by Laura McNeal
Aldine bobbed up and down fruitlessly, a little dance that she did when the baby cried, or when she didn’t, as if a swayed baby wouldn’t need to cry. She willed Ansel to drive out of the gloom. She could go out and walk to Sonia’s house, she reasoned, but the air around the barn and the house was still fog-thick with dirt, and she knew Vivien shouldn’t be breathing it. Look at Neva. Maybe the littlest had the weakest filters in their little pink throats.
Bobbing and humming, she tried again, desperately, to see if Vivien wanted to nurse, but the baby only tried for a few seconds, then opened her mouth to scream. “Oh,” she said to her, “oh, please stop crying.” She was tired of bobbing so she began to walk her, which sometimes worked, though it worked much better outside. Her breasts hurt and her arms hurt and her back hurt from holding the same weight in the same position for hours every day. Her neck hurt. She was hungry, too. She walked around the room and up the stairs, into and out of their bedroom and then into Clare’s, where there was no furniture.
She kept walking but began now to jiggle the girl and sing the “Carol of the Birds.” Perhaps it was the change of scene, or the song, but she stopped crying. Aldine dared not stop, circling the room, leaving footprints in the dust, and softly singing the same words, “curoo, curoo, curoo.” There was a folded piece of paper on the floor, the ink showing through the back like a cheap advertisement. She kicked at it once and knocked it closer to the wall. The green paint was cracked and dingy, and there was a crumbling hole in the wall with the biggest cracks, with bits of plaster dust dribbling out. She needed both arms to bobble Vivien and keep walking, but the temptation to poke at the hole made her stop, finally, after who knew how many laps or minutes, when to her relief the baby slept, and Aldine shifted her gently, oh so gently, against her chest and used one finger to probe at the hole in Clare’s wall, still whispering, as if the words alone would maintain the spell, “Curoo, curoo, curoo.” The dust came out as she dug with her fingernail, and there was something pleasing about doing that, so she kept excavating, and then to her surprise a piece of metal tumbled out onto the floor. It was a ring or a bolt of some kind. She didn’t dare to bend all the way over—that would surely wake the baby—but she eased herself down until she sat cross-legged with her back to the wall, hoping that Vivien would be too soundly asleep to notice that she was no longer moving. She almost always woke up when Aldine tried to unclasp her arms and leave the baby in the nest she’d made for her in the bed, but perhaps because she still held her, Vivien slept on.
Carefully, she reached out her hand for the ring and studied it. The gemstone had fallen out, she thought at first, but when she looked closer, she saw that what looked like scratches in a big lead-gray hole was actually the engraved signature of Tom Mix.
She slipped the ring on her index finger and listened hard for the sound of Ansel’s tractor returning but she heard nothing, not even birds. She picked up the dirty piece of paper, laced at the edges by the nibbles of bugs and mice, and saw that it belonged with the ring. Above the white silhouette of a man in a cowboy hat (in other respects, the man appeared to be naked), the paper was labeled, Tom Mix’s Injuries. All over the white silhouette were black capital letters and X’s, as if this were a pattern for counted cross-stitch. Then she saw that the letters corresponded to a list, which began:
Danger and difficulty have never daunted Tom Mix, nor broken bones stopped him. He has been blown up once, shot 12 times, and injured 47 times in movie stunting. The chart shows the location of some of Tom’s injuries. (X marks fractures; circles, bullet wounds.)
She had no photograph of Ansel and he had none of her. Why the silhouette of Tom Mix made her think of this, she didn’t know. And now they had no photo of Vivien, which was worse, because her face was changing every day. But so, too, was Ansel’s. So, too, probably, was hers. She looked again at the diagram in her hand. Tom Mix had certainly suffered. She would give him that. The X on his temple showed where his skull had been fractured in accident. The bullet wound where his privates would have been (these details had been omitted from the illustration) was where he’d been shot by bad man while Oklahoma sheriff. The letter Y indicated where his elbow had been shot in real stagecoach holdup (1902).
The note at the bottom said, Scars from twenty-two knife wounds are not indicated, nor is it possible to show on the diagram the hole four inches square and many inches deep that was blown in Tom’s back by a dynamite explosion.
She would show this to Ansel when he got back. And the ring, too. Or maybe the ring would make him sad because it had belonged to Clare. She took the ring off and set it near her leg, and because Vivien was sleeping so peacefully, and because the injuries of Tom Mix, however fantastically exaggerated, had made their own perils seem smaller-scaled, she drifted off to sleep.
Some time later she awakened with a start. The noise downstairs, she hoped, was Ansel, but it might be the Josephsons again, so she didn’t move. The noise came again and it was, she realized, someone pounding on the front door, not someone knocking his boots on the rug after opening it. Vivien woke up and began to cry.
They would hear the baby crying and this time they would not go away.
The knock came again, and then a man’s voice.
“Mrs. Price?” said the deep voice. “Is that you?”
She didn’t answer, just put Vivien to her breast, which the baby took this time. Aldine covered her and her front with the blanket and just sat there. The door wasn’t locked. It was never locked.
“Mrs. Price?” the voice called. “It’s the police.”
Was it better to answer the police, or not to answer? She was numb with fear. Ansel wasn’t back, or maybe he was back, and they had him. So many days had passed and they hadn’t returned the car, so naturally Dr. Stober had called the police. The police had talked to Glynis. She and Ansel couldn’t have been hard to find.
“Up here,” she said, helplessly, her voice hoarse. She walked downstairs with Vivien clutched tightly to her.
One man wore a hat and a brown coat with a white shirt, not a farmer’s sort of clothes. The other was Dr. Stober. Sick was what she felt. Sick all the way through.
“Do you know where Mrs. Price is?” the man in the suit coat asked. He held open a wallet that contained a badge, and she noticed that he was missing part of his pinkie.
Aldine didn’t shake her head, and she didn’t answer. She remembered that the dress she was wearing belonged to Mrs. Price. “She’s in California,” Aldine finally said. “Where they moved last spring.”
The badge man nodded and Aldine followed his gaze around the room as he took in the greasy tractor parts and unwashed dishes on the table, the sheet-covered radio, the cat’s nest in the armchair. Then he was looking again at her, in some new way now, as if she were not part of civilization, as if she had failed her time in the Practice House. He was the type with more skin than eye, great folds of it that made him look as sad as an elephant. He wasn’t large, though. He weighed barely ten stone, she guessed. He didn’t say his name, and she wasn’t surprised. He didn’t have to tell her anything.
“Do you know who this man is?” the policeman asked her, blinking his sad, wrinkled eyes and pointing at Dr. Stober, who had his hand tucked around his neck, as if he were disturbed by something.
She nodded.
“Do you know where his car is?”
She nodded again, parts of herself going cold and stiff, other parts wavy and sick. “We put it in the barn. We never drove it again after we got here. We were going to bring it back, like we said, but we had to wait for the baby to be born first. Ansel didn’t want to leave me here before that in case . . .”
She spoke through the stiffening of her throat and face. “We were going to give it back.”
The men didn’t respond to this, only looked at each other and then back at her.
“Did ye already take him to jail then?”
“Who?” the policeman asked.
“Ansel,” she said.<
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Dr. Stober kept his hand on his neck and looked away.
“You’re going to have to go to Emporia,” the sad-faced policeman said. “A relative of yours is waiting there.”
“Who?”
“Man by the name of Cooper.”
So Glynis had really sent the letter, and Leenie had sent Will. She kept her finger inside Vivien’s fist, as if the baby could keep her from going. “But what about Ansel?”
The policeman blinked, and Dr. Stober kept his eyes averted. He felt bad, she could see that. For the first time in their acquaintance, he seemed human.
“Mr. Price got caught in the storm,” the policeman said.
“Did ye take him to hospital then? Please let me go there first.”
“That won’t be possible,” was how the policeman answered.
She thought it was because she didn’t deserve it, and it seemed a long time since she’d deserved anything she wanted or received anything she deserved. “But later on?”
“I don’t like to tell you this,” the policeman said, and then he did tell her. She studied Vivien’s ear and then said she just needed to get something upstairs, and the sad-faced policeman tramped right after her (she thought he suspected her of wanting to steal money, but later she guessed he was afraid she’d pitch herself out the window, baby and all). She didn’t like to take her pinkie out of the baby’s fist but she had to if she wanted the ring, which the policeman insisted on examining. He decided the ring was nothing, so she could have it. She put it on, and he handed her the paper, too, with a suit yourself kind of look, and then he followed her down the stairs. Dr. Stober had taken himself out of doors. He wasn’t looking for his car, as she expected. He just stood with his back to the house, staring out at the horizon. Aldine found the dirty coffee cup that still lay on its side on the front porch and used it to prop open the front door so that Krazy Kat could get out. Then she settled into the backseat of the police car with her baby, who had begun crying again.
Seven years later, when she read that Tom Mix died, Aldine would fish the paper labeled Tom Mix’s Injuries from the lining of her satchel and consider all the wounds and accidents that hadn’t killed the man in light of the one that did: an afternoon of drinking in a roadhouse and then a car wreck at a washed-out bridge in the desert, doing eighty with a suitcase full of money.
108
It was ten thirty in the morning on December 9. For Charlotte, her wedding day had begun at 5:00 a.m. when she’d come into Clare’s room and flipped on the lamp. Her eyes were red and her cheeks were wet. “Dad’s living with Aldine, isn’t he,” she whispered to Clare. “He’s left Mom for her and everyone knows. McNamara’s going to jilt me. He won’t want to be seen with the daughter of divorced adulterers.”
Clare was squinting at the sudden light. “Who said he’s living with Aldine?”
“Nobody. I just think it,” Charlotte said, her voice thickening as she began to cry again. She pushed a handkerchief against her nose and saw her face in the mirror. “I look horrible. I look horrible and I’m going to be jilted.”
Clare tried to raise his head up. “You’ll look fine if you stop crying.”
“It’s Aldine’s fault.”
“McNamara doesn’t know anything about it. Nobody does. Just stop crying or they’ll ask what’s wrong.”
“I can’t.”
“Open the drawer there,” Clare said. He laid his heavy head back down. Roosters were crowing in the Mexican camp near the packinghouse, and a dog began to bark.
“Why?” Charlotte asked, not moving.
“Just open the drawer and then open the accounting book.”
She went to the drawer and sniffled. She found the paper, unfolded it, and began by the lamplight to read the Rules to Be Observed for the Prevention of the Spread of Tuberculosis.
“Dad has it,” Clare said. “Dr. Quigley told me. That’s why he can’t come back and we can’t go there.”
Charlotte kept reading, the handkerchief as small as a stone beneath her nose. When she’d finished reading, she didn’t say anything. She folded the paper and put it back in the drawer.
Clare watched her compose herself around this new set of facts. He didn’t tell her that their father didn’t even know the result of the test. It had always been Charlotte who knew the dirty secrets, the bad stories, the things you didn’t want to hear.
“I think he went there to protect us,” he said.
It took Charlotte a few seconds to decide to believe it, and then she did.
“It’s worse, but it’s better,” she said, and made a small unhappy smile. “I hate myself for saying it.” She stood up and touched his hand, swaying slightly in her robe. She was big and soft in her curly hair and robe, and she seemed ready now to go ahead with this strange new part of her life. “I’ll let you try to go back to sleep,” she said.
He didn’t sleep, though. He looked up at the ceiling and thought of Aldine’s voice, the way it sounded and the way her mouth looked when she sang to Neva. He thought of her lying that night under the suit quilt in her nightclothes. Charlotte had turned off the lamp in his room, but not in the hall, so the edges of the dresser and the bed and his own feet stayed visible. He was awake when the sun rose and awake when Neva knocked on the door and brought in Opa Hoffman carrying a little paper box.
“Your little town has a doughnut shop,” Opa Hoffman said. The old man liked him, Clare could tell. He’d been in the night before and after two seconds of looking at him had said, “You have the Hoffman eyes,” and then when he asked about his scores at school, he said, “Yes. And the Hoffman brain.”
Well, he was happy to eat a doughnut with the old man, if that’s all it took to make him happy, but it wasn’t long before his mother was there, ushering his grandfather out, beginning what she called the ablutions. He hated them, the embarrassing maneuvers, the washing Clare tried to do under the sheet. Neither of them spoke as they went about it all, his mother rushing because of the wedding, and he could hear Ida closing drawers and shuffling things next door. He could hear Ida telling Neva, patiently first and then crossly, to stop moving her head so much.
A while later, Neva stomped her way into the room, hair lacquered, chin jutting, eyes furious, red taffeta swishing. Behind her, Ida carried a red velvet headband wound with a small artificial poinsettia. “It pinches!” Neva said.
“It won’t now,” Ida said. “I wrapped the wire a little more.”
“It will,” Neva said.
“You look smashing,” Clare said to Neva, who had given him a desperate look, as if he could tell the women to let Neva go bareheaded.
“I know! I’ll hold your headband until we get to the church,” Ida said in her happy-soldier voice, dropping the headband into her giant pocketbook. “And you can put it on right before you go up the aisle.” Ida was dressed in taffeta, too, but hers was a pale green suit that she wore on all special occasions. She wore enormous pearly beads and pearly clip-on earrings and around her ringed hands pearly bracelets dripped. A green feather pointed out of her small green velvet hat, upon which perched a small black-and-green bird.
“We’re going to be late,” Charlotte said, striding into the now crowded room like a giant Easter lily in heels, one hand fluttering to her own headband, which was attached to a veil and threatened a backward slide. Her eyes filled with tears when she saw Clare, and she remembered a nickname from long ago, one he hated as much as she hated Lottie: “Oh, Dipsy. I’m sorry you can’t be there.”
“It’s all right,” Clare said. “Vinnie’s coming with a new game her cousins sent from England. And chocolates. She said that specifically.” The puffiness of crying was not quite gone from her face. “You look kind of ravishing,” he said.
“Thank you, kind of,” Charlotte said.
“Will you save me some of the chocolates?” Neva asked.
“Sure,” Clare said.
He could hear his mother calling out to Hurd, and then coming up the stairs, and
then each ornately dressed and perfumed woman was kissing him and adjusting some aspect of his bed. His mother’s face looked tight. He figured this was because of his father not coming back, or maybe her own father arriving, or maybe both. She was wearing the pearls Opa had given her for Christmas and when Clare said they looked nice, she said, “They do, don’t they?” She smiled and lowered her voice. “He asked me to wear them. I think he was afraid I’d pawned them or something.” The whole party was clattering down the stairs when Neva ran back to give him a kiss on each ear, and then an Eskimo kiss, and then a kiss on his chin, which she called an Australian, as if each position on the face had a corresponding continent. “Bye,” she said gravely. “Is Vinnie your girlfriend?”
He gave her an Australian and added a Polar, right on the crown of her wet-combed hair. “Vinnie?” he said. For a while now Lavinia had been visiting every day after school. He was grateful to her, and he thought she was probably the smartest girl he’d ever met, aside from Miss Warren, the Latin teacher. She’d gotten a new haircut, short and angular, so that she looked like a moll in a comic book, which sometimes he liked and sometimes he didn’t. He felt a tug of something toward her, a need, maybe. He didn’t know what it was. “No,” Clare said.
“Marchie says she’s your sweetheart,” Neva said.
“Well, Marchie’s wrong,” Clare said.
It was then that Clare became aware of someone outside the open door to his room. “Neva,” Lavinia said, poking her head in, “your mother told me to tell you they’re all stifling in the car, and that your sister is going to have ten thousand kittens if you don’t hurry.”
Clare was pretty sure Lavinia had interjected the kittens part, but she didn’t look saucy and amused. Her face was flushed and stricken, and he knew that she must have overheard.
