“But it’s better this way. This way, I can kiss you.” George nudges me in the ribs. I don’t believe he’d actually try to kiss me, but all the same I wish he wouldn’t joke about it.
There are things I don’t like about George. Have they always been part of him, drawn suddenly to the surface by Fannie’s absence? How can I not have noticed? I observe him quietly, trying to puzzle it out. Why do I care so much what he thinks of me?
“What are you staring at, Aggie?” he says, catching me.
“Nothing.”
We’re sitting on the barn roof looking out over the farm. Father’s magnificent flight of stairs, finished in the winter months, leads directly into the belly of the steeplelike windmill. Father does not know, but inside the windmill, where the stairs end, George has loosened several boards so that he and I can climb directly onto the barn’s slick tin roof.
“We’re cursed,” George is saying. He’s out to stake his bitter claim as one of the last living children of Robert and Tilda Smart—just George and Edith left, and Edith with a dead womb.
“Don’t say that about Edith!” I beg.
“She can’t be fixed,” he says bitterly.
“Mother’s trying to help.”
“That’s the problem right there,” he says, “and Edith thinks so too.”
I fall silent. I don’t believe a word he’s said. Mother goes to Edith regularly. She brings us along too, me or Cora or Olive, to do the tidying and play with Little Robbie, or to scrub and hang a load of washing. Edith doesn’t want to leave the house, but Mother urges her outside, helps her onto the porch and into the rocking chair. “Some have a slow grief,” she tells Carson, who edges around the house like it’s not his own.
Does Edith grieve her lost sister, or is this a longer grief attached to the nearly grown stillborn baby my mother delivered her of last summer? Obediently, Edith swallows the tinctures my mother prepares for her, but even I would have to allow the medicine has had no effect. She remains a scattered housekeeper, a slothful cook, a pretty face with eyes fading onto a distant point. She seems to bear no expectations.
George refuses tinctures and teas. “Potions,” he calls them, with scorn. None of us speak up to defend Mother, not even Mother herself. We stand aside and let his words fall to our feet, as if this could keep them from doing harm.
I don’t know what’s happened to George, but I wonder if it happened while Fannie was dying upstairs and he was downstairs listening to her die. This is not a question I can ask, but I wonder—did some loose pieces inside him slip into position that day, solidify, harden? I don’t know. I wasn’t in the house when it happened. It was George who sent me to fetch the doctor—did he do it not to save Fannie, but to spare me from knowing what it would feel like to listen to my sister die?
It’s the middle of the afternoon, and the hot metal roof stings my bare feet, the sun slaps my cheeks, bleaches my hair, draws freckles across my nose. George looks like an entirely different creature: dark eyes and hair, and skin that tans deeply. For all his sickliness, he is tall, like we all are, and his shoulders stand straight, his carriage is graceful. We gaze over a sweeping countryside, the rich cleared soil, the work that continues, even as the two of us absent ourselves from the proceedings, even as we escape. I am content to believe that my family is prosperous, that our land will be ever giving, that all of this careful plotting and growing and harvesting will keep turning, no matter what comes.
The first Robert Smart to settle the land was a blacksmith from the old country: Scotland. The graves of his wives and children are not even marked, although his is. It was the first stone to have been set into the ground that became our family’s graveyard. His son, Robert Smart, was my grandfather, who buried his father and built the original house, a square stone structure that was expanded and improved upon in the years that followed. My own father, also Robert Smart, worked with his father to finish the rambling field-stone structure that I could see now, if I scrambled to the other side of the barn’s roof.
My grandfather Robert Smart died before I was born, and my grandmother kept two rooms at the back of the house. Mother took them over when Granny died, which was after Mother married Father, but before I can remember. The larger room is our parlour, never used, and only rarely dusted. The smaller room—the Granny Room, we call it—contains a bed, and a mirrored bureau, and a washbasin, and sometimes girls stay there, but never for very long. We are not to disturb them, although occasionally Mother asks Olive to carry a girl a tray with tea or soup and bread. She used to ask Fannie. Now it is Olive’s turn to help.
The girls are ill and Mother nurses them back to strength. That is all I know.
But Mother couldn’t nurse Fannie back to strength. I am anxious whenever my mind touches on that thought. I shove it away wildly. Mother didn’t save Fannie. She was there when Fannie died, and she did nothing to save her. No, that is not the same thing, is it? She was there, helpless as the rest of us.
“I’ve signed up, Aggie.” George’s voice cracks. He’s spoken rather loudly, sneaking a sideways glance at me, and away.
“Signed up?”
“I’m going to the war, they need me, you know—boys like me.” He doesn’t wait for my reply. He is angry, I see it in his hands: fingers curled into his palms, so tightly the knuckles have gone white. “We’re cursed anyway. What’s one more dead Smart?”
“It was the flu,” I tell George. “It wasn’t a curse. Nobody could do anything, not even Mother.”
“Your mother is not my mother,” says George, but he’s stopped on a cough.
“They won’t let you.” I seize on the cough. “Your lungs.”
“They will and they have. I’m going, and soon. So long, farewell, good-bye.” He sweeps his arm to emphasize what he’s leaving, as if this isn’t the most beautiful place on earth. I hear disgust in his voice.
What do I know of war? I’ll never be a boy, never be a son. War is never going to be my way out. But George—George is exactly that: a son, and a disappointment. Robbie died fighting for his country, Robbie, the brother George will never match up to, here on the farm.
I sense that the edge, the breaking-off point, needs to be jagged between George and our father, George and the farm.
“Keep it a secret, there’s a girl, Aggie. I had to tell you, but the rest of them, they won’t know till I’m gone.” He leans into me, awkward with eyes fastened onto mine, and I think he might kiss me after all. I hear my heart catch, then tumble to racing in my chest. George sways slightly like a tree in a breeze. And I’m up before he can horrify us both beyond repair, I’m scrambling to climb the roof to its top. A couple of good leaping strides, and I grab the peak and pull myself up. There is no higher point on our land: this is it, these are the heights.
It is easy to rise.
I am standing. My knees become springs, my toes point, my arms spread wide. I can feel the muscles in my back and stomach wrapping my spine like layers and layers of gauze bandages: stronger than they appear. The wind catches my untidy hair, and my skirt.
I can hear George wheezing, terrified down below me. Good. I’m glad. What do I care? I can’t fall.
“Look at me!” I scream.
I take a step and another, chin high. The metal is imperfectly joined at the peak and hurts even my summer-calloused soles, but I dance, step after step, all the way to the end, where I can see the barnyard, many stories below. I calm my breath and bend forward slowly, patiently, to look down on the cleared gravel where the wagons turn around. Our rat-hunting dog lies panting in the sun. He catches sight of my shadow waving to him, and jumps to his feet, turning in frenzied barking.
There is Cora, coming out of the house with a basket for gathering vegetables clapped against her side.
I wave, leaning toward her. “Hiya! Cora!”
At first she can’t find me. Something about this delights me: hiding in plain sight. She stops and stares around the yard while I holler and shout: “Look up, u
p here!” She finds my shadow waving at her first, then lifts her eyes, shading them with her free hand. Her mouth is a perfect round O. I falter for half a breath, waver, steady myself before her sight. She drops the basket. Screams.
That brings our mother running.
Cora has fallen on her knees, hiding her face in her apron. She can’t bear to see what might happen next. Why does she assume the worst? I could spit with irritation. Why doesn’t she trust me?
I can do anything, anything I want to, Cora, just watch me.
“Lord have mercy.” I see my mother’s lips shape the words a half beat before their sound arrives at my ears.
I make myself stand steady as a post. And then, as if I’ve been planted on the barn roof, attached like a weather cock to a whirling vane, I spin around once, twice, three times.
My mother’s hand drops from her heart and she runs to find a better angle from which to see me—she climbs the pasture fence, as if by getting higher she will be closer to me, and then she climbs right up and into the branches of a maple that overhang the pasture fence.
Is she trying to save me? Or is she urging me on?
I feel birdlike, although I know I can’t fly, nor do I wish that I could. It’s just an act. I wave to my father, to the three hired men, to Olive standing on the porch, all of them summoned by Cora’s cries. Cora herself peeks from under her apron only to resume her hysterics. “Get her down, get her down, get her down! Before she falls!”
I curtsey, lifting my skirts and swinging them. And then I turn and run the peak to the far side of the barn where no one can look up and see me but the pigs in their rooting pen, and the cows pastured beside the mountainous manure pile.
I greet the indifferent animals. I salute the pond and pause for a breath to remember little James, drowned. And then I jog lightly back to my audience. I’ve forgotten almost everything, past, present, and future, but this—the line of hot metal, the sky over me, the waiting faces upturned. They are looking for me, hoping to see me again. They fall quiet at the sight of me, hushed for a moment.
My mother in the tree in her full apron and skirts, her arms scratched by the branches, hugs the rough trunk.
I have one more trick. It seems, suddenly, a pity I didn’t learn more last summer, when I practiced walking the fence hour upon hour—but this trick is a good one. It’s the best I’ve got. I bend backward, reaching my hands for the peak of metal, and with one quick and forceful push, curve over myself, feet travelling overhead into a brief handstand that is meant to collect itself at the other end, and finish by coming around to standing.
But I’ve mistimed my push. My hands are not planted, my hips tilt off balance. I am coming down.
I hear them gasp. No!
I hear my mother’s silence, her power. She would climb all the way up the tree and leap onto the roof and catch me if she could—if only the tree were taller, if only its branches brushed the barn.
My body collapses sideways, hip crashes vertical metal, the ridges, the nail heads poking through, the steep descent. Down is down. Down is hard dirt barnyard, broken stone, the rough unfinished roof of the never-occupied rabbit hutch, a pitchfork head, a rusted bucket, a broken plough, and God knows what: I am falling swiftly toward the side of the barn in which gathers the loose and lost elements of our farm’s life.
I will not go there. No.
A grunt, a core reflex of refusal.
I snap my legs, my spine cracking like a whip. Blindly, my arms slash out, hands slap the peak of the roof, fingers dig in. My face hits the hot metal, my legs slither straight. I hang like this, flat against the rough slide, flat against life. And then slowly, stiffly, I pull myself up, and mount the rooftop, like I’m climbing onto the back of a wild and unreliable horse.
All of this has happened in less time than it would take to say good-bye.
I gaze down on them.
They are silent. My mother is climbing down from the tree.
But I’m laughing, head thrown back, laughing like crying. Laughing like luck. Laughing like a child who knew she wouldn’t, couldn’t fall. I knew I couldn’t. I turn to look down on George, who crouches behind the windmill, pale as a ghost.
“If you were Tilda’s daughter,” he says in a low and angry voice, “you’d be dead.”
I am not Tilda’s daughter. I belong to the woman striding toward me across the barnyard, coming right up underneath so that her head tilts to an angle almost perpendicular, neck exposed, her face solemn with something that might—almost—be pride.
“Now you get down from there safe and sound, young lady!” my mother commands me.
“Yes, Mother! Right away, Mother!”
It is a relief to be commanded, and a relief to see her expression ease into a wide smile, even if she is shaking her head.
George holds his hand up to me, as if he could help me, as if I want his help, or need it. I swing my legs away from him, controlling this descent with my heels and the flats of my palms. We edge around the windmill on opposite sides and meet by the loosened boards.
This is our chance to say something to each other—this seems to be our chance. But we don’t take it. So often, people don’t. I can tell he wants me to climb through the hole in the wall first: chivalry, control. I give him that. The gesture is small enough, and I can do it. It doesn’t hurt me.
I go on ahead of George, descending the windmill steps. I don’t wait. On the way down, I pass my father walking up, nails and hammer in hand. He avoids looking at me. I guess he doesn’t know what to say, what expression ought to cross his face, so he chooses to say nothing, his features blank.
But I hear him speaking to George. He doesn’t sound angry, he sounds tired, defeated, almost. He can’t find enough words, so he uses only a few. “What is wrong with you, boy?”
I run across the mow floor and swing down the ladder into the stables below. I’m still running, across the spongy dirt floor and out into the yard. I still don’t understand that what I’ve done does not look to everyone else like it felt to me. It does not look heroic or brave. It does not look thrilling and original. It does not look like an act, which is already what I believe it to have been, believing myself invincible, believing therefore that the fall and quick catch were as foreordained and central to the performance as the fine balance, the precision turns, the element of surprise.
They think I’ve almost died. They think I’ve risked everything for a foolish show-off’s game. They don’t understand what I’m doing.
The problem will persist.
There is life, as I see it, going on all around me, terrible in its uncertainty, frightening even. And there is me, as I see myself, preparing, practicing, anticipating a series of performances whose timing and discipline I can’t predict in advance, but must be ready for at all times. These performances are not life, as I see it. They exist outside of what is real and dreadful. They arrive given an opportunity. I am in control of them. I shape them. I fold them into being and present them to an audience in order to give the audience pleasure, in order to show the world in its mirrored state, which is a state of perfect order, and the opposite of the world we’re doomed to inhabit, dark with confusion and accident.
The supposed slip, the apparent fall, the heart-stopping thrill of a moment nearly stolen back by life and thwarted by artful practice: that is what makes the entire performance succeed. That is what gives it depth and meaning.
Why else would anyone care?
The appearance of perfection does not interest me. It is the illumination of near-disaster beside which we all teeter, at all times, that interests me. It is laughing in the face of what might have been, and what is not.
8
Cracks
THERE, WE’RE PAST the bare yard, the grey house, and I can breathe again. Already I feel better, though the car is slowing, and I can see the weeds in the ditch waving slowly, taller than whatever’s in the field beyond. We’ve only come a short distance from one property to the next. Do I
know where I am? Don’t I?
“I can’t see the lane,” the girl says. “Where is it?”
“It’s overgrown—past that bunch of crab apple trees.”
With a sharp turn, the car bumps over the ruts and into the lane. I see the front field has been planted with winter wheat, rising faintly green and fresh from deep wet furrows, and I see the row of pines that hides the house from view. I always come back here. In my mind, I’m never really away.
The maples are dying, great wide spaces in between like a mouth emptied of rotten teeth. The raspberry brambles look like tumbleweed. I think I see the path we trampled, Fannie and I. See? There.
Stop! I want to see the graves.
They’ve heard me.
She’s stopped the car.
They’ve loaded me like so much freight into the chair without dropping me, which is the best I can hope for, with the pair of them.
Max directs: “I’m going to film this from a wide angle. Bring her over to me, and then into the graveyard.”
“Are you ready, Mrs. Smart?” The girl stuffs the blanket up under my armpits. The white plugs dangle around her neck, emitting a distant beat, quicker than the heart, and the wad of bubble gum she snaps between her teeth pops in front of my nose.
How old is she? She looks like a child.
“Everything’s good, I think,” she says. But she hasn’t fastened the belt.
You haven’t fastened the belt!
Max waves her onward: “This is going to be a fabulous shot!” I feel removed from the scene, as if this is a long dream. I come here all the time in my mind. To be here, breathing the cool air and the wet soil, seems less real than a dream would be.
I can’t worry over the details.
The girl knocks us through brambles, and we shudder into mud where the wheels sink, and she wrestles and curses under her breath until we progress. Max is backing up one step at a time, leading us closer to where the split rail fence used to be (gone now, a blackened post and another standing out of the ground to remind us of how we stake our claim). We’re really rolling, into the little yard, or whereabouts it used to be, hitting a clear grassy patch as the girl turns the chair toward the flat stones and we sink again.
Girl Runner Page 8
