Vinita Hampton Wright

by Dwelling Places (v5)

  Rita offers to make Amos some coffee, but he declines and says good-bye. Rita thanks him profusely, newly appreciative of what the man has helped her accomplish today. She’s not used to feeling miserable, and she’s not at all sure she could have gotten all her Christmas food delivered if Amos hadn’t been along.

  She sits at the kitchen table and reaches for the little notebook on top of her Bible. On today’s page of prayer requests is written: “help me deliver Christmas food.” She uncaps her pen, makes a thick check mark beside that line, recaps the pen, and closes the notebook. If a person were to ask her exactly how God had been involved today, she couldn’t really answer. For all she knows—and this thought she swats away as if it were a hornet—the Lord wasn’t involved at all. Was He behind the bad weather, or her bronchitis? If so, He wasn’t much help. But if He was involved with Amos being there to carry and drive, and with the car behaving itself, then He was helpful indeed. Her check marks these days are more habit than faith, but she figures it can’t hurt to give the Lord some credit, whatever the case.

  Mack

  When he stops at his mother’s, a bad sense hits him. He parks the truck in the alley and goes up the back walk to the kitchen door. Rita is visible through the sheer curtains above the sink. She is coughing as if to rid herself of some creature at the bottom of her gut, leaning over the sink and grabbing its rim for support. Mack doesn’t even knock, just opens the back door and hurries in.

  “Mom, are you choking?”

  She shakes her head vigorously, turns to motion at him, and manages to say, “No, just some phlegm I can’t get up.”

  The coughing settles down, and she does too, in the closest kitchen chair.

  “You’re taking the antibiotics, right?”

  She frowns. “Yes.”

  “Because you’ve got to take ’em until they’re gone. You know that, right? If you start feeling better, you take the pills anyway.”

  She squeezes her eyes shut, as if Mack might be gone when she opens them again. “How many years have I lived on this planet, son?”

  “More years than I have, but you manage to ignore the information you don’t like.” He sits in the chair next to her and puts a hand on her arm.

  “I’m taking the antibiotics, so just hush up.”

  He notices then the cardboard boxes lined up on the cabinet. “What’s this?” He gets up to see. The boxes are empty, except for a few items: zucchini bread wrapped in plastic, baggies full of assorted cookies, some fudge. He can tell by the red and green ribbons what he’s looking at.

  “Have you been out?” He looks at her sharply.

  “Of course. I’ve got folks to deal with.”

  “You were out today, in this weather?”

  “If I waited for sunshiny days, that stuff might sit till Easter.”

  “Mom! You’re not supposed to be out—we could’ve delivered this stuff for you.”

  “All of you are busy, and it’s just a few houses in town. And Amos drove me.” She throws in this last bit of information as if that changes everything.

  He looms over her, and she looks up at him, defiant as Young Taylor.

  “Do you hear a word the doctor says?” he asks.

  “That doctor is unrealistic. And he’s overcautious. They’re all just trying to keep from getting sued.”

  “No, he’s trying to keep you from getting another infection. He said that your lungs are weak and you’ve got to be careful.” Mack looks back at the food items. “You’ve been up all hours baking this stuff, and then you go out into the snow hauling these boxes around—”

  “I am not going to just sit in my house! It’s Christmas, and most of these old folks don’t have much else to look forward to.”

  “They’d be just as happy if Jodie and I delivered the stuff and told them you’ll visit when you’re feeling better.”

  She looks away, and neither of them speaks for a long moment. Finally, she says, “It’s not the same if somebody else delivers it. And I’ll do whatever I see fit.”

  Mack sits again, an elbow on the table, fingers kneading his head. “What is it with this family?”

  “What?” She glares at him.

  “We’re just not satisfied until we work ourselves to death. First Pop, and now you.”

  Her eyes appear suddenly to focus. “What about your dad?”

  “You know what I’m talking about.” They lock gazes, and Mack knows now why he had such an ominous feeling when he drove up. He stopped here to have the conversation that’s about to happen. “Pop thought it was more important to take care of everybody than to keep living.”

  Rita’s gaze is steely. “He was a hard worker.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “Then what are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about an accident that shouldn’t have happened.” He can’t believe what he’s about to say next but listens to it come out of his mouth anyway. “I’ve wondered for a long time if it was an accident.”

  She draws up to perfect posture but doesn’t reply for a long while. When she does speak, Mack is surprised at her composure.

  “It was always in your father’s character to sacrifice himself for others. It was his choice, his way. I’ll not dishonor his memory by questioning his motives or his actions.” Rita says these words with a steadiness and clarity that make it seem she has rehearsed them many times for years, day after day, to herself.

  Mack tries to read the depths of his mother’s eyes. Of course she will defend Pop’s actions, even his final one. What did Mack expect? He realizes that the question hanging in the air is not whether or not his father’s death was intentional.

  “Is that what you’re going to do too? Sacrifice your health without even consulting the rest of us? Will we find you dead in this house one of these days, and are we supposed to be happy about it when it happens?”

  Rita’s face trembles unnaturally. For a moment, Mack thinks she will slap him hard across the mouth. She did it once, long ago, when Mack was a kid and back-talking her. It was the only time she’d laid a hand on him, beyond the mere spankings when he was a small child—the swat that warned him away from the hog pen, the smack on the hand that kept him far from the stovetop when she was canning. But just that once, a real blow. It had shocked them both, but she never apologized, and he never expected it. He’d been mean-mouthed that day, a sassy kid about Young Taylor’s age, too big to be speaking so ignorantly and so hatefully. He’d deserved that slap. Right now, he wonders if he deserves another. But Rita sits like a statue, trembling in her cheeks, her very eyelids.

  Unable to maintain eye contact, Mack looks away. His sight lands on the Bible and little notebook that are stacked neatly against the windowsill. “You’re not Jesus, Mom.” The words leave him like a gentle wind. He doesn’t want them to damage her in any way.

  “I’m not trying to be.”

  “Yes, you are. You think it’s all up to you, how everything turns out. It just doesn’t work that way. No matter what we do, things slip away, Mom.”

  “Well—” Her voice is hoarse, from congestion or from tears. “I’m not willing to let you and the kids slip away.”

  “We’re not going anywhere. You know I’m back home now.”

  “Yes.”

  “And we can help you do whatever you need to do.”

  “I’m just fine.”

  “Don’t go out by yourself. We’ll help you deliver the rest of your Christmas presents.”

  She won’t answer. He can tell that the conversation is over and that he’s probably not done any good whatsoever. Mom believes what she needs to believe. She gets up, not looking at him. “I’m taking a nap.” And she walks back toward her bedroom. As Mack heads for the door she reappears abruptly, in the hallway.

  “There was never a note, Mack. He would’ve left one.”

  Mack swallows. “You’re right. He was probably too tired to watch what he was doing.”

  She tur
ns and leaves him again. He doesn’t know if the relief he feels is for this conclusion they have arrived at or for their conversation ending on a better note. “Bye, Mom.” He shuts the back door behind him, but instead of walking all the way to his truck angles toward the garage and enters it by the side door. There his mother’s car sits, still warm to the touch. He raises the hood, does what he has to do, and closes it up again. When he gets home, he’ll call Tom and instruct him to pretend ignorance when Rita calls him to figure out why her car won’t start. Tom’s an honest mechanic but a good neighbor too.

  He drives home through cold drizzle, repeating what he said to his mother, wondering if he really said it. “You’re not Jesus.” He feels old. He never thought he’d come to this, sabotaging his mother’s car to keep her indoors. “I’m not Jesus either.” He feels an urgency to get home to his family. It will be good to be in from this weather, to gather in warm rooms, speak to each child, and hug his wife. He realizes that those things will be enough to bring him happiness this evening. “We’re not Jesus, but we’ll have to do.”

  11

  HOLDING STILL

  Alone with thee, amid the mystic shadows,

  The solemn hush of nature newly born;

  Alone with thee in breathless adoration,

  In the calm dew and freshness of the morn.

  Still, still with thee, as to each newborn morning,

  A fresh and solemn splendor still is given,

  So does this blessed consciousness, awaking,

  Breathe each day nearness unto thee and heaven.

  —“Still, Still with Thee”

  Mack

  The sun is rising into a clear sky this morning, making the day appear warmer even though the thermometer outside the kitchen reads twenty degrees. Mack has the day off because Nancy Hendrikson’s father passed away last night—massive heart attack. He was seventy-five and had worked hard his whole life, but remained forty pounds overweight. It was his second attack, sudden. At least family was with him; his grandson Jason had come over to help the old man string Christmas lights. Mack and Jodie will take food over later and then attend the wake. This is the first of probably several deaths that will reach them during the winter. The old folks just can’t take the cold as well. They stay indoors in the stale air and get the same ailments over and over. And they get tired of all the gray outside.

  The radio is on as Mack guides the car down the frosty road. They have come to the obituaries, and Mack turns it up, to hear about Nancy’s father. He listens through several variations on “Funeral services for eighty-one-year-old Hal Lundeen of Oskaloosa will be held Thursday at ten-thirty A.M., with burial at Cedar Hill Cemetery. Visitation begins at seven o’clock Wednesday evening. The Marshall Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements for Hal Lundeen of Oskaloosa.” Nancy’s father is next to the last.

  He feels like taking pictures. He still keeps the prints tacked to the walls of the stone house. He has four rolls’ worth now, lined up like ragged banners along the light paneling. Every other day or so he stops by and stands in the cold room and looks at his collection. They aren’t going to win any photography awards. Hardly any of them have turned out the way they looked when he shot them. But he’s grabbed enough information to help him sort and hang them. They are divided into four groups, designated by which direction the scenes lie from Mack’s home. There are the East Pictures and the West Pictures, the North and South Pictures. Underneath each print is an old business card, blank side out, bearing more information: “Thompson place,” “Harold Cane’s barn,” “Mrs. Richie’s house,” “Fernmuller place.” Each is a version of the same truth: an empty structure of some sort that still has enough form to be called something. Some days Mack loses track of time as he stands there and looks at these frozen scenes.

  He stops now, four miles from home. A truck path leaves the county road and enters a pasture. There is no fence. Mack turns off the road and follows the track. He’s pretty sure this is the Simonsons’ property. The ground is frozen hard, allowing the car to enter the field with little trouble.

  After a couple hundred yards, the track fades. It ends at a solitary structure, a corncrib someone’s grandfather built. It edges what was a beanfield before the harvest. Where the tracks peter out, a single faint path continues, looking as if it leads to the end of everything. Mack considers putting his feet on that path and stopping only when it stops. It might take him to the beginning—the place before farmers or even Indians, the place as it was in the beginning and that it wants, deep down, to be always. Whoever gave men the idea that they could change its face and plant it as they saw fit, and make it serve them?

  He takes six pictures and then drives back to the county road. He heads north as the sun climbs into the crystal sky. He passes what used to be the McDougle place. He recognizes the low slope of the chicken coop. Back in the summer, Mack had approached the deserted yard, thinking he spied blackberries. Insects shrieked from the layers of shoulder-high weeds that choked the yard and old hog pens, and breezes swirled eerily through the empty rooms of the house. But more disconcerting were the clear sounds and faces that crowded to the front of his inner senses. The McDougles have been dead twenty, thirty years, their three children routed out of this yard long ago, having established in some busier, happier town the family’s new center of gravity. Yet this spot at the far end of the cornfield seems populated by ghosts, or by other beings never quite visible but always threatening to appear. Mack shivers even now, from the cold and from intuition, as the scene slips past his window.

  He drives into Beulah and walks into the Lunch Hour. By now it’s midmorning, and the small toasty space hums with people trying to get warm and grabbing a second cup of coffee before going back to work. A couple of the men nod to him, and he nods back. He sits not far from three women who share a table. They are middle-aged, with graying hair cropped short and decorative sweatshirts topping off stretch pants. The women around here seem to become thicker and more masculine as they age, while their husbands grow more spindly and softer around the edges.

  Mack sits in a booth and asks for coffee and apple pie. From there he observes the conversation going on at the counter. Julie is pouring coffee refills, and the farmers gather round in their overalls, their denim rear ends reminding Mack of the backsides of cows at a feeding trough. His gaze travels to their faces. He sees them not as faces of people he knows but as merely faces on people. It is an odd sensation.

  It’s not always easy to read a farmer’s face. You see the windburn on his cheeks and the cracks in his hands and know what work he does. You see the weariness in his eyes and understand that his life is not easy. But the details are hidden away, behind the handshake, the work clothes, and the slight smile that is part of his greeting, a standard hello for anyone he passes. His eyes do not speak of what calamity he’s dealing with now—a market that’s bottomed out or a wife’s illness. His expression tells you that there’s work to be done, that’s all.

  But when Mack looks at his own face in the mirror these days, his eyes say far too much. By now he understands that his depression does not set him apart from many folks around here; everyone has a share of it, because everyone’s life has had its hard times. But for some reason, Mack had to crawl to the heart of his darkness. That’s how he is different from the men at the counter.

  And he has put everything into spoken words, has sat in rooms with those doctors who knew nothing, nothing at all, about the life he and all of the others have lived. He sat there and told all, offered up revelation after revelation, relinquished all of their stories with his one.

  And so his face is different now from the faces of his neighbors. He looks in the mirror and sees layers of information right there in his eyes. Technically, he is no longer a farmer. But week after week, in George Dooley’s small office, he delves into what it means, more than a subject should ever be explored. He has been led by people in light coats, people with smooth, sensitive hands, into the world of tal
king, talking, talking. He has talked, has uncovered things that can never be understood. And now his face shows all the confusion his words have caused.

  He leaves the café twenty minutes later, stepping into the sharp air. The Lunch Hour sits at the end of a block. When Mack turns right and walks east, the sidewalk takes a dip, and suddenly there is Ray Danson’s barren soybean field. No matter where he turns, there is someone’s land, and there is the history of his own industry. George is right: a person can survive here only by redefining everything. Mack’s instincts must be redirected, his memories reorganized toward a different story and outcome.

  It is a week before Christmas, and the weather is cold and bleak enough to chase everyone inside. In the middle of the workday, Beulah’s streets are empty. Mack continues to wander around in the car, not yet ready to be home. All his life he has studied details: the inner workings of machinery, the texture and smell of ripening crops, the coarseness of dirt under his boots, the shade of the sky just before sundown. He needs to see other details now. He wants to see. So he parks the car on the east side of the old town square. The four streets that enclose the block are too clean, even for the dead of winter. There is little clutter of business, only smooth, empty storefronts instead. In good weather, a handful of kids with skateboards command the sidewalks, their wheels making echoes among the old, lonely trees.

  The grain elevator, two streets over, towers over the small downtown. It is twice as high and twice as thick as any other structure nearby. The bank, snug at the corner of Main and Second Streets, is still the town’s most beautiful building. Solid limestone up to the large front window, above it exact configurations of deep red brick. It is an opera house among the storefronts, its original name Beulah City Bank, still embossed above the arched window. Underneath, within that window, is the bank’s current name, which has changed three times in five years. To avoid straining anyone’s short-term memory, everyone calls it The Bank.