by Jeffrey Lent
After a time she said, “In a way it’s hard to say. Grandmother Pelham was sweet to us girls but distant too. Always gifts at birthdays and Christmas, little things. Other times little treats. But would she have been different if Father had married some white local girl? I honestly can’t tell you. She moved out of the house when he brought Mother home but she would’ve done the same for another bride. She was an old Abolitionist too. I know from Father telling me; she never would’ve. I know for a fact she did knitting and packed food parcels that were passed along to the people heading for Canada. She didn’t harbor any, but I know the name of the woman she gave the parcels too. A Glover in Braintree. But was she happy when she met Mother? You can believe in the idea of a thing but that doesn’t mean you want it in your living room. It’d be nice to think she was high-minded enough so she only saw that it would be difficult for them, that people would always stop and look, some say things.”
He nodded, paused. Then asked, “Other people?”
“Your grandfather was respected. In an odd way though I think Mother commanded more respect even than him. Because she walked right up in the face of it. It was her built up the chicken-and-egg business. Time was, it was a regular little industry. Father now, he’d of been happy to continue on as ever before: a little of this and a little of that and it all comes out in the end with food on the table and no spare time. Mother though, was a businesswoman. She put money in the bank. And those same neighbors, they might not tell you what they think, but they respect someone hardworking and clear-headed. Myself, I never ran across any true meanness, except for rude men, and any woman comes across those time to time. After Mother died, it changed a little. There was a little more distance, a little greater gap that people left between themselves and us. Part of that was they did not understand it; we did not broadcast details. We retreated a little bit after that. But it was not shame. It was respect. For her. For whatever her reasons were, those we could understand and those we could not. Does that make sense to you?”
“It does.” Thinking of his own father.
She went on. “But what you should do, you want another view of these things, is go talk to Connie Clifford. That’s Father’s little sister. Her own sons was some of those that tormented your father as a boy. They’re grown men now with little ones of their own. She did not approve of what her boys were up to. But that does not mean she could stop them. Your great-aunt. She’s overstreet to Randolph village.
Evenings after supper he spent in the kitchen with Prudence; Abigail retreated to the parlor to read the paper. Prudence busy without pause throughout the day save but to pass him by with a tease or joke of some sort. It was only evenings when she would grow serious. Times, he felt he had to coax her, as if someway his being there was enough to satisfy her. As if she mistrusted too many words. As if she knew they might not clarify but only confuse what was most essential. Other times she was blunt and direct.
“Is there family,” she asked, “on your mother’s side?”
“She was out of French Canada. Her folks came down so her dad could work the quarry in Barre. He was killed in a accident there. Her mother died sometime after that, I guess. Some years later. So Mama was an orphan time she met Pop. She was a LeBaron. I’d guess there’s relatives somewhere up there in Quebec but I wouldn’t know where to look.”
Prudence nodded, said nothing. He could not tell if this answer pleased her or not. Perhaps, in the way it was for him, it was nothing more than information.
Another evening she queried him in detail about his father; wanting descriptions of how his father had aged, where they had lived, what Foster knew of his father’s history, his business and work. And of how his father had been with his mother; what Foster recalled of the two of them, as well as friends, the people his father worked with. And also again not so much how he died but what it was like after that: the funeral, the people there. What was said. Where his father was buried. What that place looked like. And Foster told her everything he could and in the telling discovered more than he thought he knew and it all came out of him, a swift rush of words that would not stop even as he ate up the piece of vinegar pie she had placed before him, a combination so sweet and delirious that he was actually stopped, choked off for some moments gazing at her across the table where she sat with her head down on her arms, before he realized she was sobbing. And he sat looking at the rind of piecrust on his plate, knowing better than to rise and go around to her. There was no comfort, there. None wanted.
After dark he would go to the barns with Pru while she made her last check of the livestock by lantern light. When she was done he’d stand in the yard and watch her cross to the house, the circle of light bobbing roughly over the lawn. Then he’d return to the barns to release his dogs and the three of them would go up the hill under the stars and what moon there was. The dogs ranging out, loping in the starlight. Most nights they would go high onto the ridge in the woods until the dogs were tired. Twice having to call Glow off the chittering of a raccoon and once running his legs sore and his voice hoarse as she ran after deer. But most nights they would just go up through the woods and circle back down into the empty sheep pasture, the ledges soft shadows in the night and come to sit in the small cemetery where beside his grandfather’s stone he’d nested a bottle of the bonded scotch whiskey and he’d sit cross-legged and take out a box of cigarettes and unscrew the whiskey and drink small sips and smoke. Considering his day.
As he had done evenings in New Hampshire in the time between burying his father and his leaving, sitting on the boulderback by the river suspended in the mesh of grief. Foster was no fool; he’d understood Patrick Jackson’s message. Now he could see that when he’d found the letters from Abigail he’d glimpsed not only a place to study his situation from the safety of some distance but also the hope of some clarity, some wisdom greater than his own. Some method perhaps to decode more perfectly the message Jackson gave him. Instead he’d learned there was no method. And understood that a portion of what Jackson had offered was a threat, from the same forces that had swallowed his father as completely as the earth covered his body. He knew he would not be returning to New Hampshire, not in any time he could name. He would keep the house. Let it rot and fall down if it came to that. But, keeping it was holding a presence, a small cry against the dark. Even if no one noticed or heard.
So he would sit in the starlit September burnt-back grass of the small family cemetery that was partly where he came from and drink small swallows of the whiskey and consider the breathless beauty of the earth and the perfect precision of its ways, where he saw no action as random or uncounted, and try to understand this weighed against the workings of men, a world that had been moving silently to bring him to this time, to this place and moment in his life. It was a world that seemed to hold no place for him. It was a world he was not even sure he wanted part of, and yet a part of it belonged to him by the simple fact of his existence. And knew he must take up that part for himself.
He grew sentimental with the whiskey, profoundly sad and hushed before the terrible beauty of it all. His dogs slept beside him, shivering with the early fall.
He went to see Connie Clifford. He dug his best shirt and his black trousers and coat from the valise and amused Pru and satisfied Abby when he heated the flatirons and pressed his own clothes. It was only what he’d always done, his father too. Perhaps his mother had once done this work for his father but it was a time he knew nothing of. Bathed and shaved and with his boots brushed clean and buffed with an old rag, he shut his dogs in the barn and then used the same rag to wipe down the Chrysler, clearing a week’s worth of yard dust from it.
Abigail said, “You took no such pains before driving in here and presenting yourself.”
He looked at her. Her face was pleasant. He said, “I didn’t know much, did I?”
She smiled and reached to refigure some minute way his collar. She said, “She’ll be flustered by you. Don’t pay any attention to that. You lo
ok wonderful; she’ll fall in love with you and treat you like someone trying to sell her something.”
The house was in the village, white with green trim, three stories under a pitched green tin roof. Behind what had once been a livery but now was a garage fronted with hand-crank gasoline pumps, the doors of the shop open where a man worked on his back beneath a T-model Ford. The man came up from under the Ford and moved slowly into the light of the day. In his forties, hard-muscled, with a slackness to his jowls and belly. His hands lined deeply with oilstain. He filled the Chrysler with gas and washed the windshield with a rag out of a bucket and dried it with another rag out of his hip pocket. Foster paid him and told him, “I’m looking for Constance Clifford.”
The man looked at him. Blinked slow once and did not introduce himself. “That’s Mother. She’s to the house with Dad. Park your car by the garage and walk around the side, you won’t miss it.”
As if she’d been expecting him she met him at the open front door, stepping onto the stoop, a thickly built woman in her seventies, low to the ground, a button-front sweater open over a sun-faded light print dress. Her hair a snarl of silver curls. She greeted him. “Beginning to think we’d have to come up there and pry you loose.” She did not smile. Her eyes the blue of winter water. “But you escaped all on your own.”
He felt he might apologize. He said, “You heard I was here then.”
“Prudy’s a talker. Some excited, I can tell you. I’m sorry to hear about your father.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Come in the house.”
Her husband Glen was a small person also, in a suit coat and vest with fob and chain and carpet slippers, who rose from his seat by the cold parlor stove and shook Foster’s hand, then covered their two joined hands with his other. His hair a pale fringe gone but for a sharply barbered clip behind his ears. They all took seats, the couple in their flanking chairs, Foster on the edge of an old stiff horsehide-covered sofa.
Glen said, “Prudence was correct. He favors your brother.”
“That’s what they say.”
Connie studied him. Then said, “You do take after him, it’s true. Norman was gone to the war between when I was a little girl and grew up. He was a man time I got to know him. He was a sentimental man, Norman was.”
“I’m afraid I’m that way too.”
“It’s not a trait to pity or fear. Perhaps it makes for sadness looking at the world. But that doesn’t make it less true.”
“Maybe I’ll grow out of it.” He tried out a small grin on her.
“Now there. That’s Norman.”
Glen said, “It was a hard time for your father, as a boy. The other children were hard on him, more so than they were with the girls. And it was our own boys, often as not, led the pack. I strapped them all in the woodshed over it, more than once. Boys always need something different, something someway strange from themselves. It’s how they decide who they are. Your father was an easy target. I strapped those boys of mine even as I understood they felt if they didn’t do the leading then they’d become that other thing as well. Times, even, I wondered was I making it worse for your father. You do what you can do, but not a one among us can say what that amounts to, what it brings down the road.”
There was a short silence in the room. Glen and Connie looked at each other. As if he’d said more someway then either of them intended. Then, out of this, he went on.
“Aiden—that’s our youngest who you just met out the front of the store—he heard you were in town, he came to me. Told me of a time, the older boys had got hold of your father up in the woods. After school. A pair of them had him by the hands and feet, stretched out between them. They was swinging him back and forth, getting set to dump him down the side of a bank. And Aid, he told me—just a little fellow, not big enough to do anything otherwise—he went roaring in, yelling at those big boys to hold on, to wait. That he wasn’t done yet. So they held your father swinging there while Aiden waded in to kick up and down his ribs. Told me he wanted to hurt him, wanted him to feel as much pain as Aid could make. Before he went sailing down that hillside. Aid telling me how your father would not make a sound as he kicked him. So Aiden came a couple nights ago to tell me this. Not only because he knew you were here. It had been working at him these years. He came in, sat down, told me, asked me why I thought he’d done that. All I could do was look him in the face and tell him he didn’t know any better. And he sat there, right where you are now, and told me that yes he did.”
Foster said, “My mother and sister both died in the flu the winter of ‘eighteen-’nineteen. If there was ever a time for bitterness, that would’ve been a good one, I think. Everybody here thinks he was all hatred and old regrets. I guess there was some of that in him. But it wasn’t the man I knew. All I know is he never talked about this place here. Could be it was such a bad thing he wouldn’t talk of it. But then, maybe, it didn’t matter that much. I guess I’ll never know the answer to that. You think?”
Quiet again in the room. Quiet enough so through the raised windows Foster could hear the low rumble of town. He locked his hands in his lap and looked down at them. After a time, Connie spoke.
“In some ways, it could be, your father wasn’t so different from your grandfather. I’ve not thought of it this way before. But Norman was a quiet man. You didn’t know him, you’d find him silent, even severe. But he was not that way. I think two things, the war and his love of your grandmother, left him feeling he was best off at the side of life. I think he saw the farm as a refuge—a place where what world was made was of his own making.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I recall as yesterday the morning he walked back up to the farm at the end of the war with that dark-skinned girl with him. It was September and we’d been expecting him some time. Most of the men had come home by the trainload. We hadn’t had a letter from Norman since before the surrender. Mother was sick, worrying about him. Those men that came back, all we’d get from them was Norman had stepped up and asked to sign his mustering-out papers there in Washington D.C., that he wanted to walk the way home and see the country he’d just fought for. Now understand, Brother was the sort that had gone through the whole war with never a request of any sort, not even a complaint. When Father died he could’ve come home then, no one would’ve questioned it. But Norman was the type of man that once he took something up he saw it through to the end. So when he wanted to walk home, they honored that. I’ve no doubt there was men, officers certain but likely other men as well, that knew about your grandmother. But we didn’t hear the first word of her. Just that he was coming along. The way he wanted. And it hurt Mother wicked. All those men coming off the trains and Norman nowhere in sight. She would not speak of it but she’d read the paper and the lists of names and the accounts of the homecomings. And of course he knew that. Stupid in love he might have been but Norman Pelham was not the kind of man to forget what the rest of the world was up to. So when he walked up the hill that September noon with that dark-skinned girl Mother already someway knew he had made a choice that did not include her. She was just a widow woman with nothing but a fourteen-year-old girl, trying to hold everything together, waiting for him to amble on in. A mother”—Connie glared at Foster—“is nothing but a tortured creature.”
He returned her look. He said, “It must’ve been a terrible shock then. What she was.”
Connie Clifford did not move in her chair but gathered herself up, her eyes pale, lively, snapping. Then she leaned forward and looked away from Foster a moment, her eyes lighting around the room as if seeking some proof of her conviction. She looked back at him and with her voice dropping down solid on each word said, “Leah Pelham owned herself.”
He did not understand this at first and then did. Soft, he said, “Yes ma’am.”
Her glare did not relent. “People would say it was Norman made that possible. They would be wrong.”
He waited.
“She had known the worst peo
ple can offer up to one another. And walked away from that. With her head up square. And certainly she and my brother loved each other. As a young girl it was wonderful to see.” She glanced at Glen, back at Foster. “But with or without him, Leah just ate the world up. As if, you see, she not only owned herself. But owned everything she could see. I’d never known a person like that before. A woman like that.” And paused again and added, “Or since.”
Quiet then. Foster looked at the floor, the sheet of bright linoleum stretched under the furniture, not reaching the corners of the room. It was not what this great-aunt had said so much as her pitch. His voice still low he asked, “What was it happened to her?”
And Connie Clifford sat back into her chair, her hands released from the arms into her lap where they lay gnarled and twisted over each other. Her face collapsed back to her age, the skin lying loose over her skullbones. She looked down at her toiling hands. When she looked back up at him her mouth was compressed. Her eyes dimmed, someplace away. “I don’t know,” she said. “She was my friend. Was what she was.”
When he left there he did not return immediately to the farm but instead drove two blocks into downtown Randolph and parked nosed in to the curb. He wanted to be alone. So he walked among the people of the town and was alone there. It was not his father’s town; he knew that now. But it had been his grandfather’s. And his grandmother had made it her own. And now the recluse maiden aunts on the hill. The other people that were here he did not feel belonged to him. He would remain a stranger they were kind to. So finally, it was the not-so-long-dead old man and the long-dead dark-skinned woman that he felt might someway stalk within him as he walked slowly along the storefronts.
When he’d left Cliffords’ and walked around the garage to where the Chrysler was parked Aiden Clifford had come from the darkness of the shop, coming up to Foster, rubbing his hands on a dirty rag, his moon face turned down. He’d said, “It’s some car.”