Because her voice was calm, way down calm, and flat. Almost as if the thought of the person she was talking to sickened her and made her furious at once so the only way she could speak was calm. But more to it than that. It was as if she was before something evil and small both. Scorn, that’s the word I’m looking for. She scorned the person before her, in her mind, in her mind’s-eye she didn’t fear him. Although I think she once had. All right. She was telling him he’d known better and still allowed things to happen, caused those things to happen. That he took the revenge intended for her and poured it onto someone else. Because she was not there but more than that—because he could, because he had the power to do those things. Evil things, that he knew in his heart were evil and still allowed. Caused. Likely celebrated. At the time it happened and all the years later when he told her about it. Told her smiling. She talked about that, how that smile wasn’t anything. Because she knew the truth of him, knew it then and had known it always. And she told him he knew it too—knew what sort of man he was. Said she had no pity for him but hoped with all her heart that the knowledge of himself ran around in him all the time, never leaving him be but working on him all the time. She spoke of that as being like a low fire always burning, like a fire of greenwood in him, in his guts and heart. In his soul. Told him all he had for a soul was that burning. Told him she was glad to see him living, hoped he’d live on forever and ever, each day and night a torment on him. Said she wasn’t fooled by the smile; she knew the smile of a dead man when she saw it. And told him finally that she wasn’t the only one to know this. Told him each person in his life knew it of him, everyone, including that old man who saved his life and whose life got taken in thanks. And that this was with him always; all she wished for him was for it to be with him always, for that knowing to eat away at whatever passed for his heart like fruitflies at a big rotting peach. Told him in this life that was the best he could hope for. It was,” Abby said, “like she was making a wish as much as a curse. Exactly like I said earlir—as if she’d gone over and over something she’d not got right the first time but had it right now.” And she stopped then, waiting for her father.
His lower lip was pulled up between his teeth. His head nodding slightly, thinking, not agreeing. After a moment he said, “I’m confused here. Except unless you got the one thing wrong. But let me wait with that. Tell me the other part. The part of her explaining herself, what she felt guilty over.”
“The Peter part.”
“I guess that would be it.”
“It’s hard, Daddy.”
“Harder than the other?”
“Lots harder.”
“Why do you think so?” The room now very still around them, the whole house somnolent with winter night, with solitude, with the lives within settled down to just this pair, the fire in the small freestanding stove almost silent but for brief sounds as a bird turning in a nest, the rest of the house even absent the nightsounds of settling jamb or fractional easing of a nail in a stair tread or the weight of generations of ghosts clambered together up attic against the cold as if the house itself had surrendered to the recent violence or even just made peace for the night against the ferocious and dreadful calm passing between the two in the small office—that room vibrant—the two each etched with blue color before the worndown brass lamplight, etched around as fine tuberous electricity given off as both sat facing the other, both knowing this was no picking of a recent scab but as if both joined together to dig the hole that would hold them there once dug as surely and everlasting as a grave. So both calm before it, the young woman and the middle-aged man, not so much father and child, now or any longer, a
s much as cohabitants of an island country built out of the night. Launched and stranded at once, forever. The blooming nightflower, not seen again. The two plantigrades, now forever after walking hard on their heels as if not trusting the earth.
Abigail said, “It was what she was saying that was so hard. And the way she spoke. There was no calm in her. She wasn’t loud. But her voice was wild, that wildness of an anguish beyond control. There wasn’t any of the certainty, the bitterness, when she was speaking to the other one. This was all torment to her. She was telling him that he’d known all along what he was doing. That he was trading himself for her. That she hated her ignorance not to have seen it at the time. That she knew better. And wondered if she had just not allowed herself to know. Or that she had hidden it from herself, had told herself she was leaving a life behind and making a new one for herself. That this was courage. That this was what people did. But it was cowards finally who believe they can lay down one life and pick up another and not have them meet again. Told him perhaps it was the Lord who allowed her to do that only so when she came back she would stand revealed before herself in the full glory of retribution. That no punishment could be greater than to find in herself that all the rest of her life, that new life, all that was made from a lie. Lying to herself. That the Lord knew she could undo nothing and yet could not go on as before. And so was stranded in her hatred, was left to hate herself and all she’d made for herself. With no escape. Beyond escape. Daddy, the way she said his name, not just once but when she called him it was over and over, like beads on a string. Peter Peter Peter Peter. The way that one word each time carries everything in it that can’t be said, that hasn’t got a voice. You know just what I mean.”
And paused then, her eyes blunt upon him, waiting, until he nodded understanding. Then she went on. “Then she told him that however awful, however unbearable, it was for her, whatever she endured, whatever she allowed, she could never know what it was like for him. Not ever she told him. Not unless she was led out by a group of men and taken to stand tiptoe on a block with a rope around her neck and doused down with coal oil and set afire until she danced off that block. Said it made her sick. Sick of herself. And sorry for herself. Told him that was the part of herself she hated most—that feeling sorry for herself.”