Bitter Sun

by Beth Lewis

  Despite the blazing summer sun and unmarred skies, the colour and life had left Larson. Friends turned mean and petty and the speed of life slowed like we were all trudging through soft sand. School dragged and nobody remembered what we’d learned from one day to the next. My Tuesday sessions with Frank kept going. He called me sport and son and buddy. We played cards and went bird-spotting at Hackett Hill and Barks reservoir. He asked things like, how’s your momma, how’s your sister, how’s school and the farm and is Eric still in the picture? Those sessions, a few evenings down at the Roost with the four of us, and the Saturday ice cream were the only things to give colour to my world, gave it landmarks and beats to mark time passing. They were the only things that didn’t feel pointless, like the whole town was waiting for the bus and doing anything they could to pass the time, getting more tense, more irate, more volatile, the longer the wait went on.

  It became clear that summer that I was failing school. I was trying but with all the work on the farm, I barely had time to study. I stayed up long after Jenny had gone to sleep after she’d spent all evening talking about Mora and what we should do next and why isn’t Samuels doing anything and on and on into the night. Every day I was up before dawn, after only an hour or two of fretted sleep, dreams full of blue cars and dead bodies and the snap of Rudy’s arm. I was too tired, my arms and legs and brain sore. I couldn’t keep any information in my head that wasn’t clearing, planting, harvest, chores, chores, chores.

  I went to Frank, blubbing like a baby, and asked him for help. He said it was a brave man who could ask for help and suggested tutoring. An hour after school, twice a week for a month or two to get me in shape for the fall semester. Miss Eaves volunteered.

  Frank came to my house to convince Momma. She scoffed at the talk. She was half-sauced but still clean enough to hear him out. School isn’t for real men, she said, school makes soft heads and that’s never done no one any good and that Eaves woman isn’t hardly one to be telling my boy what to do, he’s got work to do here. But nobody can refuse a pastor’s plea for long. Go on, Mrs Royal, it’ll be good for him, he’s a good kid, just needs a little help.

  ‘Fine,’ Momma said, the whiskey doing most of the talking. ‘It’ll get him out from under my feet at least.’

  At first, I was afraid I’d never be able to catch up with all the work on the farm by taking two hours away but as soon as I was out the yard, I felt lighter than I had in months. I loved the farm with every aching muscle but I was still a kid and, sometimes, I wanted to act like one.

  After school on my first day of tutoring, I made sure Jenny knew she’d have to walk home by herself. Twice a week she would have to be with Momma and Eric without me there and Momma might not be in a friendly mood. Keep quiet, stay in our room, I’d said, just don’t do anything to make her mad. Promise me, Jenny, promise me you’ll be safe when I get home. She promised. Momma had been kinder, drinking less, since she met Eric but she could still strike out, a shout here, a pinch there. I hugged Jenny tight to me and told her I loved her and she said it back and kissed my cheek.

  Jenny went home and I went to Miss Eaves’ house on Cypress Drive. It wasn’t far, one of the white houses with blue shutters near the middle of town. She opened the door with a ‘Welcome!’ and ushered me inside with a long sweep of her arm.

  I’d only seen her a few days before, on the street with her dead baby sign, but that was a different Miss Eaves. The one leading me into her living room was the teacher I knew. All flowing skirts and bare shoulders showing off her arms, the skin, the folds, totally at ease.

  ‘Would you like a glass of ice tea?’ she said as we passed the kitchen.

  ‘Please, miss.’

  ‘Go on through then, just down the hall, your study buddy is waiting.’

  The words stuck in my ear. Study buddy. Another person, here, in this house. Was it one of those kids who threw rocks at me, called me a murderer? My skin prickled and I wanted to turn and run back out the door. But as I entered the room, all the prickle heat disappeared and I smiled. Smiled and smiled, I couldn’t control it. I must have looked like a clown, painted with a dopey rictus.

  ‘Hi, John,’ she said.

  ‘Hi, Gloria.’

  12

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Gloria asked as I sat on the couch beside her.

  ‘Pastor Jacobs arranged it,’ I said. ‘You?’

  She sighed. ‘I slipped two grades in English Lit and History and my parents went mad at me, said I needed extra tutoring to make sure I kept my GPA. It hasn’t exactly been easy this last year, since … you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  Gloria was different, more subdued than she used to be. We were never all that close, it was always Jenny and Gloria, me and Rudy, me and Jenny, Rudy and everyone. Never me and Gloria. She was quicksand, my momma always said, a red woman. Be careful of her, John Royal, she’ll be the death of you.

  Nerves fizzed inside me in the few minutes it took Miss Eaves to bring us the ice tea. Fear. Excitement. Something else.

  ‘Are you going to summer camp this year?’ I asked.

  Gloria’s forehead crinkled and she brushed a piece of red hair, proper rich red, not the harsh orange of Darney Wills, behind her ear. ‘No. I didn’t enjoy it that much. It was fine, I guess. Seems like so long ago I was even there.’

  ‘What did you do there?’

  Gloria shrugged. ‘Swimming, canoeing, I don’t remember.’

  A few seconds of silence, then she said, ‘I missed you guys though. A lot. I don’t want to go back. You and Jenny doing okay? Your mom still with that guy?’

  ‘We’re good. Eric, yeah, he’s nice. They seem happy enough.’

  Then we trailed off. Fell into a fragile silence. We had shorthand, the four of us, a way of speaking that meant we never needed to say everything. Rudy used phrases like ‘Bung-Eye lost at cards’ to explain a beating, Jenny and me had all sorts of words for Momma: ‘She’d had a long day’, ‘We were getting underfoot’, ‘She’d had a weekend at Gum’s’. I only put it together later that we were making excuses for them. By not saying it out loud – Bung-Eye whipped me with his belt, Momma called Jenny a tramp and locked us in our room, Momma made Jenny sleep in the barn for back-talking and sass – we were excusing them. So many things the four of us didn’t say out loud.

  I’d never been alone with Gloria. Never had to make conversation with just her. We’d known each other since kindergarten, spent hours, days, weeks, together, and yet here I was, tongue-tied and awkward. It was a blessing then, hearing Miss Eaves’ footsteps approaching and the clink of ice in glasses.

  ‘Here you go, you two,’ our teacher said. She set the tray down and took a chair opposite the couch. ‘Where shall we start? Algebra?’

  ‘You’re a geography teacher,’ Gloria said, ‘how do you know algebra?’

  Miss Eaves leant forward, rested her elbows on her knees and stared at Gloria. There was a flash, right in the corner of her eye, then Miss Eaves curled the corner of her mouth in a half smile.

  ‘You caught me. I don’t know algebra, at least not any better than you two do. But I do have a study plan with all the answers so I’m one up on you both.’

  A strange, soft silence filled the room, same as it did in the classroom when the teacher made a joke and you weren’t sure if you should laugh.

  ‘Can we …’ I began but couldn’t finish. All day I’d thought about what I would talk to Miss Eaves about when we were alone. But we weren’t alone and all my questions, the topics I’d memorised, stuck in my throat, too timid to come forward.

  ‘What is it, John?’ Miss Eaves said, her voice so kind that my nerves fled.

  ‘Can we talk about Vietnam?’

  Miss Eaves leant back as if my question pushed her.

  ‘Yes.’ Gloria perked up, that old fire in her voice. ‘Can we? People never stop talking about it but they never seem to be telling us anything.’

  Miss Eaves shook her head but in that way a
dults did when they were confused. She wasn’t saying no.

  ‘Gloria, you’re behind in English Lit and, John, you’re behind in everything,’ she said, pursing her lips, clasping her hands. ‘Neither of you need a lesson on the war.’

  ‘I don’t mean the war,’ I said. ‘The country. Like you talked about on Saturday.’

  Her eyebrows and shoulders rose like God had pulled her string. She slid the algebra study guide across the coffee table. ‘I did, didn’t I?’

  Gloria raised her hand. ‘Daddy says the zipperheads don’t know what to do with their country anyway, we’re helping them.’

  ‘Wash your mouth out!’ Miss Eaves snapped. ‘Words like that are not welcome in my house.’

  Gloria pushed herself back into the couch. ‘Sorry, miss,’ she said.

  ‘Is this the wisdom being passed down to our children?’ Miss Eaves said, calmer but I saw the same spark in her now as I did outside the Backhoe two days ago. ‘Your father should know better than to sour you with his prejudices. Those men out there with their guns, they use words like that, words like slope, to describe the Vietnamese. Do you know why?’

  Gloria, still buried in the couch cushions, shook her head.

  ‘To make it easier to kill them.’ Miss Eaves rubbed her forehead. ‘In the Second World War, the British and Americans called the Germans kraut. It means cabbage. That name turned them from men serving their country, doing their duty and fighting for their cause, into nobodies. Our troops out in Vietnam are doing the same. If you come face to face with a human being in their home, a freshman private may take pity. He may let that mother and child live. If you come face to face with a zipperhead, the trigger is far easier to pull.’

  ‘Are they cowards?’ I asked.

  Miss Eaves met my eyes. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I just …’ My chest felt like caving in. ‘I mean, cowards because they have to do that. They have to call them names and make them not real to do their jobs. It’s like lying to yourself.’

  ‘I suppose it is,’ Miss Eaves said. ‘But most of the men out there, our men, are not there by choice, they’re boys like you, John, or good men like my husband Davey, and they are afraid. They are cowards.’

  ‘Most of?’ Gloria said, leaning forward now, out of the cushions.

  ‘Yes. Most of. A few of them out there know exactly what they’re doing.’

  I didn’t say it but it was those men I respected. To look your enemy in the eye and not be afraid, not make them into something inhuman but to know them, like you know yourself, that’s what I wanted. I wanted to look Darney Wills in the eye and not be afraid.

  ‘Why are you smiling, John?’ Miss Eaves asked, with a deep frown.

  The truth was usually the wrong thing to say. I couldn’t say, you told me to face my enemies and pull the trigger. That kind of revelation would make its way back to Frank, it would be talked about in our Tuesday sessions, it would send fresh rumours about me around town and there were enough of those already.

  So I said, ‘You’re a good teacher, miss.’

  She smiled and I felt my chest puff up like a rooster.

  The sun dipped low enough to shine gold through the front windows and fill the room with light. The tension fled and we settled into an easy quiet. The family room, without a family, was a chasm between basement and bedroom. Two full bookshelves, fat and bulging with trinkets and pamphlets stuffed between books, stood sentinel either side of the fireplace. Framed photographs covered the walls. A young Miss Eaves smiled out from the top of a flat mountain. Her and one of her Misters, arms entwined, stood at the feet of a giant red Buddha. A dozen more photographs, beaches, palm trees, temples, a hundred new faces, friends, a husband or two, or three, all skin colours, all smiling beside my teacher. She painted the walls with her life so those visiting would ask where was this taken, who is that with you, and Miss Eaves could tell them, relive it again, and again. I thought, this is her way to escape Larson. Her way to still be the person she was, smiling in the photographs, instead of Four-Misters Eaves, a geography teacher in a backwater farming town.

  Miss Eaves looked at her hands, gently rubbed the bright pale band of skin on her ring finger. Four-Misters Eaves with the tan line to prove it. Gloria scratched her pen around the edges of her notebook, drawing cubes and pyramids, diamonds and spheres, all three-dimensional, all pin-point accurate without a ruler. It made no sense she was failing anything.

  Miss Eaves hadn’t looked up from her ring finger in ages and her face had turned slack and pale.

  ‘Miss?’ I said. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I feel a headache coming on,’ she said and picked up the tray of untouched ice tea. I thought she might cry. She’d said her husband went off to war, maybe she already knew he wasn’t coming back and we’d hashed up all the memories.

  ‘That’s enough for today. Algebra next time. You can see yourselves out.’ And she left, went into the kitchen and didn’t return.

  Gloria and I exchanged tight, uneasy smiles and repacked our book bags. We stepped silently down the hallway to the front door. The sunlight didn’t reach the hall – it was cool and dim and dark faces filled the photographs on the walls. I imagined myself an intruder, walking through a tomb.

  On the sidewalk, Gloria and I didn’t know what to do. We had only been inside Miss Eaves’ house for twenty minutes so our parents weren’t expecting us for another forty at least.

  ‘Got somewhere to be?’ Gloria asked and I shook my head. ‘Want to go up to Barks?’

  ‘Sure. We can cut behind the church.’

  The sun sliced down Main Street, turning the grey asphalt white. We left Cypress Drive and took Wilmore, past the post office, then Munroe toward the church, only stopping to stare at the flickering bank of televisions in the window of Merle’s Kitchen and Electric. A brand new Emerson showed the news in full colour; green uniforms, blue sky, red blood. No matter what time or day of the week, you could always find the war if you went looking. It felt wrong now, after what Miss Eaves said, to watch what was happening over there as if it was American Bandstand with different music, bombs instead of bass. I heard some people kept the news channels on constantly. Mothers driven mad scanning the face of every grinning GI and row of bodies, lonely old veterans itching for a piece of the pie and shouting tactics at General Abrams like he was the coach at a football game. I couldn’t watch any more. I turned away, back to Larson and Gloria and the low evening sun.

  Somewhere behind, on one of the side streets, I heard a car engine rev up, a low rumble I’d heard before. I looked around but saw nothing.

  ‘Do you ever think about it?’ I asked and started toward the church. The sound of the engine faded as we walked away.

  ‘What?’ Gloria fell into step beside me.

  ‘Last summer.’

  The air thickened under my words and I saw, from the edge of my eye, Gloria hesitate.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘All the time.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said.

  We walked the rest of the way to Barks reservoir without talking. At the back of the church, the tacked-on trailer office where I spent an hour of my Tuesdays was dark, the lights off, the door locked. Passing beside it now, empty and small, I saw how vulnerable the structure was. Those thin glass windows wouldn’t stand up against a hurled stone. That plastic door would crack and swing wide with a good kick. It made my gut twitch to think of it, that someplace I loved could be undone so easily. But then, I realised, that’s exactly what happened to the Roost.

  ‘It’s so ugly,’ Gloria said, nodding to the trailer.

  ‘Were you reading my mind?’

  ‘That’s on everyone’s mind. It’s just this horrible lump they put on the back of the church so the stupid pastor could have more privacy.’

  I flinched at the word ‘stupid’ but tried not to let it show. ‘Why does he need privacy?’

  ‘Don’t know. I asked my father once but he told me to mind my own business and not to qu
estion the pastor.’

  Your father is dead right, I wanted to say but didn’t. Gloria’s father, a big-shot lawyer, richest man in three counties so they say, and college-educated no less, knows what he’s talking about.

  I smiled at Gloria. ‘The pastor isn’t so bad,’ I said and left it at that.

  I thought I heard that car engine again as we passed behind the church but I put it down to the wind, or some far-away freight train rumbling on old tracks.

  We got to Barks around fifteen minutes after leaving Miss Eaves’ house on Cypress. Gloria’s walk home from the beach wasn’t too far but mine would take the better part of an hour. The place was deserted and the water low enough to reveal a few feet of sand. The sun beamed down gold on us and it felt like we were the only two people in the world and this lake was the only lake, this beach the only beach. The noise around us, insects, birds, rustling rabbits and mice in the brush, they were our music. Not one human sound but our breathing, in out, in time with the lapping water.

  ‘Are you brave enough?’ Gloria said, a wide smile on her lips.

  I knew her well enough to know that I should be nervous at a question like that. That, no, I probably wasn’t brave enough and we probably shouldn’t do whatever it was she had in mind. But she was smiling and I realised then, I was a fool for that smile.

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  She laughed then kicked off her shoes and balled her hair into a bun with a band that seemed to come from nowhere. I took off my shoes, more out of reflex than choice. Then Gloria pulled her dress over her head, showing her white underwear. I’d seen Gloria do this a hundred times, swimming at Big Lake or Barks, but tonight was different. An electric shock ran through me when I saw the pale skin on her stomach and upper thighs, skin not even the sun got to see. She flung the dress in the grass, and ran screaming into the water. I had a second to breathe, to say, damn it, John Royal, get your shirt and slacks off and show her you’re brave enough. I stripped to my underwear and splashed into the lake.

  ‘Just when I think I know you, Johnny, you go ahead and surprise me,’ she laughed, standing up to her shoulders in the water.