The Center of Winter: A Novel

by Marya Hornbacher

  I watched my father’s feet do the soft-shoe four-step they did when he drank, a little square of spit-polished shoes stepping back and forth and side to side. My mother said, “Kate, run fetch your brother.” I slid my feet slowly across the thick carpet to make patterns and went out onto the back porch. It smelled of wet leaves and heat.

  “Esau,” I called. My voice echoed, skipping like a smooth stone across the still lake. I could see him down on the wooden dock, the outline of his shoulders black against the water. The moon was very white, the way it gets when the sky is clear. I ran across the yard and stood a few steps short of where the dock began. I called his name again and said, “We’re going now.” He turned and came creaking up the planks.

  He reminded me of an old man.

  I put my hand in his jacket pocket and he wound his fingers through mine.

  “Do you see the man in the moon?” he asked me. I turned to look at the moon. Esau bent down so his head was level with mine. He pointed.

  “Right there,” he said. “Do you see him? He’s sitting on the edge of that big crater. They left him there when they landed, by accident. They forgot him. Now he just sits there and thinks.”

  I squinted hard and said, “I see him!” We stared at the moon awhile. “What does he eat?” I asked.

  “Moonflowers.”

  “Is he lonely?”

  Esau said, “Oh, yes. He’s very lonely.”

  “That’s sad.”

  “But see where the light comes down from the moon and hits the lake?”

  I nodded.

  I would see anything my brother wanted me to see.

  “Sometimes he slides down the moonbeam and goes swimming and talks to the fish.”

  “Then why can’t he just go home?”

  Esau straightened up, and we turned toward the house. “He doesn’t remember home anymore,” Esau said. “Moonflowers make you forget things like that.” We stood stalling on the porch, watching the party through the window, listening to the roar, the screen door banging in the wind.

  We went in. We said good-bye and were kissed. We followed our parents out to the car. Our father was singing.

  In the backseat, riding down County Road 10, I tilted my head to look out the window. I watched the man on the moon swinging his legs over the edge of the crater. I wondered if he was whistling.

  “Esau,” I said. I turned to look at him. He was half asleep, with his head on the window, his cheek squished against the glass. I pulled on his sleeve.

  “What?” he mumbled.

  “Does the man whistle?” I asked.

  “Of course he does,” Esau said, smiling. “He whistles all the time.”

  I turned back to the window to watch the moonbeams. They cut through the sky, cold and white, hitting field after field of corn, the perfect rows like an army of narrow men. The fields were lit up by the high, white moon, glistening like an eyeball in the sky.

  “Katie, wake up.” My brother was shaking me. I sat up in bed.

  “What? Can’t you sleep?” It was dark out. He stood there in his pajamas, excited.

  “Put on your shoes. We’re going out.”

  “Out where?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, exasperated. “Out.”

  I looked at him suspiciously. “Are you sick?”

  “No! I’m fine. Hurry up.” He hopped from foot to foot.

  I climbed out of bed and put on my shoes. “Are we going out the window?” I asked.

  “Good idea. Yes. If we go out the door, they’ll hear.” He punched a hole in the screen. I looked at it.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have done that,” I said. “Tie my shoes.”

  “Doesn’t matter. We’ll fix it later.” He knotted my laces and lowered me out the window and into the flower bed, then dropped next to me with a small thud. I looked at him for direction. In the white light of the moon, his cheeks were shadowed with a hot flush.

  We walked along the dry creek bed. The crickets were wild with the heat. He said nothing, but moved quickly, his feet sure on the flat rocks, his striped pajamas flapping around his thin legs. I stumbled along behind him, sometimes jogging to keep up, my hair starting to get damp.

  He was talking to himself. It wasn’t the kind of talking you listen to, so I didn’t.

  I heard the train that ran along the edge of town. I didn’t know how far away from the house the train was, but we were getting close to it. The high weeds scratched my legs, and my shoe had come untied. He was speeding up. “Wait!” I yelled.

  He turned but didn’t stop walking. “Hurry up!” he said. “We’re almost there.”

  “Where?”

  He reached the bridge and stopped to wait for me. When I caught up with him, I hit him in the stomach.

  “Don’t walk so fast,” I said. “I’ll get lost. And then you’ll be in trouble.”

  He glanced down at me, distracted. “We should have brought provisions,” he said severely.

  “How long are we staying gone?”

  He shrugged. “Come on.”

  And he ran. I watched as his body got smaller ahead of me, though I struggled to keep up. I fell, hit my knee on a rock, got up and kept going. The moon was straight ahead; it looked as if it dangled heavily over some nearby point, a smooth stream of moonlight sliding along the creek bed. The sound of Esau’s sneakers faded and the bobbing figure ahead of me narrowed to a point, and disappeared.

  I found him at the train tracks.

  He was on the train tracks. He leaped along them in long strides, looking like a white bird.

  “Katie!” he called.

  “Get down from there!” I yelled as I trudged up the hill.

  “Come on!”

  “No! Get down!”

  “Do you know how to tell if a train’s coming?”

  “How?”

  “You stand… here”—he came to a stop on the iron trestle farthest from me, his arms out, balancing—“and it shakes.”

  He started laughing.

  If I turned around and went straight back down the creek bed, I would get home.

  His body trembled where it stood. He laughed and laughed.

  The train turned some unseen corner and flashed its single light on him.

  My knee was bleeding where I fell on it.

  He balanced there, lit by the moon and the beam of the train, his arms out like a marionette, his body dancing as if in a strong wind.

  I stumbled backward as the train rushed by. Out of habit, in the roar and clatter, I counted the cars.

  In the ringing silence that followed the last car of the train, I heard my brother laughing. I walked up the hill and stood next to the tracks. He was lying in a ditch.

  “Esau,” I yelled.

  He scrambled to his feet and ran off into the dark like a frightened deer.

  Into the dark. That’s what I called it then: I said that he had gone “into a dark.” It was a confusion of what my mother told me, that he “got very dark.” Doc Parker called them “episodes,” and when Esau had them, he sometimes went into his room, and sometimes went Away, and then it was much too quiet, and my parents didn’t look at me, but fought in the night.

  It was only later that I knew I was right, only when I had my own, much lesser darks and realized that it felt very much as if you had entered, by accident, a separate place; as if you had been feeling your way along a dimly lit hallway, turned a corner, and found yourself in absolute dark.

  We were sitting in the living room. We were listening to the shape of silence. The shape of silence was in his bedroom, pulling on the rest of the house. Everything tipped toward him in the force of our listening to his total lack of sound. My mother fussed with the corners of a book, shifting where she sat. Her stockings shushed as she recrossed her legs. My father was in his La-Z-Boy, not leaned back but rather looking as if he might pounce out of it at any moment. He was watching the television, which murmured almost inaudibly, like voices in a hospital hall. Quietly, conspirato
rially, and with respect for our silence, Walter Cronkite told us about the war in Vietnam. My father swished the drink in his glass.

  I was coloring everything red.

  “You know what kind of bird that is?” my father said to me.

  I didn’t look up from my coloring book. “Cardinal.”

  “State bird,” my father said absently.

  “No it isn’t,” I muttered.

  “What’s that?”

  “No it isn’t,” I said louder. “It isn’t the state bird.”

  “Shhh,” my mother said.

  “Shh yourself,” I snapped.

  “Katie,” she warned.

  “What do you mean, it isn’t the state bird?”

  “It’s not,” I almost yelled, scribbling hard.

  “Okay, Miss Smarty-pants.” My father stopped swishing his drink. “What is the state bird, then?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Arnold,” said my mother. “Don’t encourage her.”

  “Loon!” I yelled, and my red crayon snapped.

  “What?”

  “It’s the loon!” I threw the pieces of my crayon at my father, who looked startled. I sat quietly, looking at my cardinal. I turned the page, selected a green crayon, and carefully outlined a finch.

  My father went to the bar and got another drink. He sat down again.

  “Quite so,” he said, rocking his La-Z-Boy slightly back and forth. “Quite so.”

  Silence settled back in around us, tucking its corners under our toes.

  Summer was ending. My brother had been in his room for days. During the day, when my mother went to work at the department store downtown, smelling of the lilac hand lotion she kept in a jar by the kitchen sink, my father sat reading the paper, lowering it when I came out of my bedroom.

  “Morning, kiddo.”

  I climbed up onto the couch and lay my head on its arm, looking at him. He was drinking grapefruit juice and vodka from a tumbler. His hair was rumpled, and he wore the blue robe my mother had given him last Christmas because she said it was unseemly for him to go gallivanting about in his pajamas, even if he was just getting the paper out of the driveway.

  “You hungry?” my father asked.

  I shrugged.

  “Cat got your tongue?”

  I stuck it out.

  I listened to the silence. Esau was still sleeping. I didn’t know how I could tell, but I could. The silence was quieter, somehow. The silence was probably laid out cold on his bed, exhausted from a night of night fears.

  When I think of my father now, I remember him smiling. Which seems, in light of things, incongruous, maybe even entirely invented. I can hardly remember him. Maybe I’ve pasted a smile on his face because I want something to remember and I want to think that we sat, summer mornings, in peaceable silence and my father smiled at me and I was enough.

  My father wasn’t a happy man. I suppose I knew that, though when you’re six, you don’t call someone happy, unhappy, bitter, cruel. When you’re six, those are transient feelings, as changeable as clouds, not states of being that define you.

  He wasn’t a happy man. I know that because of what happened, because of what my mother told me later, because of what I have pieced together and what I have made up.

  You say of a man, when he’s gone, simple things, as if to try to sum him up: He loved his children. He loved his wife.

  Often, you say: He did his best. Or, with more hesitation: He did what he could.

  You do not say that he hated himself.

  He must have worked at one time, possibly in insurance. He no longer did by the time I was old enough to notice such things. Such things as the unmentionable fact that your father watches soap operas while his wife goes to work.

  You say of such men, without further comment: He drank.

  Such men gathered at Frank’s around three in the afternoon to play pool with cracked cues and watch the game. They wore plaid flannel shirts, and caps with logos of feed stores perched on top of their heads. Their wives worked. It may have been strange for a woman to work in the suburbs back then, but not in a town that was in a depression and had been as long as anybody could remember.

  In Motley, everything was a long time ago. That’s what people said: They told a story, then let it trail off into the twilight and wet heat of August, fanning themselves with paper cocktail napkins. But that was all a long time ago, they said, and watched the fireflies beating their bodies against the damp blue dark. They never finished the story. The story disappeared, wavering up in front of them like heat, just slightly contorting their faces as they wiped the sides of their hands against their foreheads and shook off the sweat. Their mouths clamped up like small trapdoors.

  It was a long time ago. The trains and the red iron ore. The town was gone before my time. We lived in its skeleton like a pack of hermit crabs. A solitary train went past every night. Its whistle blew once while we lay there in our separate beds, waiting for the sound. When I was older, we lit bonfires and drank down by the tracks, digging small holes with sharp stones and passing the bottle around. The iron mines were stripped, rusted husks of equipment left to rot in the ditches’ faint red dirt.

  Everything the town knew was a long time ago. All that was left were the stories. The seasons. The dull, familiar rage of men without work for their heavy hands.

  The men did not complain because to complain implied a hope that things could change.

  The women complained about the men, and dragged them to bed when they passed out on the couch, and took their shoes off. Hesitating, kissing their cheeks. People love in strange ways.

  My father tapped me lightly on the head with his newspaper, getting up from his chair. “Want to go fishing?”

  We sat on the side of the bridge with our fishing hats on. I caught a perch, and we put it in the cooler with the ham sandwiches and beer. Cattails crowded the banks of the river, humming with bugs. The air had that late-summer feeling of everyone having left.

  “Is Esau going to be all right?” I asked.

  My father sat quietly, looking out at the water.

  “Not for a while,” he said.

  I considered this. “Is he going to die?”

  “We’re all going to die someday.”

  “Soon, I mean.”

  “No.”

  I looked at my father.

  In the memory of my imagination, he looks tired, the brim of his hat and his crooked nose and bushy eyebrows jutting out in relief against the sharp blue of the water. His back was hunched.

  He took a swig of beer and turned his smile on me. “No one’s going to die, Katie.”

  I never forgave him for the lie. I ought to forgive him, I suppose. You should let the dead lie.

  The man did what he could.

  There was a little thump on my window on the first day of school. I went over and moved the curtain. Davey was standing in the flower bed.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  “It’s not time to go yet,” I said, pulling the screen out and reaching down. He grabbed my hand and I hoisted him in. He straightened his sweater and smoothed his hair.

  “What’s your mom making for breakfast?” he asked.

  “Biscuits. Nice haircut.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You still got the tag on your shirt.”

  He felt the back of his neck. “Well, pull it off already,” he said. I did.

  Davey and I had been best friends for my whole life. His birthday was in September and mine was in June, so he was almost a whole year older than me, and bigger. He could rest his chin on the top of my head. But we were both starting first grade that day. We didn’t really want to go to school, but we couldn’t figure a way out of it so we were going.

  “Morning, Davey,” my father said. He was reading the paper in his chair.

  “Morning, Mr. Schiller.” Davey liked my dad.

  “You’re looking sharp this morning.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Tha
t’s a good-looking pair of pants.”

  Davey hiked them up by the belt loops. “They’re new,” he said.

  My mother came into the room, carrying a plate of biscuits. “Didn’t like what your mother was making for breakfast, hmm?” she asked Davey as he sat down at the table.

  “Oatmeal,” he said.

  “I see. Did you throw your lunch away?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He looked apologetic.

  “Uh-huh.” She bent over him, pouring his juice, and ruffled his hair on her way back to the kitchen. He smoothed it down with both hands. He didn’t like to be messy.

  “Hi, squirt,” Esau said, sitting down.

  “Davey, do you want ham or bologna?” my mother called.

  “Ham,” he called back, eating his biscuits. He liked it at our house.

  Esau walked us as far as the middle school, then we continued along Main Street alone. “You scared?” Davey asked me. We were kicking a pinecone back and forth ahead of us. “Nah,” I said.

  “Mrs. Johnson’s nice, my mom said.”

  “Yeah. Erick Janiskowski’s in our class.” I made a face.

  He shrugged. The pinecone went into the street and he retrieved it. “I won’t let him bug you. My mom’s sad,” he said.

  “How come?”

  “’Cause. My dad. I dunno. Hey, look,” he said, pointing up. There was a nest in the eaves of a house. “They had a fight,” he said, putting his hands in his pockets.

  “Maybe it was just a discussion,” I offered.

  He shook his head. “Even my mom called it a fight. I asked her.”

  “Did she say it was a big fight? Or just a little fight?”

  “She said it was little, but it was big. Now they’re not talking.”

  “How long have they not been talking?”

  He shrugged. “Couple days. My dad’s in the basement all the time. I think he’s making something.”

  Their house was spooky. It was always quiet, except when baby Sarah cried. It was like nobody lived there, or only ghosts. Every now and then Davey’s dad would come up from the basement and look at us as if he didn’t know how we got there. We’d look at him. “Hi, Dad,” Davey would say. And his dad would nod at us and go back down the narrow, creaky stairs.