Iona Moon

by Melanie Rae Thon

  Just before midnight Buck Caudill called Willy out to the Road-stop to break up an argument. Some poor loser didn’t want to pay his pool debt, and the winner was threatening to punch the cue stick in one ear and out the other.

  Willy was glad to have a mission, a life to save: this was better than six tickets; Horton would be proud. But by the time he got to the bar the debt was paid, and the two guys were slapping each other on the back, buying beers for the house, setting up the balls for a rematch.

  “Sorry to drag you out here,” Buck said.

  “No bother—better to play it safe.”

  “Wish I could offer you a drink.”

  “Some other time.” The trouble with Delores started because of that first mistake: drinking in uniform. Horton was right. One false step leads to another, and the path of evil is long and dark.

  Sitting behind the wheel of the cruiser, Willy counted thirteen cars in the lot. He tried to recall the faces of the people inside. A good policeman sees without looking. He was a lousy policeman. He could only picture four faces: the laughing men who had just quarreled, the tall girl in a yellow miniskirt—no, he didn’t see her face: he saw the curve of her buttocks as she bent over the pool table, shooting imaginary balls with an imaginary stick. And he remembered Buck, of course, Buck’s slack, weary face, Buck’s big hand setting a shot glass in front of a customer at the bar as he talked to Willy. Buck had the look of a heavy man who had starved himself; the flesh of his cheeks hung loose, and his mustache drooped. Seeing Buck hardly counted, so he’d only noticed three people. Was there a blond at the bar? Man or woman? I don’t know if you’re cut out for this line of work. The girl in yellow was underage. Most likely. He should have asked her for some I.D. But if she didn’t have it, Buck was in trouble too.

  Willy scanned the cars again. The red Mustang belonged to Luke Sweeney. Graduation present. Short men need hot cars. He hadn’t seen Luke. Maybe he was taking a piss. Yeah, maybe half the guys in the place were in the damn john. Willy banged the steering wheel with both hands.

  At the end of the lot, he saw the Chrysler and parked again.

  “Change your mind?” Buck said when he spotted Willy.

  “Mind if I use the facilities?”

  “Be my guest.”

  This time Willy looked at everyone. He walked quickly toward the restrooms but watched each face. The blond sitting alone at the bar nursing a drink wasn’t red-faced Delores, half in the bag. It was Jay.

  He looked gaunt, his face drained of color. They hadn’t spoken since the night they’d found Delores. It was difficult to tell if Jay was tight or dangerously sober. Can I give you a lift home? He’d see through that. Willy believed Jay had forgiven him but no longer loved him. No—never loved him. Willy was surprised at the word—love—his word, unbidden, what he’d felt for Jay since they were boys rolling in the grass, arms and legs entwined, what he’d felt from the first time he saw Jay Tyler hit a perfect dive—love and awe, that too, what he’d always felt but left unnamed till now. Willy almost touched him as he passed, but Jay didn’t glance at the thin man in the blue uniform.

  He splashed cold water on his face and dried himself without looking in the mirror. When he came out, Jay was gone.

  He glimpsed the Chrysler on Elm, killed his lights, and followed it all the way to Willow Glen. Jay slipped the car into the dark garage. Home safe. Willy hit his high beams. He wanted to set the blue light flashing, wanted the keening siren to wake everyone on this dead street, everyone in this ghost town.

  He looked at his watch: half past twelve. He could go home. Home, where his mother was sleeping. Home, where his father was sleeping. Home, where his sisters pressed themselves into their own dreams, swollen with desire. If he didn’t make any trouble for himself, he could just go home.

  Iona knew she could never go home, not really, and she couldn’t stay with Sharla too long either. They’d grow alike. Spinster sisters, twins with a secret language no one else understood, a way of praying, these words between them. It was simple and tender and terrifying.

  She kept her promise and started school in January. Three nights a week, she flipped burgers at Doolie’s Drive-in, wore a pink polyester uniform and knew Sharla was right: she’d rather die than do this for the rest of her life. So she went to class and took notes, passed her tests, tried not to get caught smoking in the girls’ room.

  They shared the bed. Iona slept while Sharla worked, and Sharla slept while Iona was at school. Leon asked about that the second time Iona came to visit. “You sleep on the couch?” he said. He was nervous because of what he’d done with Jeweldeen. He grunted when Iona explained.

  “What did you think?” said Jeweldeen, nudging him with her elbow.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I was just asking.”

  This was the middle of January. Jeweldeen still had a month to go but looked ready to bust. “Sometimes I want to reach inside myself, grab its foot and yank it out,” she told Iona. “Seventeenth of February—that’s my day. If I’m late I’m gonna pop my own water.”

  Jeweldeen and Tessa were both a week ahead of schedule. Frank Moon spent the eighth of February in the barn with his cow, and Leon rushed to town with his wife. The calf was male, the baby a girl. “Bad luck for both of us,” Leon said.

  The child was so small and red that Leon wouldn’t touch her. He watched her squirm in Jeweldeen’s arms, watched her suckle and sleep. He felt pity and envy, a desire to pull her from his wife, a need to protect her from himself.

  Iona wondered how it was that Jeweldeen always knew exactly what to do. Even when the baby’s tiny face twisted, even when she screamed and her whole body trembled with frustration, Jeweldeen could calm her, could lift her from the crib and still her sobs. No wonder Leon was jealous: he saw the mystery but had no part in it.

  Every time Iona went to her father’s house she expected to startle Hannah in the barn, find her sitting on a stool, bent under a cow. She looked for her mother in the root cellar. Flinging back the door, Iona was sure she’d see Hannah rise from the dark room, climbing slowly, her apron full of potatoes and beets. But it was always Jeweldeen who emerged—Jeweldeen with her broad face and strong shoulders, round arms, thick legs—good wife for a farmer, not at all like Hannah, who moved fast as air, a wraith in the woods of Iona’s mind.

  Once Iona imagined Hannah had locked herself in the bathroom. She sat in the hall by the door, waiting, listening to the snap of cards, Hannah laying out a game of solitaire in the only room where she could have her privacy. Iona was patient, completely still. Finally she touched the door; it wasn’t locked, not even closed tight. Curtains flapped in the breeze from the open window.

  If she were quick and quiet enough she might catch her mother at the kitchen sink. But she missed her again and again. She kept feeling someone had just slipped out of the room; someone had left her apron tossed carelessly over the back of a chair. Soon, Iona thought, it will be tied around a waist again. On the table, half a cup of cold tea made a rust-colored stain on white china. Will it always be this way, late afternoon, late winter. Will I always come into a room she’s just fled.

  Moving through the house, Iona felt weary, too weak to keep standing: she had to stop and steady herself, had to grab a door frame to keep from falling. She was amazed that such a small thing—dust motes swirling in a shaft of light—could unstring her: snow on the ground, this winter light, bright rectangle on the floor, and Hannah upstairs, forever dying. Later, outside, she pressed her back to the trunk of the maple in the yard, and even then she felt herself sliding down, as if her bones were blood, flowing out of her.

  You watch your own brothers carry a pine box, and you know that’s where your mother lives. But a green ribbon in yellow hair destroys you, just a girl on the street, young and rosy, nothing like Hannah, except for the ribbon, except for the hair. Sun strikes blond wood. This is what you remember most of all, how you wished to touch it, smooth, lovely wood, how you longed to lie down and feel it
, the whole length of your body.

  She stood in the barn. Four cows chewed their cud in the half-dark. Belle was still alive. Under the eave of the tool shed the last wood of winter was stacked. She sank down, crouching in the damp shadows, promising herself she would wait now until someone found her. She stayed a long time—a day, she thought, a minute. She gazed out at the fields. No one came. The black limbs of the maple were full of crows. Beaks stabbed gray air. She walked back to the house and up the steps, into the bright kitchen where Jeweldeen sewed at the table, basting a blue satin edge on a tiny wool blanket.

  Leon sat beside her, rubbing mink oil into his boots. His hands were stubby, fingers short, palms broad. Strong hands but not an artist’s hands. She wanted to remember him carving, wanted to see the grace of those hands as they turned a block of wood into a delicate woman. But she realized she had never witnessed this magic, that he must have whittled alone—in his room at night or behind the woodshed.

  She burned, jealous of him for making something Hannah loved. That was the part she did remember: Hannah holding the bear in her hands, closing her eyes to feel ridges of fur, opening them to see that the bear was smiling, slightly, so he looked sweet instead of dangerous—Hannah was smiling too, she who smiled so rarely. And it was Leon who had worked this miracle. Dull, brutal Leon. Iona tried to imagine how the same hands carving feathers or fingers, lips or eyes could cover her mouth. Don’t you ever tell, Iona.

  Leon looked up from his boots and caught her staring. She was ashamed, as if she’d seen something she was never meant to see: his thick fingers rubbing those boots, oil soaking into leather.

  “What?” he said. But she did not answer.

  In the night, Jeweldeen and Leon filled Hannah’s room with their sounds. The baby cried in Iona’s room. The baby cried in the living room and in the kitchen. The baby laughed. Everyone held her, sweet baby Louise, round, hairless Louise. Where could Hannah hide in this house full of noise? She stood at the edge of the woods where her own child was buried. She climbed in the hills where coyotes howled. Iona knew that when fall came, when the tamaracks moved gold and brittle in the wind, she would see Hannah stooping in the fields, lifting potatoes from the earth. Her mother brushed away the dirt. See, she said, see how warm it is.

  In a trunk in the attic, Iona found her mother’s cotton dresses and wool sweaters. She pressed them to her face, but they smelled only of mothballs. She found the clay plaques, her brothers’ handprints, hated and saved. What mother needs to be reminded? What mother wouldn’t recognize the smallest part: lock of hair, bony ankle, scraped knee, sunburned shoulder? Iona looked for relics like these, but Hannah Moon had left nothing of herself behind.

  Leon’s carvings lay at the bottom of the trunk. She stuffed the little farmer and the tiny woman in her bag and took them back to Sharla’s. At night she put them on the dresser and watched them in the dark. Sometimes they moved toward each other, sometimes away. I just want you to be happy, the woman whispered, and Iona thought this was strange, because she had never known anyone who was happy.

  She remembered the long morning silences of her father’s house, sheets of rain, endless rivers, the wide lake opening forever. Mother bent over the stove, and Father sat in his chair, hands cupped around coffee. Just by the curve of Hannah’s shoulders Iona could see that some word or absence of words had passed between them; her mother had turned, and meant to stay turned, busy with her woman’s work, cracking eggs, spooning dough onto the pan for biscuits, emptying coffee grounds to make a second pot before the boys woke. She resented her chores and was glad for them, for the excuse to keep her back to the man at the table. He lifted his mug slowly, sipping noisily. Even his slurping made Hannah flinch, despising the fact of him, the unavoidable body. His hands were chapped, raw and bloody at the knuckles. Iona didn’t know why they’d argued. A word or a touch could stiffen her mother’s spine, though he was the one to go out in the cold rain for firewood; he was the one who took the chill from the house.

  In this moment, he was the one Iona pitied. But he was not the one she loved.

  Iona knew that seeing her father holding the baby should make her happy, but it didn’t. She felt a space opening inside her, a hole dug at the shore, filling with muddy water.

  Leon took the baby from Frank. He was tender now but still scared, and Iona felt sorry for him, remembering how he stood at the window, chewing tobacco, unable to touch Hannah, unable to look at her with open eyes. Louise was more than a month old, but her own father still touched her as if he expected her to break or scream. Often Louise did yell when Leon picked her up. How could she trust him, this clumsy man who was afraid of her?

  “That’s how you were with me,” Frank said to Iona one evening in late March. “You wouldn’t have anyone but your mama. When your grandma had her stroke, Hannah left you here with me for five days, and I swear you howled the whole time.”

  “I remember that,” Leon said. “She wouldn’t let any of us near her.” He seemed satisfied by this, putting blame where it belonged, showing Iona it was her fault, after all.

  Leon held Louise and rocked lightly in his chair. The baby stopped crying and laid her head on his shoulder.

  “Good thing your mama came home when she did,” Frank said. “Another week and you might have starved.”

  Iona felt a pressure behind her eyes that made her head pound, a place that still hurt, where a white scar and a memory of snow converged. She wished she were Louise, that Leon and her father would hold her this way, that she would be free to love them.

  Her headache started at the old wound and spread: her brothers said they were just running, and she said they were trying to ditch her, and it didn’t matter either way because her head got split open all the same. Ice glazed the rocks. Her brothers ran, far beyond her reach already. Frank called from the woods, angry—that’s when it happened, when she looked back and kept running. She saw herself falling, as if she were a hawk and the shadow of a hawk at the same time, in the air and on the ground. She heard herself yell. Then something struck the back of her skull, and she must have blacked out because time folded in on her, and the next thing she remembered was looking up to see her father and her three sorry brothers standing in a circle around her. Her father said: Wiggle your toes for me, Iona. He smiled. He was very proud of her for doing this one, small thing. That’s my good girl.

  She saw that despite the pain—or perhaps because of it—this was a good memory, because her father held her and talked to her as sweetly as he talked to the cows when they were almost ready and he knew their sorrow.

  Now Iona watched Leon stroke the soft down of Louise’s tiny head. Later, after supper, after the dishes were washed and the baby was in her crib, Frank sat on the porch alone, smoking his pipe. Iona stopped on her way to the car.

  “Leaving so early?”

  “School tomorrow.”

  “I always forget.”

  Iona nodded. He had other things on his mind.

  “How’s it going?” he said. “School, I mean.”

  “Fine.” She wanted to tell him how much she hated it, how the girls stopped talking whenever she came into the bathroom, how Mr. Fetterhoff still made jokes under his breath, private jokes that only she understood, how she and Muriel Arnoux brushed against each other in the cafeteria and looked away, pretending they had nothing in common. She wanted to tell him that even the younger boys asked her if maybe she wanted to go to the river. “Smoke some cigarettes,” they said, “drink some wine—you know.” She wished she could say that she’d found a picture taped inside her locker, a photograph from a magazine, a dark-haired girl naked on a bed, playing with herself, one hand on her crotch, one hand in her mouth. Someone had scrawled Iona Moon across the girl’s belly. She tore it down, crumpled it in a wad, stuffed it in her pocket. Who knew her combination? She heard laughter behind her but didn’t turn, didn’t let them see what they’d done: her red face burning, her tears of rage.

  “Aren’t y
ou cold?” she said to Frank.

  “I suppose I am.”

  “You should go inside.”

  “Smoke bothers Jeweldeen.”

  “She’s not—”

  “No,” Frank said, “it’s too soon.”

  “I’ll see you next week.” She longed to kiss his forehead but she put her hand on his shoulder instead. Nite, Daddy. He seemed to slump beneath her touch, weaker, more frail than she remembered, and she was worried for him, living in this house with three strong men. She wondered if Leon might turn on him one day, pay him back for all his childhood pain. She saw her father just as he was, no longer the colossus, no longer the bear in the fairy tale, forever terrifying and tempting, turning to a man in the dark, waking as a bear every morning.

  He patted her fingers without looking up. His skin was rough, his touch heavy. She would recognize those hands anywhere, at the edge of any sleep. “I keep thinking I’ll see her,” he said at last. Iona knew that his grief for Hannah went far beyond her death, that he mourned the girl she’d been before the first child died, the girl who’d loved him for a single year. “Every time I come in the house,” he said, “I look for her.”

  Iona stroked the back of his head. “Me too,” she said. “Me too, Daddy.”

  24

  Willy saw Delores pinned to a wall, struggling with a man in a loose black coat. She dug at his shoulders, kicked at his shins. Willy shouted, but his voice was garbled, a record at the wrong speed. She moaned. He remembered that sound, remembered looking at her just this way. When she felt him watching, she opened her eyes. Slapped the man. Pushed him away. A show for Willy’s sake. Now she was tall, bigger than the man; he shrank under her gaze. The little man turned, and Willy saw it was himself, a boy wearing a foolish mask.