The Magic of Found Objects

by Maddie Dawson

  He put his paper down. The way he was looking at me was already causing something to curdle inside me. His eyes were saying STOP IT RIGHT NOW.

  “Because you can get any education you want around here, that’s why.” He got up out of his chair and folded up the newspaper. He was tall and big, his dark hair cut sharp against his head, and he had steely blue eyes that looked like beads, and although he mostly was kind of mild-mannered and unhappy, he knew how to look menacing when he wanted to. It was how he argued, pulling himself up to his full height and towering over people. I’d seen him do this with the field hands for years.

  “But if I get a scholarship, what’s the difference to you?” That’s what I said. I flipped the pancakes over in the pan, and when I turned back to look at him, his eyes had gone dark with trouble.

  Hendrix, sitting at the table, tried to signal me to stop. But I shook my head.

  “I can’t believe I even have to explain this to you,” my father said. “You have a perfectly good life here. You have a farm. This is your farm, your land. This farm is our family’s livelihood, and it is your birthright, and you have a duty to protect it. Your ancestors sweated and sacrificed for this land.”

  “I know, but—”

  “No buts! What? You think these rocks put themselves in that wall out there? Let me give you some news. They did not. Your ancestors hauled these rocks and built these walls and plowed these fields and planted and suffered and put up with droughts and floods, and they got up at three in the morning and worried over the barn catching on fire, and delivered the foals and the calves. And it’s yours to protect. Do you know what I’m talking about? I’m talking about loyalty and pride. They don’t teach that at NYU.”

  I waited a respectful amount of time, during which I put two pancakes on the plate and walked them over to his place at the table.

  “So could I just say something?” I said in my most reasonable voice. I even smiled a little bit. “I know you, and I know that neither you nor I think it helps anyone to expect people to live their whole lives doing things they don’t want to. You know yourself that’s not how the world should be.”

  I was talking to the boy he had been, the one who went to Woodstock, the boy that Tenaj had told me stood on the hill and thought the whole world would change because of that three-day rock concert. I said these words even though his eyes were coldly staring me down and even though the numbness was already coming upon me like a slow dose of Novocain. In a moment, I knew, the fight would be gone out of me. He would retaliate, and I would sink back. But I said the words anyway. I said them with a smile, with as much bravery as I could muster, with an optimism born out of hearing from his ex-wife about the wonderful, idealistic young man he had once been. I thought there was at least a shot that I could reach that guy.

  But he was beyond that. He’d gone reptilian on me. I should have known.

  “I am not arguing this point with you!” he roared. “And I am not going to stand by and watch you throw all this away just because you have some damn fool idea that you have to go to New York to be a writer. Art, young lady, is for when there’s not a crop to bring in or washing to do or a fox in the chicken coop. You’re staying here, and that’s final. We owe our loyalty to this farm. You can go to the community college and study writing all you want on the side. But you’re staying here.”

  I started to open my mouth.

  “Case closed,” he said. “You’re just like your mother. I bring her here, I show her this whole wonderful life she could have here—and what does she do? She rejects all of it.”

  And then he looked at me, with the muscle in his jaw pulsating back and forth, and then he left the house. In a moment, his truck started up and backfired in the driveway, like a gunshot, and then he was gone.

  It got worse after that. He didn’t want me to take the SATs. He said he wouldn’t pay the money for the test, and then it turned out he wouldn’t even let me take the car to go to the test. He said the community college didn’t require SAT scores, and that’s where I was going to go to school—so why was I even bothering?

  I stopped speaking to him. The house became a silent, seething horror show. Like something was alive and dangerous in there and could spring out at any time and bring the whole place down.

  Maggie said, “Why do you have to cross him?”

  Hendrix said, “You’ve gotta give in on this one. You know him. He’s not going to change his mind.”

  Judd said, “Your dad is a tough guy, but he’s got your best interests at heart.”

  “No, he doesn’t,” I said.

  Mrs. Spezziale said, “I’ve dealt with fathers like this before. This is the 1980s, not the 1950s. He’ll come around.”

  She and I worked on my essay in the guidance office, just as if nothing had happened, as if I were going to college. She paid the fee herself, and we mailed in four applications. She said again and again, “He’ll come around.”

  But he didn’t.

  I told Bunny about it during one of my lazy days with her. We used to sit and knit together, and we were making Christmas presents for everybody. Socks and scarves and hats.

  She sighed and said, “Your father can be a very stubborn man.” Then she put down her knitting and rubbed her eyes. “This feels like something that should never have happened, and I feel partially to blame.”

  “How are you to blame? That can’t even be possible.”

  She stared out the window. “Your dad never wanted this farm. He had other aptitudes, and yet he got saddled with it after his dad, your grandfather, died. I asked him to come home and run things, when what I really should have done was let him be free. I should have sold off the land right then and cashed out and gone traveling or something. But I didn’t because I selfishly couldn’t bear to let it all go. But I should have. I knew almost immediately that it had been a mistake, calling him back. Maybe his marriage with your mother would have worked if they hadn’t come back here. I don’t know. We can’t know, can we? But now I feel like he’s taking it out on you.”

  She did not say that she would go and fight him just the way she’d done when he wouldn’t allow us to have visitation with Tenaj. The fight had gone out of Bunny. Even I could see that. But she said I could sleep at the Bunny Barn. She said I should remember that I was strong and that I had my own life to lead. She said she was sorry that she had any part to play in this drama.

  And I said she was blameless. It was him.

  My SAT scores came back. I had gotten my friend Jen to drive me to the test, and I had done well.

  And then on April first of senior year, I got my acceptance letter from NYU.

  My father brought it in the house. It was big and fat, too big to fit in the mailbox, so the postman had seen my father outside and handed it to him. Walked it over to him, said, “Wow, looks like one of your kids is headin’ to college!”

  I’d never seen my father so mad when he came in the house and held it up.

  “So you did it anyway,” he said to me in a voice that might have come from James Earl Jones playing the Voice of Doom. “Applied to New York University.”

  His face was red and sweaty. His hair was plastered to the sides of his head, and his eyes now looked like they were capable of shooting sparks. He threw the envelope on the floor and went to the sink and started washing his hands.

  I stood and watched him, my arms folded.

  “I just wanted to see,” I told him.

  “See what? See if I would find out? See if I would change my mind? What exactly did you think was going to happen here?”

  I looked down at the envelope, which was big and thick with promise. If you were rejected, Mrs. Spezziale said, they’d send you a dinky little one-page note telling you that there were so many qualified candidates, blah blah blah. But if you’re in . . . that envelope holds lots of pieces of paper, all the promises for your future. Her eyes were shining when she told me that.

  I was in. I so wanted to pick up the envelope a
nd take it off and read what they said. I wanted to know the offer for financial aid. I was greedy for the news of my new life. Because I knew that whatever he was saying wasn’t going to move me one bit. I had to leave. I was going.

  “Oh, you want to see this, do you?” he said, following my eyes. “Go ahead and look at it, if you want. But you’re still not going. New York City is a dangerous place for a young person. We are farm people. We are New Hampshire people. Maybe I didn’t make that clear enough before. We are not the kind of people who go live in New York City. Get over it. We have a farm.”

  “Maggie has a college education,” I pointed out. “While you were living in Woodstock—having me and Hendrix—Maggie was in Boston getting an education.”

  He looked at me so hard his eyes bugged out. That jaw muscle was so tense I thought it might leap right out of his face. “You!” he said. “You have no business talking about stuff you don’t know anything about! Go to your room.”

  “It’s just because you wanted out of here yourself,” I said. “Bunny said you didn’t want to stay on the farm either and that you were mad when you had to come back here. You wanted to be a musician, she said. And now you’re taking it out on me. Trying to crush my dreams.”

  He came toward me, and I actually thought I might get hit for the first time ever.

  But he stopped. Looked at me. And then he smiled, a lip-curling smile that didn’t reach his eyes. His jaw muscle was twitching hard. “I am not going to have this conversation, do you understand that? You’re not going to New York University, you’re staying here, you’re helping out on the farm, and you can go to the community college. Period.”

  I held my chin up and looked him in the eye. Little bits of his spit had landed on my cheeks and chin, and I had flinched, but I was still standing.

  Shocked, but standing. I felt myself sink into the numb zone. Everything moved in slow motion.

  Now his voice dropped. His eyes had turned opaque, and he was jabbing his finger in the air. “And you are furthermore grounded until the end of the school year. No prom, no school play, no yearbook, no parties. This is what you get for being sneaky and going behind my back. You will learn that there are consequences.”

  I heard Maggie, from the doorway, say, “Robert—” but he held up his hand to shush her without even looking in her direction. He stared me down like a cobra staring at a mongoose.

  But you know something? I was the mongoose, and at least in the movies I’d seen, the mongoose wins, so I was not as afraid as I thought I would be. Even in the moment of greatest danger, I was formulating a plan. I knew deep down what I had to do, as though I’d been heading this way for years. As though I knew it was someday going to come to this. I snapped out of going numb. I felt fortified.

  And when the standoff was over, when he stomped off and went out and chopped wood or tore down a fence, or kicked the stones in the barn, whatever the hell he did, I went upstairs and packed my things. I put everything I loved in a little blue overnight bag and I hid it under my bed. And then I dragged the phone into the closet, and I called up Judd and told him everything. I asked him to drive me to Manchester, to the bus station. From there, I’d take the bus to Woodstock, and I would live with my mom for the rest of the school year.

  She would help me go to NYU.

  “Jeez, this doesn’t sound like your dad,” he said.

  “Well, it was him,” I whispered. “This is how he gets when somebody makes him mad.”

  “But . . . Maybe I could come over, and we all could sit down together at the kitchen table and talk it through. We might be able to work something out.”

  “I don’t think he’ll listen to anybody. Even you.”

  He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “But I’m going to miss you!”

  “I’ll miss you, too,” I said. “But I have to do this.”

  I told Hendrix that night when we went outside to do the last chores of the day. When I told him that I was going to Mama’s, I made him promise not to tell; he turned pale there in the barn. I could feel his body going stiff.

  He looked down at his shoes, which were covered in muck. His face looked worried in the dimness of the one yellow light bulb over the door. “You know how it is at her house,” he said in a low voice. “What if this doesn’t work? What if Dad sends the police? What are you going to do then?”

  “I don’t care if he sends in the whole damn Marine Corps. Don’t you see this is what I’ve got to do? You might have to have this fight one day, too, you know, unless you just want to stay here your whole life slopping hogs and mucking out the stalls.” I touched his arm. He was seven minutes older than me, but he always seemed like my younger brother. “It’s okay, Hendrix. It’s going to work out. You’re sweet to worry about me, but you don’t need to. Just keep my secret until I’m gone. And then you can tell them, or you can pretend you didn’t know. Whichever way you want it to be. By all means, make it easy on yourself.”

  He hugged me, and when I pulled away and really looked at him, he was smiling. “You’re kind of awesomely brave,” he said.

  I said, “I know.”

  The next morning, I woke up at three thirty, before the first rooster had started up, before my father had risen from his bed and gone out to do the early chores. There was no one stirring, but I knew I didn’t have long. I dressed silently in the dark, grabbed the suitcase, and slipped out of the house. I walked down the driveway and down the lane, walking softly so the gravel didn’t even crunch, going all the way out to the main road so they wouldn’t see the car that was coming for me. I stood, shivering in the early morning cold and watching until I saw headlights sweeping across the road, and then there was Judd. He slowed down and reached over and opened the door for me.

  “So you’re really going to do this?” he said. “I kinda hoped you wouldn’t be out here, if you wanna know the truth.”

  “Yeah, well, I am.”

  “Does your mom know you’re coming?”

  “Nope. It’s all a surprise.”

  “Huh,” he said.

  So for the rest of the ride, he told jokes because he could see I was nervous, even though I was pretending not to be. He said that at first he felt sorry for me not getting to do all the end of the year school stuff, but now he said he was envious. This had been my brilliant plan all along, he said, to keep from having to do all the boring things coming up.

  “Let me guess. You didn’t want to buy a prom dress, am I right?”

  “My dad wasn’t going to let me go anyway,” I told him. I leaned against the window. “I’ve been grounded from everything.”

  “Oh, he would have changed his mind. You didn’t let me try to talk to him.” He leaned over and tapped my knee. “If you end up going to the prom in Woodstock with some anonymous hippie guy, I’m going to be very, very jealous.”

  “You’ve got Karla Kristensen. You’ll be too busy to miss me.”

  “So. What shall I tell people?” he said. “You know, when they ask?”

  “You don’t have to worry. I’m going to write them all a letter when I get there, telling them where I am. I already left a note for Bunny under her doormat just so she won’t worry. It’s completely legal what I’m doing. And anyway, in a month, I’m going to be eighteen, and I can do what I please.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Well, if you need me to come get you, I will. You know that, right?”

  He walked me to the bus when it arrived, and I got on, lugging my suitcase. The sun was just barely showing itself as the bus pulled away and headed out on its thirteen-hour journey to Woodstock. It looked like a butterscotch candy coming up through the trees. I gazed back at Judd, still standing next to his car, his hands shoved into his pockets, rocking back and forth on his heels.

  The bus stopped at practically every mailbox and convenience store along the way. I read and slept and looked out the window and worried. My seatmate was a woman who was going to see her sister, and we talked about farm life and sisters who had
gotten away and how sad that was for everyone. I didn’t tell her my situation, but my story was like something clogged in my throat, and after we stopped for lunch, when we got back on the bus, I pretended to sleep for the rest of the way.

  When we finally pulled into the Woodstock station, it was eight thirty at night. I tried to call Tenaj from the bus station, but her phone number was disconnected. I got a recording. I hadn’t figured on that. I stood outside the bus station in the cold, windy night, looking down the darkened streets and wondering what to do. Why hadn’t I thought to call her earlier? Oh yeah. Because my phone booth was gone, and I certainly wasn’t going to make the call from my house. Also, I had been grounded.

  The thing was, I was perfectly calm. I knew that I was going to find her. Woodstock had a population of about four thousand people—you ran into the same people every day—and I was sure she was still there. Sure, we hadn’t talked in a long time, but she would have written to me if she was moving somewhere else.

  I was picturing a lovely reunion—Stony and Petal and all the other people so glad to see me, and I could hardly wait to light a fire outside and sit around it and tell stories, like before. They’d all be sympathetic when they heard about my dad. They’d know that I was a Woodstock girl, one of them, and they’d help me.

  I had a little bit of money in my pocket—twenty-two dollars after I’d paid the bus fare—but I knew I wouldn’t need much once I got to her house, so I called for a cab and gave the cab driver her address. The driver was a hippie guy with long hair with streaks of silver in it, and when he drove me up the hill, I saw the old cottage lit up just like in the old days, and my heart felt this flutter of relief. I got out of the cab with my suitcase and gave the guy a five. He said, “I think I’ll wait for you here, just in case. You never know.”

  “She’ll be here,” I said. “This is where she’s always lived.”

  But then, walking up to the door, I felt just a pang of something bad. The porch was all swept clean, and painted gray now, not the bright purple that Tenaj had painted it. And the yard was kind of a manicured lawn now. There weren’t any trucks parked on it.