by Molly Gloss
She had more strength for arguing, now that it was daylight, and when she hung up the phone from Doris, she said to her granddaughter, “I want you to take me on home now.”
Her house was cold and shadowy, but the EMTs had picked up after themselves so the only evidence B. J. had died on the living room rug the night before was his undershirt lying where it had fallen. Josephine picked that up and put it in the hamper, opened the draperies and turned up the furnace. Then she put in her teeth and got out her little address book and sat down at the kitchen table.
She called everybody in the book, telling each one, “B. J. passed away last night.” The first two or three times, her voice broke a little on the words, but after that she got used to saying it, and heard herself sound mournful and steady.
She called her daughters as she came to them in the little book, Margaret in Arizona, and Barbara in Eugene one hundred twenty miles away, and finally the last-born, Betty, who lived on Forty-Fourth Street not more than fifteen blocks from this house, though it was just the coincidental, alphabetic nature of their husband’s names that caused her to call her daughters from farthest to nearest, oldest to youngest. She tried her son’s number too, when she came to it, and let it ring and ring, knowing he was in Reno. He wouldn’t be home until Friday, at least, and later than that if his wife held on to her notion of seeing the Grand Canyon.
Josephine and B. J. when they went to Reno always stayed at the Sands, it was their lucky casino. B. J. had won on keno there, a thousand-dollar pot, and he had split it with her—she’d bought a solid maple china hutch. So when she got to the S’s she called the Sands and asked if Donald Lambuehl was staying there, but he wasn’t. The house had begun to fill up by that time, and she said, “He isn’t at the Sands,” to the five or six women standing around her in the kitchen.
“Call the state police,” Mary Tulare said. “Won’t they look for him, in a case like this, a death? I believe they’ll check with the hotels, and if you know his car license they’ll look for the plate, on the highway.” They talked about this possibility. How many hotels were in Reno? What highway ran between there and the Grand Canyon? Jack Amato would know Donnie’s car license, they were friends from the old St. Ignatius parish; Jack had Donnie’s insurance, the car and house both. Josephine’s granddaughter said, “Gramma, you should eat something, let me call Jack Amato and the Nevada Police,” and took the phone out of her hands.
She wouldn’t eat, her bowels still weren’t settled, but she got up and worked in the kitchen, she and Opal Breese and Dorothy Haines, scrubbing potatoes and putting them on to boil, chopping up onions and celery. She put the dry skins of the onions and the empty paper sack in the little trash-burning stove that stood alongside the electric range. It was as old as the house, that stove, she’d kept it when they’d remodeled the kitchen in 1955, though B. J. had wanted to take it out. Their children liked to poke around in the stove when they were little and lick the cold ashes from their fingers, that was what B. J. kept bringing up. But they were big kids by 1955, through with eating ashes, and anyway the ashes satisfied some lack in their bodies—this was what she’d been told by the old doctor they all were seeing in those days. So she had dug in her heels about keeping the stove. The kitchen was her territory—the kitchen and the laundry—and B. J. knew it.
She got hamburger out of the freezer and set it on the drainboard so when it thawed they’d be able to make up some meatballs to have with the potato salad. Dorothy made radish roses and Josephine and Opal snapped up the late beans B. J. had picked the day before from the garden they grew in the side yard. She dug some bacon out of the meat keeper in the icebox, because B. J. always liked bacon on his green beans, and then she stood up straight and said, “Tuh,” in annoyance at herself, when she remembered he was dead. She didn’t believe in ghosts but it felt to her as if B. J. must be in the next room, swapping lies with Dorothy’s husband, Paul. How could he be dead? She wasn’t sure she believed in death.
Her daughter Betty came into the house, her eyes red, her husband and their youngest child trailing her. She put her arms around Josephine heavily and wailed like a child, “Mom, oh Mom, is Pop really dead?” This was too close to what Josephine had just been thinking.
“I told you he is,” she said, annoyed beyond reason. Betty was a cross Josephine carried, for sins only God knew about, she’d been a slow baby, her talking hard to get, tongue-twisted still today, and she was an ugly girl besides, her mouth small and lopsided, her teeth too big in that little mouth. Her husband, Dewey, wasn’t a prize—he had a consumptive look to him, he never had held a steady job, he wasn’t Catholic. But he was better than none, and Betty had come home pregnant when she was fourteen. Dewey was already thirty then, and B. J. had privately sworn to Josephine that he’d throw Dewey’s ass in jail if he didn’t make right by his mistake. Josephine had to say this much for Dewey, he had married Betty without a whimper and they were still married twenty years later. Betty, and Dewey too, drank worse than B. J. ever had; her red eyes might have been from that. Those three grandchildren had grown up badly, no fault of their own. The oldest girl took welfare for her fatherless babies; it was the heartbreak of Josephine’s life.
About the time the potatoes reached a boil, Barbara came. She had driven up from Eugene in two hours, but without her husband, without their three children. They would all come for the funeral, she said. The children had cried for their Poppy, Paul was sorry too. Paul was the husband, he owned a hardware business. Josephine had approved of the marriage when it first happened, but the business was 120 miles south, and Barbara and her husband came up to Portland only two or three times a year. They would stay at the house an hour or two and then go on to the husband’s mother’s house. Those grandchildren called Josephine “Nanny,” B. J. “Poppy”; it was the husband’s mother who was Gramma, the husband’s father who was Grampa. B. J., more so than Josephine, had blamed Paul for taking those three grandchildren away from him. “Well I guess it’s too much trouble for them to come, even now that he’s dead,” she said to Barbara, and people got between them with a lot of words and smoothed it over.
Someone met Margaret at the airport, she came in while people were eating meatballs and potato salad in the living room. Margaret had always been B. J.’s favorite. He would get her to rub his neck for him, or walk up and down his back when he had a kink from bending over the tables all day. He’d been a pattern cutter until he’d retired, guiding the heavy cutting machinery around pieces of work shirts, overalls, uniforms, five dozen thick. B. J. had taken Margaret’s side of it in her divorce, and whenever Margaret came up from Arizona to see them, at Mass he would give Margaret a little nudge, trying to get her to go up and take Communion, as if he wanted her to spite the Church. Margaret cried on Josephine’s neck, her mouth in Josephine’s hair, “Oh Pop, oh Pop,” and Josephine patted her and said, “He loved you girls.”
Josephine and her granddaughter and Marvell Johnston did up the dirty dishes. It was nine o’clock by then and Josephine was tired, she wanted to go to bed, but she set her feet solidly before the sink when other women tried to take over the work from her. “She likes to keep busy,” someone said. “Let her go ahead, it’s better if she stays busy.”
“It’s got nothing to do with staying busy,” Josephine said angrily, but what did it have to do with . . .?
People touched her arms, her back. “Oh now, Josie,” someone said.
The house emptied out swiftly around ten o’clock. Margaret and Barbara sat on in the living room. They put on the TV and talked low enough so Josephine couldn’t hear their words from the bathroom, where she put her teeth in a glass and unpinned her hair, brushing slow through it from the scalp. When the phone rang she stayed in the bathroom—she was washing her face, the creases of her neck, with a soapy washcloth. After a while Barbara came and said through the bathroom door, “Mother.” Josephine didn’t care about Barbara’s husband but she wished the three children had come. She couldn’t re
member the last time they had slept overnight in this house. “They’ve found Donnie,” Barbara said. “He and Linda and the boys will be here in the morning.”
Donnie and his wife had two sons Josephine used to get along with. They were fourteen and sixteen now; they’d become sullen, she didn’t know who they were anymore. On New Year’s Day, B. J. had slapped the older one for his smart mouth, in front of Donnie and Linda, and there’d been a terrible explosion of yelling and tears. Josephine had yelled too, at B. J., at Donnie. It had blown over slowly. That grandson, when he came in the house, still wouldn’t talk to B. J., hadn’t spoken to him in almost ten months. Never would, now.
She rinsed her teeth off and put them in her mouth again and went out in the hall for the phone book. She sat down in the kitchen to call the Doves Mortuary, the night number. “We’ve got hold of my son now,” she said into the phone. “I want to go ahead and set a day for the rosary and the funeral.” The girls came into the kitchen while she was still on the phone. Barbara stood behind Josephine and kneaded her neck with her long strong fingers. Josephine couldn’t hear the TV anymore; they might have turned it off when the phone rang. They were good girls, both of them, she didn’t blame them for having husbands she couldn’t love. “They want me to bring Pop’s clothes over tomorrow, to bury him in,” Josephine said when she hung up the phone.
B. J.’s bedroom smelled of cigarettes. Smelled like B. J. She opened a drawer of his dresser and got out a pair of socks, an undershirt, boxer shorts. They were stiff and clean. Josephine still used a Monkey Wards wringer washer and hung her laundry on a line in the backyard. Even in this stinking room she could smell the hot water and lavender soap. She got out his navy blue suit, the suit he wore to Mass, and to funerals and weddings. It was thirty years old, at least. She laid it on the bed and stood and looked at it. All his children had finished taller than him, Josephine stood over him an inch herself, but she never had thought he was small. He was wiry, strong, even in his seventies, he never had put on a soft belly, he could still dig up the garden himself with a heavy fork, and he still mowed his own lawn, even the front that was so damn steep. She never had thought he was small. But she saw suddenly that the shoulders of the suit were narrow, the trousers no bigger than Barbara’s twelve-year-old son’s. On her tongue, she found a dry flake of something, not ash, tooth powder, she brought it back into her throat and swallowed, and her eyes burned suddenly with tears. When she had washed his clothes—all these years, fifty-two years, wringing his pants through the washer and pinning his shirts, his underwear on the line—why hadn’t she seen how small he was? Small as a boy. She never had noticed it until this moment.
Personal Silence
THERE WAS A LITTLE FINGER of land, a peninsula, that stuck up from the corner of Washington State pointing straight north at Vancouver Island. On the state map it was small enough it had no name. Jay found an old Clallam County map in a used bookstore in Olympia, and on the county map the name was printed the long way, marching northward up the finger’s reach: Naniamuk. There was a village near the tip, and this was named too: Mizzle. He liked the way the finger pointed at Vancouver Island. Now he liked the name the town had. He bought a chart of the strait between Mizzle and Port Renfrew and a used book on small boat building, and when he left Olympia he went up the county roads to Naniamuk and followed the peninsula’s one paved road all the way out to its dead end at Mizzle.
It was a three-week walk. His leg had been broken and badly healed a couple of years ago when he had been arrested in Colombia. He could walk long-strided, leaning into the straps of the pack, arms pumping loosely, hands unfisted, and he imagined anyone watching him would have had a hard time telling, but if he did more than eight or ten miles in a day he got gimpy and that led to blisters. So he had learned not to push it. He camped in a logged-over state park one night, bummed a couple of nights in barns and garages, slept other nights just off the road in whatever grass and stunted tress grew at the edge of the right-of-way.
The last day, halfway along the Naniamuk peninsula, he left the road and hiked west to the ocean, through the low pines and grassy dunes and coils of rusted razorwire, and set his tent on the sand at the edge of the grass. It was a featureless beach, wide and flat, stretching toward no visible headlands. There were few driftlogs, and at the tide line just broken clamshells, dead kelp, garbage, wreckage. No tidepools, no offshore stacks, no agates. The surf broke far out and got muddy as it rolled in. When the sun went down behind the overcast, the brown combers blackened and vanished without luminescence.
The daylight that rose up slowly the next morning was gray and damp, standing at the edge of rain. He wore his rubber-bottom shoes tramping in the wet grass along the edge of the road to Mizzle. The peninsula put him in mind of the mid-coast of Chile, the valleys between Talca and Puerto Montt—flat and low-lying, the rain-beaten grass pocked with little lakes and bogs. There was not the great poverty of the Chilean valleys, but if there had been prosperity up here once, it was gone. The big beachfront houses were boarded up, empty. The rich had moved in from the coasts. Houses still lived in were dwarfish, clinker-built, with small windows oddly placed. People were growing cranberries in the bogs and raising bunches of blond, stupid-faced cattle on the wet pasturage.
At the town limit of Mizzle a big, quaintly painted signboard stood up beside the road. “Welcome to Mizzle! Most Westerly Town in the Contiguous United States of America!” Jay stood at the shoulder of the road and sketched the sign in his notebook for its odd phrasing, its fanciful enthusiasm.
The town was more than he had thought, and less. There had been three or four motels—one still ran a neon vacancy sign. An RV park had a couple of trailers standing in it. The downtown was a short row of gift shops and ice cream stores, mostly boarded shut. There was a town park—a square of unmown lawn with an unpainted gazebo set on it. Tourists had gotten here ahead of him and had gone again.
He walked out to where the road dead-ended at the tip of the peninsula. It was unmarked, unexceptional. The paving petered out and a graveled road kept on a little way through weeds and hillocks of dirt. Where the graveled road ended, people had been dumping garbage. He stood up on one of the hillocks and looked to the land’s end across the dump. There was no beach, just a strip of tidal mud. The salt water of the strait lay flat and gray as sheet metal. The crossing was forty-three nautical miles; there was no seeing Vancouver Island.
He went back along the road through the downtown, looking up the short side streets for the truer town: the hardware store, the grocery, the lumberyard. There was an AG market. The computerized checkout that was broken, perhaps had been broken for months or years—a clunky mechanical cash register sat on top of the scanner, and a long list of out-of-stock goods was taped across the LED display.
Jay bought a carton of cottage cheese and stood outside eating it with the spoon that folded out of his Swiss Army knife. He read from a free tourist leaflet that had been stacked up in a wire rack at the front of the store. The paper of the top copy was yellowed, puckered. On the first inside page was a peninsula map of grand scale naming all the shallow lakes, the graveled roads, the minor capes and inlets. There was a key of symbols: bird scratchings were the nesting grounds of the snowy plover, squiggly ovoids were privately held oyster beds, a stylized anchor marked a public boat launch and a private anchorage on the eastern, the bayside shoreline. Offshore there, on the interior strait, the mapmaker had drawn a nonspecific fish, a crab, a gaffrigged-daysailer, and off the oceanside, a long-necked razor clam and a kite. He could guess the boat launch was shut down: recreational boating and fishing had been banned in the strait and in Puget Sound for years. There was little likelihood any oysters had been grown in a while, nor kites flown, clams dug.
Bud’s Country Store sold bathtubs and plastic pipe, clamming guns, Coleman lanterns, two-by-fours and plywood, marine supplies, teapots, towels, rubber boots. What they didn’t have they would order, though it was understood delivery might
be uncertain. He bought a weekly paper printed seventy miles away in Port Angeles, a day-old copy of the Seattle semi-daily, and a canister of butane, and walked up the road again to the trailer park. “Four Pines RV Village” was painted on a driftwood log mounted high on posts to make a gateway. If there had been pines, they’d been cut down. Behind the arch was a weedy lawn striped with whitish oyster-shell driveways. Stubby posts held out electrical outlets, water couplings, wastewater hoses. Some of them were dismantled. There was a gunite building with two steamed-up windows: a shower house, maybe, or a laundry, or both. The trailer next to the building was a single-wide with a tip-out and a roofed wooden porch. “Office” was painted on the front of it in a black childish print across the fiberglass. There was one other trailer parked along the fence, somebody’s permanent home, an old round-back with its tires hidden behind rusted aluminum skirting.
Jay dug out a form letter and held it against his notebook while he wrote across the bottom. I’d just like to pitch a tent, stay out of your way, and pay when I use the shower. Thanks. He looked at what he had written, added exclamation points, went up to the porch, and knocked, waiting awkwardly with the letter in his hand. The girl who opened the door was thin and pale; she had a small face, small features. She looked at him without looking in his eyes. Maybe she was eleven or twelve years old.
He smiled. This was always a moment he hated, doubly so if it was a child—he would need to do it twice. He held out the letter, held out his smile with it. Her eyes jumped to his face and then back to the letter with a look that was difficult to pin down—confusion or astonishment and then something like preoccupation, as if she had lost sight of him standing there. It was common to get a quick shake of the head, a closed door. He didn’t know what the girl’s look meant. He kept smiling gently. Several women at different times had told him he had a sweet smile. That was the word they all had used—“sweet.” He usually tried to imagine they meant peaceable, without threat.
