by Jeffrey Lent
He stood and rubbed his hands together, then brushed the grass off him. The dogs up with him. The sun gone behind the ridgeline but with last rays sent up against the trailing pale clouds. The farmstead below quiet. The Chrysler parked square in the center of the yard. From here he could see it might be an intrusion, something dropped in from another world. What little else he might know, he knew that welcome as he might be he also posed some threat to the world of the two old women below him. He could not say precisely what that threat might be but was sure it was there somewhere within him. Some hurt he might bring. He stood watching as the thin heat vapor of smoke from the house chimney clouded and billowed and burned before slowing again. A shimmering. Someone was fixing supper. He was hungry and he went down the hill, the dogs trotting behind him now in the dusk. Below, he knew they were waiting for him. He went toward them, determined that best he could, he’d do no harm.
“We set a plain board here.” Abigail, over the stove in her pearl-gray dress. “Not like the fine fare you’re used to over to the resorts.” And commenced filling the table with platters of slabbed ham, boiled new potatoes, sliced tomatoes, steaming sweet corn, bowls of yellow wax beans, small onions caramelized in cream and butter, parsnips, applesauce, pickled dill beans, cucumbers sliced in vinegar, yeast rolls, saucers of butter and jellies. Prudence came in from the hall out of her work clothes, wearing a button-front pale blue housedress. Her hair bound in a headcloth like the cartoon colored people he’d seen in the papers. Smelling of soap. She filled water glasses and moved a coffee pot to the hot center of the range. Foster washed his hands under the gravity line, the water cold enough to sting, barely raising a lather from the rough soap but his hands came away clean. He made slow work of drying his hands as the ladies took their places at the table and then went to the obvious place, where he’d been seated earlier. Lost amongst all the food the platter of molasses cookies sat untouched. He wished he’d taken some up into the woods with him.
“We ask no grace at this table,” Abigail said. “But the grace to accept the workings of the Lord, mute and unknowable as He is in His wisdom.”
“Are your dogs not housebroke?” Prudence asked.
“Yes ma’am, they are. But the young one can still be a handful. They’re in the car. I was thinking maybe there was a shed or empty stall I could bed them for the night.” He would not tell them the dogs slept with him.
“We’ll set them up after supper. They’ll be wanting some scraps I’d bet also.”
He grinned. “They’d eat some I think.”
“Eat,” said Abigail. “I can hear your young stomach rumble all the way over here.”
They passed the food around, filling plates. Foster was flushed, the heat of the kitchen, the surfeit of food. He’d been living on sardines and crackers, rat cheese and egg sandwiches, tinned meat, a couple of times hamburgers at the diner in Littleton since his father’s death. He took up an ear of corn. The first he’d had since his last meal with his father.
“That sweet corn’ll be tough, likely,” Prudence observed. “It’s late season. Would be better creamed I’d think.”
“Saw you up in the burying ground.” Abigail, dicing ham into small squares on her plate. “Would be more questions than answers for you there. Is that right?”
He chewed and swallowed. Took up the cloth napkin to press against his mouth. “It’s a lot of Pelhams up there. That one James, he was my great-grandfather, is that right?”
Prudence nodded. “Father’s father. Died while Father was at the war. Kicked in the head by a horse as he bent to pick up a dropped dime. Father said it was the hardest dime that man ever earned. He’d say that dry, like it was humorous but you could hear the sadness behind it.”
“And that’s who Pop was named for?”
“Pop,” said Abigail. “That’s what you called him?”
“Yes, ma’am. Mostly. Sometimes Dad. When I was little, Poppy.”
“I can’t imagine it. Our father was always Father. And mother Mother. But Jamie taught you your ma’ams. He knew the importance of politeness.”
He looked down at his plate. Ate a little. Said, “It was just the two of us. Mostly, we were comfortable with each other.”
“There, you see,” she said. “Perhaps I’m jealous of that. Yes, your father was named for his grandfather. Us girls, we were just called names they liked. Which is better, do you think: to have a name that connects you to some past you don’t know anything about or have a name that doesn’t have anything to do with all those old dead people?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t named for anybody that I know of. But my sister, she was named for our mother’s mother. Other than that, I couldn’t say.” He felt he was being sized to some gauge he had no knowledge of.
“Don’t sit there,” Prudence said, “with your plate empty watching us fuss over our food. You want more, take it. Clean the table, it won’t make us anything but happy. Try some of that yeast bread. Sister takes great pride in her bread.”
“It’s just bread. It’s nothing but that.”
“You see? I can’t bake bread. It’s just not in my hands.”
“In your head is where it is. Bread is just bread. Unless it’s wrong; then it’s not bread at all but something else.”
“Bricks or mush, that’s what’s in my head. But I gave up years ago. Why bother when it’s good and right on the table each day? Take some of this.” She passed the bread to him and he lifted out a pair of the rolls and then both sisters began to circulate platters and bowls toward him and he filled his plate again. The coffee was boiling on the range and Prudence pressed back her chair and without rising reached back to push the pot off to the cooler side.
Foster sat waiting while she did this. He split one of the rolls and spread butter. Cut ham and dished out applesauce. The tomatoes were salted and were a bitter sugar on his tongue. He looked at the corn but there were three cobs on his plate and he didn’t want anymore. He took up half a roll and ate it. Then forked up a bite of ham dredged in the applesauce. Such sweet food. Then placed his knife and fork alongside the edge of his plate. Looked up, from one sister to the other. Both watching him. As if waiting. He could not be sure but it looked that way. He nodded.
“It’s good bread. My grandmother. Your mother. She died awful young, didn’t she? And that on her stone? She could not stay. What’s that?”
Abigail scraped back her chair and roughly, swiftly, rose and left the room, the door into the hall closing behind her with the soft swipe of old smooth hinges. Foster was alarmed, watching her go. Then looked to Prudence. Who was not looking at him but was intent mashing a bit of potato together with a curl of butter. She lifted this to her mouth and chewed and swallowed. Took a drink of her water. Then looked at him.
“She blames herself for what happened. She’s certain she could’ve done something to stop it. What was just a doubt in her at the time, over the years, has hardened into certainty. It didn’t matter what Father said to her, what I said to her. It has never mattered to her what another person thought or felt regarding her, if it was contrary to what she knew about herself.”
He nodded. Drank his own water.
“Now.” Prudence pushed back her chair from the table the better to face him. He was done eating also. She went on. “I already told you Mother was a runaway slave girl. From down in North Carolina. She was just sixteen years old. That winter of ’sixty-four and ’sixty-five. That was a terrible hard time for those people, all of them. Mother used to say that the white people got the cream, the coloreds got the skim. That winter I guess it was more like the whites got the skim, coloreds the gravel. So things were pinched. And what happened was, the son of the man who owned her—you understand that? One person owning another? Like cattle or hogs or sheep?”
“Yes ma’am. I had my history.”
“What happened was, that boy—and he was just a boy, a couple years younger than her and he’d already been off in that terrible bloody war and lost
a part of one of his arms and got sent home again all so he and his kind could keep on owning people like Mother—what happened was he and she was alone one day that winter and he tried to force himself on her. You understand that?”
“Yes,” he said, his eyes now on hers. Her arms crossed over her breasts as she sat reared back in her chair, regarding him. “I understand that.”
“Not yet you don’t. But it gives you more to think about. They was alone to the house and she laid him out; him just one-armed, it wasn’t that hard for her. She grabbed ahold of a flat iron and swiped it into the side of his head and he went down, blood everywhere and she saw him and knew he was dead and she ran out of there. Got some help from an old man also owned by those white people and left that night, right then and there. In a pouring cold rain.
“She traveled alone, most times at night. Got help from people here and there. Someone would point the way, name landmarks. Give her a bit of something to eat. Think of that. A girl your age traveling alone in strange country when she hadn’t been five miles from where she was born before. And every step of the way a step she wasn’t supposed to take. That war was most of the way over and there wasn’t any way but for most everyone to know it but that didn’t make it safer for her; if anything it was the opposite. It was desperate times and terrible things were happening, could happen at any time. But on she went.
“Now the people she ran away from, the white people, it wasn’t some big farm, plantation or anything. They was just town people, the white man a lawyer. So the colored people, the slaves he owned, were just that old man called Peter, the one who helped Mother get away, him and Mother and her mother, called Helen. And a very old woman. Rey. Rey was her name. Aunt Rey Mother called her but I don’t know if that was blood or just because she was an old woman. Anyhow, it was just those four colored people. And she ran away from there and left not only that white boy dead but her own mother behind as well. Imagine that. Scared to death and full of guts, a wild girl running out of the only life she’d ever known and running toward something that she didn’t have any idea of. North. That was all. No idea of where she’d land or what she’d do with herself once she got there. Just going.”
She stopped then, still looking at Foster.
He said, “And she came across a wounded Vermont farm boy named Norman Pelham.”
“That’s right.” Prudence stood. “At least that’s the short way of telling it.”
Abigail spoke from behind the hall door, her voice muffled. “She hanged herself.”
Then she came through the door and stood beside her sister and gazed down at Foster, her face broken up with rage, grief, the skin shining, taut. Again she said, “She hanged herself. She was forty-two years old. November of 1890. She was the same age your father was, I just realized. She lived all those years here thinking she was hid out good from killing that white boy but what she hadn’t counted on was not being able to hide out from herself. And all that time she couldn’t stop thinking of her mother. She couldn’t even send a letter. Didn’t dare but didn’t know where to send one either. But it kept working its way inside of her, chewing away at her. Until she couldn’t stand it anymore. So she took the train down there and was back in less than a week and wouldn’t talk about it. Not to us, not to Father. Not to anybody. But herself. I overheard her. We’d try to talk to her about it and she’d look right by us. Not like we weren’t there but as if it was something that could not be spoken of. And then one morning in November without a word or note left behind she took herself up high in the woods and hanged herself.” And stopped as if out of breath.
Foster, pressed into the chair, feeling the backslats cutting into him through his shirt. The room hot. The two women side by side, the one looking off, away from him, the other taller, leaning forward, swaying, the anger coming off her as a bright current that filled the room exactly to all its contours. Foster said nothing.
Then Prudence began to clear the table, slow deliberate motions as if she might drop something, lifting bowls and platters one at a time with both hands, her feet treading each step firm down onto the floorboards.
Abigail said, “Your father was a little boy. And he saw her. Saw her when Father carried her down out of the woods, her face all swollen, bloated up, purple-black, the color of a plum. He saw that. Five years old.” The words chipping out of her mouth, spittle in beads as if broken from the edges of the words. “He hated himself, your father did. Hated what he was. Ran out of here and never would come back. Because he did not want to be what he was. The same way Mother thought she could leave her old life behind clean he did the same. But it does not work that way.”
“I don’t know,” Foster said, soft.
She went on. “And then here comes you to tell us he was killed in an accident, run over by a car and also telling us he was a bootlegger. Had a liquor business is what you said. Well I’m not an idiot. I am not a stupid woman.”
“I don’t know,” he said again. “It could’ve been the way they said it was. I don’t know.”
“Oh,” she said, “I can tell you. However it was, it was not an accident. Even if it was, it still was not. Do you understand me?”
“No ma’am.”
She leaned more toward him, her upper body over the table now. Prudence behind her, at the sink, her back to the room, not moving. Abigail said, “Your father was at war with himself. There was no harm he could inflict upon himself so he looked to the world to do it. When he was a boy, a small boy he was too, the other boys tormented him. Called him names, spoke of his mother. Cruel things, the cruelty of boys. And he fought them. Fought them, one on one or in groups. He never cared. All of them bigger and stronger than he was. But not a one of them tougher. He would not quit. They would leave off of him before he would quit. And he would not speak of it. Now, a boy like that, is he going to change as a man? Or is he going to go on mistaking the world for himself. For what he hates?”
“I don’t know.” His voice small against her. “He was always good to me. My mother and sister too, the best I recall. He’d tease me, but it was always kind.”
She placed both hands on the table edge and braced herself on her arms, studying him. She said, “And all that time he was lying to you. If you want to learn anything about your father, what you have to do first is set aside everything you think you know.”
Foster looked back at her. After a minute he said, “No. I can’t do that. But I can add to it. I already am.”
She pushed off the table to stand upright. “Well,” she said. “Good for you.”
Prudence had a pair of tin lard buckets filled with scraps for the dogs. He followed her into the woodshed entryway where they paused as she lighted a lantern and stepped out of her carpet slippers and into one of the pairs of gumboots lined against the wall and he followed her out into the yard.
He set the lard buckets on the roof of the car and let the dogs out. Glow raced in and out of the lantern light. Lovey came down off the seat slowly and stepped up to Prudence and sniffed at her and Prudence held down a hand and spoke to the dog and Lovey relaxed, letting her head be stroked. Foster whistled for Glow and set the buckets down in the circle of light and the dogs ate.
Prudence said, “It was Sister mostly who raised your father. After Mother died we were still a family but it was an odd little bunch, at sixes and sevens most of the time it seems now, looking back. It was Sister who worked so hard to make things as normal as she could for that little boy. Played games with him like a girl half her age. And later, when because of the fighting and torment we took him out of the school, it was her that did his lessons with him. Her that planned them out and kept up with them. Father would set him to parse sentences and then forget all about checking the work to see it was done right. It wasn’t bad intentions; it was that after Mother died Father did not pay attention to things the same’s he’d done before. But because it was Abby mostly who raised your father it hurt her bad when he ran off. Without telling anybody where he was g
oing or why.”
“I could see that.”
“There was some bitterness in it too. She’d had some disappointments as a young woman and then, just at the time when she might of gone off somewhere, done something else with her life, she was suddenly left with a grieving father grown old and a wild little boy needed mothering. And so whatever ideas she ever might’ve had about anything else, they all got swept away.”
“What about you?”
“Me? I never saw or wanted anything than to stay right here on this farm and work it like a man. I’ve done just fine, thank you.” Her face wrinkled in the orange lantern light, serious.
He grinned at her. “I believe it.” Then asked, “You said disappointments. That Abigail had? What were those?”
“The usual sort. Boys. She was some right sort of beauty as a girl.”
“Still is.”
“Umph. You’re not so young as I thought.” She went on. “But the disappointment was, beauty she might be but it wasn’t a wife those boys were chasing. That colored blood. She was the berry everybody wanted to pick but eat right there in the field, not carry home with them. Stop on the way theirselves and wash their hands. And that was before Mother killed herself.”
Then each stood silent regarding the other and the night around them. The dogs worrying the empty pails, their heads down inside as they scraped the flavor away with their tongues, the pails scooting against the dirt of the farmyard. Quiet, Foster asked, “Why’d she do that, you think?”
Prudence looked away from him a long moment. Then said, “Pick up those buckets; let’s get your dogs some water. Then find then a nice place to bed them down.”