Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “I’m all right,” Sandra said, stumbling into the light.

  “O.K., honey, I just wanted to know where you were,” Clemmie said. “I saved you some chicken and some squash casserole.”

  Sandra crept down the carpeted stairs into the funeral parlor. It was empty, except for the casket. The lid had been lowered. Sandra heard her father speaking on the telephone in his office. “Now, Daisy,” he was saying. “I knew Bud as well as anybody, and he wouldn’t have wanted to stay hooked up to those tubes.”

  When he came out, Sandra said, “Hi. I fell asleep upstairs.”

  He laughed. “I’m surprised you could sleep in all this racket. Damn phone’s been ringing itself silly.” His fist opened and closed. “Now what?” The telephone was ringing again. Clemmie, who had followed Sandra, rushed to answer it.

  “Are you feeling O.K., Dad?” asked Sandra as she straightened a wall carving of a youthful Jesus. It was made of plaster, with glitter scattered on it.

  “That’s one of those things I’m going to get rid of,” he said. “Damn stupid crap.” He grinned and stepped toward her. “I’m not leaving it for you to inherit.”

  “I don’t want it,” said Sandra.

  “I don’t want you to have it,” he said. Leaning on his cane, he reached his free arm around her and squeezed her tightly. He whispered accusingly in her ear, “You ran off from home and didn’t think about us.”

  “I came back, didn’t I?” she mumbled, letting him hold her, more tightly than Tom had ever held her. She started to cry. She knew she could never explain herself to him, but that didn’t seem so important now. It seemed more important to be kind. She said, “Dad, why don’t you show me that old furniture you wanted me to have?”

  He grinned. “How will you get it back to Alaska?”

  “I don’t know. FedEx?”

  “Some of Bud’s people are coming down from Akron, Ohio,” Clemmie said, hanging up the telephone.

  The next morning, the mail brought a letter from Tom. He wrote, “A bunch of us took a drive up to Murphy’s Dome the other night, up beyond that old D.E.W. system with that white phallic tower. The wildflowers are all out. The lupines are as blue as your eyes. When I was up there, I thought about the time you and I were there and the wind came up and we almost got hypothermia. We were rushing around naked, and I realized I was sorry I’d accused you of having Southern blood.”

  She didn’t get to finish Tom’s letter—her father appeared, ready to show her the furniture in the basement. He had been too tired yesterday. As she followed him down the hall, Daisy Johnson and a swarm of kin arrived at the door.

  Daisy said, “Claude’s looking so well, Sandra. I didn’t know it was you on the phone the other night. I never expected to find you at home.”

  “Did you think I would never come back?”

  Daisy smiled. “Sandra, if you had a husband, you could take over this business from your daddy and let him rest some.”

  Sandra stiffened but held her tongue.

  “I imagine I’ll be closing the funeral home for good after this, Daisy,” Claude said. “A little place like this isn’t fancy enough to suit most folks nowadays. And some of them want to be cremated.”

  Daisy nodded knowingly. “Bud’s sister-in-law in Florida is bad off and said she wanted to be burned and dumped in the ocean. I told Bud I wouldn’t go all that way to Florida for the funeral if they didn’t have the body.”

  “That’s the trouble, Daisy,” Claude said. “People don’t want to do things right anymore. I was telling Sandy about her great-great-great-granddaddy. There was a man who did things right—because he was a carpenter. And if you’re a good carpenter you’re liable to do things right, don’t you imagine?”

  “Dad’s threatening to give me some old furniture handed down through three or four generations,” Sandra explained.

  Claude said to Sandra, “I’m going to show you that furniture right now. Come on, Daisy. You’ll appreciate this.”

  “Where is it?” Daisy asked. She was a small woman who didn’t look strong.

  “In the basement.”

  “Are you sure you can get down the stairs, Dad?” Sandra asked.

  “Positive.” He twirled his cane playfully.

  “I’ll stay up here if you don’t mind, Claude,” said Daisy. “It would be disrespectful to Bud.”

  “Well, if you think so,” Claude said.

  “Here, hold on to my arm,” Sandra said to her father.

  “You’ve done him a lot of good, Sandra,” Daisy said. “I know he’s missed you.”

  Sandra guided her father down the stairs, his cane clattering. Funerals bring out the best in him, she thought—and she was immediately ashamed. In her mind was a swarm of scavenger birds hovering around a wolf kill in Alaska.

  In the basement, Claude turned on lights. He asked Sandra to move aside some boxes and picture frames. The furniture was arranged in a corner, set out as if it were a furnished room. A dining table with ladder-back chairs, a sideboard, a china cabinet, a washstand, a rocking chair, a hope chest. Sandra had half expected to see a child’s coffin, but there wasn’t one. The modern simplicity of the furniture surprised her. It resembled something in a Sundance catalog. It was beautiful. Her father must have gone to some trouble to arrange it here for her benefit. And now she saw he had restored it. The finish was smooth, and the wood was oiled and fresh, not dusty. The pieces were set out carefully, and so lovingly refurbished.

  “When did you do this, Dad?”

  “Oh, off and on for a few years. I needed something to do. Your mother always wanted me to fix it up.” He started toward the stairs, then turned toward her. “I never got over your mother,” he said. “When she died, it was like I disappeared for years. I thought nobody could see me.”

  Sandra was startled. She didn’t know what to say, but she let him hold her again. Then he turned away. She lingered in the basement while he made his way up the stairs. Daisy was beckoning him. Sandra studied the furniture, trying to imagine why her father, late in life, took up Thomas McCain’s calling, as if his ancestor were in fact calling him. Was there a time in life when one’s forebears suddenly insisted on being acknowledged? She imagined her father and Thomas McCain having strange conversations. Shop talk, she thought. The pieces were lovely, worn through time and use.

  She could see her father at the top of the stairs, chatting with Daisy. Daisy had on an improbable pink pantsuit. She was smiling. Maybe they were laughing over old times, something funny Bud had said. Sandra could imagine Daisy and Claude becoming lovers. She remembered what her father had said about Thomas McCain and all his wives, how he quickly replaced the wives lost in childbirth. She pictured old Thomas jumping straight from the burial service into the urgency of courtship. But her father hadn’t done that when her mother died. He was loyal to her memory. Sandra herself hadn’t felt the need to honor tradition and continuity. She had gone off on a tangent from her history. Life seemed to her so strange, suddenly—the way people carried on, out of necessity, and with startling zest, at the worst of times. It was the stamina required by a bold adventure, a trek into the snow.

  She heard a car crunching gravel in the lot behind the building.

  Her father said, “Come on up here, Sandy. People are coming in, and the viewing’s about to start. I need you to help me lift the lid.”

  Window Lights

  I don’t like the way the world is going nowadays, so I’m taking a break. A man gets tired of always striding out to gather trophies. A lot of guys who feel the same are just staying home with their guns. I’ll stay here with my meager entertainments, waiting until the air clears.

  I used to go on business trips, with my garment bag and briefcase hugging me like a little entourage. The last time I flew, the plane sat on the runway forever. On the P.A., the pilot apologized for the delay, saying we had missed our takeoff window due to inadequate federal funding for air-traffic control. I stared at the window by my seat. I noticed so
me strands of what appeared to be dog hair in the window. They were stranded between the two sealed ovals of plastic. The pilot announced that we would have to wait thirteen minutes for the next takeoff window. In my mind, I could see my little girl, gauging when to enter a jump rope turning before her.

  Here at home these days, when I look out the window I can tell if the slightest change has occurred—a bird on the fence, a sprinkling of leaves on the neighbor’s fish pool, a fallen branch from the sycamore tree. I notice any new colors and patterns of light. My grandmother called windowpanes “window lights.” And that was appropriate, since in her time windows were the main source of light. Grandma never turned on the electric bulb in her kitchen until it was far too dark to see and she had to feel her way around.

  I recall her last years alone. I’d see her on periodic visits to Tennessee, where she had gone to live in the place she was raised. It had been a log house originally, in the pioneer style, with a shed roof above a porch and a breezeway called a dogtrot running through the middle. There was a chimney on each end of the house. My uncle Lon and his wife had lived there a long time. Lon was Grandma’s oldest son. Lon and Bessie bricked over the logs and closed in the dogtrot. They added a wing and a lot of other things Grandma didn’t like. When she moved back, she shut off the new part with the parlor and the picture window. Lon and Bessie bought a brick mansion with white columns in Nashville after he made it big in religious publishing. One night, Lon got drunk and smashed his car into a van of high-school wrestlers. He wasn’t injured, but when he saw all those hurt kids scattered across the median he returned to his car and shot himself to death.

  Grandma hated the picture window. “It don’t set well with me,” she said. It wasn’t that she was afraid of people looking in, although by then a development had sneaked up around the house. She didn’t like looking out at other people’s houses and cars. She stayed in the back room, a nest she had made for herself with a path worn in the flowered-print rug. When I went to see her, I noticed her little nook had its own unique smell. It was a rancid smell of pork grease and old shoes and coffee and stale cornbread and age. She tuned in the local news on the radio every morning to learn the deaths, the weather, and the wrecks. But when Lon gave her a police radio one Christmas, she wouldn’t use it. “It ain’t right somehow,” she said. “You’re supposed to hear it on the regular radio, not like Eavesdropper Pop.” She wouldn’t use the telephone either. Lon and Bessie insisted she have one, for emergencies. Once, she lay on the floor for two days with a broken hip. She could have dragged herself over to the telephone, but she wouldn’t. “Why, that hip commenced to heal, me a-laying there that way,” she told me later in the hospital.

  I sometimes imagine I am turning into my grandmother. Lately I’ve realized I am living on little but air and water and a few cans from the no-frills store. I’ve got drugs all the way out of my system. I don’t drink anymore. I don’t even take medicine. I’m laying low, observing, retreating, going off for forty days and forty nights, descending into the cave, maybe into the dark night of the soul—those clichés of mythic descent. I’m open to them all. My guide is the light of the television screen. Late at night, I have my pen ready to write down the toll-free numbers of the special offers.

  It’s peaceful. The cats politely ask to go outside. They bring back the news—a mouse, some feathers. In one way or another, the world comes to me.

  And here comes Maddie, out of the blue. She called the other day. She moved back here to Lexington a month ago. I hadn’t seen her yet, although she promised we’d talk when she got settled. She told me about her alienated-wives’ support group, her skills-rejuvenation program, her trainee probation period at Luggage Land. I still love Maddie, and when she called and hinted that she wanted to end our separation, I was confused. I thought I did, too—she and Lisa are all I ever wanted—but I didn’t think it should be easy for her.

  She asked me if I was taking care of myself, eating right.

  “I’m living on a dollar a day,” I told her. That wasn’t exactly true.

  “How possible?” she demanded. “What can you get for a dollar?”

  “You can get a can of hominy for forty-seven cents and if you mix that with a can of kraut you’ve got a pretty decent meal.”

  “Bill, are you trying to starve yourself?”

  “Oh, another day I might eat oats,” I said. “Not that instant stuff—you’re just paying for packaging and processing.”

  “You can’t live on oats.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re just too lazy to cook. You’re refusing to deal with food because I’m not there to cook for you.”

  “It’s sociology,” I said solemnly. “I’m running an experiment.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “I’m an isolated, uncontaminated specimen. I’m studying the effects of TV on the blank and hungry slate of the human mind.”

  “You’re making this up.”

  “Every day I write down an Insight of the Day,” I went on, reaching for my journal. I shifted the telephone to the other ear. “Today I wrote, ‘If you stay alone without speech, until you can hear yourself think, the universe will be opened to you.’ ”

  “Have you tried counseling? I know a good—”

  “I get plenty of counseling from TV. I just let things happen. I just wait at home till somebody on the tube tells me what I have to do. Isn’t that what everybody does? Turn on the TV and somebody says buy this, eat that, don’t eat that, watch this? What’s so strange? Do you find that strange?”

  “I guess I’m not really surprised.” I could hear Maddie sigh, a last-straw kind of sigh. There’s no kidding around with her. She always takes me so seriously. I thought she’d see I was trying to make light of my isolation—the fact that she tries to keep Lisa from me. But I guess there’s a lot we’ve never understood about each other.

  “You’ve got a frugal habit of mind,” she said. “You always save food. You take the cracker packets home. And you save the jam jars and the soap from hotels.”

  “Maddie, I’m thinking a lot lately about people who don’t have much to eat.”

  “But you can afford to eat, can’t you? Are you trying to make a point about child support?”

  “No. I’m thinking about people who don’t have money to eat. The other day I chipped a tooth. I decided not to get it fixed. It makes me aware of all the people who can’t get their teeth worked on.”

  “That’s dumb. You’ll lose your tooth.”

  “But people have always lost teeth. People used to be toothless by forty—if they lived that long. My grandmother didn’t have a tooth in her head.”

  “I’m taking care of my teeth because they told me I’d have trouble with false teeth on account of this bone in the roof of my mouth? They said they’d have to cut it out to fit false teeth in. How’d you chip your tooth?”

  “Popcorn.” My tongue raked over the chipped place. It made a satisfying rasping feeling on my tongue, like sandpaper. I said to Maddie, “I can clean my tongue with the sharp edge of the tooth. You know how cats’ tongues have those spines all over them?”

  “I hope you’re not going to get scurvy,” Maddie said. “You at least need to take antioxidants.” I could visualize her long black wavy hair, the little round knobs of her cheekbones. Those knobs were a motif all over her. Her beautiful shoulders and breasts reiterated her cheeks. I loved her knobbiness. Even her knees were appropriately shaped and beautiful.

  “I want to kiss your knees,” I said.

  “I think you must be lonely,” Maddie said. “And I can help if you let me.”

  “Help? What on earth can you mean? You can help by bringing Lisa back home. How is she? How are her teeth?”

  “Lisa’s fine. Her teeth are perfect. She’s practicing her clarinet all the time.”

  “She won’t play it for me when she comes over.”

  “You get on her nerves. She can’t concentrate with you hovering over her.”
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br />   What could I say to that? At least I wasn’t drinking anymore. That should count.

  It intrigues me that I don’t get this tooth fixed. I never minded dentists. I always liked the laughing gas. It would send me on an adventure in the woods. The wallpaper at the dentist’s is a mural of a forest landscape. Once, while getting a tooth filled, I was Hansel, leading my sister Gretel bravely into the forest. We met Little Red Riding Hood, asking for directions. She was going to her grandmother’s. I accidentally sent her to the witch’s gingerbread house. The child was really Lisa, in her Halloween costume. I see the significance of all that now, but I didn’t then. Not that I have much confidence in the dream state. It’s just stuff floating around, relaxing, stuff you mostly forget when you wake up because your memory receptors are shut off in sleep. That makes sense to me. The mind’s swirling impressions and memories and capacities just let loose in a free-for-all. It’s Dada. I think Dada was thumbing its nose at Freud. Freud was a Victorian, and everything had to make sense to those people. Then the Surrealists and the Dadaists came along and turned dream symbols on their head and laughed themselves silly.

  Just when my dreams start to make sense, there’s a punch line, like Maddie calling.

  Today, the morning newspaper tells about a homeless couple with two children. The husband is a Yankee, but the wife is sixth-generation Kentuckian, Scots-Irish to the bone. The husband lives under a bridge with some other guys, beside an open fire where they drink beer. He used to work with horses, but then he couldn’t get work. She sleeps at the shelter with her two children in a single bed. She walks her nine-year-old boy to school. The school gave the boy a coat and some jeans and shirts and sweaters. He got to pick them out himself at the mall. He makes A’s and likes to draw. The mother walks around town with the four-year-old girl till it’s time to line up at the community center for a hot lunch. In the afternoon, they get the boy from school and play in the park until it’s time to go find some supper. She says she doesn’t like to keep her kids in those centers, around all those drunks, so she keeps walking.