by Jeffrey Lent
That next winter one hundred and twenty miles south a winch cable snapped in the Millstone Hill quarry and he was crushed by a four-ton block of granite being lifted to be worked into elegant monuments for other men. She did not recall the telegraph arriving but an afternoon dark from the early winter twilight when a neighbor woman bathed her in a washtub in the kitchen while her grandparents and uncles and aunts sat in the small parlor with the heavy curtains drawn and a lamp lighted, the only sounds the drawn raw wails that would rise from time to time from the bolted room upstairs where her mother had been for a day. Those sounds became the death of her father and the twilight colors on the snow her memory of him.
On a raw bright day the following spring with the ground thawed he was buried under high blown clouds down off the St. Lawrence, the shadows moving over the land like the hands of God, leaving her face intermittent with heat and chill as she stood beside her mother head to toe in black. Two days later they rode trains south from Sherbrooke, her mother following the trail in reverse of the letters that arrived over the winter from an attorney in Barre city offering attractive services in a suit against the quarry. Joey later came to understand her mother was traveling not only after the promise of money, some restitution for the life envisioned, but also fleeing from under the roof of her in-laws, the small village gossips and the glances of the single and married men of Saint-Camille.
For six months they lived in a modest hotel and ate cheese and day-old bread that Claire brought home from the bakery where she worked as a counter clerk. Leaving Joey then still Joy with a humpbacked woman with a small cottage set apart among the derelict rooming houses and failing shops along the riverfront, the woman who would slap Joey when she spoke French not English, cuffing her shoulder or the back of her head. There were a dozen other children kept thus and the older ones boys and girls both tortured the younger. It was there she learned that pain inflicted directly upon a penis immediately changed male behavior toward her. The girls were harder, more clever in cruelty. Joey watched them all, sure that watching would reveal how if not to please them at least to imitate.
Upon occasion known only to himself the attorney McCarson would arrive of an evening carrying a paper sack of licorice whips and hore-hound drops for Joey. He would consult quickly with her mother and then leave, to wait on the outer stairs while Claire quickly brushed out her hair and changed to her best dress and left Joey alone with the sack of candy. She would eat the licorice and feed the horehound one drop at a time out the small dormer window, watching the lozenge slide down the mossed shingles to lodge in the eavestrough or bounce clear into the street. For a couple of days after these nights out her mother would be pensive, her forehead working in quick bursts of thought, then after a little time would relax. And her chin would again tilt up and her eyes quicken leaving each day for work. As if, Joey told Jamie, she had again seized the future.
The suit failed. McCarson sent a clerk reading law in his office with this news. A week later himself arrived, a vast man of fine suits and a constant sheen to his face, florid, with a pouched neck. An eater of beef and pork and game. An appeal was proceeding. The key was not to despair. He knew these men. It was much like chess but Claire did not know chess. It was much like devising a new recipe, knowing the ingredients and knowing the end result aimed toward. You do not stop once you’ve begun. Where would any of us be if we did that? There was the question of his bill to date.
She would lie listening to her mother’s cries, pips of birdsong as if broken out of her. Then long silence. She would not listen to his chuffing, his entreaties. Then again, finally, the pips blown out full, terrible cries of unbearable pain. Pain Joey could not imagine but felt appropriate and did not know why. After she heard the door close after him she would wait some more and then go out through the blanket curtain to her mother, who would be settled back against the bedstead or sitting up at the table in her robe, her face slack, her eyes open without seeing and nothing beyond this to explain the torture. As if it had left with him. With nothing to explain the ways she’d taken part.
“In a way those were the good times,” she told him. “That first year, year and a half, when she still had hope. But somewhere in there she allowed herself to see what that cocksucker lawyer was up to. Maybe she just learned it bit by bit. But she wasn’t the only stone widow in that town so she might have heard things more directly. And then things kind of came to a head with me and she made some choices and changes.”
“What happened with you?”
“I got into some mischief. She moved us out of the hotel and into a rooming house down there near where you were staying and worked a deal with the landlady to sweep and clean the slop jars and such each morning and then went off to work up at the bakery. Evenings she did piecework in the set of rooms we had fourth floor up under the eaves. Broiled in the summer and froze in the winter but it was cheap. And part of the deal was the bitch owned the place was to watch out after me. She and me came to understand one another real quick over that; she didn’t want to do it and I didn’t want her to. I went my own way and whatever I did it was up to me not to let Mama hear of it.”
“What was the mischief you got into in the first place?”
She rolled onto her side to face him, both still lying to watch out the window but with a blanket pulled sideways off the bed to cover them over. “I pooped in a sack and carried it uptown along with some farmer’s matches I’d gotten somewheres and climbed the stairs to Evan McCarson’s office and set the bag alight there before his door and then rapped on the door so someone would come out—him, I thought—and stamp out the fire.”
“That’s an old trick.”
“I guess so. It was new to me. And I made the mistake of standing watching and waiting.”
“You didn’t run off?”
“I wanted to see the look on his face.”
“How’d that go?”
“It wasn’t even him but someone young and quick enough to grab a bucket of water kept inside the door to pour out the fire and still chase me down the stairs and grab me before I made it to the street.”
“You get whipped for it?”
“What?”
“Did she thrash you for doing it?”
“No.” She looked at him, a look he thought meant she failed to understand him. He would learn this look meant he’d failed to understand something of her. She said, “She never put a hand to me. Not then or ever.” She paused, watching out the window. He left his hand on the swell of her hip, not moving. After a time she said, “She worked like that four years. Until she had the money she owed him. She wouldn’t pay him piecemeal. The evening came she had it when he arrived. I was ten years old. Sitting at the table doing my homework. I think about it now and wonder what that knock on the door meant to her. How she’d waited for it. What she thought at that point was happening in her life. How she let him in as always and poured him a cup of tea while he sat at the table. He no longer brought me candy or such. They’d long since stopped any pretending. Although he always took her out for the evening first. Myself, I think that was just to show her off on the town. Something he owned, what was his. But that night she poured tea for herself instead of slipping past the hung blankets to dress. Sat across the table and took the paper money from the can where it had been rolled waiting on the table for him for two-three weeks. And counted it out to him, down to the last dollar. And how he stood then, not counting the money over like I bet she’d hoped he would but folding it and disappearing it into his vest pocket. Then told her he’d forgive the interest. Took a ten-dollar gold piece out and laid it on the table. And told her to get herself dressed. Told her he was hungry and said by the look of her she was too. Told her to recall prostitution was a crime in the state of Vermont. But a gift between friends was nothing more than that. And then took out a cigar and trimmed the end of it and lit it up, his fat mouth sucking around it, and dropped the dead match on the floor and went down the stairs to wait for her. The room f
illed up with the smell of the match. And she stood there looking at the door. She was still young. I only realized that this minute. And then she went behind the blanket and I heard her dressing herself and she came out without looking at me or speaking goodnight or nothing. Went down the stairs. I sat there listening to her go.”
“Let me ask you something.”
“What.”
“Was this the same fucker roughed you up? When we ran?”
“I already told you who that was.” Impatient. “No. He never messed with me after one time I was home alone and he undid his buttons and tried to stick it in my mouth and I bit it.”
“You bit his click?” Felt himself shrink against the mattress beneath him.
“Oh yeah.”
“Bit it off?”
She rolled against him and spread her mouth and razed his shoulder with her upper teeth. “Of course not. But I left marks. He yelped and slapped my head.”
“So what happened?”
“What do you mean, what happened.”
“After you done that.”
“What do you think? He left me be.”
“Yuht, I bet so.”
Picking up where she’d left off she said, “She talked about going home. Quebec, I mean. Not Saint-Camille. Talked about going to Sherbrooke, even Montreal. Saving her money, thinking she’d buy a little bakery somewhere. Every second Tuesday she went out to meet McCarson and those gold pieces went into that sack. I never saw but the first one. She of course thought they were a secret to me. I didn’t care about going anywhere. I’d listen to her when she talked about it but I never had any enthusiasm. Canada! You know how people hate the Canucks around here. It was the last place I wanted to go.”
“I always try and take a person for just how they are.”
“Huh. That’s what you think. What you like to think.”
“Why do you say that?” He’d rolled onto his side, reaching over her to the sill for the cigarettes. He propped on one elbow, trying to read her features in the streetlamp light.
“You’ve got fevers of hate in you.” She paused, not moving, her stillness a perfect thing—the slope and craft of her nose. And added, “Like any man.”
With his thumb and first finger he popped the cigarette in a high arc out the window and did not wait to watch the glow trail down out of sight but rolled onto his back. His voice soft he said, “I expect you’re right about that.” Still mild he said, “What happened to your mother?”
She hadn’t moved when he did. Still on her side looking out the window. He couldn’t see her now. His eyes lost on the ceiling, nothing there but the dark of a water stain. She said, “You’re bound up tighter than a secret. Just so you know, we’re not going to get anywhere like that.” Then she went right on. “I hated school. It was a fight to make me stay there long’s I did. The only part I liked was the recitals and commencement pageants and the plays. I was always the one to find a reason for some little spectacle. For parents or just for classmates, it didn’t matter to me. George Washington’s birthday. Lexington and Concord Bridge. Ethan Allen. I’d figure something out for it. Plus the dramatic society. I’d stayed I’d of done good with that. She found me a voice teacher. I wanted to take lessons on a piano but I’d as quick gotten an elephant as a piano. So I ended up with just my voice. Which the way it worked out was good luck from bad.”
“Be a pickle, we was trying to haul along a piano right now.”
“Exactly. She was a horrid little old woman with a mustache. Hungarian or Polack, something like that. She made me stand on a stool. Told me it would keep my back straight. Taught me how to breathe, how to sing. Stood there before me with a pencil lifted in one hand, beating time while I did the same exercise over and over. She’d poke me in the chest with the stub end of the pencil when I was getting tired and say, ‘Lazy girl, lazy girl.’ I didn’t like her but I liked what she taught me. It was enough to keep me going back. I didn’t need prodding from my mother, although she kept it up. I think she’d figured out before I did that it was the only thing would save me, would maybe make me a life better than hers. She knew I didn’t have patience for most things. I’ve always been that way, hate to wait for a thing. She had a cancer. In her parts. For how long I don’t know. The time I learned about it, it was all through her. She didn’t tell me until she had to.”
She was quiet then. After a time he asked, “How long ago was that?”
“Three years.”
“That’s a long time.”
“I’ve done all right. I’ve got a talent.”
And he lay silent still gazing up at the mottled spray of the plaster wondering how many other times she’d lain so, naked beside some man as she spoke of her life, the parts she’d pick and choose to offer up each time somewhat different and knew he would not ask her, would not only not want to know but whatever she told him he would not be able to believe, even were they to lie so through a thousand nights to the numbered dawnings and her tellings adding layer to layer as her soul clarified itself before him; even then he would know there was something not told, something held back, and he admired her for this.
He rose from the bed and stood looking at her. In the gaseous yellow from the streetlamp her body was pale, the color of old riverstone bleached by sunlight against the furrows of the sheet, her legs running out from her as water flows down from above, her hips meeting the swelling in his brain and chest and then the concave fall of her waist and the thin rise and spread up to her shoulders, the knobs and raised planes of her shoulderblades, her head and arms akimbo hidden under the dark spray of her wild torn hair. The underside of her heels resting at bed’s edge made to fit exactly his palms if he were to step forward and lift them up. He rubbed his face with his hands and then ran them down over his chest.
“Joey,” he said, “we can do whatever we want. There’s not a thing can stop us. We’re orphans, both of us. We’re free.”
She rolled over and sat up, pulling the sheet around her waist. Her back to the window, her face a blank mask, she spoke from within the tangle of knotted hair. The tips of her breasts as eyes out of a void. “I had you pegged for a runaway farmboy.”
He nodded, not confirming or denying. “I killed my mother. Getting born.”
She sat silent with that a moment. “You never knew her.”
“No.”
“Like my father.”
“It was just Father and me,” he lied. “My father was off in his head. You weren’t even right about the farmboy business. It might once have been a farm but all I ever saw was it grown up to puckerbrush and the shingles going a little more each spring. He fought in the war. The Southern Rebellion. Had some kind of wound to his head. Just didn’t much care about things. That legless old man back there in the Barre station, that’s why I gave him that piece of your money. Father was like that, but some ways worse. He had a pension from the army but mostly lived on money made by selling off bits of land. He was a fair hand to cook and would have supper on the table for me every evening but that was about it. Sit there watching me eat it. Told me stories but they were all about the war or before and the same ones over and over, mostly a jumble of things. The way I grew up, it wasn’t so different from how you did. Left on my own, I mean. It’s no brag that I was a hellion and a fair one at that.” He paused then and looked away from her and then went and sat beside her on the bed, no longer looking at her. “I wasn’t even really a bad kid. It’s just that people don’t like peculiar things and the two of us up there on the hill was peculiar to the rest of them. So I ended up getting a little toughened up too. Which was good I guess.”
After a moment she reached and ran a finger down from his ear along the line of his jaw and held the tip of her finger against his chin and stroked him there and then took her hand away. He waited a moment more and without turning his head reached behind him for the cigarettes and leaned to hold himself upright with his elbows on his knees. He said, “It wasn’t nothing but a chimney fire. But I wasn�
��t to home and so they tried to pin it on me. Once a person thinks you’re a certain way, that’s the way you stay in their minds. It doesn’t matter what happens. That was March of this year. I guess it’d been a couple years since he swept the flue. Burnt the house to flinders, what was left of it anyway. Pretty much all what was left was the cellar hole filled up with charred timbers. So the minister took me in. He and his wife didn’t have any children and I guess they had hopes for me. I got a decent suit of clothes out of it. And I waited until the last bit of that land was sold and I had a little cash and came north. Went to Barre because that’s where the train was going. But maybe, I figure, I was going to meet you.” And sat still and did not look at her.
“That’s some tale.”
He could read nothing distinctive in her tone. So turned his head just enough to look at her. “It’s the truth,” he said.
She said nothing.
So again, his voice gentle and low and sweet, just only a prod, said, “We’re orphans, you and me. We can do anything.”
She leaned toward him then. Her voice also low, urgent, some taint of threat. “I make my own way.”
He looked at her. Wanted to touch her and did not. “You really sing?”
“Like a bird to break your fucking heart.”
He nodded. “Tomorrow, we’ll take the train and tour around. You’ll see, this is a different place. We can do anything we want here. We can do it straight. There’s ins and outs to figure but all that is, is a little time. It’s a good place.”
“I don’t believe that. For a minute.”
He nodded. “Tomorrow, you’ll see.”
She leaned closer and ran her hands over his head. Her fingers turning furrows in his hair, stroking through to his scalp. The fingers already telling him what he wanted to know. And he knew the trick was never to reveal that he knew a thing before it was announced otherwise. So he sat under her touch.