Margaret from Maine (9781101602690)

by Monninger, Joseph

  “’Course it is.”

  “I’m tempted to bring Gordon, but he’s a little young. I’d like him to see Washington, but maybe he’s not ready yet.”

  “He’ll be fine here with me.”

  “I’ll give Mr. King a call back then and say I’ll do it. It’s a little something we can do for Thomas.”

  Benjamin nodded and smiled. For an instant, she spotted the family resemblance. It had passed from Benjamin to Thomas and now to Gordon. They were all big men—at least Gordon seemed headed in that direction—with plain, solid features and strong chins. Margaret often thought of them as trees, as a circle of oaks growing out from a central grand oak, their lives established by acorns carried deeper into the forest by slow, gradual progress. She found nothing hurried about any of her men.

  It was a short morning. By the time she finished her chores, the sunlight had already become a bright bar in the barn doorway. As she returned to the house, she passed by the phoebe nest. Her boots made a loud clumping sound against the ground. Dew flicked up from her toes. A nice breeze moved across the north pasture and it stopped her for a moment. She put her hand to her eyes, shading the morning sun from her vision while she looked slowly around the farm. Spring, she thought. Late May. She took a deep breath, then another, and she watched for a moment as the breeze pushed the large web of a barn spider into a shimmering dance. She thought of Charlotte’s Web, the story by E. B. White that always came to mind whenever she saw a spider’s web. What a pig, she thought, then she continued across the dooryard, climbed the back porch, and pulled one foot, then the other, out of the muck boots. The boots released her feet slowly, gasping as they did, and she closed the screen door behind her, the weight of her step setting the china in the dining room cabinet to rattling and gossiping.

  * * *

  The boy—Gordon, six years old—had been waking for a half hour, sleep coming and going over him like a drawer hesitantly opened and closed. He lay in his single bed, his body making a bulge only halfway down the tube formed by the blue Hudson Bay blanket his mother had tucked around him the night before. A red plaid curtain lifted and fell, lifted and fell with the breeze that pushed across the farm. It was the same breeze his mother had felt when she stepped out of the barn, but the boy couldn’t know that and neither could she.

  Around the boy, in the mountainous contours of his blankets, several dozen green army men enjoyed a quiet peace in their endless war. The men—cheap plastic army men, perfectly green, stamped out in a factory near Shanghai, China—replicated poses more closely associated with World War II than Iraq or Afghanistan or even Vietnam. Near the boy’s chest, fallen into a bunker near his armpit, a radioman, kneeling, held a World War II walkie-talkie to his ear and chin, listening for messages that never came, detailing their positions, which changed nightly depending on the boy’s whims. On the other side of his arm, set up in an ambush, seven riflemen lay on their bellies and pointed their plastic rifles at the foot of the bed. One of the rifles had broken away, and the boy, hearing accounts of sawed-off shotguns, had decided the rifleman had one of those for a weapon, although he called it a saw-chuck shotgun without knowing better. The soldier with the saw-chuck shotgun was Gordon’s favorite, although he resisted having favorites for fear it would prejudice the war games and make them hollow. Still, he often wondered if the saw-chuck soldier wasn’t a little like his father, who also lay on his belly in the white bed, and whose snoring reminded him of sawing, which probably had something to do with that type of rifle.

  He slept a little more, and then finally he felt a hand on his forehead, then lips. He opened his eyes. His mother sat on the edge of the bed, a white terry cloth robe wrapped around her. She wore her hair up in a towel, and Gordon saw a drop of water fall from her neck to her shoulder.

  “Morning, buster,” she said.

  “Morning, Mom,” he answered.

  “You ready to wake up? Grandpa Ben said he’s coming in to have coffee with you soon.”

  He nodded.

  “Where are we going today?” she asked him.

  He knew the answer, but he felt shy suddenly and wouldn’t reply.

  “To the hospital,” she said, filling it in for him. “To see Daddy.”

  “Daddy,” the boy repeated.

  “That’s right, sweetheart. Grandpa is finishing up with the cows. I’ve run a bath. Will you jump in and I’ll be in in a second to help you wash, okay?”

  He nodded.

  He didn’t want to get up until she left, for fear of knocking the soldiers out of their positions. The red plaid curtain lifted and fell. His mother brushed his hair back one more time, then stood and walked out of the room. He grabbed the saw-chuck shotgun guy from near his armpit and carried it with him when he went toward the bathroom.

  * * *

  On the back porch, Margaret stopped to smell the lilacs. They were common lilacs, purple, and smelled like wind mixed with something floral and difficult to name. She breathed deep and stretched her back. She liked what she wore—a simple cotton dress that hung smoothly around her frame—and she was glad she’d allowed her friend Blake to talk her into buying it. It was a good run-errand dress. She had a sweater to put over it if the hospital proved too cold. Blake had been right. Blake was usually right about such things.

  She turned to go back inside, but then paused for a moment more beside the lilacs. Thomas loved lilacs; he cut them each spring, bringing them inside in bundles that he left in a small watering can beside their bed. There they stayed, trembling with each footstep over the bare wooden floors of the bedroom, the moisture of the can occasionally sweating a moat onto her bedside table. Even with them so near, she could not depend on smelling them. The scent rose and fell, disappeared altogether at times, then suddenly reappeared at the fluff of a blanket or the tuck of a pillow.

  She cupped one of the lilac heads in her hand and brought it to her nose. Yes, the scent was there. She had already cut a half dozen and put them in the car for Thomas. She had no idea if Thomas could sense such things, but it couldn’t hurt, and maybe, she liked to think, in some small, primitive part of him he still recorded sensations like these. The doing of it would be the good of it, she liked to quote.

  Back in her kitchen, she watched Gordon row through his bowl of Cheerios. Benjamin, large and red and smelling softly of cattle, sat beside the boy, drinking coffee. Benjamin drank his coffee black, as Thomas had taken it, and she liked that in the Kennedy men. She went to the sink and rinsed out her coffee cup and set it to dry on the drainer.

  “Do you have an appointment to see anyone over there?” Ben asked.

  “I’m going to try to catch Dr. Medios. That’s why I want to move along. He has early rounds.”

  “I never understood why hospitals have to start up so early in the morning.”

  “I don’t know. That’s a good question.”

  “Is he the Indian fellow?”

  “Yep.”

  “I remember talking to him. He’s okay. Always looks above your eyes at your forehead. That’s what I noticed.”

  “He’s been good about Thomas,” she said, then she turned her attention to Gordon. “Come on, buckaroo. Let’s get moving here. Finish up.”

  Margaret wiped down the sink with a cloth. She did it unconsciously. When she remembered what she was doing, she hung the cloth on the neck of the faucet to dry. Then she ducked quickly into the front powder room and checked her hair once more. She looked fine, she decided. Her hair, actually, hung the way she liked. She pushed at it and resettled it above her shoulders. On her way out, she ran her hand over Gordon’s hair. She loved the feel of her little boy’s hair. It was short and soft, like a deer’s, she decided, or what an otter might feel like. Yes, an otter. She often thought of her little boy as an otter, as strange as that sometimes seemed to her. She liked thinking of him as a sleek tuck of mu
scle, a gamboling, happy boy at large in streams and rivers, gliding and playing all day. Her otter-boy, she sometimes called him.

  She lifted his empty bowl of Cheerios away; he was finished but stayed in place gazing at a maze on the back of the cereal box. Margaret went to the sink, ran water in the cereal bowl.

  “Okay, buddy boy,” Margaret said to Gordon, “brush your teeth and we’ll get going. Maybe if you’re very, very good, we’ll stop at Hot Dog Depot.”

  Gordon shot upstairs without any additional urging. He loved Hot Dog Depot. She heard Gordon turn on the water upstairs, then she lost track of him as she walked quickly past the screen door and shut off the television in the den. A pretty morning, she thought. Spring had definitely arrived at last.

  Chapter Three

  She let Gordon carry the lilacs from the car and though it slowed them down, she smiled at the seriousness with which he carried out this small function. He held the flowers out, the broad heads nearly large enough for him to hide behind, the silver handle of tin foil bright in his hand. The parking lot was familiar; she had visited the hospital ten billion times, she felt, and she knew each crack she passed, each patched section. She noticed that the red maple in the center island had become green suddenly. It was a magic trick played each spring. One saw the buds emerge, forgot to look for what felt like a moment, and miraculously the tree adorned itself in fresh, sweet leaves. It made her happy to see it.

  It was visiting hours and she knew the way. She was glad that Gordon had the lilacs. They obscured the inevitable hospital odor, the combination of cleaning products and still water and decay. She could never enter the hospital without recalling her aunt Lucy’s final year in a nursing home, the halls lined with old folks in wheelchairs, their heads like drooping dandelion puffs. But this was a veterans’ hospital, and there remained in the air something fierce and proud and broken. She shook herself to get rid of that train of thinking. She asked Gordon if he needed help, and he said no.

  She could not imagine what it must be like from her boy’s perspective. How did he reconcile in his small world what these men meant? She worried that it frightened him to come here, and she had talked to her pediatrician about it, and they had both concluded that some visits, spaced appropriately, made sense. Without the visits, they risked turning “Daddy” into Santa Claus, a mythical figure that was always good and observing and never arriving. Only this was different, Margaret often wanted to say: no Christmas morning waited, no climax ever came due. No other side to the calendar existed, no before and after.

  When they entered the ward, Margaret noted the silence. It always impressed her. It was a library, she felt, a place of stored lives, and she couldn’t help lifting Gordon up into her arms—not for his benefit, but for her own. She passed the familiar beds: Mangan, Fitzgerald, James, Phillmore. The men stared up at the ceiling, their eyes closed.

  “There’s Daddy,” she whispered to Gordon.

  He nodded. She kissed his small, sweet head.

  “Oh, aren’t those pretty?” a nurse said, suddenly appearing. Where had she been? Margaret wondered. She must have been bending down below the sight line of the beds, because she whisked past, stopping for a second to sniff the lilacs in Gordon’s hands. Margaret didn’t recognize her, which was surprising because she thought she knew all the nurses.

  “Lilac season,” Margaret said.

  “Oh, we’ve got a great big stand between our yard and the next one,” the nurse said, “and I go out there with my coffee whenever I can and just breathe it all in. You can hardly believe something smells so good.”

  Margaret smiled. She wanted the nurse to move on, especially because she was conscious of Gordon looking about, first at his father, then at all the other cocoons living in the ward.

  “There’s Daddy,” she whispered again, and this time the nurse smiled and peeled away, promising to bring a vase when she returned.

  Margaret walked to the bed and held Gordon carefully, letting him set the pace. She saw his eyes running over everything: the monitors, the small finger clip on Thomas’s index finger, the bed railings, the silver bags dangling from the rolling stand.

  “Want to get down?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer. She let go with one hand and reached down and cupped Thomas’s forearm. The gesture meant, See, here’s Daddy, he will do you no harm, he wants nothing from you, he would have loved you if he could, but what did that mean to a six-year-old boy?

  “Want to give him the lilacs?” Margaret whispered.

  He nodded and held them out. Margaret lowered her son enough so that he could place the flowers on Thomas’s chest. Like putting flowers on a grave, she realized, and she quickly raised him up and then lowered him to his feet. When she was sure he was steady, she leaned over the bed and kissed Thomas’s forehead. She removed the lilacs and made a place for them on the bedside stand. They sent up their fragrance in small, nearly imperceptible waves.

  “Your daddy always loved lilacs,” she said to Gordon, touching his hair. “He would cut a bunch of them and bring them into our bedroom so we could smell them all night long. Do you like lilacs?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think they may be my favorite flower. Although I don’t really know if they are a flower. Maybe they’re a shrub. I don’t know if there’s a difference.”

  “What’s that?” Gordon asked, his head nodding at one of the silver bags of liquid suspended over the bed.

  “That’s food and water.”

  “Oh,” Gordon said.

  “It’s okay to ask things. You don’t have to worry. He’s your dad, that’s all. He was injured in the war.”

  Gordon nodded.

  “Will he get well?” he asked, though they had been over this.

  “No, sweetheart. He won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  She had been over this, too, but she took an even breath and explained it again.

  “The injuries are too severe,” she said, “too deep inside him. It’s hard to explain. He’s just kind of asleep now. It’s called a coma. But it’s not regular sleep, so you don’t have to worry. He had a bad injury and his body can’t catch up to what he wants to do.”

  Gordon nodded. And Margaret, for just an instant, felt herself losing it. Her jaw trembled slightly and she forced herself to straighten up the bedside table, to tuck the blankets closer on Thomas’s frail body. How was she supposed to explain her husband’s condition to his son? If she said he was merely asleep, why wouldn’t Gordon assume sleep could do this to him, too? But a coma meant nothing to a child. It was all a confusing jumble, a rat’s nest of poor answers, and she finally squatted down next to Gordon and hugged him. She made a decision not to wait for the doctor. Not today. Not with her son here. There would be plenty of other days for doctor consultations.

  “After the nurse comes back, we’ll put the lilacs in the vase and then we can go to Hot Dog Depot. Would that be okay? You’ve been very good. Very, very good.”

  She pulled him close. Her heart turned to dust, to a bright cloud of sparkling dust pushed by a wind, pushed by spring, pushed by the tiny arms coming up around her shoulders.

  * * *

  In the final sunlight of the day, Margaret carried a cup of tea onto the back porch and sat down on the glider. Dinner had passed; the dishes stood stacked in the drainer. She had swept the floor and put away the meat loaf in a Tupperware container. She would make sandwiches tomorrow, maybe open-faced ones, and the mashed potatoes could be moistened and reconstituted and served with chopped carrots. Not terribly original, she decided as she sat and pulled a small afghan over her shoulders. She considered getting up to find The Gourmet Cookbook, a favorite for browsing, but then she decided she felt too comfortable to move. The last light of the sun reflected softly off the metal roof of the barn, and she watched to see how the day would
end.

  Her body slowed and sleep made its first approach, though she did not give in to it. She reached forward and took her tea and sipped it. She loved this moment. The day was done but night had not arrived, and the scent of lilacs drifted and curled in unpredictable ways. Behind her in the house she heard the television news. Benjamin listened and she knew Gordon played around his feet, his trucks and soldiers a village beside a giant’s boots. Shortly, it would be his bedtime. Then night would settle on the house, and she would hear it blend into the darkness, the winds finding it and teasing it to come away. And sometimes coyotes called, their chirps like eager pups, and the cows might answer in their dull, heavy lowing, and rest would come. Sleep would close around the house like a summer lake, like the bright glisten of moonlight on water, and it would linger there until the next morning. That was what she thought as she sat and watched the sunlight pull back to end the day.

  A few minutes later Gordon appeared, a fistful of soldiers clutched in his small fingers. She patted the seat beside her and he climbed up, tucking himself against her. She spread the afghan over him and for a moment he did nothing except savor the warmth. His little hands felt cold. She kissed the top of his head.

  “It’s almost bedtime,” she whispered, deliberately setting her voice low so that he might calm himself.

  He nodded.

  “School tomorrow,” she whispered.

  He nodded again. Then he rolled over slightly onto his back so that he could watch his soldiers in his hand. She wondered for an instant what war he fought. It seemed perpetual and it occasionally worried her. She could not help wondering if it had something to do with Thomas. It seemed obvious that it must, but she had never been a little boy and so she couldn’t say what motivated him.

  “You want to watch to see if there’s a star tonight?”

  “Hmm-mm,” he murmured, a sound meant to say yes.

  “Your daddy put that star in the cupola. It’s a prism.”

  He nodded. She watched the top of the barn. Years ago, Thomas had hung a prism in the cupola. It was a star, he said. All year the sun found it in entertaining ways, sometimes flashing a rainbow onto the side of the house or shooting a bright, combustible pin-light onto the ground or water trough. At this time of year it usually caught the late sunlight, turning to fire the instant before the light left for the day.