Half Wild

by Robin MacArthur

  “Yes.” I don’t recognize this face; his left eye wanders slightly upward.

  “Jesse Maise. From the farm down the road.”

  Jesse. I haven’t seen him in fifteen years or more; I’m surprised how old he looks, how broken, how kind. “Oh, right. Hi.” A pale, thick scar runs from halfway up his cheekbone to the corner of his eye.

  He nods and rubs his beer glass with his thumb. “Bet your mother’s happy to have you back.”

  “Yes,” I say, thinking of her Saab broken down by the side of the road, of her wet cotton dress, of Jesse, it must have been, in his truck, reluctantly pulling over.

  “She doing all right?” he asks.

  “Yes. Thanks. She’s fine.”

  “Not too many goats left, it doesn’t look like.”

  “No. Just one.”

  “I always thought she was cool shit—doing it all herself like that.”

  I smile, surprised. I didn’t imagine Jesse thought anything of my mother, other than different, or strange. “She is. She is cool shit.”

  “Thought all hippies were as pretty and independent as her.” He laughs. “In college I found out they weren’t.”

  I can’t help but laugh too. “Cheers to her, then,” he says, reaching his glass toward mine, and I raise my arm, and the glass clinks, and I follow him with my eyes as he walks back to a table in the corner below that cat’s yellow eyes.

  Kristy nudges my arm. “Sweet, huh?” I nod. She leans in closer, her voice a near whisper. “His daughter died—drowned—a few years ago. His wife left.”

  “Oh,” I say. I can picture Jesse and his older brother, Clem, standing at the edge of a pond with BB guns, aiming at frogs. I can see Jesse—blond, scrawny, quiet—at the back of the bus, picking at scabs. I hadn’t thought of him in a long time.

  But I think about him that night back in my room. I think of that wandering blue eye and that mysterious scar and that loss; I think about letting him touch me like he touches the other things that belong to this place: tractors, fences, barn doors, cows. I think about my mother and death and fear and abandon. And I think of Matthew, sweet Matthew, who has left two messages on my phone, checking in. I leave a message when I know he’s at work, promising I’ll call soon. I pick a book off my old bookshelf and flip through the pages: Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It was my favorite. Sabina and her brazen solitude.

  I drive my mother to her appointment: forty minutes by interstate. Her twenty-year-old Saab smells like mildew and cigarettes and the lemon air freshener that hangs from the rearview mirror. We listen to tapes she has kicking around on the floor of the car: Al Green, the Sex Pistols, Dolly Parton. The Saab shimmies as soon as we hit sixty, so I drive fifty-nine, the windows rolled down, my mother’s seat tilted back and her gray hair whipping this way and that in the wind.

  The oncologist with the bleached-tooth grin tells us he has scheduled radiation to start two weeks from now, but that nothing is cut-and-dried here. He looks at my mother, then at me. “A mastectomy is possible,” he says nervously. Then adds, “Likely.” He tells us that the key to success is lifestyle and attitude. He says it twice, looking again into my mother’s eyes, then mine. His eyes betray his words, spill faithlessness. I think of her overflowing ashtrays and overgrown fields and dripping roof and dying goat and drying-up inheritance. My mother blinks and smiles and says, “Of course,” and heads for the door. On the way home she leans back on the headrest and closes her eyes. After a while she reaches across the seat and touches my thigh. “You happy doing what you’re doing, baby?”

  I look in the rearview mirror. “I don’t know.”

  “Why not?”

  “Too ornery.” She opens her eyes then and we both smile. But I feel something rise in my throat that is salty and bitter, reeking of fear.

  My mother roots around on the floor, then pulls up a tape and pops it in. The Flying Burrito Brothers start to sing “Hickory Wind.” She pulls the visor down and closes her eyes.

  I drive home thinking about Gram Parsons’ body in an outrageous embroidered suit burning up in the desert of Southern California, about the strange ways we choose to die. I think about the reckless beauty of my mother’s life compared with my small rooms and the art I haven’t made. At the next exit I pull off the blacktop and take the back roads—gravel that follows Silver Creek and meanders past houses I’ve slept in, fields I’ve gotten drunk in, swimming holes where I’ve skinny-dipped or gotten stoned. These places that flicker with memory and strange grief and misrememberings.

  They make me lose track of time; the days slip into one another. I’ve been here a week and a half, or two. My office has told me to take my time, but I still haven’t bought a return ticket. How long is too long?

  I drive to Indian Love Call to meet Kristy. It’s on Silver Creek, over the bridge and a pull-off to the right. Seventeen years ago Kristy’s dad died two miles downstream; now she sits on a log with a six-pack of wine coolers by her side. We roll our pants up, dip our toes into the cold water, open two bottles, and lean our faces and shoulders back to catch the sun.

  “What do you think it feels like to be in love?” Kristy asks.

  I feel the pores of my face expand, my skin open like a flower.

  “I mean do you think you’re in love with that guy in Seattle?” Kristy makes circles in the sand with her middle finger. I don’t respond.

  “I think I’m in love with Dylan Pial. He’s in love with me,” she says. I’m quiet. I remember Dylan from high school. Part Abenaki, part French, I think. Kind eyes.

  “I think that men either idealize you or need you,” I say with my eyes closed, thinking of my mother’s long string of boyfriends: the guitar player, an English teacher who grew pot in the basement, a motorcycle mechanic with a wife in New Hampshire. “It’s one or the other.”

  Kristy nods. “I think he needs me.” She has been in love many times; it’s a knack she has.

  “Infatuation,” I say. “You need some of that. Keep them at a good arm’s length.”

  “And make offhand comments about penis size,” Kristy says, her chipped front tooth flashing in the sun. “To keep them guessing.”

  We laugh and sip our coolers and tip our shoulders back. Upstream, kids wade in the shallow pools, and below us the creek widens out over smooth rock. I dig my bare toes and heels into the sand.

  “No, but for real,” Kristy says. “I think he might be the one.” She stares off at those kids, laughing and splashing.

  “I have no idea about love, Kristy,” I say. A racket of sparrows takes flight in my chest. They open their mouths, but no sound comes out. “I have no fucking clue about love.”

  My mother and I eat dinner on the porch: tuna and greens from the garden. She’s missed all her scheduled appointments. Her answering machine fills with calls from doctors.

  “Tell me something cool,” she says.

  “A starfish can turn itself inside out.”

  My mother grins. “Really? That’s magnificent. But I was actually thinking something more personal.”

  I look at the woods, at the field, at my hands. “It’s good to be here.”

  “Oh.” She glances at me from under her furrowed brow. “I thought you might hate it here.”

  “How could I?” I look across the fields at the barns and the gardens and the ochre shadows of the trees. At the bottom of the hill I can see the roof of Kristy’s double-wide, the tin roof glaring white with sun. Inside, her mom, I know, is drinking coffee and watching reruns of Twin Peaks. I don’t hate it here; I hate what happens to me when I am here. I hate the way it draws me in. The way it leads to nowhere but itself. The way everyone and everything is connected and a person cannot be free. “It’s too beautiful to hate it here,” I say.

  My mother laughs. “Yes,” she says. “Yes it is. Why do you think I’ve stuck around all these years?” She sets her jar down and closes her eyes. After a while she drifts into sleep. Her body trembles once, her lips open.
I take a moth-eaten wool blanket off my chair and lay it over her thin legs. I want to leave. I want to go home. I want to undress in front of Matthew to a slow song, a glass of cool bourbon in my hand. Here, I want to say. Have me.

  My mother tells me she has something to show me. She leads me out the door and through the overgrown north pasture. From halfway across the field we can see a view of the Maise farm below us, its roof lines and gray hollows. “I saw Jesse the other day,” I tell my mother.

  She looks at me and grins. “Cute, no?”

  “Cute as pie,” I say.

  She nods and looks in that direction. “You hear about his daughter?”

  “A little.”

  “Three years old.”

  I feel my heart dive toward the grass, then deeper into the substrata of glacial till and bedrock.

  “But let’s not think about that now,” she says, continuing uphill.

  At the top of the pasture she stops and closes her eyes and tips her head back.

  The field is quiet and still, the woods insulating the spot from the sounds of the trucks on Route 100.

  “I like to come here,” she says, “and pretend the world is going on without me. Like I’m a bit of nothing, nowhere.”

  “That’s bullshit, Joan,” I say quietly. “You’re not nothing, nowhere.” I want to be nothing like her. I want to be part of the world. And yet I think about the time I walked across the Golden Gate Bridge at midnight, drunk. I think of some of the ways I have slept with men: in search of obliteration as much as love.

  She continues on toward the woods, and I follow. At the edge of the field she trails a stone wall into the trees and up a slope to a spot of revealed ledge. “Look,” she says, pointing to a shallow cave in the rock face. She gets down on her hands and knees and roots around. “I found this a few days ago,” she says, rubbing something between her fingers. I go to where she kneels and peer down at what she’s holding: some fur, the color of coyote, or bobcat, or fox—I can’t tell. It’s the color of the twelve-point buck that hangs above the bar at the Stonewall. I look into the empty cave, and my skin breaks out with fear. It smells like piss and dank stone. “You think?” she asks.

  “Think what?”

  “Oh, come on. It’s catamount. Cougar. Panther. I’m sure.”

  “Maybe. Or fox.”

  “Oh, Hannah.”

  “What?”

  “When are you going to become a believer?” My mother’s eyes are glistening.

  “What do you mean?” There’s unkindness in my voice. And hers.

  “When are you going to believe in anything? In life or love or fucking wild cats?”

  I don’t respond.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, standing up and reaching her arms around my shoulders. Her face is flushed.

  “Forgiven,” I say, turning.

  We walk back to the house in silence. When I get to my room I find there is a new message on my phone from Matthew asking if I am okay, if Joan is all right, if he can come out to join me. I don’t call him back. I tell myself I’ll call later tonight. But instead I lie in bed and think about catamounts and cows and fireflies in fields and girls drowning. I think about what happens to a heart once it’s known something like that, and where Jesse finds his company, and whether he believes in big cats, or love, or belonging.

  “I want to mow the fields,” I say the next day. My mother raises her eyebrows. When I was twelve I swore off shoveling stalls and stacking wood and weeding the garden; I told my mother I wanted to be a poet or a punk rocker, a Patti Smith of the world, and she bowed her head and said, “Fine.”

  Now she glances at the fifty-year-old rust-colored Farmall parked in the barn, then back at me. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I want to.”

  She looks out at the fields: two years of overgrowth tangled through them, blackberries and sumac invading the edges. “There’s not really any point,” she says.

  “I want to.”

  She squints toward the tractor. “Okay. Climb on.”

  My mother stands below me and shouts instructions: how to lower and raise the cutter bar, how to work the clutch.

  “You’re crazy!” I shout at her, the tractor rattling and choking below me. “Doing all this by yourself.”

  “No choice, baby-girl. No choice,” she yells back. I ram the gearshift into first, let up on the clutch, and the machine lurches into the field. I lower the bar; grass and sticks and leaves spurt out behind me. The engine buzzes in my ears, the steering wheel vibrates and makes the skin of my hands and arms itch, but I get into a rhythm. Back and forth, lower, raise, turn, lower, raise, turn, lower. At the edge of the field I glance into the woods and think of my mother fixing the fence that day, of what the feeling along her spine must have been. I think of some large and wild creature there, lurking, but all I see are squirrels, darting up and down the bark of trees. I finish the half-acre field. My legs ache and my arms and shoulders burn. Freckles have appeared everywhere.

  “Well done!” my mother calls out, handing me a glass of ice water. I drink it fast, then stand on the porch and look out at what I’ve done; I’m disappointed to see the three other fields I haven’t yet touched, but I’m proud, too, of that neat field saved for another year from the scrub that wants it. The women where I’m from, I think, are crazy, yes, but also capable.

  A blue GMC pulls into the driveway. I walk out to meet him in the driveway.

  “Jesse.”

  “Hi.” He smiles, looks out at my mother’s house and barn, rubs his face with the back of his hand. I have an urge to reach out and touch the scar, which looks both old and tender. “Wanted to see if I could help out with anything. Offer a hand.”

  “That’s kind.”

  “Thought it might be about time.” He takes off his hat, his thinning brown hair falling into his eyes. “Your mother doing all right?” I wonder what gossip is circulating now, and whether it’s done in the name of sympathy or righteous satisfaction. My mother never made much of an effort to love her neighbors; why would they love her back?

  “I guess. I think she’s okay.”

  “Saw you up on the tractor.” He looks at me; another smile flashes across his lips. I think of the boy on the back of the school bus and how this man is nothing like him.

  “Yes. First time ever.”

  “Looked kind of natural.”

  I blush. “Thank you.”

  He looks at the barn and then at the gray clapboards of the house. He puts his hand on the door handle of his truck and pops it open. “Well. If you need anything, just say the word. No need to be puritan about asking for help.”

  “Thank you,” I say again. And then, “Jesse.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You want to go for a walk?”

  He meets my eyes. “Sure.”

  We walk to the top of the field and back through the woods to the Stark cemetery. I tell him I’ve forgotten all the small details of this place, so he tells me the names of ferns we pass: maidenhair, ostrich, cinnamon, royal. I show him the names on the stones at the cemetery, and he smiles. “Not lighthearted folks, were they?”

  “No.”

  He asks why I don’t come home more often, and I tell him I envy the way he belongs to this place and it belongs to him.

  He laughs. “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  I tell him coming home involves opening my body to layers and ripples of memory and the confusion of belonging and not belonging and the dichotomy of both loving and hating my lonely and crazy mother.

  He looks down at his hands, tugs on a piece of grass and uproots it. He looks at me like I am some skittering leaf, blowing this way and that in the wind. “You think you’re the only one that feels confusion or pain?”

  I think of rivers and lakes and deep-water wells and feel my heart freeze. “I’m so sorry,” I say.

  He looks down at his fingers. “It’s okay.”

  We sit in silence for a while and then get up and w
alk the long way home around the edges of my mother’s fields. Seeds fly everywhere: dandelion, milkweed, goldenrod. Sunlight touches everything. Back at the house Jesse climbs into his truck and smiles through the open window. “Thank you,” he says, and I nod, and stand there watching the back end of his pickup leave, my body tender to the point of breaking.

  My mother sits on the glider after dinner and asks me for a jar of wine; I bring us each one and join her. Her eyes settle on the far horizon; waves of late-summer heat rise up and out of the field. She is eating little and her body thins daily; gray hairs fill the bath drain, drape across her pillow. I’ve called my office again. I may lose my job. Do I mind? The sugar maples are turning along the roadsides. Three times I’ve asked her about fixing the roof, and each time she’s shrugged. “Before the fall,” she says. “Before the fall.”

  I go inside, put Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps on the record player and turn it up loud. When I step back onto the porch she is dancing in her chair—twirling her arms around her head, swishing her hair to the beat of Ralph Molina’s drums. I down my wine and start dancing too; I swivel my hips and pout my lips and toss my head back and forth.

  “Rock and roll,” my mother says. She stands up, shimmies over to me, and reaches her arms out. “Dance with me, baby-girl?” she asks, so I put my arms around her bird-thin waist and we do, to “Pocahontas” and then “Sail Away.” Her breasts are small against my chest and unloved; I don’t want her to lose them. When the music ends she tips her head back and laughs. “Coots!” she hollers. “Couple of crazy coots!”

  I laugh too. The wine has gone straight to my heart. “Rooty-toot to the moon!” I call out, still holding my mother’s body against mine. “Rooty-toot-toot to the frickin’ moon.”

  At midnight Kristy and I meet in the field between our houses. We lie in the grass and lean back on our elbows; the dew-wet grass soaks into the butt of our jeans and the elbows of our sweaters. She tells me her mother hardly leaves the house anymore. She tells me she wants to get pregnant before it’s too late, with Dylan.

  “Really, babies?” I ask.