by Joan Chase
We hear something move in the weeds at the back of the yard. At first we are scared but when we edge closer we see that it is Rossie leading Queenie. He hardly ever rides her, is considered too heavy, but still he is bossy because she came as a gift from his father. Queenie is the only material evidence we have of that man’s existence, other than Rossie, although Gram remembers him and has told us that his friends called him “Dopey.” Sometimes we are afraid Rossie will hurt Queenie and we try to protect her, and tell on him. But this night we are too amazed and excited that he would have her here with him in the dark.
“We want a turn,” we yelp when we see the two of them clearly.
“Shut up,” he says. “Who’s there?”
“Us.”
“Okay. Today I showed you a trick. Now I’m going to do one. Like they do in the rodeo. And you can watch. Go turn on the light.” Celia says she doesn’t remember a trick, but the rest of us remember how she flew across the yard.
After that we make a little audience for him between the cornfield and the lawn, where he mounts Queenie. He carries a willow switch. Usually it is the most we can do to get her to move at all, either that or she runs away with us to the barn.
The porch light comes over the lawn and seems like a spotlight for a stage. Rossie draws Queenie up tight on the reins. Then he kicks her and lashes her with the switch. She is so startled she bucks, going straight up, so that Rossie nearly slides off. Even in the faint light we can see his face and something in us cringes. We know that look which comes over his face when things don’t go his way, comes on him when he sits on our stomachs and pounds our chests. He slams Queenie again. And, as if recognizing fully her situation, she explodes into motion in the direction of the barn. Rossie is so tall his feet would touch the ground if he didn’t hold them up. The empty stirrups slap. The saddle creaks and shifts. We have never seen Queenie go so fast. She races as if Rossie has become too much for her, the way he is too much for his mother and for us.
Then Rossie begins to lift himself to his knees and then, nearing the clothesline post, he is standing in the saddle. Bravo! For an instant. For then he has vanished in the dark as though taken by the hand of God, while Queenie disappears at the corner of the drive. From the orchard comes the pounding of the work-horses as they run beside her, nickering softly.
We stand over Rossie. Beside him on the ground an end of the clothesline still dances. We are scared and sorry we have laughed.
“Leave me alone,” he sputters, struggling to sit, brushing tears away with the back of his hand. He lies down again.
“He’s dead,” Katie says, and we laugh again.
Rossie sits up. “Shut up, dummies.” He coughs and it sounds feeble. We laugh some more, skipping back so he can’t hit us. When he lurches to his feet we run toward the house. “Mad dog. Mad dog.” We can’t wait to tell about Rossie’s fall. We know that Neil will be secretly glad.
But we don’t tell. They are playing a game and have forgotten us. We wonder what Neil knows about Aunt Grace. He seems the same. Now everything has been cleared away from the dinner and all the women sit with Neil at the wide boarded table playing hearts. Grandad is asleep and Uncle Dan is late at the store. Neil tricks the women again and again while they are distracted by the joking and fooling, thankful the trouble is over. Neil takes all the hearts and the queen of spades. They lose, take bunches of hearts, over and over, and act as though they love it. Love him. Don’t care. “You girls sure don’t take after your mother,” he tells them, because Gram gets furious and won’t play whenever she loses and she cheats to win at solitaire. Neil remarks that in a curious way he almost misses her. “At least when the old woman’s around you know somebody’s at home.”
We leave them. Upstairs Aunt Rachel’s door is open and her porcelain lamps, a shepherd and shepherdess, are illuminated, their innocent faces smiling sweetly under fluted ivory shades. Arranged before the mirror on the dressing table are her creams and perfumes, her gilt dresser set and hairpins. For years we have invaded her room, spilled her powders and worn her pumps and finery up and down the house and drive. She has complained, mildly, in her indulgent way, but we have ignored her and do as we please, use up her favorite cologne. Now Neil is here and has taken control; he says somebody has to protect Aunt Rachel. He has said that we may not even enter her room, that if we do, his two daughters at least, over whom he presumes he still has some authority, will wish for Gehenna as consolation from his wrath. He says that if he were in charge around there, things would be a lot different.
We stand in the doorway, inch nearer. Celia and Jenny try lipsticks. Then Celia smooths her hair with the tortoiseshell comb. Downstairs they are still absorbed. We hear Neil “smoking out the queen.” Aunt Elinor is careless and shows her hand. Neil says she should use her mammoth frontispiece for something useful. “Look! Of course I look,” we hear him. They laugh and tell him he is impossible. “You women bring out the worst in me,” he admits.
Hearing them far away and entertained, we move in closer to the lighted mirrored table. What right does he have to be here? To tell us what to do? We do what we want. They are playing their game and we begin to fix our hair and polish our nails. Celia puts one of Aunt Rachel’s records on the Victrola and one by one we dance.
Aunt Rachel’s hand mirror falls. Shatters. Then Neil is upon us. He has sprung from the kitchen in one leap, it seems, as though he’d been half waiting. His face is terrible. “You won’t rest, will you? Not until you get what you want.” He is hardly able to form words but he only dares touch his daughters. We are yanked and dragged through the hall and pushed into a dark room. From a great distance Aunt Grace calls, “Neil.”
They don’t come. He slams the bedroom door and shoves us onto the bed. We hear his breath and then the sound his belt makes sliding out of the notches. We are afraid of his belt, plastic with ridges which leave stripes. We wait for its sound on the air. But there is nothing. Just the sound of his breathing and after a while it’s quieter and he sits down on the side of the bed, which makes the mattress slant toward him, and he is near us in the dark, quiet now, so that except for the pitch of the bed we would think we had been left alone. It’s that way such a long time that we are almost not afraid. Finally he gets up and goes to the door, stands there a moment, his hand on the doorknob. Then he speaks, wearily and without anger: “You know your mother is dying.” Light falls on the bed and we see that we are lying on Gram’s appliquéd quilt. Then it is dark again as he shuts the door and we begin to sob and sob, sorrow all through us as though it is the only real feeling in the whole house and now we have to accept our share.
When much later we leave the room, Celia and Jenny are waiting at the top of the back stairwell. They go down with us. We have all been crying. We crawl down the tunnel of the stairs and sit on the rubber treads. We can tell that everyone is mad again at Neil, that they are making him pay this time. When he says things, no one laughs or answers. We imagine their faces, hard, eyes downcast. Neil’s voice is pitched up higher than usual, as if the strain has affected even him.
They don’t respond to the change in Neil but somehow he knows we are there and he begins speaking to us where we are beyond the door in the dark. He tells an old story about his life in the West, the freight cars he hopped to get there. How hungry he was. How lonesome. He describes the flowing prairie and the rising moon, the incomparable sky. Then he asks us can we hear the shy tittymouse. Already we are smirking when he says that; we don’t believe any such thing exists in all the world, except in his head. Then he calls out, “Annie. Katie. Stop your sulking and get out here.” The women come immediately to the door, surprised, and draw us all out. We are blinded by the light and stagger into the room, like redeemed outcasts. While we drink lemonade we ignore Neil, and the women make a great fuss over us, showing how much they love us, how apart Neil is.
Neil says that if we keep frowning like that we will be wrinkled up by the time we’re twenty and won’t ever g
et husbands, that around here we have to be careful or our mouths will be like prunes, that for his money, resentment nursed and cultivated is the fount of all disease, particularly degenerative disease. And perhaps if there were less of that in certain quarters, certain people wouldn’t be sick all the time. He comes then to sit on the floor at our feet.
“Help your poor old balding father,” he says, and our hands begin their task almost automatically, massaging his head up near the forehead where the fair wavy hair has begun to thin and recede. Soon our palms are slick and rank with the oils from his head and we can smell its sourness as though it is a horse’s lather. He tells us that we will become famous in this way, that since the world began man has labored, experimenting endlessly, to restore hair, that we two are engaged in that great family project, magic. Maybe, he says, we have found the answer. This encourages us, so we work all the harder. Strong fingers, he goes on, will pay off at the piano—and elsewhere. His eyes nearly close beneath our stretching, kneading touch and we watch the pulse throb in his veins under the taut skin, which is strawberry pink under the darker spots of freckling. The women go into the other room but we are not afraid now. Neil rests so quietly under our hands that we think he has gone to sleep. We will go on endlessly. He will never release us.
But he is not asleep and begins to tell us another story. He wishes we had known his Aunt Sarah “on the distaff side.” She’d been as hardy and capable a woman as could be imagined. Word had it that she’d just stop by the furrow long enough to drop her babies, fourteen of them in all, and then would go on at the plow. When her youngest boy fell out of the barn loft and bit off the end of his tongue, she took it, warm and slippery as it was, and with her needle and thread stitched it back on—while the initial shock still rendered it somewhat numb. Anyway, that boy had lived to tell the tale. This had happened twenty-five miles from any doctor and in the time before women had capitulated to the notion that the chief advantages of civilization were to dress well and have the leisure to be sick.
He asks us to turn off the light. Moonlight, falling in silent silver between the tangled trees in the orchard, fingers across the drive. The silhouetted, discernible forms of the trees suggest personality: Neil always said they reminded him of the family—some a little apart, on the fringes, a few little tots here and there, the gnarled old crone in the center, and then the five sisters, close together, their slender branches intertwined, thrashing in any wind at all, making much ado about nothing. The sawn-off waterlogged stumps he compared to the few men who ever dared to approach. We think now that Neil is not one of the trees at all, but he is like a bold colorful blue jay, sailing and bluffing.
“Oh, the poor sad waifs,” he croons under his breath, telling us the ways of the wicked world. “You two better stick with me. You’ll find there isn’t much more around here to be counted on, unless you want a lot of singing and dancing. With me you know exactly what you’re getting.”
He is quiet, drinking. “Anyway,” he adds, “what other choice do you have really? And I doubt things will ever get as bad for you as they did for your poor old pappy when he ran away from home in nineteen hundred and twenty-five. I don’t imagine you girls will want to try that.”
We have tried. More than once. Years ago, after he whipped us, we vowed to run far away, to break his heart in pieces. We took out a suitcase and folded up a few socks and some underwear, which seemed as lost in the large case as we would be in the world. Neil walked us to the door. “Long as you’re set on going,” he said, and frowned. At the end he seemed sad. “I surely hate to see you go. But if you’re determined.” He shrugged his shoulders and his eyebrows too, which were a frizzled blond. Often we’d heard him lament that he couldn’t have them transplanted to the top of his head. He gave each of us a nickel, to make our start in the world, he said. We refused the money, still haughty, making him suffer. Then we were out in the world, in the abrupt dark. The door closed. With the closing of that door it seemed we had gone a million miles. We began to fling ourselves against the door, pounded and cried. But he had locked it and gone away. Frenzied, we beat on, nothing else to do, and then magically he appeared before us, outlined against the warm and lighted room. “Now haven’t I seen you before somewhere?” he said.
“Yes, yes,” we cried, struggling to speak. “We’re Anne and Katie. Your daughters.” Saying that made us sob out loud.
“Why, can it be?” He warmed slowly. Looked more and more glad. He embraced us finally, recognized us as truly his two beloved, long-lost daughters. We could feel our fear dissolve in the safety and relief of home, of Neil’s love expressed at last, almost as though we had indeed made some long and perilous journey alone.
In the dark now we sit and remember those times, feel his love. Laugh with him about his tricks, the things he’s done. From the other room we hear the murmur of the sisters talking, calm and peaceable. “Thick as thieves, aren’t they?” Neil says. “Guess I’ll have to see about that. Make some impression,” and he gets up and slicks back his longish yellow hair. He pinches our legs, says he hopes we don’t ever run to fat. “Glad I raised you girls to be tough,” he says. “Considering the way things have turned out, I don’t think there’s a better thing I could have done for you.” He sounds proud of us and as if he’s never really felt anything else.
PART FOUR: AUNT ELINOR
GRAM sent us with Tom Buck to wait for Aunt Elinor’s train. It was cold in the station and we could see our breath flaring toward the vaulted ceiling, which had been painted a heavenly blue with golden rims, like a sun always sinking just out of sight. Tom Buck was going to marry Aunt Rachel. But she was not the first of the Krauss girls he had loved. Years before, he had been in love with Aunt Grace and had tried to marry her, long ago when she had been in college, before she met Neil. It seemed that the death of that old love was merged with Aunt Grace’s death and burdened him still as he shuffled over to the wooden benches, which were sectioned into seats like desks in an old-fashioned schoolhouse. He slumped, his head in his hands.
He said the train from New York had been delayed because of the night’s storm. We said nothing, but knew it would never come. Aunt Elinor had forsaken us; inside us was the thought: if only she had come in time. The train station was stark in snowlight and as immense as a waystation to heaven, under that distant blue dome where we imagined the spirit of the recently departed hovered. And perhaps might be called back. “Come back,” we yearned. Tom Buck had to wipe his eyes, as he had all morning.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Katie said. We went with her for something to do. The ceramic tiles were tiny fitted hexagons of black and white, covering the walls and floor in grimy precision. All the stalls had metal lockboxes requiring a dime. Jenny went to ask Tom Buck for the money, but Katie wriggled herself under the door. Anne tried to pull her back, then went after her, only she was heavier and got stuck halfway and Katie was kicking her shoulder. When Jenny came with the dime, they couldn’t get the door open, with Anne wedged under it, Katie still shoving her with her feet, just to be mean. But when finally Anne was able to get up she rushed to the sink, raving, “I’m filthy. It’s terrible. I touched it. I’ll die.” She didn’t mention Katie at all, scrubbing frantically at her face and hands in the rusty rivulet that was all the faucet would produce. And that was cold. Katie was afraid to come out. We were hating her, as we always did when she turned mean. But Anne was struggling to control herself, scrubbing and scrubbing her hands under the cold water, not even saying shit and damn, the way she wanted to. We could tell that from her face on fire. “Redheads have no secrets,” Aunt Rachel said.
We just walked out and left Katie there, went back to Tom Buck. We were glad Aunt Rachel was going to have a husband again and we tried to make him feel included, though Uncle Dan said it was more than he’d been able to feel in thirteen years. Under the circular dome the air took up our voices and expanded them so that they hummed in reverberating lonesomeness. We called out to each other. Wh
en Katie came back she stayed away from us, watching Anne as if she couldn’t believe Anne wouldn’t fight.
Then the floor began to vibrate and then to quake. It was a wonderful sensation; in full power the train materialized, its wheels screeching, blowing steam. We followed Tom Buck to the gate, came face to face with the appalling force of the engine, which was stopped but seemed to pant and gather for another rush forward. Then with more resignation than we had ever felt before, we knew the train from New York wouldn’t change anything. They had taken Aunt Grace out of the room before we were awake and it didn’t matter if Aunt Elinor had been there or not.
That summer, a year and a half before, when Aunt Grace had gone to the Cleveland Clinic and they had told her what she said she must know, the unvarnished truth, Aunt Elinor had come home from New York with her new religion—almost as if she had been handed it straight from God for this occasion. The doctors could do nothing, they were the first to admit it, and told Aunt Grace that she could live only a few months, that her cancer had spread beyond their ability to treat it. But Aunt Elinor was ready for them, the nay-sayers. She had come armed with Truth against Evil, with Spirit against Matter.
“We must never again believe the physicians. Do they have the power of life and death? Do they note the sparrow’s fall?” Christian Science was a science of health, it was the power of God revealed and demonstrated. It would help all of us, as it had helped her; and it was going to cure Aunt Grace completely. Aunt Elinor was absolutely convinced of it. Besides, under the circumstances, “Grace, my dear,” Aunt Elinor asked, “what have you possibly got to lose?”
During that summer Aunt Grace sat with her sister in the kitchen until nearly noon every day. No longer did they sleep late; there was work to be done. The Bible and the new book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, lay open before them, spiked with the markers that underlined the lesson for the week. Usually we were included too and the day began with reading the lesson designated in the Christian Science Quarterly. These lessons had titles such as “Love,” “Spirit,” “Matter,” “Reality.” Serious words to meditate on, words that impressed us with their power and ours, if we could only figure them out, feel them profoundly. We took turns with the women, reading from the Bible, selections carefully chosen to extend our thinking, often passages beginning in the middle of sentences; it seemed that each word was significant in itself, so much so that Aunt Elinor perceived meaning upon meaning. But when she read the corresponding portion of Science and Health, revelation seized her almost continually, so that she became breathless to declare the surpassing wonder of it—drawing us by the forcefulness of her belief. All of it related to Aunt Grace’s healing, to our lives there on the farm at this time, with this mission. Together we would conquer. Sometimes she would stop suddenly, as if in listening to herself she had become amazed. She’d throw up her hands and laugh out loud.
