Snow had gotten into the car and the driver’s-side floor held an inch of standing water. If you weren’t careful, your boots got soaked, and if your boots got soaked, your toes froze. Jack’s Drum was gone but Annie had new packages of Bali Shag.
She sat in the driver’s seat and looked out the window at the field: patches of snow amidst the dead grass, ribbons of orange fencing flapping in the wind. The trees were still gray, leafless netting beyond which the sky turned colors and crows flew. Annie pulled her knees up to her stomach and wrapped her arms around her legs. “I miss him,” she said, not looking at me. Her voice was from some far-off place.
I nodded.
She rubbed her hands back and forth on her thighs. “And I’m freezing.”
“You want to go inside?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t want to go to California anymore either.”
I was quiet. I started to shiver. “Where do you want to go?”
Annie didn’t answer. We finished our cigarettes and threw the butts out the windows. She pulled a bottle of Bacardi out of her pocket and took a sip. Giggled. Handed it to me.
I looked at her a long time. It wasn’t yet noon. “Sure,” I said, tipping the bottle back and feeling the warmth slide down toward my spine.
“Hey, Annie,” I said after a few minutes. I wasn’t looking at her but toward the back side of the barn where the rust from the tin roof had streaked down the weathered pine. The air smelled of mud and last fall’s rotten leaves.
“Yeah?”
“Where’s the rum from?”
Annie licked the edge of a new cigarette, rolled it tight, stuck it between her lips. She lit a match and inhaled and the tip burned.
“Annie. Who bought the rum?”
She turned toward the window. “Trevor,” she said. “Trevor. I’m with Trevor, okay?”
I looked at her, but she just stared at the view and put her cigarette to her lips and breathed in.
“No,” I said, quiet.
She flicked her head and looked into my eyes without blinking. “Yes. And guess what else?” She lifted up her flannel shirt and showed me her jeans, which were held closed with a fat safety pin. “I’m going to have a baby.”
Later that day Mr. Davis told us in history class that his cousin had been killed in An Loc. He laid his head on his desk and told us to read whatever we wanted to read. I looked at a page on the Korean War over and over without understanding a thing.
Jack came back. He didn’t die. In early August he got off a bus in Nelson with some other local boys. There was no hero’s parade, no trumpets or flags, just parents standing on the concrete sidewalk crying and waving their arms and some antiwar protesters holding peace signs, but they all knew Jack and some of them were crying too. I stood at the edge of the small crowd behind Annie and her dad and Trevor and watched Jack step out into the light. The sun was bright in my face, and I had to squint to see his long legs and broad shoulders coming down the street toward us. I had all sorts of things going through my body; I felt for a moment, standing there in the hot sun, that my life was just beginning.
But when Jack got close he stumbled a little on the pavement and grinned down at the sidewalk; a front tooth was gone. “Jack-o!” someone yelled from behind me, and when Jack looked up I saw his eyes were clouded over. They were darker than I’d ever seen them. They were two dark holes where his eyes should be.
Annie ran out into the street crying and calling his name. She threw her arms around him, but he pushed her away so she was at arm’s length, shook his head strangely, and started to laugh. He laughed so hard, he had to bend over. Then he walked to their dad’s truck and climbed in. Annie and their dad and Trevor followed. I stood on that sidewalk for a long time.
That night they had a party. There was no music, just twenty people or so standing around the kitchen and living room drinking beers. Jack carried a bottle of Old Crow and kept grabbing the butt of a woman he had gone to high school with named Vicki. Annie sat on the couch next to Trevor playing with the label on her bottle of beer. Trevor held his hand on her leg, stroking her thigh, occasionally touching her growing belly, while she sat there watching Jack and twisting that label into little balls between her fingers.
Late that night, after most people had gone, Jack walked up to me where I stood in the kitchen. It was the first time he seemed to notice me, and he put his face close to mine. “Clare,” he said, and I felt a flicker of something in my body. He smelled like Crow and his fingers shook. Through the doorway I saw Annie glance toward us, then look away. Jack put his hand on the plaster behind me and leaned his body into mine. He was all bone and muscle. He put his mouth against my ear. “I want you,” he said. There was no sweetness in his voice; it was full of something I’d never seen or heard. That’s when I noticed his eyes, wet with tears behind the bloodshot. So I let him have me.
In the hayloft of the barn he pulled off my pants and slipped his own down around his knees. He wrestled my breasts and stuck his tongue into my mouth. “I want to,” he said, pushing his soft penis against me. But he couldn’t. After a while he stopped moving and was quiet. His tears dripped down my cheeks and pooled inside my ears. Then he stood and wiped his nose and pulled up his pants and slipped down the loft ladder. I lay there for I don’t know how long before getting up and climbing down that ladder into the dawn.
I walked out behind the barn and through the damp grass to Karmann. I sat in the driver’s seat and looked at those postcards of places Annie and I had still never been that were now mildewed and speckled with fly dust. I looked out the window at the marbled cow field and line of shaggy trees and the brown hill and salmon-colored blushing sky. Something moved and I thought for a moment it was Jack, coming toward me, waving something bright in the sun, but it was just a scrap of torn plastic caught on some weeds at the edge of the field. I got out of the car and walked home. I lay in bed listening to “Helpless” over and over until the sun hit the top of my mother’s pines. A week later I got accepted to college in Illinois. Since then I’ve been all over: Mexico, Canada, California. No place is like I imagined. Love is different too.
6
GOD’S COUNTRY
Cora doesn’t know much about her town these days, but she knows her grandson Kevin is one of the ones painting the signs and hanging them up by the side of the roads. She knows because he came and knocked on her door a few months back and asked if he could use the barn—said that he and his buddies had some projects they were working on—and since then she’s seen them unloading old pieces of plywood, a few cans of paint, six-packs of beer. They park their jacked-up trucks in her driveway and spend a few hours at a time in there with the lights on, a boom box playing country music she can hear through her closed kitchen windows. When they come out they are grinning, feisty, the way her own boys looked after they’d done something they shouldn’t have, like lock a kitten in the washing machine or cut the hair off their sister’s dolls: that kind of look. Cora can recognize it even from where she sits at her kitchen window sipping her coffee. Not that she’d tell a soul.
Kevin is a nice boy. In two days he will turn eighteen, and she has decided to tell him, on his birthday, her hope that someday he will take over this farm, what’s left of it. She always thought her sons would farm here, but one was killed in Khe Sahn and the other moved as far away as possible with no desire to return, and so she hopes that Kevin will; in summer he mows her lawn once a week, in winter he shovels her path, and every spring he helps her take the storm windows down. His mother, Cora’s daughter, Stacey, lives in a mobile home down the road with one man or another, and so Cora has always had a soft spot for Kevin: the towhead, the one she used to invite over after school for fresh bread with butter, the one who called her Grandma Thora until he was ten, before they taught him to say his hard c’s. A sweet boy. Which is why she thinks there must be some reason for the signs. Something she doesn’t know about. Not that she knows much at all anymore.
That much
is clear this morning reading the paper. She’s pushed her coffee cup aside and sits at her kitchen table reading the story about the signs and thinking about the blacks she’s seen here; she sees them when she goes to the IGA or to the drugstore, and every time a small part wonders why they would want to come to a place like this, a place where they have no roots. None of their own people. Lord knows it’s not the jobs.
The article is front-page, the headline in bold. It says they have found two signs, rough plywood with spray paint, nailed to trees along one of the two blacktop roads that run through their town. Both have said, GOD’S COUNTRY IS WHITE COUNTRY and have had an undeciphered acronym—NHR—scrawled at the bottom. The last paragraph says there is a police investigation, that if anyone knows anything, they are supposed to call. Good Lord. But she won’t call; she hasn’t seen a thing, really.
She looks up from the table and out her kitchen window. It’s her favorite view: ragged fields stretching down to the valley of Silver Creek, then leaping upward into Round Mountain, raging with October color, and beyond that, blue with distance, the silent hills of New Hampshire. The view she’s known her whole life. The hills she calls her own. She can’t quite place the feeling she has reading the article; it’s a feeling similar to the time she stole her sister’s cream-colored blouse when she was sixteen, wore it to a dance, couldn’t get the yellow stains out of the armpits, and so threw it out in the trash and never told. It’s a feeling close to something else too, something she can’t put a finger on, and it comes with a surprising bitter sensation in her mouth that reminds her of the taste of the pins she holds between her lips when sewing. But enough of that. There’s too much to do in a day to just sit around worrying about the things you can’t name or see.
Cora sips the last bit of her coffee and brings her dishes to the sink. Her new cat, Toby, an orange tom who showed up at her door a week ago, rubs against her shins and purrs. It’s been a long time since she’s had a cat around; when this one showed up she decided it was time to stop having to put mouse poison in the cellar, stop having to empty the mousetraps from under the kitchen sink. A cat. A companion. She hadn’t realized she’d been so lonely.
At lunch she doesn’t want to read the letters to the editor, but the page is open on the table in front of her, so she does. One points out the irony that the signs have been nailed onto trees on country roads where no black people live. Another says, “The unwillingness to reveal themselves shows a cowardly ignorance and is emblematic of a deep-rooted racism.”
Her husband, Fred, was a racist—she knows that now—only it was the Vietnamese who killed his son and the Italians who worked in the quarries he didn’t like; there weren’t any black people here then. At least that she knew of. Now when Cora goes to Nelson for her grocery shopping she is surprised how many different-colored people she sees—Chinese and blacks and Mexicans, or people she thinks are Chinese and Mexican, though maybe they’re from somewhere else. Whatever the case, they’re all there in Nelson, the little mill town by the river, living in the houses where the mill workers used to live, tossing groceries into their carts, the kids begging for this or that, just like any kids. Seeing them makes her confused and somewhat pleased too—she likes to think of them running through the woods at the edge of town, breathing clean air, throwing stones into creeks, growing up in this simple place just like she did. A good place to live, to grow up: God’s country. That’s what Cora’s father always called it, and her whole life she’s agreed. Her two-hundred-year-old house sits ten minutes outside of town, invisible to the road, on a hill overlooking a field and the brook where mist settles in the mornings and beyond that, more hills, covered with more trees. The world, she thinks, would be a good place, a better place, if people had all been given childhoods, and places, like hers.
But Kevin must know something she does not. Toby jumps into her lap, raises his hips, and she scratches them: that deep and resonant purr. She has read that petting cats is good for one’s heart, and Cora secretly likes to think, every time he sits near her, that her heart is going back in time and getting younger. She’s seventy-five and doesn’t want to die. Though she isn’t sure she wants to live to see her home become something different, either.
In the next letter to the editor a woman writes that the kids putting up those signs are “ignorant, hate-mongering idiots.” The words sting Cora like a slap across the face.
Not one of those words fits Kevin, who can get the lawn mower started each spring, can accurately estimate the number of pounds of lime needed for her fields each year to keep them healthy and green, and has helped her fill out her license renewal form without a glitch. She wonders who these people are, writing the letters, and can’t help but picture one of her many neighbors with their new post-and-beam houses that are meant to look old, their brand-new European cars, their golden retrievers. Some of these neighbors have never, after all these years, come by to introduce themselves or say hello to Cora, whose father once owned the land they live on. And hate-mongering? She thinks of the small boy who used to show up at her house after school, snot crusted below his nose, pale and runny blue eyes, of the warm, fresh bread she placed in his hand.
Toby stands up and rubs his hip bones into Cora’s shin. She feels her heart slowing. But that uneasy feeling returns, and with it, that metallic taste under her tongue. Silk blouses and late nights. One night when she was young, bare feet in wet grass, but—young heart! Stop this bickering, this nagging worry. She will go rake leaves; she will rake all the leaves; she will rake until her body is too tired to do anything else.
That night Cora wakes startled. There is no unusual sound: storm windows rattle against the trim, water hisses through the radiator. Still, her heart’s a drum and her eyes won’t close. A dream, it must have been. She settles her thin body back into the flannel sheets, wiggles her toes like she does, closes her eyes and tries to drift back to sleep, yet she can’t help but feel distracted by the sliver of moonlight that makes its way into the room and across her bedspread through the crack between the curtain and the trim. Moonlight: always enough to keep her up, to threaten her vulnerable sleep. Fred could sleep through anything—sick babies, lightning storms, windstorms, teenage sons in pinhole-in-the-muffler cars, sons MIA in the mountains of Vietnam. But not Cora; she was the one to get up and rock the babies, walk the house checking for broken windows and barns on fire, or just lie there in bed next to his thick and sleeping body and worry about their boys and their girl; the this and the that. She thought when her children moved out sleep would come easier, but it has not; old age has made her sleep less, and need, it seems, hardly any at all.
Toby stands up and comes toward her head, purring, pushing his nose into her face. She tells him to be quiet, closes her eyes—squeezing them tight to shut out that pesky streak of moonlight—but the face that flashes across her mind forces her upright. She leans toward the windows and pulls the curtain wide, breathing hard. What made her think of him? She hasn’t thought of him in years, or pictured his face. Those dark eyes, those gap teeth. French Canadian, he said he was, and that explained enough: that sun-darkened skin and black hair. French, her father said. The Chinese of Vermont. It was what everyone said back then. But she let him dance with her that night she stole her sister’s blouse, cream satin with pearl buttons. The barn dance was called by Glenn Orfee from New Hampshire, with accordion, she remembers, and big bass and piano and fiddle, round and round until that shirt was soaked through, the satin stained, the smell of her all over it.
Good God. What is she doing up in the night, barefoot on the cold wood floor, staring at the moon? That was almost sixty years ago: 1947; she was barely sixteen. But Cora cannot sleep. At five she turns on the light by her bed, dresses, and goes to the kitchen to make coffee. Toby the damn cat: making her heart young.
At eight Cora walks down her driveway to Route 100 to get the paper. It was a cold night, one of the first, and the grass glistens with frost. Leaves are scattered here and there: blo
odred soft maple and golden sugar maple and honey-colored oak. She takes the paper out of its mailbox and is relieved to see that the front-page photo is of two children playing in a pile of leaves, a jack-o’-lantern grinning next to them. Just like her own children used to do when they were young; it gives her a little pang to think she has no other grandchildren or great-grandchildren to frolic in leaves like that. She feels the same pang during apple-picking season and sugaring season and on days when it snows. Where are the children? she finds herself asking, looking down the hill to where they should be sledding, or tasting sweet sap, and that absence is why she has always had such a soft spot for Kevin. This house is, in some ways, as much his as hers. Her great-grandfather, his great-great-grandfather, built it, stone by stone and board by board, and so she hopes someday Kevin will live in it. She used to slather the butter on his bread and pour him glasses of milk and tell him stories of when there were still cows in the barn: how she and her sister made ice cream every night with the thick cream, how they sprayed milk straight into kittens’ mouths from the cows’ teats, how before they had neighbors or electricity they walked two and a half miles to get to the one-room schoolhouse, and back at the end of the day, and never complained a bit. Kevin always nodded politely when she told him those things, then reached for more bread and held his empty milk cup toward her. Occasionally she would notice bruises on his arms underneath his shirt sleeves, and those times she fed him more bread, made sure she always had some around in case he came by, tried to keep track of what man Stacey was dating at the time, though she couldn’t seem to keep it straight. Cora wondered what a kid, growing up like that, heard at night. Those thin walls. When he turned twelve she offered him money—a few dollars at a time—to come help out around the place, and he came: quiet and sweet and ever helpful.
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