Kenzie
Prayer time today is painful and tiring. Kenzie’s heart just isn’t in it. Something dark and uncomfortable keeps welling up there. Instead of praising God and thanking him for all his goodness, she keeps hearing questions pop out of her mouth.
“Why are you letting Dad do this?”
“I thought you were healing him. How am I supposed to pray when I can’t tell if you’ve really answered the prayers I prayed before?”
“If you’d just tell me what to do, I’d do it. Why don’t you have something to tell me about Mom and Dad? Don’t you think I’d be faithful?”
She leaves the sanctuary totally frustrated. The gray evening clouds spread over her as she pedals down the road. So it is with a sudden, overwhelming relief that she sees Mitchell Jaylee standing at his mailbox, one elbow resting on top of it. She stops in front of him and says hi.
“How are you this evening? About to freeze?” His face looks full of conversation he is waiting to have. The injury to his right eye is healed, and the patch is gone. Even in the twilight his eyes have warm light in them.
“Yes.”
“Want some cocoa?”
“I need to get home.” The word home makes her realize how much she dreads being there. “But I can take time for cocoa.”
She follows him inside the house. It is dim but seems clean enough, with magazines and tools lying around. She sits in the tiny breakfast nook and watches him put water on to boil and get out cups and packets of hot chocolate.
“How’s your sculpture coming?” It is so cool to be in on Mitchell’s artistic life. Because she’s never heard anyone talk about it, Kenzie figures that she is the only person who has seen his work.
“Oh, great! I added three pieces to it since you were here last time.”
“Wow. What are they?”
“Let’s see, the seat of an old lawn mower…a scythe…and one of those old baking tins that has indentions shaped like corncobs.”
“Awesome.”
“I’ll show you while the water’s heating.” He leads the way through the back door and into the barn. When he turns on the lights, the cold, dusty space is flooded with orange-yellow. Kenzie walks closer to the sculpture.
“I see the mower seat…and there’s the pan.” She looks and looks but can’t find the scythe.
“Give up?”
“No!” She points a warning finger, and he laughs. “I’ll find it.” As her eyes search through the scramble of metal for the round blade, she feels Mitchell watching her. It makes it hard for her to get a good breath. It also makes her feel safe. He comes closer while she searches. Finally, she sees the scythe, worked into the chicken wire so that the blade itself hardly shows, but the handle forms a sudden angle. “There it is.”
“Good. I think you should try sculpting for yourself.”
“I don’t think I really get it.”
“You don’t get it before you do it. It gets you.”
“Huh.” This is a different concept, but she sees the sense of it right away—the idea that something determines your destiny rather than you determining anything. After all, Jesus said, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.” He said it to the disciples. Kenzie thinks about how every person is probably chosen for something.
Mitchell laughs again, softly. “You’re shivering. Let’s go back inside.” He waits until she is outside before reaching back and shutting off the lights. Then he rests a hand, just barely, on her waist. “Watch it—I’ve got some old boards here to your left.”
“Thanks.” She walks slowly enough to keep that contact between them, all the way to the house. It makes her feel so cared for, this hand on her back. Suddenly her throat hurts and hot tears form in her eyes. She blinks frantically so that Mitchell won’t see once they are in the house again.
But he is noticing everything. She isn’t used to being studied like this. “You got a cold?” he asks.
“Uh, yeah, a little.” She sits at the table and won’t look at him. He finds a paper napkin and hands it to her.
“Guess it’s time I put you on my prayer list,” he says, smiling.
She stares at him. Could he know this—that his name is written on her list?
“I know you pray for me, Kenzie.” He empties the chocolate packets into the cups of hot water.
“How would you know who I pray for?”
“Oh, I can just tell. You’ve got that kind of a soul. I bet you pray for a lot of people. And I bet that anybody you meet goes on that list in your head.”
“Are you mad that somebody would pray for you?”
“Oh, no! It really touches me that you would do that. Are you crying?”
This moment has slipped out of her control. Something inside her collapses, and the tears spill out of her eyes and down her face. She tries to catch them with the napkin. She feels Mitchell close beside her, pressing a fresh one into her hand.
“I didn’t mean to upset you, Kenzie.” His voice is gentler than any voice of any person who has ever talked to her.
“You didn’t upset me. I was already upset. Everything’s so awful.”
“What’s awful?” He is stroking her sleeve. It’s just a matter of Kenzie leaning a little bit for her to be against his chest and for his arms to be around her shoulders. She lets go then, and her crying shakes both of them.
After that part is over and she’s blown her nose and Mitchell has set their cups of cocoa on the table, Kenzie talks a long time. About Dad and Mom. About her discipline of prayer and the times when Jesus’s eyes move and when she floats. About how Young Taylor is into things he shouldn’t be. About how nobody else in her family seems to have faith anymore, and now they need it more than ever. She talks, and Mitchell just listens.
After she’s finished talking and the cocoa is gone and after Mitchell has given her a strong hug good-bye, Kenzie rides home feeling changed. Jesus knew that she needed a spiritual friend. This has been the plan all along. He is watching over her after all. God has heard her prayers and answered them better than she would have answered them herself.
She gets home late, and Mom and Young Taylor have already eaten. Mom doesn’t ask questions about where Kenzie has been. She is distracted, cleaning out one of the closets upstairs. Mom sorts things when she is upset. She throws things away too. Kenzie decides to look through the spare room first thing tomorrow to make sure there’s nothing in there she still wants. It’s the room where all the odd clothes go—the jacket that needs the lining fixed or the jeans with a stuck zipper. But other items land there too, when Mom picks them up and doesn’t know where they go or who they belong to. So Kenzie will look out for her personal property, because, with Dad gone again, Mom will likely clean and sort and throw things away all week.
Jodie
It is the worst of all times to get a call from her former sister-in-law. Jodie isn’t in the mood to talk with anybody. But Marty’s voice is friendly, and it sounds as close as next door rather than all the way to Omaha.
Marty just wants to hear how everybody is. Even though she hasn’t lived in the area for nearly three years, she has a couple of friends who keep her updated. For instance, she knew about Mack’s hospital stay. She called Jodie that very week. Marty has never stopped caring about her husband’s family. But some ties are just too tender to put much weight on. Jodie and Marty have kept a polite distance, especially since Alex’s death. It’s as if both of them know that any conversation will have to lead to that event and to other events that are over with and that nobody can fix.
“So how are you, Jo?”
“Oh, doing all right. You?”
“We’re fine. I’m thinking we’ll come down sometime around Christmas.”
“Good. We’ll put you up here.”
Jodie becomes sad all over again, about Marty and the kids not living around here anymore. They don’t live that far away even now. And Marty has been dating someone pretty seriously. Well, good for her. Jodie wonders if the guy is someon
e her niece and nephew like, or if this shift is one more variation of hell for them to survive. But she sincerely hopes Marty will get back on her feet.
“I heard that Mack’s back from the hospital.”
“Yeah, he’s back.” Jodie can’t think of a single word to follow that.
“God, Jo, is it that bad?”
Jodie sighs into the receiver. “To be honest with you, I feel like I’m always one dinnertime away from complete annihilation.”
“I know, I know. I’m sorry it’s so hard.”
Jodie remembers the day her sister-in-law stopped by and sat at this kitchen table and said, “I can’t do this anymore.” She could no longer bear to walk into the bank to ask for more money. Alex’s lack of coping skills left everything up to Marty. All the juggling of bills to pay and no money to pay them with. All the times picking up the phone and having to hear from creditor after creditor. All the trips to this business and that to explain, once more, why the balance couldn’t be paid off yet. Her life, like every farmer’s wife’s, was filled with record keeping and calculations, endless forms and appeals. Marty sat up later and later, strategizing with pencil and calculator, and Alex disappeared frequently to drink, more than once bringing the pickup back late at night, dented and scratched up from forays into ditches and fence posts. So that bright afternoon in March, Marty spoke the unthinkable to Jodie in a deathly quiet kitchen. She said that maybe if she just quit taking care of everything, something in Alex would come to life again. She didn’t know, but this was where she had to stop.
Of course, Alex did not rise and heal, did not sober up. Everything fell deeper into the hole. And he and Marty fought so horribly that the whole family thought one of them might kill the other.
“It’s not as bad as I’m making it sound,” Jodie says. She realizes how quiet the house is. She has no idea where her kids have gone. “He’s trying so hard to be useful, and I wish he’d just relax. And then he gets defensive because he doesn’t think I trust him to do anything.”
“It’s that idiot guy stuff. Got to be competent, in control.”
“I think that’s what brought him down the first time.”
“It’ll work out, Jo. You and Mack have a real strength between you.”
Jodie does not say that Mack has moved out of the house. Instead, she remembers vividly when Marty packed up the kids and headed for Omaha to stay with her parents. They stopped long enough to say good-bye to Rita, Mack, Jodie, and the kids. But she’d left the family before that day. They’d all felt her twisting against the tight-lipped resignation they had all grown to wear so well. She left, and Alex died, and God only knows what suffering that has dealt her. Jodie wonders if Marty lies awake still, all this time later, and replays her last words to Alex, replays herself walking out the door, and condemns herself for his death. Some things Jodie will not allow herself to think about for more than a second or two, the pain of those seconds being so swift and complete.
After she hangs up the phone, Jodie walks into the front room of the house. Its picture window overlooks a harvested beanfield, its autumn presence lumpy and gray. During the warm months Jodie gazed over the endless rows, their young leaves twittering and green, inching up and filling out, day by day. She has stood here and watched the motion of breezes through the rows, has breathed in the smell of seedlings growing earthy and luxurious.
When she was a child, living with her parents on the edge of another farm town, she imagined that angels played in the fields, that the wind sounds were really angel whispers, and that when the greenness rippled from one end of the field to the other, the angels were playing. She remembers how intent she used to be on seeing the angels. She would wander out in early mornings, through her parents’ back gate, and venture into the neighbors’ fields. Somewhere she’d gotten the idea that angels become visible in the half-light exactly between night and day. So she would shiver in her pajamas and jacket and tiptoe into a row of corn and look hard at the spaces between the stalks. The angels never became visible to her, but she never doubted they were there.
She stares now, through the large window Mack and Alex installed when their families were young, and the view before her appears infinite. The sense of distance cuts her to the core. So many people she loves are far away now. Her mother and brother Paul, Marty and the kids. Wayfarers, they are off to other regions, following their individual roads. And then there are the dead, who are farthest away of all. She wonders if Daddy, Taylor Senior, and Alex wander the fields as she once imagined the angels did, playing in the breezes and watching over the ongoing family story.
Maybe Jodie is the true wayfarer. Mom and Paul, Marty and Sharon and David are at least headed somewhere. And the deceased have arrived to wherever they were going. It is Jodie who wanders now, from room to room and memory to memory. Even as she stands fast in her living room, she is lost. When she scans the field beyond her window, it is for some sign. She remembers vividly the day she lost five-year-old Kenzie. One moment Kenzie was playing in the sandbox Mack had built for the kids to the east of the vegetable garden; the next moment she was simply gone. Jodie was alone—Mack and Alex were in fields several acres away—and her frightened calls for little Kenzie turned quickly into screams. Then, as she looked out at the soybeans for maybe the twentieth time, there was the rapid bobbing of a sun-streaked head of hair, nearly a hundred yards out. Jodie ran toward the movement in the field, and mother and daughter met and locked under the glare of midday.
The old hymn about the wayfarer puts reunion in each verse: “I’m going there to see my father…savior…companions.” Jodie no longer knows who exactly she longs to meet in that awful space between now and forever, who she hopes will appear between the crop rows. All she knows is how much it hurts to stand alone at her window now, and how much she wants to believe in angels again.
She leaves the front room and studies the calendar on the kitchen wall. Before long, her niece and nephew will be here. Marty will once again sit at the table and sip coffee and wax gently sarcastic about any and all matters. Christmas. Jodie can’t bring herself to think about that. It is just two months away, and nothing is ready. Worse, she doesn’t have any inclination to work at a celebration of any kind. She flirts with the idea of going by herself down to Galveston right on the holiday, let the rest of them fend for themselves. But no, that would be too simple. It would be too much of a comfort for her, to be with her own mom, near the ocean, not having to lift a finger.
5
BUYING TIME
Beneath the cross of Jesus I fain would take my stand,
The shadow of a mighty rock within a weary land;
A home within the wilderness, a rest upon the way,
From the burning of the noontide heat, and the burden of the day.
—“Beneath the Cross of Jesus”
Rita
In the space of a morning, Rita has pulled together three boxes of items to take out to the stone house. Pots and pans, linens, soap, cereal and all manner of canned goods, blankets—she even bought a new one at the pharmacy. If Mack is going to soul-search out by himself in the woods, then he needs to at least be comfortable. This is still within Rita’s power.
Amos helps her load the stuff. He doesn’t ask where it is going, just assumes that she is taking it to somebody’s house or to the local food pantry or something. And Rita doesn’t enlighten him. He is half-deaf and not that connected to community gossip anymore, so chances are Mack will do his little retreat and get himself back home without Amos—or her other neighbors—hearing anything about it.
Mack isn’t at the stone house when she pulls up. It occurs to her then that this is a weekday and of course he’d be at Hendrikson’s. He is still holding down his job, after all.
Well, she can’t carry the boxes in by herself. She sits in the concealed drive, a chilly wind whipping against the car. The minute she gets out in that wind, she knows the coughing will start again. And she’ll have to make trip after trip to the hou
se, unloading the boxes a handful at a time.
She looks at her watch. Young Taylor should be out of school by now. She shifts into reverse and heads for the farmhouse.
When she gets there, she stays in the car and honks. Jodie appears at the back door. She reaches for a corduroy jacket and wraps it around herself as she skips out to the car. Rita rolls down the window just enough to talk.
“Young Taylor here?”
“No.”
“I need him to help me.”
“Can I do it?”
“Can you leave now?”
“Sure.” Jodie hops in.
“I’m just taking some things out to Mack.”
Jodie looks into the boxes on the backseat and says nothing.
“Got extra—it’s just taking up space.”
“He told me he didn’t need anything.”
“He does—just doesn’t know it yet.”
Jodie laughs.
“What’s so funny?”
“Oh. That’s quite a statement: he needs something but doesn’t know it yet.”
Rita thinks about that and chuckles. “I suppose that applies to just about everybody, doesn’t it?”
Jodie insists that Rita stay in the car while she carries the boxes in. It takes her all of ten minutes. Her cheeks are pink by the time she gets back in the car.
Vinita Hampton Wright Page 12
