Vinita Hampton Wright

by Dwelling Places (v5)

  “He’ll think it’s Christmas.”

  “Have you seen him today?”

  “No, he’s at work.”

  “He doesn’t even stop by in the morning?”

  “Just to pick up the kids and take them to school. Speaking of Christmas, Marty called and said that she and the kids were planning to come down for the holidays.”

  Rita’s heart makes an extra powerful thump. She’ll finally get to see David and Sharon. They are both teenagers now. Immediately, a new list forms in her brain, all that she has to get accomplished before they come. When they get back to the farm, she is so distracted by the sudden new plans that she barely hears Jodie say good-bye.

  My Lord, Christmas is around the corner, isn’t it? She has lots of cooking to do in the next few weeks. And shopping. And helping all her old folks with their shopping and their Christmas cards. And extra church events.

  As she enters Beulah’s city limits she sees Young Taylor on foot, apparently heading home. She slams on the brakes and honks. He looks up and doesn’t appear happy. But he comes to her side of the car.

  “Let me give you a ride.”

  “I’m fine, Grandma.”

  “It’s miles to walk!”

  “I’m not going straight home. Eric’s meeting me at the video store.”

  “It’s too cold out here! And why aren’t you getting a lift from your dad? He should be getting off work in just a little while.”

  “Dad needs his space.”

  She stares at her grandson, trying to read something in those shadowy eyes of his. “What in the world does that mean?”

  “I don’t think he wants any company right now. Eric will drive me home later.”

  He turns from her suddenly and continues down the street. Rita slowly pushes on the gas and moves toward home. What makes teenagers so sullen? Were they always that way? What a thing for Young Taylor to say about his dad. She needs to talk to Mack about this. Maybe she should stop at Hendrikson’s before he gets off work. Maybe she should drive back out to the stone house and be waiting for him there. She could cook something and have it ready for him.

  But she hasn’t yet delivered medicine to Mrs. Garvey. Since her stroke, Mrs. Garvey depends on Rita—and others—a lot. It is that or the nursing home. Rita has long suspected that the day Elaine Garvey figures out they are planning to ship her to the nursing home, she’ll eat rat poison or something.

  So here is an old woman who’ll die before leaving her house. And then here is this son who is compelled to not be in his home at all. In a perfect world, Rita would own a mansion and just put everybody in his or her own room. At least then she could stay out of the weather.

  Mack

  The first Sunday after his move, Mack wakes up at five because he’s cold. He digs out one of the blankets his mother brought. But he can’t sleep, so decides to get up. The dawn has slipped behind lately, brightening the woods later and later. For a few moments, while Mack stokes the fire and revels in the heat and makes his coffee, his mind fills with plans for the day, even the week. This is a new start. He will figure things out here. But the enthusiasm fades when he stands up and looks around the place, looks outside at the dark sodden ground. His ideas always require much more energy than he actually has. For all of his planning, he comes to consciousness at about nine o’clock and realizes that he is still hunched beside the stove, clutching a cold and empty coffee cup.

  He goes to church and is glad to see Jodie there. Religion used to be a simple thing. Life was arranged around regular times of worship, prayer meetings sometimes, holiday programs, and the church dinners that felt as familiar as noonday meals at the Lunch Hour. The same people were always at church. The same women prepared the same dishes for potlucks. The same folks became disgruntled over every little thing or helped the rest of them keep a sense of humor. Belief about God wove in and out of conversations with people in the next pew and then in the discussion of pork prices over doughnuts and coffee after the prayers were finished.

  Now there is some hitch in all of this. Mack sits next to Jodie this morning and tries to feel calm and normal. He tries to be comforted by the words he has always known by heart: the story of the woman at the well, the prayer requests that nearly always include someone entering chemotherapy or facing surgery. The announcements of church events that remain essentially the same year in and year out. There is the pancake breakfast to raise money for the senior ministry, a request from the local food pantry for extra donations with the holidays coming up. But Mack can’t listen to them in the same way. He feels twitchy and tired at once. When the prayer requests roll around in their predictability, he silently questions their usefulness. Will this make any difference? Will the cancer disappear now that we’ve mentioned it? He has the sudden urge to add to the list. I can’t bring myself to live in my own house with my wife and kids—how would you announce that, pastor? The Barrys aren’t here this week; I heard at work that she’s filed for divorce. Where does that fit? An announcement or a prayer request?

  To stop these thoughts, he blinks several times and shifts position. Why should he suddenly be so bothered? Why can’t he just sit here and let the words come and go, same as always? They sing the closing hymn, and he turns to Jodie. Seeing the blankness in her face, he wonders if she ever has the sort of mental arguments he’s just waged in his own head.

  “Sweet, do you want to go over to the steak place for lunch?”

  Her expression is pleasant enough. “Well, I was just going to make spaghetti anyway. Sure.” She turns to Rita and then informs Kenzie. Young Taylor didn’t come to church. They leave in their three vehicles, Mack taking the lead, and travel a couple of miles down the highway and pull into the parking lot that is just beginning to fill; it’s a popular after-church place. The steaks are cheap and come with baked potato and salad bar. Rita mentions another restaurant that has added a hot food bar as well, but she’s not complaining. This is merely her ongoing assessment of local food establishments.

  As they sit at the table together, Mack watches his mother, wife, and daughter. He misses his son but knows that Young Taylor’s presence would add more tension than pleasure. It seems to be Young Taylor’s job in life to add tension and see what the rest of them do with it. This thought occurs to Mack just as swiftly as the other thoughts intruded during church. He piles sour cream on his baked potato and asks his mother if she still goes to the nursing home every Sunday afternoon. He knows that she does and that she will now give them the rundown on the residents they know, and on some they don’t. He is able to relax as the space fills with her words; he doesn’t have to respond to them, only to let them be. This is what he wants more than anything in life—to let things be, and to be left alone.

  They say good-bye in the parking lot. Mack takes his time driving back to the stone house, going by a different route to lengthen the trip. He is not yet comfortable with being alone for hours. Maybe he should have accepted Jodie’s invitation to come hang out with her and Kenzie at the farmhouse. But he needs to dive into solitude and suffer through it and come out on the other side. He’s not sure there is another side, but he may as well find out sooner rather than later.

  Most of the trees have faded lately under harvest dust, but the burr oaks and maples around the stone house have turned, filling the atmosphere with their own lights. This time of year the air is faintly sour with early decay. Already the cottonwoods have shaken leaves from their highest branches, layering the ground in dull brown.

  He spends the afternoon gathering wood. He does nothing but walk slowly in one direction and then another, gazing along the ground for twigs and limbs. After a while he begins to separate the wood according to size. He finds a box that once contained a microwave and fills it with kindling. He fills a leaky bucket with the driest twigs. He piles larger sticks to themselves, breaking them across his knee to make them kindling size. Fallen limbs are another pile; these he’ll have to saw into manageable pieces.

  There
is a lot to be gathered right around the house. The clearing has filled up over the years with underbrush and small trees. But a bit farther out the woods are older, and the trees there have been shedding dead branches for decades. A broken limb, a tree split by lightning. Through an afternoon of searching the ground for firewood, Mack is aware of just how cluttered the ground can be without looking cluttered. When he sleeps that night, he dreams of tree parts in all their shapes and thicknesses. He keeps picking up branches through the night.

  The next afternoon, when he gets home from work, he repairs the firewood rack his dad made years ago, and he fills it with the larger logs. By then, it’s too dark to work. So the next day he searches out a few larger limbs and saws them into firewood, using an old bow saw. There was a time when Mack would have tossed that aside and gone back to the farm for the chainsaw. But now he has lots of empty time, and it’s satisfying to do the cutting by hand. The following afternoon he is back at it again. It is a sunny day, and cold enough for a jacket. After a while Mack has slowed to an easy rhythm with the saw. He finds himself watching with interest the teeth biting into the wood and the orange dust building up around the blade.

  He spends hours and hours with wood. With trees and twigs, breathing in the scent of fresh shavings and rotted stumps. By midweek he can close his eyes and identify five or six types of trees just by feeling their bark. He wakes up each morning, and his gaze wanders out to treetops. Wherever he goes he walks over roots. Trees become his habit.

  He moved to the stone house on Friday, and by Monday he knew that he’d not moved far enough. Rita showed up with a backseat full of canned goods and blankets and old dinnerware. She soon ascertained that there was no place to store most of it, so she hauled him back to town to help her load a dresser and utility shelf. Of course, she insisted on staying to cook dinner. Mack decided to stand back from all of this and not get upset. The old leopard would not change her spots, and she seemed less panicky about the situation as long as she was doing something. So let her bring out a dozen bran-banana muffins. That was less cooking he had to do.

  But by now, Wednesday, when the old car rumbles up to his door, something inside Mack reaches its limit. Mom has worn a whole new set of ruts in the ground around the house. He looks out and sees her trying to wrestle a footstool out of the trunk—the one covered with curtain fabric that has been filled for years with old hunting magazines—and he strides out the door, both hands in the air.

  “Mom, I don’t need that. No. Leave it—just take it to the thrift store.”

  “But you’ve always used a footstool.”

  “Well, I don’t now.” He grabs the edge of the stool and maneuvers it back into the trunk. She glares at him when he shuts the lid. “I don’t need anything else.”

  She changes gears in record time, turning toward the house. “You’ve not had any supper I’ll bet.”

  “I’ve got everything I need. You just go home. It’s getting too cold for you to be driving around this late in the day.”

  She stops and does her pressed-lips look, pulling her jacket tighter. “You act like you’re trying to get rid of me.”

  “I’m out here by myself for a reason.”

  “What do you think about out here?” Her directness takes him by surprise. She has shifted her weight to one leg, her arms crossed and making her look more formidable than ever. “Out here all by yourself—what do you think about, son? That’s what worries me. When people stay to themselves too much, they start having thoughts that aren’t good for them.”

  “Not always.”

  “Sometimes they go a little crazy.”

  “Well, I’ve already been crazy, so the prospect doesn’t scare me so much now.” He sees her immediate disapproval and laughs to indicate that he’s joking. “Mom, I’m doing all right.”

  “You’re sleeping well?” There’s that mother tone that is so hard to resist. “You still have an appetite?”

  “I’m sleeping and eating just fine.”

  Her eyes mist over then, and she reaches up and pecks him on the cheek. Then she pulls away fast and goes back to her car. Mack wishes he’d taken that moment to give her a hug, something she probably needs more than she would admit. But she flashes that strong smile and a little wave, and drives off without looking back.

  Mack goes back to the house and sits on one of the two chairs left from an old dinette set, his feet up on the daybed. He’s arranged it so that he can sit like this and look out the window and into the woods. He does this often, and many minutes might go by before he notices or changes position.

  Jodie

  “This is a bad idea. A really bad idea.”

  In the privacy of the truck cab, Jodie tries to entertain common sense. She’s had so many discussions with herself in this junky space that she may as well just tape the set of speeches and replay them when appropriate. There’s the speech reminding herself that even obnoxious teenagers grow up and into nice people eventually. And the one about the home repairs that would be nice but are not urgent. It is three in the afternoon, and the sun is hitting her right in the eyes and turning the dust on the windshield into a bright murkiness that cuts visibility to nearly nothing. Pop cans roll in the floorboards among the fast-food trash. The dash and passenger seat are cluttered by stiff work gloves, some loose and dusty books on tape, four weeks of church bulletins, and a plastic grocery bag full of canned diced tomatoes she was supposed to have delivered to Rita.

  During the past couple of years she has reentered the adolescent stage of imagining elaborate scenarios in which she will somehow, in the course of her regular and grueling life, happen on to one of her favorite actors. Perhaps John Cusack will have a flat tire while wheeling across the state of Iowa on his way to some offbeat film festival. Or Harvey Keitel will stop at the house, wanting directions to the colonies of Amana or the bridges of Madison County. Jodie has allowed herself rampant fantasies; she doesn’t even feel embarrassed about them anymore.

  Back when this started, Mack was keeping her up nights with his pacing. His agitation put them all on edge. That, and the anger that would flash out of him when he made the slightest error or couldn’t put his thoughts together fast enough. The worst times, though, were when he wandered between the house and outbuildings, or just stood in the alfalfa, looking frightened. When he did manage to lie down and try to sleep, and when Jodie lay beside him, her heart clattering almost audibly, it had been such a relief, such a break from her mind’s real work, to fantasize about romances that would never happen.

  Foolish fantasies work better than allowing panic to fill the bedroom. They work better than praying to the God she no longer trusts to protect her family. And while pastors and Sunday School teachers always warned about the sinfulness of such daydreams, this season of Jodie’s life has revealed to her how little she concerns herself with right and wrong anymore. Her remaining virtue seems to be the will to survive. If imaginary diversions can help her get through another few hours, then God will simply have to cut her some slack.

  But at moments like this, driving along in a filthy pickup littered with the family’s trash and chaos, if Jodie were to see John and Harvey in the same car, stalled right in front of her, she would step on the gas. She has stopped checking the rearview mirror to see if, in the past week, the tiredness has emptied from her face, to glance at the little lines forming around her mouth, the diminished eyes and lifeless hair. She wears jeans stained with either paint or spaghetti sauce, she can’t remember which. Twenty years ago her oversized flannel shirt would have made her look cute, but now it just adds weight to her natural baggage. She doesn’t even want friends and neighbors to see her anymore, let alone some handsome guy looking for an afternoon romance.

  The truck makes its automatic way into town. She watches her hands, her dry-looking, forty-something hands, grip the steering wheel and look as if they were expert at something. She glances a second time at the wedding band. Dull with time, but sturdy as ever.

&nbs
p; She has agreed to meet Terry Jenkins for coffee at the Lunch Hour, that’s all. He will walk over from the school, after gathering materials from his classroom. It isn’t unusual for Terry to be at the school on a Saturday. He heads up one or two faculty committees and is involved in some extracurricular activities with students. He asked Jodie to help him organize a local history tour for his social studies classes. Jodie is friends with Naomi Muller, who is one of the several senior citizen curators of Beulah’s small but growing museum. That’s what Jodie and Terry will talk about over coffee at the town’s only café. They will meet in the daylight where everyone can see them, and they will make plans for a series of tours during the dreary winter months. Within several counties are nearly as many museums, most of them housed in old buildings or otherwise vacant storefronts along near-deserted main streets. Most are piled high with items that testify to the way people lived in every era of the past 150 years. These museums have no official guardians or professional curators, just old folks who want to preserve the history of their communities and have little else to do. It will be a good way to spark the interest of a few bored kids in the middle of February.

  Jodie is aware of other sparks that might ignite as well over this innocent coffee. She has been out of circulation for years where flirtation is concerned, but right now her gut apparently knows more than she is willing to admit. She remembers Terry’s longer-than-normal gaze in the parking lot weeks ago. And the chemistry between them has become palpable enough that she makes an effort to avoid seeing him or talking to him directly at school—or, depending on the day and her mood, she does make the effort to do so. While she tells herself with perfect logic that this is just coffee, her palms get sweaty.

  She pulls up to the café beside three other vehicles she recognizes. Terry’s isn’t one of them. He rents a small house three blocks away. Since moving back to Beulah eighteen months ago, he has adopted the town’s shrinking core as his home space. His parents still farm a few miles north of here. Terry went to college right after he graduated, about the time Mack and Jodie were getting married. Jodie is two years older than Terry and can remember him vaguely from school years. When people are under the age of twenty, two or three years’ difference in age separates entire worlds. So when Terry returned, after years of teaching in other places and a short, childless marriage, Jodie noticed his presence on the faculty but didn’t give it a second thought.