Spindle City

by Jotham Burrello

  “Looking good, Dad,” Will said, buttoning his trousers.

  Joseph stepped back and snapped the hankie against the grill. “Spic and span like your brother.”

  “Can’t believe he’s a soldier.”

  “Indeed,” Joseph whispered. And God help the poor bastards that have to fight him.

  land between my hands

  Joseph left June Street at three-thirty, motoring down Main Road in Tiverton. He crossed Stone Bridge and entered Portsmouth, passing Island Park near four that afternoon. Middletown was a short distance farther. He drove slower than usual, hoping he’d run out of gas or a gale might blow up from Mount Hope Bay and him an excuse to turn back home. But Wiggins had filled the tank for the weekend, and the Lord had delivered another brilliant late-summer day. In the months following his Patriots’ Day visit to White Mountain, Joseph had replayed his altercation with Hollister in the cafeteria. He’d begun to question his abandonment of the boy. All summer this poisonous stew simmered, and now, going to see Maria for the first time since the accident, the pot boiled over.

  Otis Bartlett had bought the Middletown farm as a real estate investment, not for its rich black soil. Before Hannah Cleveland had handed Joseph the mill, he’d planned to quit and set about making the farm a profitable business. João turned a profit now, but a substantial infrastructure investment was necessary to sell large quantities of his butter and milk out of state. In their state-of-the-farm meeting last year, when João said distributors could handle sales, Joseph expressed his fears about putting too many middlemen between the farm and its customers. João’s other brainstorm, to add cattle to the dairy operation, was swiftly vetoed.

  The sweet honeysuckle that rimmed the eastern edge of the property brought a smile to Joseph. It had been Lizzy’s idea to plant it, and though her nursery and greenhouse plan never grew out of its small plot near the house, Kitty maintained it religiously. At the turnoff he honked at Kitty packing up her vegetable and flower stand. She was a short, stout woman with muscular arms and deeply tanned skin from another summer spent working outdoors. Joseph had always been fond of Kitty. She’d been widowed some ten years, but with João’s help, she kept up her family’s vegetable operation. She and her two daughters managed the stand from June through September, selling out most days to day-trippers and summer residents of Newport.

  Kitty stood and waved fruit flies off the tomatoes when the car stopped. She turned the bruised patches down. When she didn’t hear a car door slam, she stood and raised her hand to block the sun.

  “Well, Mr. Bartlett, you are a welcome sight for lonely eyes.” Though she was a few years older than Joseph, she insisted on calling him Mr. Bartlett out of respect for Otis. The old man had allowed her family to stay on the farm after the foreclosure, though he’d politely asked the brother who had run it into the ground to leave. “What brings you out to the country on a late Sunday?”

  “Some business with the boss,” Joseph called over the engine’s hum.

  “Been a time since you been out this way.”

  “Want a ride to the house?” Joseph pointed up the road. “You can remind me of the way.”

  “Can you wait a minute? I’m just packing up. Mostly crickets today.”

  Joseph pulled the brake and got out and helped her load wooden crates of tomatoes and melons and corn into the back of the car. Kitty set the flower bucket between her legs in the passenger’s side. Each dime bundle was tied with red ribbon.

  “Hand me one of those.”

  Joseph ran his hand up the bunch of flowers and then pressed his palm to his nose. Besides the hybrid tea roses, Lizzy’s garden in the city had gone to seed. He plucked out a yellow begonia and tucked it in the band of his hat.

  “Lizzy loved flowers.” He handed Kitty a black-eyed Susan.

  “I know,” Kitty said. She squeezed his forearm and then wove the flower stem through her coiled hair. As the car gained speed, the earthy smell of the vegetables circulated between the seats.

  Kitty said, “I thought the big farm meeting was never going to happen.”

  “Is that what it is called?”

  “João asked me to put in our wish list a month ago.”

  “You have a real democracy here.” João’s diplomacy always tickled Joseph. He wished he had such a luxury at the mill. Before Kitty began to lobby him directly, he asked, “So, Kitty, how has the new girl worked out?”

  “New girl?”

  He played dumb. “What’s her name? Maria?”

  “She’s not so new anymore.” Kitty adjusted the flower bucket between her legs. The shine went out of her eyes. “She lives with me and the girls. Had night terrors at first but now sleeps most nights. A little weak in the right eye but don’t complain none.”

  Kitty looked out her window and removed her hairpins. The cool breeze swept her hair back. In the rearview mirror, Joseph watched the black-eyed Susan tumble down the middle of the dirt lane. He braced for questions about Hollister or what he’d done for Maria’s family. None came. He had endured such silences. Evelyn and Mary Sheehan—heck, even his own mother—had had similar reactions at the mention of the girl’s name. The greatest isolation over the long winter came at night, alone in bed. Joseph had imagined their tight lips were a result of not wanting the conversation to lead to their opinions of his poor parenting or, worse, Lizzy’s. He feared what they said about him in private.

  “She up at your place?”

  “Sundays she’s at the big house, João’s teaching her to read.” Kitty lifted the flower bucket to her lap. “Oh, there was something: a fire in one of the outbuildings. A lamp fell, but João smothered it. Burnt his hands, though.”

  “Badly?”

  “Bad enough. Maria made an aloe salve for the burns.”

  Joseph removed the begonia from his hatband and laid it on the dash. He turned to Kitty. “Thank you for minding her.”

  Kitty had the last word on the matter. “She’s a quiet girl,” she offered, “but industrious.”

  At the house, Kitty called to one of the boys to unload the vegetables and flower bucket. She waved goodbye to Joseph, thanking him for the lift, her tight smile telling him what she really thought of him.

  * * *

  João sat in the front parlor, going over the sales figures. Expanding the sweet corn was the next project, then, God willing, a cranberry bog. The low rumble of Joseph’s car filled the house. João lowered the ledger book and folded his reading glasses. The car horn moaned twice, and Maria looked up, startled from her book. She had taken to reading Otis’s books to learn English, just as João had years before. Today she’d complained of chills, and João had draped a brown afghan over her shoulders. When the car engine cut, João resisted the urge to go to her. He caught her eye. Her pupils widened. They both looked at the clock on the mantel. Joseph was right on time. Turning back to the ledger in his lap, João could not recall the figure he’d just computed for the cost of excavating a bog. The clock’s ticking filled the room.

  Kitty had been encouraging Maria for a week now to start readying herself for going back to the city. Her family said a year was enough recuperation. They needed an extra hand with the small children or for her to earn a higher wage on a factory floor.

  “It’s time.” João walked to the door. He wore gray-striped overalls under a denim vest and a white cotton shirt with cutoff sleeves. His thick black hair stood on end. (He ran a hand through it when calculating figures.) He paused to tuck his reading glasses in the breast pocket of the vest, hoping Maria would respond, but she hadn’t spoken much the past year, and she didn’t now, just kept her eyes trained on the window.

  João set her bags near the door. Since she’d come with so little, there wasn’t much to pack. He crossed his long brown arms. “Here are your things.”

  He walked in front of the window to make sure she understood.

&
nbsp; Her gaze seemed to go through him. It was a look that had confounded him these last months. It occupied a state somewhere between coma and comprehension. But he hadn’t seen it in the two weeks since the reunion dance.

  Lately his eyes hadn’t been zooming directly to the anchor-shaped scar on the bridge of her nose where the broomstick had struck. She had caught him staring more than once. The summer sun and time had muted the scar to a mere smudge. A stranger would notice the bend of her nose, but not the scar—not unless they had seen her in the month after the accident. Luckily, her mother had pinched the skin tight in the hours after the blow. But it saddened him to think that every calm pool or glass window she looked into would remind her of the horrid event. And then the screaming nightmares that had kept Kitty and her girls up nights would return. João wondered, as he often did, what sort of disfigurement Hollister carried. He had often dreamt of the deep scars he would someday inflict on the boy. He looked out the window.

  Joseph waved to João.

  The younger man nodded. He turned back to Maria, then pointed to her bags. “He won’t wait long.”

  She blinked, their code that she understood.

  “Thirty minutes.”

  * * *

  The men sat on a stone bench between two large hydrangeas, the acidic soil produced brilliant blue flowers. João’s gardens produced Kitty’s dime bouquets. Joseph had removed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. The farm brought roughness out in men. João’s ropy limbs mocked Joseph’s smooth forearms.

  He said, “How’s that new tractor working out?”

  “That new engine, she’s beautiful. Raises our profit. More of that in the future.”

  “I like hearing you talk about the future.”

  João squinted into the fading sun. “The sun’s my friend—and the rain. I feel at home. If I can’t feel the land between my hands, I want to die.”

  Joseph removed his hat to fan his face. “Kitty said something about a fire?”

  “In the tool shed. Small, but straw burn terrible.”

  “You burnt?”

  “Jeez, hands hurt pretty bad.” João raised his scarred hands and shrugged. “But I don’t think she’ll leave no pain.”

  There’s a slight change in the boy, Joseph thought. João kept smiling at his hands. But there was something else—something off, something missing. Joseph, suddenly irritated, changed the subject. They both knew why he was there. “So how is she?”

  “She hardly speaks,” João said, his smile widening. “But she a good worker from barn to field.”

  She’d spoken no more than a handful of words, preferring instead to nod at João’s farm chore demonstrations or wave to his dinner suggestions or exhale an exasperated moan when a cow kicked over a milking pail. Though at first unnerved by her reluctance to speak, João had come to find this arrangement agreeable; it required he make eye contact with Maria to assure her understanding. Like Maria’s relocation, he hadn’t had much of a choice in the matter of his own. But after nearly six years he had accepted his fate. It wasn’t the life he’d dreamed of on his crossing—the point had been to get off the farm. But this wasn’t his father’s arid soil. He could produce here. And lately, he’d seen its potential and begun to spend more time in the farm office than in the barn. He only milked in the morning—and that was because he liked watching the sunrise. Maria, too, had taken a liking to the early morning rhythms of farm life and insisted on taking on more chores, though João had told her to ease into it. She started on with the butter girls, making Rose Butter—Extra Alfalfa Makes It Super Creamy—but when two men left without notice, he pulled her to the milking barn. She’d taken to the job. He enjoyed having someone around who understood Portuguese, and had assumed they’d discuss life in the Azores, given she was from a nearby island, but she showed little interest in their homeland. Mostly, they sat quietly in the musty barn listening to streams of milk ping off the sides of their tin pails. Still, he was happy for the company on cold winter mornings. But as winter turned to spring he began to fear she’d lost any joy in life except tending the animals.

  One early morning he told her one of his grandmother’s folktales, thinking Maria’s relatives had told similar stories.

  “To be beautiful is to have blue eyes, blond hair, and skin as white as milk. The island princess was beautiful,” João began. The horizon burned a brilliant mix of copper and gold. João sat on a short wooden stool so Maria could see him between the cow’s hind legs. The barn cats wound between his boots. A milky mist rose from his pail. “The island princess wanted to marry a simple-minded prince to rule his kingdom. But the simple-minded prince spent his days on horseback, traveling over his lands. One day he came upon a country girl with nothing more than a mule to her name and a fat bump on her forehead. The prince began to spend time in the girl’s village. The island princess became madly jealous of this country girl. And soon the island princess’s blue eyes faded to black, and her blond hair turned brown, and her pearly skin tanned. The island princess set out a magic picnic for the prince of fine jellies and exotic fruits that would make the prince love her instead of the country girl, but being that the simple-minded prince was simple, he did not like fine jellies and exotic fruits, so he fed the picnic to his horse. The next day, at the king’s festival, the horse broke free from his lead when he saw the island princess and trampled her to death. Later, the simple-minded prince set to marry the country girl. When she raised her veil at the church the crowd gasped. The country girl’s eyes had turned blue, her black hair blond, and her dark skin was white as milk. Now she, too, was beautiful.”

  João stopped milking. Grandmother told it better, he thought. She painted pictures with her hands. Maria paused and turned toward him bleary-eyed. I scared her, he thought. Had she stopped listening after the word “trampled”? Or perhaps, he hoped, the words “princess,” “beautiful,” and “marry” circled her brain like dobby horses on a carousel.

  Maria slowly scooted the wide-lipped pail across the dirt floor with her foot and emptied it into the aluminum tub and sat down under the next cow. She dabbed her eyes on her sleeve. João knew America could crush one’s spirit to the point where you no longer believed that a peasant could marry a prince. Even on the islands, the peasants rarely won the ring.

  When he could no longer stand her silence, he stood up and then flung open all the windows and doors in the barn to flush out evil spirits. She stopped milking. He stood over her and extended a hand. She set her chin in his palm. After a moment, he said, “The princess fell under the mau olhado.” He waved his free hand over the crown of her head. “I bless you against it.” He waited for what seemed like an hour for a reaction. But none followed. Finally he dropped her chin and emptied his bucket.

  After a few minutes she stood and emptied her pail into the tub. She stepped beside João and said, “I fear you are too late,” then shuffled off to the next cow in the row.

  * * *

  Through the front window of the house, João saw Maria going between rooms. Smoke came from the chimney. She’s making traveling tea, João thought. He wondered if she’d packed the hair combs and lavender silk party dress he’d bought her for the reunion. Far away, her shadow seemed to dance like she had in his arms the one time she had agreed to leave the farm. Actually, she’d had no choice. In late June, Kitty’s relatives held a reunion in Westerly. João had tagged along the last few years to organize the clam boil. Neither João nor Kitty thought it a good idea to leave the girl unattended. Besides, a weekend of organized games, hiking, at least one christening, and a dance with music provided by Kitty’s cousins would be restorative to the girl’s soul. In an effort to explain Maria’s presence at the party, Kitty told her family João was bringing his sweetheart.

  In his arms on the trampled grass dance floor, João heard Maria laugh for the first time. She seemed in a trance, spinning under the sparkling white lights. An
d soon João lost track of the movement of his limbs, preferring to concentrate on the rich scent of her hair. He insisted they dance to each tune. Kitty and the others left them in their own orbit, but she watched them like a proud mother. Maria understood the music’s spell better than João thought, for before the band’s last songs she pulled him to a corner of the tent. The front of her lavender dress was damp. Wisps of hair clung to her temples.

  “What is it?” João asked, looking over his shoulder as the band tuned up for the last song. Her face beamed, but she didn’t speak. When he tried pulling her to the dance floor, she resisted. “What?”

  Yawning, she glanced over her shoulder to her room in the main house.

  “You want to sleep?”

  She nodded.

  He cursed himself for thinking the night would never end. Plus, he’d hogged her, there were probably younger, more handsome men she’d wanted to dance with. What an idiot. He should have continued at the textile school, or started his own business with Manuel. He buried his nails into his coarse, chapped palms.

  When he wouldn’t meet her eye she squeezed his wrist.

  “We’ll dance again?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “The music, the band.”

  “Yes.”

  “They play all night.”

  She squeezed his wrist again.

  For the first time João was the one without a voice.

  She blinked a few times to reassure him and then kissed his cheek. “Thank you, João,” she said. “For all the cows.”

  They both laughed, and she released his wrist and whirled out of his reach, running out of the tent toward the main house. He watched her go, hoping she’d stop and look back, but she disappeared into the dark night.

  João slumped in a chair near the edge of the tent, refiguring what she’d said and what he had forgotten to say. He sat there for hours, nursing tall mugs of stout that Kitty’s brothers kept replenishing. The next morning one of the cousins found him asleep in the grass near the bandstand. He fetched João a cup of coffee and then asked him to help dismantle the tent.