by T. Greenwood
I shook my head.
“I was only a few months along. Barely showing yet.” She smiled. “Your father was down in the basement, working on something , and I was cleaning out the cupboards. You wouldn’t believe the stuff that your grandmother left behind. There was barely room for our dishes when we moved in. So, anyway, I was trying to get everything cleaned out. They call that the nesting instinct, though I’ve never much believed in that sort of thing. We had this step stool, but I still couldn’t reach the top shelf. I figured I could just pull the drawers out, use them like steps. Like a ladder. Well, I should have known how stupid that was. Especially with my being pregnant, but I had my heart set on getting that junk cleared out, so I climbed up. And just as I was reaching up for a mason jar filled with bobby pins or some such thing, my ankle twisted and down I went. The next thing I knew, I was having terrible pains,” she said.
She’d never told me this story before.
“I’d also knocked the wind out of myself, and so I couldn’t make a sound to let your father know that I’d fallen. Luckily, I must have made a big enough thud when I fell that he heard it and came rushing upstairs. Back then, the closest hospital was in St. Johnsbury, so he was driving like a maniac to get me to the hospital, and I remember lying in the backseat praying . Like I used to when I was a little girl. The whole way to the hospital, I was bargaining with a God I didn’t even believe in anymore to keep you safe. But what I mostly remember is thinking about what would happen if I did lose you. I hadn’t wanted to have children, you see….”
“Mom,” I said.
“I’m sure you knew that already. You’re a bright kid. You know you weren’t exactly part of the plan back then. But that afternoon, I had three hours of sitting in the emergency room to think about what would happen if you weren’t born. And even though I was scared out of my mind to be a mother—I wanted you. I wanted so badly to have you.”
I picked up the bottle of wine and studied the label.
“You see, the things that terrify us—the things that scare us—are sometimes the best things for us. If not for you, I would probably have gone on to do all the things I planned to do. Moved home to Boston, gotten a job with the symphony, all that. But that would have been an easy life. Being a mother . Taking that leap of faith, that was the real thing. That, for me anyway, was taking a chance. And now I can’t imagine having done anything else.” She smiled and reached for my hand. “I’m so proud of you. Graduating from high school, in the wink of an eye. Off to college. I didn’t do half as bad a job as I thought I would.”
“So now your job is done?”
“Oh, I don’t know about being done. But you’re almost grown now. A man. A good, kind man.” She squeezed my hand. “And now suddenly here is this opportunity. Of course I’m nervous. I’m terrified . But I have to do this. Not only for the people down there, but for myself.”
“Betsy says that the white people down there will hate you,” I said.
“It wouldn’t be the first time someone hated me.” She laughed and took a sip of wine. “Luckily, I never wanted to be belle of the ball.”
I looked at the kitchen computer. “Dad won’t know what to do without you here,” I said.
“He’ll be fine,” she said. “Maybe now he can channel all that creative energy into something truly useful.”
I smiled.
“You’ll be home at the end of the summer?” I asked. “Before I leave for school?”
“I’ll be home when my work is done,” she said. “And I hope to be done by the end of the summer.”
I wanted to tell her how much I would miss her, but I only managed to say, “Okay.”
The day that my mother arrived at the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, for orientation, three civil rights activists working for Project Freedom disappeared in Mississippi. We heard about this on the news, and my father sat pale and stunned on the couch for nearly an hour afterward. I knew then what the mothers and fathers of my classmates who had been sent to Vietnam must be feeling: a distant sort of terror, palpable but removed, like trying to touch someone’s face through a window. There was only the TV screen between us and the horror of what had likely happened to those three kids, to what could very well happen to my mother.
I left my father on the couch and wandered around the house, feeling lost. Usually the door to my mother’s study was closed all but a crack, revealing just a sliver of her frizzy hair, a glimpse of her peering over the top of her glasses, a flash of gray from her ratty old sweater. But today, the door was wide open. I had never set foot inside that room, not that I could remember anyway. Even as a child, I never trespassed. I imagined it though, dreamed a dark, quiet place—a tiny lamp on her desk providing the only illumination. Everything, in my imagined version of this room, glowed an amber color and smelled the musty smell of books. But now, on this early June evening, sunlight streamed through the bay window, blinding me as I opened the door. Her desk, which I knew was large, wooden, and heavy, was not as large as I dreamed it, and it was not cluttered but completely tidy. There were books, of course, but they were not in the disarray I had assumed they would be. In fact, they were alphabetized, fitting snugly into the floor to ceiling shelves along one wall behind her desk. There were no stacks on the floor, no scattered papers, no calico cat purring softly atop a pile of paperbacks. (I knew we did not have a cat, but still, this is what I imagined.) The one lamp on her desk was not amber glass but a simple banker’s lamp—brass with a green shade, the kind you find at public libraries. There was not only an unexpected orderliness to this room but an ordinariness . I felt the suspicions I’d been having suddenly confirmed; I didn’t know my mother at all.
But just as I was about to leave, I noticed the familiar gray sweater, the heavy cabled cardigan she almost always wore both inside and outside this house, hanging on the back of the door. I suppose I could have seen it as a good sign: that she would soon be back, that there had been no real reason to take it along for such a brief journey. But instead I knew that what it really meant was that my mother, this mother of unexpected order and efficiency, might believe that things were disposable. And suddenly her absence was even more complete, as if I’d found her very skin there. Shed. Molting one life for another. Only the cast off husk remaining.
Missing
E ight of the eleven missing bodies had been found. The victims’ families came to retrieve their loved ones’ remains. They arranged for burials. They left white painted crosses at the place by the river where the train derailed. Most of the families came and went quietly. A few banged on the door of my office demanding to speak to the person responsible for the accident after they had exhausted every other ear that would listen. I offered them water, a place to sit. I listened to each of them, allowed them their anger. I rarely bothered with the canned explanations I’d been coached to provide by the railroad representative. The NTSB was still investigating, but they believed that the derailment was likely due to a fracture in the rail. The break was small enough to go undetected during routine inspections and maintenance, but under the passing train it simply split. It was an accident. Simple as that. But I knew this was not what they wanted to hear. In a true accident, no one is at fault. What these people, in their tremendous grief, wanted—needed—was to have someone to blame. I could understand this.
The families of the victims w
hose bodies had not been found (the twenty-five-year-old father of four from North Carolina, the eighty-year-old woman from Georgia) came as well. Both of them wanted to visit the place where it happened. And because the representative sent by the railroad was unfamiliar with the area and wouldn’t have been able to find his way through the woods, I took them.
The widow of the missing man arrived at my office door with four children in tow. Though I suggested that I show her the way to the river, she insisted she could find it if I gave her directions. But as the children started to follow behind her, the baby clinging to her hip, I said, “You can leave them here. I don’t mind.”
She looked at me suspiciously, and then sighed, “Thank you.” She lowered the baby to the floor and accepted my scribbled map. She placed the remaining three children in chairs facing my desk, shook a finger at them, warning, “Don’t y’all tear nothin’ up.” And then to me, “I’ll be back real quick. Promise.”
“Please take as long as you need,” I said. “They’ll be fine.”
When she came back just a half hour later, her eyes were rimmed red, her makeup smeared. She grabbed a tissue from a box on my desk and smiled at the children, who had, despite her request, left my office in shambles. The youngest had found contentment sorting through the crumpled papers in my wastebasket, but the others were climbers.
“Come on, y’all,” she said, peeling the biggest one off the windowsill and gathering the littlest one in her arms. The other two clung to her legs. She said quietly, “I’m so sorry, sir. Thank you.”
I knew that she’d likely had only enough time to get to the river and turn back around. Not nearly enough time to actually grieve. “Did you have enough time, ma’am?”
She looked at me confused, eyes filling again, and said, “He was twenty-five years old .”
When the old man whose wife had been on her way to visit her sister in Montreal came to the station, he accepted my offer to take him on the trek south from the station to the river. We walked slowly side by side through the woods; he had a cane, and his breathing was labored. When we got to the site of the crash, there was little evidence of the wreckage remaining, only the flowers. The crosses.
“Here?” he asked, gesturing toward the river with his cane.
I nodded.
He walked toward the water’s edge, and for just a minute I worried that he might accidentally fall in.
“How long were you married, sir?” I asked.
“Sixty-five years,” he said without looking back at me.
“That’s a lifetime.”
“A lifetime and a half.”
When it was clear that he wasn’t in danger of falling in, I sat down on a moss-covered stump and watched him.
He knelt down next to the river, cupped his hands, and drank a handful of the cold water.
Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out an envelope. Without saying a word, he pressed the letter to his mouth and then rested it gently in the water. It was chilly out, and a shiver passed through my body. The current quickly grabbed the envelope from his hands and carried it downstream. The pale paper dipped and bobbed, and then disappeared around a bend in the river.
After a while, I helped him stand back up.
“Okay,” he said. “Time to go home.”
Freedom Summer
T he summer of 1964 was the shortest summer in all of my memory, each day like a grain of sand, slipping through my fingers despite every attempt to hold on. From the moment I tossed my cap up into the blue sky on graduation day, time seemed to accelerate. Because Brooder was gone, shipped off to Vietnam by then, and Ray was working full-time at the mill, it was just Betsy and I again. But the lazy days of summers past were an anomaly to what I now knew to be true. Summer was fleeting, and Betsy Parker was as evanescent as summer. Before autumn arrived, before we parted for our separate futures, I knew I had to do something. Say something . I was running out of time. There was urgency to every minute of that summer. I must have been the most desperate man alive.
There was a Dylan song on the radio that summer, though it wasn’t very popular, not part of the usual play list. If it had been, I probably would have quickly grown bored with it. But I only heard it maybe once a week or so, sometimes just catching the tail end as I got in the car and turned on the radio. Betsy loved it too, but because it wasn’t on the Top 40, I couldn’t find the forty-five anywhere. I wanted to surprise her with it. Wrap it in gold tissue for her. But instead, it became a running challenge, to catch it on the radio—to take the DeSoto out for long drives, suffering through “Chapel of Love” and “My Guy” in the hopes that those first few notes would take us by surprise. I thought of it as our song; it captured all that wild desperation I was feeling. All my crazy hope. One afternoon in July when it had easily been a week since the disk jockey had played the song, Betsy showed up at my house looking listless.
I had a part-time job that summer, mowing the sloping lawns between the tombstones at the cemetery. I’d gotten a scholarship to cover my tuition at Middlebury, and so I didn’t need to work much that summer, just enough to save some extra cash for school. (I hadn’t managed to save much though; I’d spent all of my graduation money and my first two paychecks on a brand new 35 mm camera, which I planned to give to Betsy for her birthday at the end of the summer.) I made my own hours, usually Monday and Thursday afternoons, when traffic through the cemetery was at a minimum. It was a Monday, and I was putting the mower into the trunk of the DeSoto when Betsy arrived.
“Let’s go swimming,” she said. “It’s too hot.”
“Okay,” I said. No one was waiting for me at the cemetery.
Betsy and I usually went swimming in the river. There was a good spot not far from Paul and Hanna’s. We’d swim all afternoon and then Hanna would make us dinner, hang our suits and towels out on her clothesline. Not too many kids knew about the spot, so we almost always had it to ourselves. But today as I started to turn down the road that would take us there, Betsy grabbed the wheel. “Let’s go to Gormlaith.”
Lake Gormlaith is up in the Northeast Kingdom, near Quimby and the Canadian border. It was mostly tourists up there this time of year, lots of rented camps. It’s a beautiful lake though. There’s a small island in the middle, and legend is the lake has no bottom. It was about a forty-minute drive; Betsy was quiet but restless. She rolled the windows down and leaned her head out, letting her hair get tangled in the wind. After about twenty minutes, she sighed and said, “I can’t wait to get out of here. I’m so tired of this place. There’s nothing to do.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Ugh. Don’t you get sick of this? Church, pastures, cows. River. Church, pastures, cows. River.”
It was true. The small towns and hamlets were like loosely strung beads, between which was nothing but green pastures and so many cows. But I loved this repetition, this pastoral rosary. It was predictable.
“Where would you like to be?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, leaning back into the car. “Anywhere but here, I guess.”
“Hmm.”
“You mad?”
“Nah.”
“You’re mad ,” she said.
“No I’m not,
” I said, feeling mad.
“Sure you are. I know you, Harper.” She laughed knowingly and rolled the window down again.
“You don’t know me,” I said, a lot more loudly than I intended.
She turned toward me, her smile fading into a frown. “Where would you like to be then?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, when you grow up. When you realize that there’s nothing here but small towns and small minds and cow shit. A whole lot of cow shit.”
I sat silently, staring at the dirt road that curled like a gritty ribbon in front of us. I gripped the wheel tightly and reached to turn on the radio so that I wouldn’t have to speak. I didn’t know how to tell her that I didn’t really care where I was, as long as she was there too. And so we drove for a while longer, not talking, until we were so deep in the woods that the DeSoto no longer had any radio reception.
“I only meant that I’m bored,” Betsy said, touching my right hand. “Don’t you ever get bored with all of this?”
“Sure,” I lied. I wasn’t ever bored as long as Betsy was around.
“Uncle Paul’s got a camp up here. There’s no running water, but there’s electricity, and if you want to stop at Hudson’s, we can get some hot dogs to make for dinner later,” she offered, like an apology. “Marshmallows and Hershey’s for s’mores?”
We spent the afternoon swimming at the boat access area of the lake, a rocky beach with a small grassy shore. The water was warm on the surface from the sun, but colder in the depths. My legs were numb as I crawled out of the water and onto the grass. Betsy had spread out two towels. She was lying on her stomach, fast asleep. I lay down next to her on the other towel, moving her hair out of her face so that I could see her better. She smiled in her sleep. I could have stayed there until the sun went down. I had never felt so content. God, I adored her.
