Half Wild

by Robin MacArthur

  8

  WHERE FIELDS TRY TO LIE

  It’s April, and the kitchen where I sit, sipping a cup of black coffee and watching the light on Round Mountain, has yet to warm from the sun or from the log I put in the cookstove two hours ago, so I get up and throw another log on and open the damper. The wet wood hisses—it will not burst into flame—and I stand there for a moment with my hands searching the matte black surface for warmth, and then go back to the table, and to my still-warm coffee, to stare at the view and watch the sun come.

  It’s my first morning here: rising in the cold house at five because I can’t sleep, stepping outside the kitchen door to take a leak—the remains of last night’s liquor streaming through my yellow piss—heating water for coffee and drinking it black at this table where the names of my siblings and me are carved into the southeast corner leg with the dull blade of a child-size jackknife. I was the one who did the carving, as I was the one who did most things, being oldest, and least daunted. Which seems funny to me now, considering how my surviving siblings’ lives have been freer than mine, less constricted, less haunted by this place, and that summer some twenty years ago.

  This place: a rugged hillside farm with a view of New Hampshire to the east and Round Mountain to the south, built on ledges of granite with red-dirt rivers that look like veins digging trenches where fields try to lie. The buildings: a two-hundred-year-old Cape with peeling white paint, a gray barn, and three smaller barns, each at various degrees of communion with earth. No one has slept in the house since my father killed himself three years ago. When I arrived last night at dusk I found the counters covered in mouse shit, the kitchen door, not latched properly and never locked, blown open in the wind. Which is maybe why this place has seemed so inhabited by ghosts this time around: my sisters in their thin dresses running barefoot up cold stairs; our father’s dark eyes glistening toward the television; my mother’s bent shoulders and eyes stretched as far as she can see out the window toward the horizon; and my brother—most of all my little brother—with his thin bones and hooded eyes and habit of always turning away.

  But enough. It’s too early.

  I get up and look out the window at the barns and fields that now belong to me. What on earth will I do with them? Because my sisters have chosen to marry men who live eight hundred miles away, and because I’m the one who can afford to pay the taxes and the farmer next door to mow the fields once a year, they are now mine. I thought I had hired the farmer’s daughter as well—sixteen, red hair, the spitting image of her mother at that age—to check on the house now and then, to look for broken windows or squatters, but clearly she hasn’t been by since the door blew open last. Nor has she swept out the leaves and debris or chased out the squirrels. So be it. I didn’t call to warn them I was on my way. I called no one. I’m still not sure I knew where I was going when I loaded my books and clothes into my car while Helen was still sleeping, those books and clothes that still smell like her hair and paints and will continue to for as long as I keep them closed up in bags in the backseat of the car, untouched by fresh air. A six-hour drive and I was here by five. The note she was expecting left on the pillow in my crooked hand with its one vapid word: Sorry.

  But enough of this: more coffee. Outside two robins land in the damp earth of the yard, then chase each other into the maple tree with the clatter of their sexed calls. The light hits the gray wood of the barn, washing it clean. Home—a facet of my life as substantial as love has been, or work. The place I am always trying to leave or return to, the place that will not let me be. I told that to Helen when we were twenty-nine and first in love; she nodded and looked at me with those dark, serene eyes, full of tenderness and incomprehension. Not everyone feels this way about the place they were born. Not my colleagues, or Helen, whose paintings revel in the beauty of surfaces: concrete, lace, fences. And I envy her, and them, that freedom, and yet wonder who I would be, and what I would think about the world, were I not from here. And then I wonder if such a freedom would make me more jovial, more lighthearted, more lovable, more capable of love.

  But who the fuck cares; I look out at the two hapless robins, trying to fuck, and think that even so I would choose this sweet yearning, just as I would have chosen to love, even if that love would lead, as it has, to pain. And it is when I am thinking like this—most often when I’m far away, and more than a few drinks into some bottle of Argentinian Malbec or expensive bourbon—that I become victim to the lies of nostalgia, that they seep into my bones and shade my memories of this place a soft, muted, and lovely gray.

  But not this morning. This morning this room smells of cellar dampness and mouse shit, and the driveway, visible through the window, my two-year-old red Volvo incongruent in its center, is a line of black mud leading toward the doorway of the large barn where my father took his life one morning at dawn. So I am not back with any romantic dream of returning to the land. That dream, with all its sweetness, is for others with far more innocence than I will ever know. “I will arise and go now,” Yeats wrote when he was still young and in love.

  A knock at the door and I jump. It’s early—my watch says a few minutes shy of eight. I run my hand through my thinning hair and stand up, bumping the table and spilling a bit of coffee. Standing at the door is the tall, red-haired girl from down the road whose name I have forgotten, the one who looks just like her mother, Jane, Jane who I once kissed—sweet must of hay—behind a barn when we were no more than fifteen.

  “Morning,” I say.

  The girl stands sullenly with her legs spread, her hands on her hips. She wears tight blue jeans, a wool farm jacket, barn boots.

  “Hey,” she says, her voice muted and flat. “My mom told me to come and see if you need anything. Make sure the house is okay.” I look again at my watch and wonder what time she got up this morning.

  “Oh, right,” I mutter. “Everything looks fine. Just a few mice and squirrels. Thank you.”

  “Okay,” she says, and shrugs, and turns to go, and I realize then that I haven’t paid her for watching the house, if that’s what it could be called, and that’s probably the real reason she’s here in my doorway at this early hour.

  “Wait,” I say, and the girl turns. “I owe you money. Come in?”

  She shrugs, peers through the doorway into the kitchen, and follows me inside. I search for my checkbook among the things I’ve scattered on the counter: catalogs, bills, an English Department newsletter. The girl leans against the fridge and inspects her fingernails, and Helen’s fingers flash across my mind: paint-filled nails, long, graceful bones. I find the checkbook and open it and then have to look up at this girl—my mind is blank. “I’m sorry. I forget your name.”

  “Rachel.”

  “Oh. Right. Rachel Cole?”

  “No. That was my mom’s name. Rachel Clement.”

  “Right,” I say. And then, again embarrassed, I realize I don’t recall what I said I’d pay her. She is looking over the things scattered across the worn Formica; her eyes settle on the half-empty bottle of Maker’s Mark. “Just stuff,” I say. An apple blush appears for an instant in her cheeks, and she looks back at her fingernails. “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten how much,” I say.

  “Fifty.”

  “Oh. Right,” I say, and write her a check for seventy-five.

  She looks me in the eye for the first time, and I’m surprised to see how curious and bright her eyes are—not completely un-innocent yet—and then she is turning and calling out “thanks” over her shoulder, and then she is gone, the house quiet again, and uninhabited, except by me, and the squirrels, and the ghosts, which are sure to come creeping back shortly.

  My brother Ross was youngest. Two years after me came my sister Adelaide, a year after her, Dell, and four years after that, Ross. By the time he was born my mother’s black hair was streaked with gray; her narrow shoulders had already begun to curve inward. The day she came back from the hospital with Ross I stood in the yard and watched my father come out
from the barn, a shit-coated shovel in his hand, and shout, “What is it?” And when my mother said, “Boy,” I watched my father drop the shovel and go to her and whisk her up into his arms and swing her around in a circle there in the dirt of the driveway. He called out, “Nice work, little lady!” and a look of pain streaked across my mother’s face, and then my mother’s mother, Memé, who was climbing out of the passenger’s seat of the car, a small bundle in her arms, shouted, “Put her down, Jake,” and my father set my mother down and nodded toward the small bundle in Memé’s arms. “A boy,” he said. “Good. Someone else to do some work around here,” and then he glanced toward me, and nodded at my mother’s father, who was getting out of the car from the driver’s seat, and went back into the barn.

  I pour myself another cup of coffee and go back to the table where I can see that barn again, the shifting light revealing weathered pine, streaks of black rot, woodpecker holes. I can remember the smell of the yard that day, the sweet rotting scent of late summer. I was eight, and I followed my mother and grandmother and sisters, who had appeared from the garden, into the house. I was afraid of my mother’s body, of the way she limped and of the smell of medicine and blood that was still on her, and I watched as she sat down on the couch in the parlor and my grandmother put the bundle on my mother’s lap and folded the white blanket away to reveal my brother’s face. It was a beautiful face—my mother’s dark features and straight nose and thin, delicate lips. And then I noticed that his legs were curved in an odd way, and that his left foot—she had pulled the blanket down farther now—was thin and twisted in a way that made me turn away.

  “What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

  My mother looked at me with tired eyes, and her upper lip trembled once. “His legs are crippled,” she said.

  And I remember then a shiver of disgust and fear and deep protectiveness going through my body, for what would a boy be, here in the world I knew, the world he was being brought into, with legs like that? And what would my father say when he found out? And what on earth would my brother be, when he was old enough to go to school, but a cripple, and later on, when he became a man, but a cripple still? And so I left that room and that house and went down across the fields, high with August grass, to the river, where I sat for a while and tried to calm the tingling in my fingers and my toes and the ice-cold breath that rose like a fountain up and out of my chest, and when I could not I slammed my fist into the earth again and again.

  “What are you afraid of?” Helen asked so many times that it stopped being a question and became a plea, on her part, for a man who was not afraid of what she had to offer, of the deep water that love could be. Afraid of oceans, afraid of dinner parties, afraid of barns and their sparrows, afraid of making love without the safety of the dark, afraid of Helen, with her long fingers, attempting to find me in there. “Nothing,” I said, every time.

  “This won’t do,” Helen said not more than two weeks ago. “This kind of love.”

  On the other side of this glass the world is waking: mist rising out of the valley, steam rising off the roof of the Cole and Clement barn down the road. I step back from the window and open it, and the chirping robins assault me with their unbearable optimism. Shut the fuck up, I want to whisper to them. Beg them. Please. Please. Shut the fuck up. But they do not.

  The sun has now reached the top of Round Mountain, and as it crests the highest pines the table turns honey-colored in the light. I feel the warmth on my hands and spread my fingers so the heat can work its way into the creases of my knuckles. Soft and pale, my hands look nothing like my father’s—cracked and arthritic—at this age. Fifty: the age when men realize they are growing old and have made little of their lives. My father made it past that—this—ripe age, by drowning himself slowly with cans of Budweiser and hard work and the misery he chose instead of love.

  My brother, Ross—hands long and thin like our mother’s—will never see five decades, and I am glad, in the only way a surviving brother can be, that he will not have to face this crossroad of manhood. In my most optimistic moments I imagine that he has been set free from it all. But then again some people find that freedom in other ways—without drinking themselves into oblivion, or dying, or so I have been told.

  I get up to make myself something to eat. There is a pathetic collection of food on the counter: a loaf of white bread, a bag of Chessmen cookies, a jar of peanut butter: all dull-colored food. Who would have thought I would marry a woman who liked all things the color of blood? Beets, wine, vermilion. A woman who paints skies desert red and fields chartreuse. I could get in my car and drive to the IGA, or better yet, the Stonewall, a place where I am sure to see faces I have not seen in twenty years, aged like my own. But I’m not ready for that. My car would stand out too much amidst the pickup trucks and mud-splattered station wagons, and the color of the food would be no better. I look out the window at the barn and the deep-rutted driveway and at the fields, which are still last year’s brown, and farther yet down the road to the peak of the Cole and Clement house, where Jane and Rachel and Jane’s husband live, and at the shadow of her father’s double-wide next door. If it were a different time, and maybe even a different place, I would put on a wool coat and walk out my door to their place and ask if they have any extra eggs. Just one or two would do. And perhaps some butter. But I won’t. Instead I stuff three Chessmen into my mouth and swallow. The sugar pools amidst the remaining liquor in the bottom of my stomach, and I think for a moment I may vomit, but I don’t. I just stand there leaning over the counter with my head bowed, thinking how I should buy a sponge and wipe these counters, thinking how I should find a broom, a rag, a cloth of any kind.

  My brother learned to walk, eventually, with a crutch and a cane, but he never learned how to clean a stall or drive a tractor. My brother’s heart was weak also—that’s what we called it, a weak heart, and I knew no other medical details. My father, in turn, never learned to love my brother. My father who supposedly, once upon a time, courted my mother with wild roses, and sang, though I never heard them, French love songs. But by the time Ross came along, that sweetness was gone. My father was disgusted by him, as people sometimes are by those whose bodies reflect their own human weakness. He used a pronoun, never a name, to refer to Ross. “You’re not bringing him, are you?” Or, “What’s he doing?” Ross, who learned quickly how to make up for his weaknesses by making the people around him laugh. He made spot-on impressions and told absurd and crass jokes and learned to do cartwheels and land on his stronger leg. He had a sweet streak none of the rest of us had. He would limp across the yard, bringing me and my sisters and our mother fistfuls of daffodils and baskets of wild blackberries. He liked giving gifts, and he liked making other people happy, most of all my mother and me.

  I open the bag of white bread and slather a slice with peanut butter. I chew and swallow and then do the same with another. “You eat food like it’s a chore,” Helen said not long ago. “Don’t you ever enjoy it?” And I did enjoy Helen’s food: wine, oysters, warm, thyme-scented stews. “You eat the same way you make love,” she said, her brown eyes laced with tears, and in the moments when I think I may still be lovable, still capable of love, not yet ruined by my father’s unloving, that line rings in my ears and in an instant I am back on this farm, no matter where I am.

  I down the rest of my coffee, throw my shoes and coat on. I need to leave this kitchen. I stand in the open doorway and breathe. The air is warm against my face, and I let sunlight soak into my aging skin. Spring is everywhere—rotting manure, mud, dirt, pollen, the sugary smell of sap running through trees. I pick up a rock and toss it into the air. It hits the grass with a pock and settles back into the earth. I could go inside and start drinking; I could get in my car and leave here; I could go into that barn and light a match to a corner of old hay; I could call Helen—no, I cannot do that. I look at the driveway and think of that summer, of the yellow dust that settled everywhere, of the way it streaked across stones and dirt
and wood every time it rained, so much so that my mother said, “Strange, so strange.”

  I was nineteen, Ross was twelve, and I was already leaving, though I didn’t know it at the time. I wanted nothing to do with this farm, or anyone on it. Unlike half my friends—Jack, Danny, Clem—my draft number hadn’t been called, so I hired myself out to work at the slate quarry in Jacksonville. By doing so I passed up not only the war but working on the farm like a good son. To add insult to that particular injury, I had done well in school and so instead of working with stone, where my father could at least respect my hard muscles and long days, I was put to work in the office helping with the books. I added numbers while my friends died in jungles and swamps and my father toiled alone in these fields.

  I got paid well that summer. Half of it I gave to my mother, who stored the cash in a tobacco tin in her underwear drawer, but the other half was my own, and I spent it on things my father thought frivolous and sickening. I bought leather dress shoes and Levi jeans and, worst of all, a secondhand Volkswagen Bug that my father was ashamed to see parked in his yard. I dated a girl whose parents owned a summer home, a girl who went braless and whose brown hair smelled always like oranges, a girl who was on her way to Wellesley College. By that fall I had secretly applied to the University of Vermont. I thought the world was mine for the taking; I thought at that young age that the self could exist where the body resides.

  That summer Ross hit puberty. His cheeks and mouth became fringed with mouse-soft hair, and he started having wet dreams, and my mother, whose hair had turned a solid silver-white by then, took me aside one day on the porch and in a quiet and steady voice said, “Do for him what I can’t and your father won’t.”

  So for a few weeks I tried. I helped my brother shave and took the sheets off his bed and washed them in the new General Electric washer we had recently installed on the back porch. One afternoon in early June I invited him up to a deer perch in the woods and we walked up there slowly, him stepping over rocks and logs with great effort and determination, to that spot at the top of the field with a view to New Hampshire, where I handed him his first beer. It was a hot day and he drank it silently and with relish. We were both quiet, simply sitting there in the hot afternoon sun taking gulps of the cold beer, sweat running down the backs of our legs, our eyes looking down on our haphazard farm, littered with broken machinery and little rectangular barns, and out over Round Mountain to Whiskey beyond.