When she saw him for the last time, he was in a hospital in a cloud of cocaine. She said good-bye to him, but he didn’t hear her. She drove west on Route 40. The hue and texture of that cloud around him seemed to be projected out onto the giant scrub-board sky. It was as though his mind were spewing waste against the blue vault. He always used the word “waste.” He could have been an architect, she thought. He saw all landscapes as constructions—the vistas and lines of rocks and sand and scrub and sky. A wasteland, he kept saying. She couldn’t keep loving someone who would squander the sky itself. That was the last time she let herself be in love. He was only one small event in her past, one of those unmanageable pieces of her life that she had swept under the road as if the road were a rug, and now here she was in Kentucky, looking for road signs. But she was still riding that Harley. She remembered seeing, in the bike’s swooping light, an owl the size of a small child standing by the side of the road. It revolved its head and rose—with marvelous, slow grace—into the blank night.
The Funeral Side
On her first night home in two years, Sandra McCain slept in her mother’s old sewing room. Her own room had been filled with furniture from the store downstairs. One side of the first floor was McCain’s Furniture and the other side was McCain’s Funeral Home. As a teenager, after her mother died, Sandra worked in the furniture store; and as children, she and her brother had played hide-and-seek between the parallels of the divans. Now, since her father’s stroke, a small staff operated the furniture store, but the funeral side was closed.
During the night, she heard her father’s cane stab the hallway floor. She heard the commode flush.
Earlier that evening, as they sat on the balcony watching lightning bugs, her father said, “Well, Sandy, so you decide to come home to your old daddy when you think I’m going to kick the bucket.”
“I’m glad to see you still have the funeral-parlor manner,” she told him. He always turned on the charm downstairs, but upstairs he was plainspoken. The stroke was mild, but it had weakened him. “We never used to have flowers like this out here,” Sandra said. The balcony was framed by half a dozen swinging baskets of fuchsias and geraniums.
“Damn place has always been full of flowers.”
“But these are so friendly, not like all those horrible glads and mums that were always downstairs.”
He made a fist, then released his fingers, an exercise to work out the deadness in his arm. “When are you going to marry and settle down?”
“You always ask me that. You seem to forget I was married once.”
“How come you didn’t stay married?”
“We wanted different things.”
“A man and a woman always want different things,” he said.
“Well, Dad, I sure don’t see how the human race has survived.”
He grunted. “What’s it like up there in Alaska anyway? Is it like that old show Northern Exposure?”
“Not really.”
In Alaska, the long summer light was beginning, so the darkness down here in Kentucky felt unnatural. From the balcony, the moonless sky seemed claustrophobic, but the lightning bugs winked little glimmers of hope.
Her father had been in this dying town all his adult life, putting people to rest. Surely his work had distorted his perspective, she thought. In high school she had hated him—or hated his work anyway. But now she regretted the distance between them. Her impulsive marriage was years ago, when she was in her early twenties. She and Wayne were married at Herrington Lake, near Lexington. Her father had a funeral to direct and did not come. At the end of the ceremony, the whole wedding party dived off the limestone palisades, like penguins. When she saw the wedding photos, her mind superimposed tuxedos on the guests. Wayne was large and comfortable with himself. He had dozens of good qualities. One of them was his simple sincerity. Another was the way he thought well of people, regardless of their flaws. Wayne was in graduate school, studying engineering, and Sandra was getting an M.A. in communications. One night, in the middle of a chapter called “The Dysfunction of the Mass Communicated,” she suddenly threw the book across the room. She never went back to class.
In the morning Sandra brought her father a cup of herb tea and a bowl of granola. He was sitting on the balcony in a recliner from the store. By now Sandra had readjusted her image of him to include the new gray in his hair, the larger bald spot, the paler cheeks.
“I don’t want that stuff,” he said, making a face at the cereal.
“It’s good for you.” She had already lectured him on cholesterol and fat. “This is what I eat in Alaska.”
“We’re not in Alaska,” he said. “I read where people should eat what’s right for their climate. That’s why Eskimos eat whale blubber and the Chinese eat rice. Don’t you eat blubber up there?”
“Why am I trying to talk sense to you?”
He grinned. “I read about this health-food nut who lived to be a hundred and had never eaten anything impure. He went on one of those fasts that are supposed to be so good for you and starved to death.” As he laughed, his cane fell to the floor.
“I’m not sure what you’re driving at,” said Sandra, retrieving the cane.
“If I had denied myself for a hundred years, I’d be calling for a bottle of whiskey and a big box of Goo-Goo Clusters at the end.” He laughed. “Would you bring me whiskey and Goo-Goo Clusters on my deathbed?”
“Anything you say, Daddy.”
Sandra returned to the kitchen and swapped the granola for a carton of eggs. She wondered if he was just being stubborn about his diet, or if his line of work had taught him something about dying. He was too young to die. The thought of his death made her furious—partly at herself, for waiting so long to come home.
Sandra pedaled around town on her father’s bicycle. Cork (Pop. 1,700) was surrounded by cornfields stretching across the flat bottomland. The hardware store had closed long ago, but the florist’s shop, the tiny grocery, the post office, and a gas station still lined Main Street. McCain’s, one of the half-dozen large old houses in town, was faded yellow, and its wood siding was warped.
She crossed the railroad tracks and rode out past the water tower and the Christmas-tree farm. They always had a tree for the store, another for the living room, and a third for the funeral home. Once, a child had died just before Christmas, and the family brought the child’s presents and set them under the funeral tree. After the burial, Sandra’s father returned the packages to the grieving parents, together with the guest register and the thankyou cards. The family kept the gifts, unopened, under a small silver tree in the girl’s bedroom. Now Sandra realized that she might have only imagined the silver tree.
She rode for two miles or more, passing house trailers and occasional new brick ranch houses. After being in Alaska, she thought this landscape seemed small and tame. There was not much wild left, although the new houses appeared to have sprung up like funguses in the fields. Alaska was far away. She tried to imagine Tom Girardeau at the Riverside Restaurant late at night, while the sunlight lingered. She pictured him ordering beer and steamed clams and insect spray. They often sat there for hours, watching the floatplanes take off and land on the Chena. She was sorry to miss solstice. Tom would go with friends up to Eagle Summit, where the sun seemed to crawl horizontally across the sky.
On the way back into town, she stopped at her widowed aunt’s house. A red pickup was parked on the street, and a boy was mowing the yard. Aunt Clemmie, Sandra’s father’s sister, had tried to mother her and her brother, Kent, after their mother died, but they resisted. Sandra had been fiercely secretive and would never confide in Clemmie—not about her nightmares, or her grief, or her condemnation of her father.
Clemmie let Sandra in the side door. “I bet you wish you had some of this weather up there in Alaska, Sandra. Don’t you freeze your behind up there?”
“You get used to it.” Sandra fingered a warm jar of strawberry preserves on the kitchen counter. Just then the lid p
opped as it sealed. “I love the snow,” she said.
“It snowed here the second of March,” Clemmie said. “It killed the peaches.”
“How do you think Dad’s doing, Aunt Clemmie?” Sandra asked as she absently patted the cat, a haughty Persian with a breathing problem.
“Oh, honey, I don’t know. The doctors said the arteries in his neck are blocked and that wasn’t a good sign. But since you came home, he’s doing so well! I see color in his face I haven’t seen in months. He’s real proud you decided to come home.”
“I don’t know what I ought to do,” Sandra said as they moved to the living room. She sat in an easy chair spotted with doilies.
Clemmie said, “That brother of yours hasn’t been down since Claude was in the hospital. But he works so hard and has a family.”
Her aunt’s tone was apologetic—Kent could be excused because he had responsibilities; Sandra had no responsibilities, since she had gone to Alaska voluntarily and was not married to the man she lived with.
“It was just extraordinary your daddy did what he did,” Clemmie said, inviting the cat into her lap. “Raising you and Kent by himself and operating those businesses.” She laughed. “We used to tease him about people coming to view the body and then on the way out shopping for dinettes. ‘Dine now, die later,’ we’d say.” The cat looked at Clemmie admiringly, as if she were telling him stories. Clemmie went on, “Claude had a time with you kids. Oh, you fought him and he couldn’t do a thing with you. He blames himself for the way you turned out.”
“How’s that?” Sandra said sharply. The cat glared at her.
“Well, your divorce and the traipsing around you do. He worries about you up there. He’s afraid you’ll freeze or get eaten up by a bear.”
“He never said that.”
“Claude never let on about his personal feelings. But he forgives you.”
“Forgives me?”
“Don’t go blaming him for everything, Sandra,” said Clemmie gently. “That’s the way with everybody these days.”
Sandra settled her head back against a crocheted doily and listened to her aunt chatter. She imagined herself a cadaver, her head resting on a satin pillow, with lace framing her face. If she stayed here in Cork, she would just keep sinking until she lost all feeling, like someone in a sensory deprivation tank.
When Clemmie had phoned about the stroke, she begged Sandra to come back home. She said, “He always claimed he didn’t need anybody, but he’s been lonesome since you kids left. You probably don’t even remember what a fun-loving man he was before your mother died, you were so young, but losing her made him draw up in a knot.”
Sandra did remember. She remembered the night her father erected a teepee on the balcony for her and Kent when they were little. It was fashioned from a faded funeral canopy. Her father made hoot-owl and ghost noises in the night to scare them while they camped in the tent. She remembered evenings when they churned ice cream on the balcony, and he teased her mother, pinching her playfully on the rear. Sandra’s mother had her hair fixed every Friday morning at Maybell’s Beauty Parlor, to be nice for the weekend. And Claude inevitably joked about her hairdo. “Did you sleep in your hair wrong, Sally? It looks lopsided. Have the squirrels been in your hair?” When she was dressed up and had her makeup on, with bright red lipstick, he would say, “Your mouth looks just like a hen’s butt.” Back then, the balcony was the center of their life. It seemed to suspend them up in space—away from the crowded furniture, away from the bodies in the dark parlor. It was as though they were riding in a hot-air balloon. They watched thunderstorms from the balcony.
Two years ago, when Sandra’s plane circled low over Fairbanks, the first thing she noticed was the bright neon sign of a Safeway. Sandra had promised herself she would stay two years in Alaska, and she had. She stayed there longer than she was married, longer than any of her stretches of school or jobs. She wrote her father occasional postcards, reports of bears and moose, with pointed references to how cold and wild it was. She went to Alaska with only a duffel bag, the remnants of her belongings from ten years of moving around. The only loss she regretted in all her wanderings was the dog she adopted in Lexington after her divorce. She was working at the human-services agency and lived in a basement apartment in one of the refurbished old houses on Maxwell Street. Her pet had the energy and endurance of a sled dog, she thought later. He loved to stay outside in the winter, his coat thick and glossy, even when the water in his dish was frozen. He had been poisoned, the veterinarian told her after she found him dead. He was stretched out on his side, at the basement entrance, as though he had been trying to get indoors. There was a puddle of blood under his tail.
Tom Girardeau kept sled dogs, but Sandra never grew attached to them. She had expected sled dogs to be beautiful, but most of Tom’s dogs were skinny mixed breeds, not huskies or malamutes. He said, “People will run anything that’s fast. They run hounds, shepherds. I even heard of somebody running a Scottie. And there’s a guy who’s trying to cross huskies with coyotes.” Tom’s doghouses were inside an enclosure adjoining a shed, where Tom had hung old saxophones and trumpets on the siding. Sandra almost expected a spontaneous concert to occur, with the dogs howling in accompaniment. Once, when she and Tom were canoeing, they passed a group of sled dogs on the riverbank. The dogs were on top of their houses, howling in chorus. It was near midnight, in that mellow light of early summer.
Sandra lived with Tom in a log house near Fairbanks, on the south slope of a hill with a view of the Chena River. On clear days they could see the jagged ridge of the Alaska Range, mountains crinkled up like freeze-dried clouds. Tom worked for the state agency where she had found an office job. In the dead of winter they rose at three in the morning to warm up the car. When she moved in, he had said only half-mockingly, “I can already see the day you’ll move out. How long will you last out here in the elements?”
“I might last longer than you think,” she said stubbornly.
“No, I can tell. You’re Southern. Your blood’s too thin.” He seemed a little sad.
He had been in Alaska long enough to know exactly at what temperature the car’s engine would freeze, exactly how many layers of clothing to wear in what weather. He knew how to dry salmon, how to repair a canoe. He had built the outhouse and the sunspace, where he was able to grow a few salad greens. He had come to Alaska to work on the pipeline and stayed because he fell for the frontier lifestyle—if living by necessity could be called a style, a point they argued about. She thought he romanticized hardship as much as she valued change. The dog team wasn’t necessary, and he kept more dogs than he needed for one sled. The dogs’ energy was like a basketball team in action. In the night, Sandra found their howls comforting music. The darkness grew tight around her in the winter, as if it cut her off from the rest of the United States and stranded her there on a horn of land on the noggin of the continent. Sandra lost her sense of time in the first long, dark winter. Four A.M. and four P.M. seemed the same. But as she stayed on, she learned that there was no pure division between light and dark. It was always becoming lighter or darker, like the moon inching through its phases.
When Sandra learned about her father’s stroke, Tom encouraged her to go take care of him, insisting so emphatically she felt he was pushing her away, as if he were asking her to go out with another man.
“If you don’t go, you’ll be sorry the rest of your life,” he said. “You have to go work it out with him.”
“What do you mean?”
“You blamed him for what he did to your mom.”
“She had a kidney disease. She didn’t catch it from him.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“He never told me how serious it was,” she said. “He didn’t let me visit her in the hospital. I didn’t know she would die.”
“So now you won’t trust any man.”
“Don’t I trust you?”
“No, you don’t,” he said. “If you did, then you
could say you love me. You never say you love me.”
Late that winter, Tom set out early one morning, running the dogs on some trails toward Nenana. He did not return until after the sun had come and gone. She was worried, even though she knew Tom had clear rules about the cold. He carried sled-repair equipment, ice creepers, camping gear, even a sewing kit and extra plastic booties for the dogs. As the dark deepened and she shoved more wood in the stove, she thought she heard a dog yelp, but it was only the wind. At last, in the moonlight, she saw the dogs coming, their shadows cavorting on the snow. Tom, still exhilarated by the run, went about routinely warming dog food on the stove. His cheeks were flaming, and ice crystals matted his beard. Looking outside at the dogs, still frisking, she felt foolish. She wondered if her anxiety was only cabin fever, her desire to be on the trail to somewhere else. The next morning, fresh snow had obliterated the doghouses. The dogs used the snow for a blanket. They burrowed, breathing through little blow-holes.
When she left for Kentucky at the end of May, Tom drove her to the airport. On the way, they saw a ski team racing down the highway on short, wheeled skis. In town, when the summer light came, the children snaked through the streets on skateboards. Tom used a three-wheeler to run his dogs in the summer. Before Sandra boarded the plane, she told him, “I don’t know when I’ll be back.” She knew he thought she wouldn’t be back at all. Yet she didn’t know how long she could bear to stay at home.
In Alaska, she had seen a dog that looked amazingly like her old pet—the same facial markings and coloring, the same shy, agreeable expression. He was in a pen in a small settlement where most yards were littered with the tattered remains of frontier living—oil barrels, rusted refrigerators, snowmobile carcasses. The tiny post office was having a rummage sale on its porch. She thought of trying to buy him, but she decided it would be a great mistake to get a new dog so much like the original. It would be unfair.
Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail Page 11
