Iona Moon

by Melanie Rae Thon

  Willy’s sisters sneaked up behind him while he stood watching his father. Lorena grabbed his legs and Mariette knocked him over. They pinned him to the floor and started tickling. They weren’t strong, but they were both fat. Once they were on top of him, he couldn’t move. Willy heard the back door snap. Horton wasn’t going to have any of their nonsense tonight. But his father’s presence was still in the house. Don’t hurt your sisters, Willy. Lorena was crushing his bladder. Never hit a lady. Mariette shoved her fingers into his ribs, not tickling but jabbing, making him writhe. A man is stronger than any woman. Stronger in his body, stronger in his mind. He had to pee. Lorena had her big butt right on his pelvis. His arm was twisted behind his back. He felt tears sting his eyes, the hot shame, his bed wet again. Jesus, Willy. His mother so tired, stripping the bed, stripping him, buying the rubber sheets that squeaked when he turned in bed, that made him sweat even though the cotton sheets covered them. How old was he then? Too old to wet the bed. And now Lorena was bouncing and laughing, loose flesh of her legs jiggling, pink dimpled skin, small eyes squinting shut in delight, and Willy’s tears were rolling into his ears and the wet spot was spreading on his jeans and Mariette was squealing, “Willy peed his pants,” and his sisters were both standing, covering their mouths, shaking with laughter, and Willy was on the floor, burning, seeing Iona Moon pressed up tight to Matt Fry, knowing exactly how he smelled. Exactly.

  Around midnight, Willy heard two shots and hung his head out the window. Flo’s car still wasn’t in the drive. The moon was low and almost full, flattened on top like a smashed pumpkin. His father stood in the yard with his pistol drawn. He seemed to waver in the yellow light, and at first Willy thought he’d shot himself in the foot.

  By the time Willy got downstairs, his father was underneath an elm at the edge of the lawn, staring at the raccoon he’d shot out of the tree.

  “Damn vermin,” he said without looking at the boy. “That coon made a mess of our garage last winter. Stole half a bushel of apples before I got wise to him.”

  “How do you know this is the one?” Willy said.

  Horton whirled to face Willy. “How do I know?” He cleared his throat and spit on the ground. “What the hell else could it have been?”

  Willy backed away from his father. He saw the big man’s legs tremble, saw the glint of the gun against his hard thigh. The boy looked at the limp body of the animal, the masked bandit eyes, the pointed nose, the clean paws, delicate as the hands of a tiny woman. He turned and sprinted toward the house, the crushed head of the moon so bright he had to close his eyes.

  2

  Jeweldeen Wilder pedaled her bike two miles across the Kila Flats to tell Iona what her daddy had done.

  “Locked Sharla in the cellar. Says she’s not coming out till she tells him who got her in this mess. And she keeps saying the same thing: Everett Fry.”

  “Everett’s been dead a year and a half.”

  “Every time she says it, Daddy just gets madder.”

  Jack Wilder was a fat man with no hair who sweated when he thought too hard. Even his fingers were fat. Iona imagined his red face and damp shirt as he stood nose to nose with Sharla, making her say the name one more time.

  “Come on,” Jeweldeen said, “we can look at her.”

  They raced their bikes down the rutted road, even though Sharla wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry.

  “Where’s your daddy?” Iona said when they got to the Wilder place.

  “Spreading manure.”

  “Hot day for that.”

  “He don’t mind the smell.”

  “Isn’t he afraid you’ll let Sharla out?”

  “Said he’d break my arm if I did.”

  “So you won’t?”

  “She never did much for me.”

  They crept around the back of the house to peer down into the cellar. Iona remembered hearing about a man overcome by gas while shoveling fertilizer on a warm day. He fell face down in the stuff and smothered in two inches of shit. She thought this might be a fitting end for a father who locked his own daughter in a hole.

  “There she is,” Jeweldeen said.

  The tiny window was speckled with dirt. “I don’t see her.”

  “On that sack of potatoes in the corner.”

  Iona could barely make out the lumpy shape of the girl in the shadows.

  “She’s a mess,” said Jeweldeen. “Thank God my mama isn’t here to see this. Daddy says Sharla would put her in her grave for sure if she weren’t already there.”

  Maywood Wilder had died of pneumonia before Jeweldeen could walk. Now her picture hung on the wall above the television. Jack Wilder liked to remind his daughters that their mother was watching over them, just like God. Such talk could bring Sharla to tears but had no effect on Jeweldeen.

  “Mama would have died at least a hundred times if we put her in her grave every time Daddy says.” Jeweldeen puffed out her cheeks and lowered her voice to mimic her father. “Your mama would fall down and die if she saw how filthy you are, Jeweldeen. It’d burst your mama’s heart to hear you take the Lord’s name in vain, Miss Sharla.” Jeweldeen crossed her arms over her chest and became herself again. “Geezus,” she hissed, “my mother has turned over in her grave so many times she’s halfway down the hill by now.”

  Iona smashed her nose against the mud-spattered glass. Maybe Sharla was fatter, but she always looked soft because she was so fair, skin pale as uncooked dough, hair wispy, almost white. When Sharla was hot, she blotched from her neck to her forehead. Nothing so fine or flattering as a blush ever rose on her cheeks. Jeweldeen was much prettier and knew it. Her hair was thick and wavy, gold as hay. For my blue-eyed sweetheart, the man at the candy store always said, touching Jeweldeen’s shoulder as he gave her a free bag of sour balls or a long rope of licorice. Even Leon liked Jeweldeen, said she was dangerous, and Iona wondered how a thirteen-year-old girl could be a threat to a grown man.

  Sharla clutched her knees to her chest and rocked. “She could go crazy down there all by herself,” Iona said.

  Jeweldeen clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Go crazy? She is crazy. Says she got knocked up by a guy who’s been dead since November before last.”

  “You think she believes it?”

  “Came to her in a dream. Everett weighed nothing at all, but she felt him all the same, like the air just got thicker in that one place.”

  Iona tried to imagine this. When Leon climbed on top of her, he’d felt heavy as a cow.

  “She says he didn’t talk but she heard his voice in her own skull. He told her he was tired of being dead and he was sorry he shot himself.”

  Leon didn’t talk much either, as Iona recalled, but she’d never known her brother to be sorry about anything.

  “That’s why he wants Sharla to have his baby. He means to be reborn.”

  Leon unzipped his pants but kept them on. Having babies wasn’t the point of the whole thing.

  “No wonder Daddy locked her in the cellar. Imagine Sharla telling people Everett bumped her.”

  Iona remembered Sharla’s other dream, the way Everett touched her, the way she exploded. Jack Wilder thought she was cracked long before she expected a dead man’s baby. Like a sick animal, he said, but it only happens to females.

  Iona wondered if female animals went crazy from having kids or not having them. After the five-legged calf died, Angel rolled on her back, rubbed the hair off her hide till she bled. Later, she charged the fence, and Iona’s father had to hold her while Leon pulled the barbs out of her flesh. Free at last, she tried to jump Leon, the unexpected object of her strange desires.

  Iona’s father said a cow had a big head, but no brains, nothing but tongue filling up all that space.

  Iona peeled potatoes while her mother fried hamburger for a shepherd’s pie. They were last year’s potatoes, the skins wrinkled and dusty, the flesh a bit too soft, already sprouting tough violet shoots. She meant to tell Hannah now, while they were alone, b
ut something stopped her: the line of her mother’s mouth, or the way she held her hands under the warm water long after they were clean.

  At dinner, Iona told the story. She knew what her brothers would think.

  “Could be anyone’s,” Leon said. He was nineteen but looked thirty. The skin under his eyes was pouched; he’d already lost a patch of hair over both temples.

  “She’s done half the senior class,” said Rafe.

  “You hush,” Hannah said.

  “It’s no secret.” Dale’s mouth was full of pie.

  “She’s blaming it on a dead man ’cause she forgot to keep a list of the possibilities,” Leon said. “Poor Everett can’t even deny it, and he’s probably one of the few guys in town who didn’t pop Sharla.”

  Iona stared at Leon, trying to decide if his nastiness came from being one of the few or one of many.

  “You hear me?” said Hannah. “I won’t have you talking that way.”

  “I heard you, Mama. I just don’t see the point.”

  Iona’s father said, “You sit at this table, you mind your mother. That’s the point.”

  Leon stood, let his napkin fall. “I’m done anyway,” he said.

  Iona lay in bed wondering how Everett looked when he came to Sharla in her dream. His picture in the paper after he died showed a proud young man in uniform. The flag waved behind him, out of focus. Everett’s mouth was firm. I do what I’m told to do.

  The picture didn’t look a bit like the Everett Fry Iona knew. That Everett Fry parked on Main for half a day at a time, staring at women, making them jittery for weeks afterward. That Everett Fry wore a red and black plaid hunting cap with the ear flaps pulled down and the visor shading his eyes. His hunter’s vest bulged; he had something hidden in every pocket: knives and grenades, leather straps and dried beans, a half-dozen boxes of shells. He smoked filterless cigarettes down to a nub so small he could barely pinch the hot butt between his yellow fingers.

  Then there was the third Everett Fry, the clean-shaven one wearing his uniform again. His eyes were startled, opened wide. His mouth was open too, revealing jagged chips of bone: his teeth shattered by the blast. If Sharla put her hands on his head she’d discover the back of his skull was gone. Iona wondered if men bled in dreams or if the wound would be nothing worse than a hole, surprising and strange but not too terrible to touch.

  Iona rode her bike along the dirt road to Jeweldeen’s. She stopped pedaling near the Zimmerman place, coasting to look at Al’s bulls. Muscles rippled over their buttocks. They had thick necks, twitching tails. She knew the scent of a cow wafting across the field could turn them mean. Sometimes even her smell made them paw the ground under the fence. But this day was still, and the bulls chewed their cud, gazes blank as her father’s when he looked at her without seeing. He had more important things on his mind: potatoes and corn, beets and beans. He worried: Too much rain or too little? Even in June he had to figure what he’d do if they got frost in September.

  Iona wondered if Sharla had given up and told her daddy the truth, or at least something halfway believable. The afternoon was hot; dust flumed under her tires. Iona’s father would fret about the heat, remembering the year the topsoil dried up and blew away. He was sixteen years old. The potatoes shriveled in the sun. Like horrible little heads, he said.

  Like her own head when she got lice last fall and Mama had to shave off all her hair. Hannah grabbed soap and scissors and hauled Iona out to the back steps. She yanked a clump and cut, then another and another, wasting no time on tenderness. Soon Iona’s long hair lay around her in limp, dark swirls. Her head felt light and sore. Hannah rubbed Iona’s scalp with kerosene. The oil burned, and the pain spread to her neck, a fire radiating through her shoulders to her arms to the tingling tips of her fingers. The heat shot down her spine and her legs prickled—just as they had when she fell in the briars and her daddy had to twist the spiky thorns out one by one with his pointed pliers.

  But her parents hadn’t done these things to hurt her, so she was lucky in a way, not like Sharla Wilder, who’d been locked in the cellar for a solid week.

  “No end in sight,” Jeweldeen said when Iona got off her bike. “Every morning he goes down there and asks her who done it, and every morning she gives him the same answer. Yesterday he took a stick to her legs, said he’d beat the truth out of her. She said ‘Everett Fry’ about a hundred times before he stopped.”

  Hearing Everett’s name out loud made Iona touch the back of her own head.

  “I broke the cellar window with a rock,” said Jeweldeen. “You can look at her if you want.”

  Sharla sat crushed in the corner, exactly where she’d been the last time Iona had looked. “Does she ever move?”

  “You should see her jump when she hears Daddy on the stairs. And she was sure dancing yesterday when he whacked her with the stick. You never saw a fat girl move so fast.”

  “Why doesn’t she bolt the lock from her side?”

  “He’d bust down the door and whup her good if she tried that.” Jeweldeen peered through the jagged hole in the glass. “Hey, Sharla,” she said, “somebody’s here to see you.”

  Sharla shuffled over to the window, old already, dress torn at the shoulder, legs blue with bruises.

  She climbed on an empty crate. “More cake,” she said.

  “It’s all she’ll eat,” said Jeweldeen. “I made her one yesterday and one the day before, and they’re both gone. Daddy would thump me if he knew. He means to starve the truth out of her.”

  “I’m hungry,” Sharla said, raising her hands toward the window.

  “Honestly,” said Jeweldeen, “you’re gonna drive me straight up this wall with your begging.” She banged her fist on the side of the house. “I already told you, cake’s gone. You ate it, Sharla, the whole damn thing.”

  Sharla stared at her sister. “You talk to her,” Jeweldeen told Iona. “I’ll go see if I can find her something sweet.” She wagged her finger at Sharla. “But I am not making you another cake. You’re too fat anyway.”

  Jeweldeen was right about Sharla being too fat. Her breasts and belly were already bloated, twice their usual size. “You can tell me,” Iona said. “I won’t breathe a word to your daddy; I won’t even tell Jeweldeen.”

  Sharla cocked her head and her brow wrinkled. She put her hand over her mouth and Iona saw the chipped red polish on her nails. Living in the dark, eating nothing but cake, waiting for her father to come down the stairs—no wonder Sharla was starting to go off. “I know why you’re acting this way,” Iona whispered. She remembered the day her father put Angel down. Hannah wanted him to wait. Dry a year, he said, and now she’s worrying the others. But he was sorry to do it, and Iona saw him in the field, stroking Angel’s head.

  Jeweldeen returned, carrying two slabs of bread with butter and sugar. Sharla snatched them from her sister, stuffed a whole piece in her mouth and scuttled to the corner. No amount of coaxing could lure her back to the window.

  “I’ll bring you another slice,” Jeweldeen said. “With honey this time. Or strawberry jam. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Sharla squatted and chewed. “Forget it, then,” said Jeweldeen. She grabbed Iona’s arm. “Honestly,” she said, “I don’t know what you find so interesting.”

  Iona found everything about Sharla Wilder interesting. Maybe she did make love to Everett Fry before he shot himself. Maybe it felt like being with the ghost of a man and now she couldn’t get it out of her head. No matter how many times her daddy smacked her legs she was going to keep on telling him the same name. Everett Fry. What good was the truth? No one in his right mind was going to marry Sharla in her condition—even if Jack Wilder did hold a shotgun to his head. Maybe that was the real reason Sharla lay the blame on Everett. He’d turned the gun on himself and was safe from her daddy.

  Iona stayed clear of the Wilder place for the rest of the week. She wanted to see Sharla alone and planned to sneak over there some night. She’d ask Sharla what it was like to m
ake love with Everett Fry, to feel the scar on his shoulder with her fingers, the place where the flesh was puckered and hard.

  Did a dead lover whisper your name, or was silence the most important thing? Did you hear the wind in the grass? Did the branches beat against your window? Did he smell like a man, like your own father, or was his breath sweet as cinnamon and almonds?

  Iona never got the chance to ask these questions. On Sunday, Jeweldeen appeared. She still wore her church clothes, though it was late afternoon. Her little white anklets and patent leather shoes were speckled with mud. It had rained during the night, and Jeweldeen had ridden straight through the puddles.

  “Sharla’s not pregnant anymore,” Jeweldeen said, puffing as she tried to catch her breath. “She’s sick though. Too hot to touch. Daddy found her on the floor of the cellar when we got home from church, bleeding like a stuck pig. ‘Well that’s that,’ he says, and we carried her upstairs. My hands were burning. Fever a hundred and four, I’d say, but he won’t call the doctor. ‘Leave well enough alone,’ he told me. We put her in a tub of cold water. The bleeding slowed down but she’s still hot.” Jeweldeen climbed on her bike. “I better get back there before Daddy sees I’m gone.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “He won’t like it.”

  “Since when do you care?”

  Jeweldeen shrugged and Iona ran to get her bike.

  They rode fast without talking. The day was already dark, the air heavy with low clouds. Al Zimmerman’s bulls rammed their heads into the electric fence as the girls passed. The shock made them rear back but didn’t stop them from charging again, digging at the dirt with their sharp hooves.

  Jeweldeen peeked down the cellar window as they propped their bikes against the side of the house. “Look at this,” she said. Iona was afraid Sharla’s father had already forced her back down the stairs. But it was nothing like that. It was Jack Wilder himself, on his hands and knees, scouring the place where Sharla had curled into herself hours earlier.