Frank and Iona were surprised when the light did come: it was neither terrible nor loud. Clouds lay low and thick on the horizon, so the passage from the night was merciful and slow, and they felt it had been this day forever.
They washed the body of Hannah Moon. Her bloated feet were milky and blue as fish underwater. Frank sponged them, tenderly, though they seemed strange to him, not at all like the long knobby feet he thought he remembered. He washed her swollen knees and fleshless thighs; he washed between her legs. The pubic hair was gone, and he saw that the distance between girlhood and old age was painful and brief.
Iona couldn’t look at her mother’s body, though she had seen the shriveled breasts and sharp hipbones every day for months, though she knew each sore on her mother’s buttocks. Now she washed Hannah’s face and imagined her as only her father knew her: as a child on the road, as the girl in his bed, as the woman who reached for his hand and pulled it toward her belly, as the wife who said: See how warm it is.
Iona’s brothers slept in ignorance while Iona chose stockings and shoes, a pale green dress, a pair of gloves, a ribbon to tie in her mother’s dry hair.
Later, after an uneaten meal, the boys all sat around the table and watched a plate slip from Iona’s hands and shatter on the floor forever and ever.
Alone, she stood in the kitchen as a drip from the faucet filled a cup in the sink. Each drop made the surface tremble, and she felt the water move in her own body. The thin golden light of winter streamed through the window, so beautiful she wanted to lie down and die in it.
Visitors came and went. Hannah’s sister Margaret arrived from Boise. She wheeled their senile mother through the house. “At least Hannah got to live her own life,” Margaret said. “Look at me, tied to this old woman.” Iona thought she saw her grandmother’s face twist with understanding. Margaret stooped in front of the wheelchair and wiped drool from her mother’s mouth with her own sleeve. “But you’re a sweetheart, aren’t you, baby? You don’t give me any trouble.” The old woman grinned, a great toothless smile that made her whole body strain and quiver. She didn’t know why she was here; Hannah was just a name like any other.
Hannah’s two brothers paid their respects, then sneaked out back to drink whiskey from the silver flasks they kept in their pockets. Quinte and Ray Cislo had fifteen fingers between them—a man and a half, they liked to say. Their wives stayed in the kitchen, chopping vegetables and making pies no one wanted to eat. Iona heard their chattering complaints, their endless gossip and weightless threats: I told him my bag was packed. But when Iona opened the door, they hushed and looked at her in a pitiful way that made her ashamed.
Her father’s sisters called from Wolf Point and Sheridan. The roads were bad; they weren’t coming. They sent their love. Everyone said that. I send my love. What did it mean?
Frank’s parents were dead, but that didn’t stop them from visiting the house. Iona hated them for her mother’s sake. Marry a young one, Delbert Moon said. His wife sat beside him on the sofa, her arms folded over her big chest. I told you she was too frail to outlive Frank, Eva said. I’m surprised she lasted as long as she did.
Clayton Cislo came too, drunk as he was the night he died. He winked at Iona. She thought she was too good for us, he said. Couldn’t wait to get away from her ma and me. Well you can see where it got her.
The unnamed child found her mother, brought her tiny bag of bones and laid them in the hollow of the woman’s pelvis. Iona was jealous of the baby and longed to be cradled, body within a body, just that way.
Iona’s brothers didn’t go back to Missoula that winter. No one asked why. Every night they sat at the table, each one in his place: the father at one end, Leon at the other. This never changed.
No one but Iona noticed how the mother’s absence filled her chair, how her hand fumbled with the fork. No one else saw her rise from the table to close the faded curtains and block the glare of the setting sun.
Iona sat beside the empty chair. The sun made her blink and squint. She stood and moved toward the window. Her limbs floated, her bones were water. Slowly she drew the curtains and said, “Sun’s in my eyes.” Her own voice made her dizzy. One of her brothers burped. None of them stopped eating. She had to lean against the sink. Whatever happens, happens again and again. The sun flared as it set, and the trees at the crest of the hills seemed to catch fire. Her father’s spoon scraped across the bottom of his bowl, and Iona Moon sat down to keep from falling.
6
Jay Tyler knew the woman was dead. His mother had clipped Hannah Moon’s obituary from the paper and left it on the kitchen table. He wondered if she knew about him and Iona, or if she was just trying to make a point about what could happen to mothers, even young ones. He felt sorry for himself and then angry, as if Delores wanted to blame him somehow.
Willy Hamilton talked about it too. He sat by Jay’s window and Jay lay on the bed. Willy hadn’t been to see Jay since the second cast came off, since the day Jay had said: I don’t need your fuckin’ pity.
Willy said, “I just keep thinking of Iona pulling that cat out of the river, saying she’d touched plenty of things that had been dead longer than that.”
Jay remembered Iona Moon touching him, the part that was dead now. He wanted Willy to leave. “I’m tired,” he said.
Willy stared out the window, at the bare black trees and the icy street. “She touched her too, after she was dead, I mean.”
Jay felt Iona’s long hair brush his cheek, the warm rag on his chest, imagined her washing his body as she had washed her mother’s body. “It’s late,” he whispered.
Willy stood up. “I should go,” he said. The room was dim, full of shadows, and Jay was glad for that. Objects lost their outlines, furred, and grew indistinct, as if they were crumbling slowly in the night air. He’d wake to find himself outside, lying on the frozen ground, the house and everything they owned fallen down around him. “I saw Muriel Arnoux at school this week,” Willy said. “She looks all right—if you want to know.”
It was a boy—if you want to know.
He didn’t want to know anything.
He drank himself to sleep and saw a dirty girl in overalls grab a chicken by the neck. She swung it over her head in great windmill loops. Bones snapped. The chicken fell to the ground and ran twenty feet, its head dangling, before it collapsed in the yard.
He woke cursing Willy Hamilton. What did he care how Hannah Moon died, or what Iona touched. What did it matter if Muriel Arnoux looked all right when she’d already made it clear she was never going to be all right again.
He had taken his mother’s car twice since the accident. Every time he hit the brakes he felt the stab in his shin and knee. Once he drove to South Bend and paid a woman twenty dollars for a blow job. He didn’t want to take his clothes off, didn’t want to see her face or feel her breath at his ear; he just wanted to unzip his pants, close his eyes and leave his body. But he couldn’t come. She gave him half an hour and finally said, “Look, baby, I don’t have all night.” Weeks later he headed north to the gorge where the cliffs plunged sixty feet and the squeezed river grew fast and wild. He thought of the woman who’d jumped from the bridge and was saved—bad luck or bad planning; people miscalculated all the time.
Now he took the car again. He parked by the high school three days in a row before he spotted Muriel. He didn’t know what he wanted. Slouched in his seat, he hoped she wouldn’t notice the Chrysler.
She walked with her head down. She looked more like her mother already, puffed up in a down parka so she seemed thick through the middle and slow, taking tiny steps, afraid of falling on the ice. She looks all right. It was a lie. If you want to know.
He parked in the same place on Thursday and again on Friday. Both days she passed him quickly, without seeing. She was still a clean girl, Jay thought, but if he held her in his arms and pressed his nose into her hair, he thought she’d smell of wet leaves and damp earth.
He couldn’t find her o
n Monday and wondered if she’d seen him after all. He worried that she might be sick and envisioned a long illness that would leave her body wasted and her mind fogged. It was very important to see her before this happened.
The next day a letter came for him at noon—a small, square note with no return address. His name and street were printed in careful, tiny script. Though he couldn’t remember seeing Muriel’s handwriting, he was sure the letter was from her.
He took it upstairs to his room, locked the door, sat down on the bed. He wanted to tear it open but restrained himself, easing one finger under the flap gently, the way he knew Muriel would.
He hoped the letter contained some secret message, some words he could not imagine until she spoke them, a line of forgiveness to heal him, a burst of longing to make him whole.
The note wasn’t signed and didn’t begin, Dear. There was only one sentence: Stop it, Jay.
He wished he could have been kinder to her that day last August when she’d come to the house to tell him that their child was a boy. If he had, she might speak to him now, might sit beside him in the car and feel some tenderness or regret. For two days he stayed home, but on Friday he waited again. At three-thirty he glimpsed her in the rearview mirror and knew she saw him too. She looked startled, about to run. He thought he’d have to chase her, but she walked toward his side of the car, her stride swift and deliberate. He rolled down his window, and she said, “Leave me alone.”
He stared at her quilted blue coat, trying to remember his hands on her belly. “I just want to talk.”
“My father’d beat me if he caught me with you.”
“Then get in and put your head down.” Jay was surprised to hear himself say it, and even more surprised when Muriel walked around the back of the car and did what he asked.
He hadn’t worked it out this far, had no plan of where he’d take her, but he drove toward the river, as if by going back to the place it all started, he could begin again and change the past.
Already the white winter sun sank through thin clouds near the horizon, leaving sky and river the same metallic gray streaked with gold. The far shore was black, and the line of trees appeared in the perfect mirror of water. Jay thought everything could be turned upside down and still look exactly the same. The river could open above them, and the sky could flow toward the dam at South Bend. Whether trees grew upward or hung from their roots made no difference. He wanted to explain this to Muriel so that she would understand how solid things could be made insubstantial and the past could be washed away.
“What do you want?” she said. She leaned into her door and rolled down the window even though the air was frigid. He rolled his down too, to show her that anything she did was okay. Anything. And he would do the same. Whatever she wanted.
“What?” she said. He was staring. He saw now that she was scared. Her voice quavered. Her nose was red as if she held back tears. He was sorry. He didn’t want her to be afraid of him. He reached for her hand, but she jerked away and held her own hands in her lap, fingers tightly laced.
Jay thought about the slivers of glass in his cheek, how they worked their way to the surface for months after the accident, how they made hard knots before bursting through the skin and dotting his face with blood. “I don’t want anything,” he said.
“Then take me home,” said Muriel, “and stop waiting for me. You don’t know. You don’t know what my father will do.” Tears welled and her eyes glistened. I’ll kill you and go to hell without regret if you ever come near my family again. Jay knew what Francis Arnoux would do to him. He moved toward her. He wanted to kiss the tears from her cheeks and say, I hurt too. He wanted to touch the back of her neck, under her hair.
But when he put his fingers on Muriel’s face, she pulled away, as if his hand burned. She looked at him, eyes wide, mouth tight. He forgot how sorry he was. His touch was vile to her, he saw that now. Look, baby, I don’t have all night. And to her too, Jay thought, to all of them. Mommy has a headache. He wanted to slap her. He wanted to kiss her hard, force her lips apart. He thought of the river at the end of winter, ice heaved up on the shore, great broken chunks, the relentless river, green and black and slow. He’d brought her here to make everything all right, and now she had ruined it again. He had thought of her so tenderly, like a child. Now he wanted to grab her legs and pull her toward him. If he repulsed her, all the better. She was cruel to make him behave so badly, to make him see himself this way.
But his hands were shaking. He was afraid too, and the tears streamed down his face though he didn’t know why he was crying. Once his mother had shown him a tree in the woods that had been cleaved and burned by lightning. There was a wound in the trunk, and the tree had two trunks after that, growing out of the scar, forever joined and forever separate. He didn’t understand then, but he did now.
He thought there were two kinds of people. The distance between who he was before the accident and who he was after was insurmountable. He had crossed a boundary. He wanted to tell Muriel that she was here, on the other side, with him, that they couldn’t go back and be what they were in the past, that the people who loved them then couldn’t love them now, could barely see them, in fact; so they should try to love each other because they were twin trunks of the same tree, their lives scarred by the same wound.
What do you want? She despised him. Nothing. She wasn’t even pretty anymore, and never would be again. Nothing. He headed back to town. It was just past five but already dark.
“Christ was whipped thirty-nine times for a question he couldn’t answer,” Muriel said.
He laughed, a loud bark from the chest. “I’m no Jesus,” he said.
“I was thinking about myself,” she whispered.
It was only after he’d dropped her three blocks from her house that he realized what she meant. He imagined her father waiting behind the closed door. He heard the insistent, unanswerable question: Where the hell have you been?
Jay knew that Muriel thought he’d ruined her life. No one will marry me now. That’s what she said. She was planning her spinsterhood at fifteen. She was going to live at home, take care of her parents, nurse them in their old age. I can’t ever make up for the pain I’ve caused. He thought they should be grateful to him for what he’d done; now she’d stay, humbled and ashamed, forever their servant—no, slave.
He drove back to the place where they’d parked. A light snow was falling. Jay Tyler reviewed his crimes. He thought of the frog he’d caught when he was seven. He whacked it on the head to stun it, torched a wad of papers and threw the frog on top to see it explode.
He remembered things he’d seen that he had no right to see: Everett Fry’s hat blown off his head; Sharla Wilder sitting half naked on her bed; Roy Wilkerson curled into a ball on the sidewalk.
Once, when no one was home, Muriel had led him through her house. In every room there was a different image of Christ: a blue Jesus hanging in the bathroom, hands nailed to the cross—even his blood was tinted blue; Jesus opening his own chest in the living room to reveal his throbbing sacred heart; scattered crayons and the Jesus coloring book spread on the kitchen table: Jesus rolling a stone from a tomb, calling to a man four days dead; Jesus multiplying loaves and fishes; Jesus talking to his disciples at the last supper—one of you will deny me, one of you will betray me.
Jay had laughed about the coloring book, but now he thought how good it would be to sit with Muriel’s little brother and sister, trying to stay within the lines, how peaceful to come to some understanding as the pictures emerged, as color gave them shape and sense.
There was so much he didn’t understand. Why didn’t the frog explode—why did it only hiss and shrivel and turn black? Why did his mother touch him so tenderly, then go away? What good did it do to lock herself in the bathroom and let the water run and run? What had Iona Moon told him about winter on the Kila Flats—Absolute zero, no degrees. Frozen pipes. Her mother’s frozen legs, no, only swollen: she couldn’t walk. Same thing. Th
e outhouse. Don’t sit down all the way—your ass might freeze to the seat. Don’t stand up. You know what will happen.
There was a place in the center of his body that was this cold. Absolute zero. He wanted to lie down with Iona now, to drift without moving, rest without sleeping, to feel the hard bones of her chest against his chest, skin against skin. He didn’t understand this either, didn’t know how she would heal him, or why, except that she was the only one who wasn’t afraid. If he’d had any courage at all, he would have gone to her and tried to explain.
Iona saw the boy as he ducked out the henhouse door. Even in the half light of the January morning she knew the skittish shadow was Matt Fry. He sprinted across the white field, hugging a small bundle to his chest.
A thief has to steal, she thought. A hungry boy doesn’t give a damn about what other people say they own. Better to come here. Al Zimmerman or Jack Wilder might shoot first and ask questions later. Matt Fry’s own father would shoot for sure.
She heard Hannah say: All your kindness is never going to change him. Now she saw that this was true. If her brothers found out about the eggs, they’d go up to the shed and slap Matthew around—Teach the little shit a lesson—as if they’d forgotten he was once their friend. But their meanness wasn’t going to change him, either. One more blow to the head wouldn’t knock any sense into him.
Iona thought it was unfair that her brothers sat around all day waiting for the ground to thaw, while she had to go back to school. They weren’t up early enough to expect her to make their breakfast, but they still counted on dinner—even if all they’d managed to do during the day was drive to the dump.
The worst of it was the fact that she’d flunked every class in the fall. That meant summer school with dummies or an extra semester next year. Thinking about it as she stood on the road waiting for the bus made Iona want to forget the whole thing. What good was a high school degree to a girl like her? She wasn’t going to college and she could already read.
Iona Moon Page 8
