by Jeffrey Lent
“It would be in a fireproof safe.”
“All right. And I don’t owe you anything?”
“No. Now. That’s it for the estate. No bank accounts, no loans, no liens. But, back in July he brought me this, asked me to hold it for you.” And reached into his vest and brought out an envelope. Handed it to Foster. He took it and looked at it. His name was on it, in his father’s fine loopy script.
“You know what this is?”
Morse said, “It was sealed when he gave it to me.” Not quite an answer.
“All right,” Foster said. “I owe you anything for this?”
“No,” said Morse. “Nothing.”
In the envelope was a hand-drawn map of the area of woods just behind the barn. Landmarks were indicated with circles and in each circle was a number. On the side of the map the numbers were repeated, each with a figure after it. At the bottom of the column was a total. There was no note, nothing else.
Foster took a spade from the barn and dug up the mason jars and coffee cans, all eleven of them. Some of the cans soft with age. He’d known they were out there, just had no idea there were so many of them. He carried them in armloads into the kitchen and took out the tied rolls of bills and flattened them out on the table in separate stacks. And sat and counted through it and then counted again. Then checked his father’s addition on the map. Off somewhat. Foster thought about that. It wasn’t like him. Counted the money one more time. A little more than fourteen thousand dollars. He divided the money into five-hundred-dollar stacks and rolled them and tied them with string. Then stacked them into a shoebox, the best thing he could find. The odd hundred and eighty-three he folded flat and put in his wallet. Then he took up the shoebox and walked around the house with it. Finally he put it down at the bottom of the woodbox and stacked kindling over it. Summertime, it seemed like a good place.
Far out in the woods, not marked on the map, down in the ground an old tea canister had rotted away. The tin melted into the humus. The old gold pieces nestled in the soft earth like precious lustrous butter pats.
At night he wept. With both dogs upright beside him, both faces intent upon his as he sat with his hands over his face, the all of him racked up in his throat. Over and over saying, “Poppy, Poppy, Poppy,” the name bubbling out of him. For hours until he was sick, aching, exhausted. Wept even after he realized it was self-pity as much as grief. Until he suddenly and vividly heard his father’s voice commanding him to stop. “Stop it.” Just once. He took his hands from his face and looked around. There was nothing and the sound did not come again, just the echoes of it. He looked at his dogs. They looked back at him.
What he’d missed at the time and what he could not stop thinking about now was the absence of Jeeter and Amy Carrick from the service. He did not like them, never had and knew his father had not either but still. They should have been there. What bothered him more was he was sure Patrick Jackson had noted their absence also. And said nothing. Which meant he was also turning them over in his mind. Or he was accepting something. Foster wanted to know which. But would not contact Jackson to talk about it. He could not say why. Maybe nothing more than an echo of his father reverberating within him. But one night he went to his father’s bedroom where he’d not been in years and tipped open the door and turned on the light. He went to the small rolltop desk and sat and went through it, all the pigeonholes, all the drawers, all the loose papers scattered over the surface. He did not know what he was looking for but knew he would know it when he found it. Confident that willing or not his father had left some message for him. What he found was nothing close to his thoughts. One of the small drawers pulled out hard unless lifted up in its track. He got the drawer free and went down on his knees and reached back in and pulled out a small packet of letters bound with a rubber band. At first he thought they might be old letters from his mother to his father and was excited by the idea. But the most recent postmark was little more than two years old. He went back through them. All the same return address, an Abigail Pelham of Randolph, Vermont. The same handwriting. Postmarked every couple or three years. Each and every one addressed to his father but at a distant post office, General Delivery. Wells River. Conway. Berlin. He sat for a time, holding them in his lap, knowing he held something that would forever change what he knew of his father. From a box on the desk took one of his father’s cigarettes and lighted it and decided that some part of him would forever be trying to clarify that knowledge. And so opened the most recent of the letters and unfolded the single sheet. Pale ink gone brown on the page it began:
March 29, 1926
Dear Jamie,
Father has passed….
Part III
Sweetboro
Seven
What surprised him first was how close it was. On the roadmap it seemed a vast distance. But the final day of August he’d left at sunup with Andy Flood coming over at dawn to eat a breakfast with him and go over the care of the house and see him off. A little after two that same afternoon he’d parked on the main street of Randolph Vermont, watching the people walk by him. Thinking that even among them might be one with some fragment of his own blood. During the time since he’d found the letters he’d reconciled to the notion that his father had a past and had been silent about it. Foster could not say for sure that at some point in the future he’d not do the same. Everything that had happened to him in his life this far seemed impossible to describe to any other person. He suspected that any telling would diminish the actuality of it, that such a telling would replace memory and lock events and persons into some simple single line of reference, some reduction enacted both upon himself and the persons recalled.
He ate a sandwich and looked out upon the mild weekday throng. Trying to feature some younger version of his father among them. Studying the buildings, the streets. Watching the people. Parked at the curb, he felt comfortable. The people seemed to him more workaday, less worried over themselves than the people he was used to from the resorts. Even the merchants seemed plainclothed; suits readymade without overdue fuss or attention. Himself bareheaded, in engineer boots and corduroy trousers and a plain open-necked white shirt. He felt he might step out and walk among them and be at home someway.
The man at the post office studied him carefully before issuing curt precise directions to the farm. As if examining him for intent. Foster thought Well, two old ladies living alone, I’d be cautious too. That was what he knew: Abigail, the letter writer, and her sister Prudence. And Father, his grandfather. Now dead. No mention of any others in the handful of letters.
What he knew: The first letter had been written a dozen years ago, clearly in response to one from his father and had been effusive, a quickly written three-page expression of delight, with an invitation for the four of them to come visit. More than three years passed before the next and either in response to the long silence or in something his father had written the tone had changed and this change was maintained throughout the remainder of the widely spaced letters. It was clear each was in response to communication from his father. One mentioned a postcard received. All after that first letter had been little more than updates of agricultural notes and the health of Prudence and Father. Abigail did not write of herself. Only the last letter, writing of the death of their father, had been sent to the same General Delivery address as any of the others. Foster believed she’d written it without any assurance it would be claimed. He could only assume that his father had not written a reply.
He drove south out of town and turned right where the postmaster had told him to and climbed in low gear the rough-packed road, a grade steeply up through close-drawn woods and then the land opened into a bowl and he saw the farm sitting ahead of him, the house and barns backed up against a hillside of pasture, the land below the barns spread in more pasture and hay meadows. The hillside pastures were studded with rocks and low circular juniper and a flock of sheep moved in the late summer grass. Below the barns in another pasture a herd of dun-colore
d cattle grazed, some ruminating in the shade of a pair of elms. Above the sheep the pasture gave way to woodlot that crested up over and crowned the ridgeline. Torn late summer clouds above.
He drove down the lane and parked in the yard between the house and barns and told the dogs to stay and got out and reached behind him to tuck the tails of his shirt back in and went up to the house. It had never been painted and the wood was weathered the soft buttery color of molasses. He skirted the back entryway where he knew everyone entered and exited and went across the small lawn past an old lilac and stood on the oblong block of granite set into the ground long ago as a stoop and knocked on the front door, his knuckles light at first and then harder, a crisp three raps.
The door opened in and an old Negro, a short stout woman in her fifties, stepped into it. She wore heavy serge trousers tucked into knee-high rubber boots and an old sweater darned many times. Her face deeply wrinkled, skin the color of cinnamon but heavily splotched with tangerine freckles. Green eyes. A fierce head of hair, once the same color as her freckles but now salted with gray. She peered up at him and said, “Oh, my.”
“Oh, ma’am, excuse me,” Foster said. “I must have got the wrong turn.”
“Well I don’t guess so,” she replied.
He’d not seen a Negro but a couple of times and those from a distance. He stepped back off the granite onto the grass. “Excuse me,” he repeated. “I made a mistake.”
She stepped after him and snaked one hand out and grasped hard around his wrist as if to hold him there. Her hand hard knotted, freckled and calloused. “You look just like Father,” she told him. “You’re Jamie’s boy, aren’t you?” And then without waiting for an answer, without letting go of him she pivoted her head and called back into the house, “Sister come here look!”
And swiveled back to peer at him again and said, “You are Foster, aren’t you? Foster Pelham?”
“Yes ma’am,” he said. His voice coming out of him as from a great distance. Not understanding anything. Somewhere far back he cried out Poppy! Poppy!
And she looked down where she clutched him and as if understanding something of his confusion and even fright she let go of him and took her hand in her other before her but at the same time she spoke. “I’m Prudence Pelham. Pru or Prudy is what all calls me though. To you I guess I’m your Aunt Pru but that sounds strange don’t it. Although I’ve thought of myself that way for years, knowing about you and that dear little girl also, your sister that died. But I never did hear or even speak the words out loud. So you call me what you like—Pru or Aunt or both or neither. Oh I can’t tell you how you look like Father, your grandfather. Yes indeed, look at you. Those great wide eyes. You never seen anything like me I guess.” And again she turned without pause to shout back into the house, “Sister you come look right now!” And back to Foster, still speaking. “I’m a shock to you, I can see that. So you didn’t know what to expect. I’m not surprised by that. What’s happened to your father, that you’re here? What kind of trouble’s he in?”
Foster rocked. When he stepped back he came to rest with one foot up on a small hummock of grass that othertimes he’d not of noticed. But now it had him off balance and his right leg was shaking, the knee beating like a wing. He looked at the woman, her wide mouth with stained teeth. He said, “He’s dead.”
“Oh my,” she said and laid both hands up flat on the breast of her sweater. “Oh no,” she said. Her face working then swift through changes. She said, “What happened to him? It wasn’t good, was it.”
And her pain so bright like focused sunlight over her face touched him and he took a step closer to her and his voice soft he said, “It was an accident was what they said.”
She tipped her chin toward him and her eyes were wet but very clear and angry and she said, “But it wasn’t, was it?”
What no one had said. And so it was easy to rock back and forth before this strange old woman and tell her. “No. I don’t guess it was. Just made to look like one. And what I think, looking like one served too much purpose to too many people to find it otherwise.”
And she took her hands down and said, “I feared for him. Always. Not a day went by in my life that I didn’t. He was angry over everything, your father was. And he wanted everything also.”
Foster said, “He was a good man. Was good to me.”
“I’m sure he was,” she told him. And again turned her head and cried back into the house, “Abigail!” A beat for each syllable and coming down hard on the last so that it sounded to Foster like two small preludes and a final hard chord. Prudence looked back at him and said, “He was tender, your father was. Always. But he never found a way to allow that part of him. Not that I knew. Now you’re telling me he did.” Her face working like some clockwork lay behind it, the works of sorrow as she spoke. “I expect you’re right. You knew him much after I ever did.”
Foster did not know he knew this until he said it. “I think all he ever wanted was to make things right. And maybe he didn’t know how to do that. Or maybe he just had bad luck. But what I remember was that he tried.”
As he said this he heard the tread of someone coming down the hall behind Prudence. He rocked forward to see past the splintered sunlight who it was. And Prudence seemed to rise a little as if alerted but was also bent sideways, craning past him, and then her hands flew up and she cried out. “Is that your dog after the chickens? Boy? Foster? Look there.”
Glow had gone out the open window of the car and was stalking the length of wire runs off the side of the barn, stepping forward slowly, each step a cautious trembling motion, pausing to lock on point at the birds, so huge to her, so close—nothing she’d ever seen before. The young dog silent with her stalk. The chickens in mild hysteria, gabbling their alarm and outrage. Roosters swaying nervously between the hens and the wire. Lovey sat upright in the driver seat, watching her daughter, ears lifted. She already knew about chickens.
Foster went down across the lawn and passed the car, telling Lovey to stay, only to say something, to infer some authority upon the situation, and went over quickly but smoothly to come up behind where Glow was frozen, shivering, only her head moving in faint clicks as her eyes passed from bird to bird and back again, trying to keep them all under the pin of her gaze. Hundreds of chickens. He ran his hands over her sides, telling her to whoa, and took her by the collar and pried her around in a half-circle until she faced away from the birds and then he squatted by her and stroked her nose as she kept trying to turn her head back to the birds and he spoke to her in a soft voice, telling her no no no.
His head downtilted, his eyes cutting up to study the house, the strangeness there. Another woman had come out the front door, this one taller, in a dress. Standing talking to the first one. Abigail. Abigail and Prudence. Foster not understanding anything yet, except that everything was changed. And not even feeling this yet except as a veneer over him, a shiver of knowledge. Wondering if he might not just walk Glow back to the car and get in himself and drive away. Knowing he could not and angry with himself for even thinking he might want to.
Then the taller woman started down the lawn toward him and he rose, hobbling bent over with the straining Glow toward the car. Abigail coming around the front of the car as he opened the door and got Glow up inside and rolled the window up enough to keep her in and shut the door. And straightened then and turned.
The strangeness convulsed within him, twofold. The world unraveling and knitting itself together at once. The woman before him was some version of his father. Taller, in an old-fashion highnecked dress of pearl-gray, with her hair drawn back tight behind her head. But with his father’s features. The same olive-toned skin tight over fine bones, high features, deftly sculpted. The same crisp lips, pouched and taut. The same eyes running over him and taking him in. The nostrils with a broader flare but even that flare delicate, arched out as if the tissue and filament of her face were built to taste the world. The second convulsion indistinguishable from the first�
�he’d not until now understood that a woman older than twenty-three or so could be beautiful. And this shock of recognition and desire rose in him together and he felt as if he were someway deformed and he felt this knowledge rise up hot over his face and he looked away from the woman, up the lawn toward the house to check and make sure the other woman was there also, thinking that if she was it would someway lessen his monstrousness. And she stood, Prudence, with fists on hips, watching them. He guessed she someway knew what he was feeling, had known it herself other ways all her life. And he felt tenderness toward her and looked again to Abigail before him.
She held out a hand toward him, the slender long arm encased in a dress sleeve with a flourish of lace rising to rim her wrist. She said, “I’d bet a dollar you were thinking you should just get in your automobile and scoot. Get away from all this. I’m Abigail.”
He took her hand, thin bones, dry. “I found the letters you sent to my father.”
“Pru tells me he’s dead.”
“Yes ma’am. He is.”
She let go of his hand. “And you drove over here.”
“I did.”
She studied him. Then said, “You’re what? Sixteen?”
“Just turned.”
She nodded. “It’s a lot, isn’t it?”
“Yes ma’am.”
She did not smile at him but he felt she wanted to. “Don’t ma’am me. Are those his dogs in the car?”
“They’re mine.”
“They going to be all right? With that window up that far? It’s a hot day. They have enough air?”
“I think so.”
“Don’t kill your dogs over some chickens gone off the lay.”
“I wouldn’t. I think they’ll be all right, ma’am.”
She did smile at him this time. As if caught out. Like his father. She said, “Leave them then. Come up to the house and we can sit. There’s questions we all have.”