by Jeffrey Lent
Foster drank a little whiskey. The electric bulb suspended overhead was arcing, dancing shadowy light. He waited a pause and then said, “Who was it?”
“Who was who?”
“When my grandmother did her best to strike you dead and ran off out of here and left you? You talk about being alone then. But you were just a boy. Bad hurt. So who was it that took care of you? Who was that person?”
Mebane nodded. Took up his whiskey. Did not drink but set it down and looked at Foster. He said, “Did you hear me?”
“I did.”
“All right.” Mebane nodded again. Then took up his cane and rose up, using the table edge to push his body against to stand. Clamped hard on the cane looking down at Foster. He said, “It was her mother. It was the only one here. It was Helen took care of me.”
Foster studied him. Then said, “She must’ve known what you’d done. To get your head laid open.”
“Well, I sure didn’t tell her.”
“But she knew.”
“I don’t know what she knew. What I can say for sure is I was hurt and her daughter was run off and one man was dead on account of her running off. So who can say why she did what she did? What she knew? What her reasons was? Maybe it was just to save herself. Maybe it was nothing more than that.”
“Now wait. You’re telling me there was just the two of you here alone and her nursing you and you two did not talk at all? Not one bit beyond what you needed or wanted? With everything else gone away you did not talk to her?”
Mebane weaved against the cane. As if the cane was the one reliable piece in the upright grouping of himself. A single slender raised vein pumped on his forehead. He said, “I tell you what. Some of this work you have to do yourself. I can’t lead you through like a child at a medicine show. What I’m doing. Is to go pee. I’m an old man. My bladder can’t hold that whiskey like it used to. Then I’m going to bed.” He scowled at Foster. “Other than that, I’m not going anywhere.”
“Well I guess I’m not either anytime soon.”
“There you go.”
“One thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I understand why you’re telling me all this. But sometime you’ve got to tell me the rest. The part I came after. Just so you know.”
Mebane looked at him a long time. The old man’s eyes watery with fatigue. Foster began to think Mebane would say nothing, was waiting for Foster to say something more.
Finally Mebane said, “You watch yourself with that girl. She is the only creature on this earth I love even a little bit. Do you follow me?”
“I guess so.”
“You’ll get what you want, in my way and my time. When I’m satisfied that I’ve got it right.”
Foster sat silent.
“Well,” Mebane said. “Goodnight then. Turn those lights off when you’re done setting there. I don’t trust that electric.”
He sat at the table for the time it took the sounds of the other life in the house to cease, the faint scrapings of movement from the second floor, the pad of uneven feet. Then a time more while the house settled to rest around him. He corked the bottle of whiskey still half full but drank off what was left of his own glass, left it there on the blotter as some rough evidence of the night for the morning and carried the bottle out with him, leaving the room dark behind him; also the kitchen where he paused before the dark to study the remains of the uneaten dinner—the jars of vegetables and the biscuits. It was not just food. He was pretty sure of that.
Outside the evening haze had thickened. There were no stars. It was still warm, the air heavy, a thing immediate to walk through, to breathe in. The rub of cicadas pierced the air as if the insects inhabited all living space. As if they would bore into his ears.
He let the dogs out of the slave cabin and kept the door open to sit and watch them, white ghosts scouting the fenced yard. Then left them be and lighted the lantern inside, leaving it on the floor as there was no place but the bed to set it otherwise. Went and knelt by the hearth and took up the snakeskin there and broke the segments apart in his hands. Dry hard shackles of some body passed by. Then reached into the hearth and rubbed one hand there. Squatting on his haunches. Just old stones, long cold.
The dogs came in and lay up on the bed and watched him. As if they wanted to see what he would do next. He turned and sat crosslegged on the floor with the lantern turned to a low wicker and looked back at them. He drank a little from the bottle of his father’s scotch.
Twice he went out across the yard through the gate to the Chrysler in the alley. He sat there and smoked cigarettes. He could take off the brake and hold down the clutch and coast silent down the alley to where it dropped to the street and there pop the clutch and drive off as quiet as driving could be. Out to the crossroads. Pettigrew. Where she said she would wait for him. He turned sideways on the seat and propped his feet up on the far side of the dash and with the bottle between his legs sat smoking. He had no idea why he did not go to her. Each time he went to the car he intended to leave and find her and each time he did not. Each time he left the car to return to the cabin where the lantern, the wick turned low, was blackening the chimney so the cabin grew more and more dim. Just shadows. Shadows of walls and floor and hearth and rising rough chimney stones and the jut of bed into the dim space and the two forms on the bed with their eyes yellow and pale as from another world watching him.
The rain began sometime while he slept, not waking him but entering into him someway as it struck soft against the old rotting splitcedar shakes overhead so his dreams were of rivers, of swimming underwater through windowglass water, some brown-skinned girl swimming alongside him, streams of bubbles sweeping from her mouth back into her short twisted glistening hair, her body naked but never quite seen altogether. Together they skimmed over the smooth riverbed stones.
He woke to a rain-dimmed early dawn, fresh and sharp-edged, bouncy. He stood up in his trousers and opened the door and watched the water run slantwise into the overgrown dried-up backyard. The dogs went past him, quick-footed with the sudden cool, after rabbits in the tall broken grass. The rain came through the open door and streaked an oval on the old floorboards around his bare feet. He ran out to the back fence and through the gate to the Chrysler where he rolled up the left-down windows, thinking, Stupid. He should’ve guessed it would rain. Feeling again that he was in a place where he could not recognize simple signs. He dug in the backseat and got his canvas coat.
Everything—the yard, the old carriage shed, the still-dark house, the trees beyond—was distinct yet close. As if color had been drained from the world and with it simple perspective. Back in the cabin he took off the coat and got a shirt on and his socks and boots. Roughed his wet hair with his fingers and then put the coat back on. The dogs splattering damp marks, traces of themselves, in the dirt layer of the floorboards. Wet and happy, both of them, smelling like dogs, eyes pitched up on him.
He stepped again into the wet day and shut the door behind him, closing them in. He stood a moment studying the dark house. It was early. He crossed over the yard to the carriage barn and went in a small man-sized door set into the two larger doors that would open out. To one side a row of vehicles: a covered buggy, an open carriage, a two-wheeled fancy gig. All dull with grime and dust, spiderwebbing like the hands of ghosts over them. The cloth sunscreen of the carriage rotted off its slender frameworks. The other side a row of straight stalls, empty, cleared of all manure or bedding, of anything at all. Except—when he went up into one and ran his hand along the planks of the stallside where the wood had been smoothed by years of rubbing—some few long dark horsehairs still caught in splinters of the wood. And the wood of the feed manger worn down where hungry necks had pushed down into it, time after time, day after day. Old tie-chains welded with rust lay in the bottom of the mangers.
At the end of the stalls a row of feed bins and beyond that a door let into the wall and he went through there and was in a small slope-roofed shed bu
ilt onto the side of the barn. The shed empty. Nothing there at all. At one end a small hearth and rough chimney. Against the inner barn wall, high up, was a set of eight spaced wooden pegs the thickness of his wrist, a foot long and curved up. Harness pegs. That was all. Even the hearth had been swept clean. The room was dark, just a single paned window set high on the shed wall, dark with grime, not cleaned by the rain. Foster squatted and looked around him, studying the walls, the floor. And finally could see where there had once stood a bedstead built into the wall like the one in the cabin he was staying in. Along the wall at the end of where the bed had been, found some nails where clothing had once hung. Thought he could see patches on the floor where perhaps a chair had been scraped back and forth from a table over the years. That was all. At the end of the shed was a door that opened into the yard and he went out through there. Against the side of the carriage barn, right up close under the eaves, was a stack of stovewood. The stack had at some point come right up to cover over this outer entrance to the small shed. Where Peter had lived.
A pall of dense sour woodsmoke hugged close down over the yard. He looked at the house and from one of the two chimneys a thick oily spume rose up, the color of wet black wool. He crossed over to the house and went in through the kitchen. In the dining room he found Mebane down on his knees before the grate. Stacked up smoldering against the andirons was the stack of ledgers from the table. Beside Mebane was a pile of yellow newspaper, from which he was removing sections and crumpling them against his chest and then feeding them under the ledgers, prodding with a poker lying before him on the hearth. His cane was upright, within reach, against the hearthside. He looked around when Foster came in and then back at his work, reaching for another sheaf of newspaper.
“What’re you doing?”
Without looking back at him Mebane spoke. Into the fire. “Nothing. Burning trash.”
“What was in those books?”
Mebane took up the poker and stabbed hard at the mess before him and the ledgers gave way, sliding one off the other. Fresh fire licked up. “Nothing.” He stabbed again. Still not looking back.
Foster left the old man to his burning and went through into the kitchen where he stood at the sink washing up from the night before. Wiping down the counters. He fried eggs on the electric coil and toasted bread and laid the food out on plates. The work made him melancholy, the rain against the windows. The meals he’d cooked alone or for his father, the water dripping off the tamaracks and hemlocks. He was a long way from home. Even if the house was still there, even if it was his, it seemed long gone. He was terribly sad. It seemed the farther he went the less he had.
He carried the plates into the dining room and silent put them down. Took up the glasses from the night before and carried them to the kitchen. The fire was burning well now, Mebane standing to the side of the fireplace, a couple of sticks of wood atop the stacked ledgers. The room was warm, drying the moisture from the air. Foster came back in and together they sat and ate.
Mebane mopped eggyolk with breadcrust. “I thought you’d be out running all night.”
“No sir. I stayed in.”
Mebane nodded as if they’d agreed upon something. “I was awake myself much of the night. Pitch and thrash. Then just about daybreak the time I got to sleep that girl called me up to make sure I hadn’t killed you or run you off.”
“Daphne called here?”
“Wasn’t you supposed to meet her?”
“It wasn’t anything firm.”
“Un-huh,” Mebane said. “Are you going to run off on her? Treat her bad? Time comes you’re done with me?”
“I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Mebane looked at him. “Life is a misery, isn’t it?”
“Seems like.”
“You’re lucky, you know.”
“How’s that?”
“Most people, it takes up half their life or more to figure that out.”
“I don’t know. There’s ones that seem to do all right. That it seems things work out all right for.”
“All that is, is them not paying attention.”
“Could be luck.”
“Is that what you’re thinking? Luck? Let me tell you. Unless you get hit in the head, every one of us sooner or later comes down to lying there reworking each and every inch of our lives. Gasping for breath. Imagine how that is—to not be able to draw breath. And you lie there wondering what mercy the Lord can provide. Because it’s clear the tired old earth is out of mercy if it ever had any to start with. And the Lord, the Lord He is silent. He don’t go peep. Now tell me, what kind of luck is that?”
Foster grinned at him. “Not much I guess.”
“It’s not funny. Not much is right. Look over there in the fireplace. You know what that is burning up?”
“No sir.”
“That’s right you don’t. What that is, is years of trying to write out what happened in my life, long afternoons, midnights, long hours, chewing on a pen-tip, trying to get things right. Because it seemed like it was all I had. Some way to get it out of me and before me in a way I could see it. That would make sense to me. Something I could touch, could review.”
“Why’d you burn it up?”
“Why boy, because I got you. Because you’re the one I can give it to. Because you’re the single one needs it as bad as I do.”
“I don’t want all this. Some single answer is enough.”
“You’re close,” Mebane said. “You’re closer than you think. You been adding two and two and you just about got it. Except you got that extra one thrown in and you’re still trying to make her fall in and add up to four. But she’s a sum all of her own. Part of this but her own also. The same way you are.”
“You lost me there.”
Mebane scowled at him. “There is always some other one that keeps us hopeful. That makes us believe things can change. Or at least keep us smoking onward, intent on reaching the next bend. The place where it all comes together. Where it all makes sense.”
Foster leaned back in his chair and looked at the old man beside him. Mebane creased and white, his eyes up to a high glitter, a chatter of iris and pupil. Foster said, “You’re talking about love, aren’t you?”
Mebane said, “Sometimes it can be love I suppose. Or at least start out that way. Othertimes—”
“Othertimes what?”
“Othertimes, I don’t know what to call it. Something that eats at you, that burns at you, that consumes you. That you can’t touch. That you can’t even see. But that is with you every livelong day. It’s a fair thing to call it a passion. But you got to recall, passion is one of those things that is individual, complicated, as many-faced and -sided as a person. As the person that bears that passion. Do you understand?”
“I guess so.”
“Listen. Your grandmother. Leah. I’m going to call her Leah. That’s how I knew her, how I thought of her. You never met her. Is that all right with you? If I call her Leah?”
Foster was silent.
“There you see. It’s coming now. And you know it don’t you? What you came after. What you thought you wanted to know.”
Foster was very still. He said, “Tell me.”
“I killed her, boy. It was me. Yes.” He held up his hand palm out. “As sure as if I’d followed her back up there to those Vermont woods and tied the rope myself. I did.”
“Now what you have to do is forget everything I’ve told you. Because this is the part that is not about any of that. I don’t mean for you to discard it, just let it slide off to a corner of your mind and hold it there for later. For you. Right now feature only this—a man who twenty-five years past harmed a woman and the woman did her best to harm him even worse but failed. See that man, not young anymore but still one with a hint, a faint stir of hope that the mess of his life could change someway. See him there, right out the front of this house sitting up on the front porch in a hot September afternoon, not so different from the one you walked in on. Except he
’s out there like he does most every afternoon. Waiting. Because there has not been a day go by but what he thinks of her. Not a single solitary one. She, who could be dead for all he knows. Except she is not. He knows this. And it is not just daytimes. At least once a week he wakes from dreams of her, dreams where her skin and voice, where the touch of her is so vivid that waking he wants to hurt himself to get back there. To that dreamland. And he wonders how many of those dreams occur that he sleeps right through. On the one hand he likes to think it’s not many of them and on the other he likes to think that she flows through him all the time without stopping. Because he knows it is not his brain that labors over her, not his mind but his soul. His heart. Where each and every day he is disturbed by her. Where he has long since worn out all the could-have-beens. All the ways he could have been different. Acted otherwise. Where he has made some peace with himself and does not quite think she will have done the same but still knows it will be different if he should see her again. And you see, he expects this to happen. Except he has been expecting this for so long it is expectation he has become. The actual woman, she is a fragment. She is only a portion of all that waiting. She could be anywhere on the earth, doing anything. And so he sits right where he is, because it is the only way he can think that she might ever find him. Because, you see, he cannot find her. And that is not a question of knowing where she is or not.