Vinita Hampton Wright

by Dwelling Places (v5)

  Mom sits cross-legged, there on the bed, and tucks hair behind her ear. “How long have you two been friends?”

  “A few months. Since before Halloween.”

  “So you talk? And you pray, stuff like that?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Do you…” Mom is thinking hard. “Do you feel romantic toward him?”

  “It’s more like a calling.”

  “What calling?” Dad asks.

  “To work for God together.”

  “That’s what you were going to do at this retreat place?”

  “Yes.”

  For a moment, she thinks that the conversation is over. She has answered their questions, and nobody’s getting mad. But Mom’s eyes are working still, and she then does what she is so good at doing—getting to the point.

  “Kenzie, have you been having sex with him?”

  Thank you, Jesus, for helping us stay pure. “No, Mom.”

  “You haven’t?”

  “He’s kissed me a couple of times, that’s all. We want to stay in God’s will.”

  “You know,” Dad says, and clears his throat, “there’s a reason Mitchell stays up for days at a time.”

  Mom finally looks at him.

  “It’s God’s Spirit,” Kenzie says.

  Dad rubs his hands together slowly, the way he does when he’s working out something in his head. “I think there’s more to it than that. He has a condition that makes him swing from highs to lows. It’s a chemical thing in his brain.”

  “How would you know?” She can feel demons at the door.

  “Well, because someone who knows him told me. And Mitchell doesn’t always take his medicine—”

  “I don’t want to hear this, okay? You think that everything gets solved with some stupid pill!”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You’re the king of pills! You don’t know anything!”

  “Kenzie!” Mom’s eyes flash.

  “I’m just trying to do things the right way, Mom!” If she hadn’t cried so much already, there would be tears coming now. She’s glad there aren’t, because she has to be strong. “I pray and pray, and it doesn’t make any difference. You just don’t care! You don’t have faith! Nobody in this family cares anymore! You just pop pills and argue and—” Well, maybe she didn’t run out of tears after all. She gets off the bed to head for the hallway and the bathroom, but Dad takes hold of her, and just like that she’s on his lap. And just like a little girl with no strength at all, she is crying into his shirt, and he is saying over and over, “Baby, baby. We’re all right. Everybody’s all right. Baby, baby…”

  The rest of the evening is quiet, full of tears and sighs. She can tell that Mom and Dad are both hurting a lot; they hardly ever cry in front of her or Young Taylor, but they weep too a little, and stay close by. Mom makes hot chocolate, and they are at the kitchen table drinking it when Young Taylor comes in, full of a strange story about Grandma. Dad just stares at Young Taylor and manages a question or two.

  “So she’s home? She’s all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And where’s the car?”

  Young Taylor shrugs. “She made us leave it at the dump. Said something about wanting a Chevy. I don’t know—you go talk to her.”

  “She coughing a lot?”

  “No. I think she got scared, though, sitting out there on the road.”

  “Well, good. Maybe she’ll stay put for a change.”

  “Maybe we should just get her a better car.” Young Taylor seems to notice then that something’s wrong. “What’s up?”

  Mom pulls him down to the remaining kitchen chair and goes for another cup. “Nothing. You have supper?”

  “Grandma made me eat soup with her.”

  Shortly before midnight, Dad walks Kenzie down to where she is supposed to meet Mitchell. He didn’t want to at first, but probably he thinks this is the easiest way to confront Mitchell. Then Kenzie thinks it’s probably not such a good idea. She wants to go by herself, promising to say good-bye to Mitchell and come right back. Of course, Dad won’t go for that. Mom says that maybe she should come along, but Dad waves her off, almost as though he’s mad that she’d suggest it. Probably fathers need to take charge of stuff like this.

  They wait a long time, but Mitchell never comes. She tells herself that he must have found out that people knew, and so he stayed away. But that doesn’t even matter now. She is tired and kind of relieved that she doesn’t have to take such a big, awesome step this minute, this day. She wonders if Jesus has intervened, through Mom and Dad and even the mistake with the journal, and saved her from what looked right at the time but really wasn’t. In a strange way, when she and Dad walk back into the house and she goes upstairs, she feels as if she is returning to her real self. This is too confusing to think about—who has she been lately, if not herself? And haven’t her prayers been true, her time with Jesus exactly what it should be? But she pushes all of this away as she crawls into bed, her head aching from all the crying and trying. Dad kisses her good-night, and Mom comes in and lies down beside her. She doesn’t remember when Mom gets up, only that she is alone when she awakes for a moment and sees that the clock says four A.M., and she feels perfectly safe.

  Jodie

  She and Mack have been talking, off and on, for hours. Kenzie is spending the day at Rita’s, helping her clean out kitchen cabinets, because Rita saw a mouse two days ago and won’t rest until the whole place is ravaged. The two of them are without transportation, and Kenzie is calm, though not talkative. Mack and Jodie decided that a day with Grandma might do her good, although Grandma has no idea that she almost lost Kenzie to some cult off in Kansas. Young Taylor has uncharacteristically taken his hunting rifle and Ed’s dog out to the fields in hopes of bringing home some rabbits. He still won’t eat any form of pork but has apparently rediscovered the value of killing his own food.

  Jodie is cleaning house like a mad woman, Mack trailing behind her, doing what he can. And the whole time they talk. They yell or cry or stomp out of the room. He has set up an appointment for them to talk with George, and now she doesn’t want anything to do with it. She says she has broken things off with Terry, but he suspects she hasn’t. They talk at each other, over and around each other. It is a prolonged battle, brimming with strategy and failure.

  “I’m trying to do what you need for me to do, Jo.”

  “How can you know what I need? I don’t even know what I need. You think you can just fix things. That’s always been your problem. You’re your mother’s son. Just fix things and expect people to shape up.”

  “Maybe I used to be that way, but not anymore. Nothing’s that simple. I’m not trying to make it simple.”

  “Just give me space, Mack.”

  “And let you leave without trying to put us back together?”

  “I don’t have the energy to put anything back together.”

  “That’s why we need to keep our appointment with George.”

  “It would be you two against me.”

  “What?” He drops the pile of newspapers he’s gathering. “What are you talking about?”

  “You’ve already got this relationship. I’m the new one. And I’m the one who’s been sleeping around. I know where this is going.”

  “Jo, it’s not like that. This guy is real professional. He’d never stack the deck. He wants to help both of us.”

  “But, see—” She slaps the dust rag on the back of the sofa. “See, what you don’t get is that, no matter what anybody says, you’re the person who needs help and I’m the person who has screwed up. Because you’re the one who went to the hospital, and I’m the one who stayed home and let everything go to hell. I’m the one who didn’t hold things together in the first place. See, Mack, it’s my job to make sure you and the kids are okay. And I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it. So I’m already guilty.”

  Mack gets up and heads for the door.

  “Where are you going?”
r />   He doesn’t turn around. “I can’t.”

  “Can’t what?” The old impatience rises in her, this inability to deal with her husband’s unfinished sentences.

  “I can’t be in this room right now.” He is through the kitchen and gone before she can pull him back with more questions.

  But his words repeat in her mind: I can’t be in this room right now. When has he said this before? She knows he has said almost those exact words, but not recently. She picks up the dust rag again and stares out the window, where Mack is coming into view. He is walking to the old barn, the one that houses all their leftovers. He will rummage around for an hour or more, finding things to chop into kindling or patch up in some way.

  Then she hears those words of his, from deep in her memory. I can’t even sit in the same room with him. It was what Mack told her the Sunday he walked out of church, halfway through the service. One of the deacons was their banker, and after months of battles in the man’s office, after the notices and warnings and refusals had built up into a wall no human could climb over, Mack had said that he could not sit in that church with that man. He had left before the offering plates were passed—a part of the service painful to them, a family who had given to the church always, without fail, until recent months—and he had never gone back.

  I can’t be in this room right now. Jodie feels a hammer strike that hard thing inside her, that core of strength that has, over months of coping, turned into coldness. She realizes suddenly that Mack did not say what he actually meant: I can’t be in this room—with you—right now.

  So this is what she has become: the banker. The caretaker of other people’s troubles, the one who in the end turns tired and angry and finally greedy, the one who stops hearing others’ sorrows and simply collects their property. The one to whom the debts are owed, debts that cannot possibly be repaid. She has piled up Mack’s debts, all the pains his pain has caused her, and she has kept the books, and he can see that pile of debts between the two of them, and he knows that what she demands of him is impossible. She needs a bookkeeping sort of justice. She is the banker, and she can foreclose whenever she wants.

  Jodie feels the hammer strike again, like a judge’s gavel, against her tired, rigid heart. She tries to stop thinking, but instead imagines, in acute detail, the devastation in her husband’s spirit. The accumulation of defeats. The constant inability to do enough or be enough. And the loss of the one person, his wife, who could have, with a look or a few words, rendered those defeats less deadly. Jodie begins to tremble. In light of this great, awful sin, this gathering and keeping of debts against her husband, her adultery of recent days seems almost a small thing.

  Mack

  As his family troops out the door and gets in the car, Mack fears that he is leading them to a place from which they will not return whole. After Reverend Maynor came by a few days ago and invited them to the special church service, Jodie didn’t say a word about it, but Mack brought it up with George. And George, the master of deadpan, displayed enthusiasm on the spot. A grieving ceremony, yes. A chance to make the good-byes formal. What an excellent idea. And Mack called the reverend and committed his household to the evening, without asking anyone else’s permission. This is not the way he usually does things, but when Jodie and the kids gave him incredulous looks, he did not defend himself but took another tack altogether.

  “Would you all do this for me? I feel like it would help.” Asking for help is not his habit either, but it won over Kenzie, who, even as wounded as she is, still wants to be helpful. Young Taylor shrugged, and Mack took that as a yes.

  He has feared all day that Jodie will back out at the last minute. If she goes, it will be only for his sake, and these days he cannot measure the depth or intensity of her feelings toward him. He no longer assumes that she is committed to his well-being, and this has wiped out his equilibrium. Somehow, he stays in the house. He even sleeps in their bed, although he doesn’t lie down until she is asleep, and he does not touch her. It stirs up all of his anger to be so close to her. His stomach churns acid, and he doesn’t sleep for hours at a time. But they have decided that the last thing their daughter needs right now is seeing her dad move to the spare bedroom. Plus, Mack fears that if he walks out of their bedroom he will never again find its entrance.

  He doesn’t know how he keeps going about his business, putting in full days at the shop and dwelling in the farmhouse every evening, taking care to talk with his children. It’s all he has, these moments full of awkward questions and answers or superficial comments about the day, but he just keeps talking and listening and trying to read these people who have managed to wander so far from him and each other.

  It’s as if his soul has its own agenda now. He goes through the motions of love and acts as if things will get better, which, as recently as a few months ago, would have felt hypocritical. But the efforts don’t seem hollow to him. They are steps he must take, regardless of any immediate reward or relief. So he steps into each day and just keeps stepping.

  Now the four of them step into a cold afternoon in mid-January. Mack notices the sky without really studying it. In the back of his mind float masses of chalky gray. He is ready for the sun to shine again, ready for color and the smell of soft dirt. The fields are still bright and expansive from the snowfall of two days ago. Even without direct sunshine the land’s surface is as smooth and white as frosting on a wedding cake. In fields where corn stood during the past year, perfect lines of tan stubble push through the crust of snow and mark the memory of harvest.

  In a land of long straight lines, Grace Methodist of Oskaloosa offers a large room filled with roundness—oval windows and pews that curve to hug the front of the sanctuary. The old wood shines. The gently shaded stained glass tints the air with combinations of color that suggest holiness and perfection that reside not out in the elements but in people’s hearts. When summer was laden with heat and maturing crops, the sanctuary air brushed silkily across bare arms and necks, and the polished wood of pews, altar, pulpit, and piano tickled a person’s nose with the memory of resin, sawdust, linseed oil.

  Mack and Jodie first came here to worship summer before last. It was a shift away from the friends and enemies of the tiny Methodist congregation in Beulah. The pastor serves both congregations. Reverend Maynor, with losses of her own behind her, has been ordained for five years, the last two of them served here. She lends a soft strength to the community in the way the church gives curves to the straight-edged fields beyond its property.

  Now, in the dead of January, the dried-out Christmas greenery has been removed from windows, ledges, and railings, but still there is the scent of cedar. It is a golden room in the middle of a cold blue landscape.

  Kenzie hasn’t said much to either Mack or Jodie since the night they found out about Mitchell Jaylee. For the first time in her young life, Mack senses true defiance in his daughter. It doesn’t present itself as open anger, only quiet obedience that seems to have no spirit left, and Mack approaches Kenzie as if she were a new acquaintance.

  He and Jodie talked to the youth pastor at the Baptist church, who was almost as upset as they were, ashamed at not having figured out that something was wrong. Pastor Williamson showed them a video that Kenzie gave him to watch, apologizing for not having jumped on that issue immediately. Mack and Jodie watched about fifteen minutes of it, while Kenzie was out of the house. Reverend Francis struck them as most definitely crazy if not criminal, but they don’t yet know how to suggest this to Kenzie. Pastor Williamson has offered to work on this part of it, and they are grateful.

  They are also relieved that the situation with Jaylee did not go further. After talking with Kenzie, Pastor Williamson is convinced that there was no sexual relationship, although it certainly seemed to be heading in that direction. Mitchell hasn’t been seen in Beulah since the day he and Kenzie were to run away together. Jerry has tried to contact Reverend Francis’s compound, but no one will return his calls, and given that Mitchell
is a grown man, Jerry is not compelled to bother law enforcement officials two states away. This would not be the first time Jaylee shut up his house and disappeared for weeks at a time.

  Now Kenzie and her mother sit mutely in the pew, a foot apart. They look shut down, and as Mack observes the other people who are gathering, the fear races through him again. He has no right to drag them through this, not now.

  Rita is homebound, after yet another trip to the emergency room. Not from pneumonia but a fractured shin. She slipped on her own back step, taking out garbage that Mack would have hauled out if she had just waited another twenty minutes. He is slightly grateful, though, that she is unable to be with them this evening. She’s shown no interest at all in the service, and he has run out of fight or patience where she is concerned. Amos cornered him earlier today, when Mack stopped by to take the two meals Jodie put together for her, and asked if Rita would like company, and Mack said, yes, she’d probably really like that.

  Young Taylor does not sit with them but takes a place in the very back pew, close to the door, in case he needs to make a fast getaway, Mack guesses. He wears all black but no makeup. Mack turns in the pew once or twice to be sure he’s not slipped out. The second time, Young Taylor, his arms stretched along the pew back, raises a forefinger in acknowledgment.

  Ed and Lacy are here. They sit in the pew just behind Mack and Jodie. Of course they would be here, as they are always close by. Several members of Beulah Methodist are present; Mack doesn’t know which “grieving families” they are connected to, but he does notice Jon and Annette Peters and remembers that Jodie used to go places with Annette. What Mack hasn’t expected, though, is to see the Lesters, Masons, and Kernbetters, neighbors who have farmed adjacent acreages during the past twenty years. The Masons were good friends of Rita and Taylor Senior. They smile at Mack and Jodie and sit a few pews away.

  Three other families are making formal good-byes to farming. Two of them Mack and Jodie know, having followed their tragedies at a distance even while their own unfolded. The third couple live in the next county, and their loss is the most recent: they auctioned off their goods not quite three months ago.