The Writing on the Wall: A Novel

by W. D. Wetherell

  I can’t tell a story like she can. Can’t make you cry like she can wouldn’t care to wouldn’t know how. Oh plenty of tears alright a lifetime’s worth like everybody but most came on one terrible afternoon and that’s buried in the past now a lot thicker than these walls. Funny Dottie Peach who’s always ready with a wisecrack even a crude one even a mean one if somebody gets on my bad side and someday if I’m not careful it’s going to be Crazy Dottie Peach who can’t tell a story straight can’t even start at the beginning. But if what goes round comes round what does it matter where on the circle you start?

  I can’t tell a story like Beth can. I was born she says I was married she says I fell in love with another man. Joke’s on her he doesn’t like girls. Damn her! I HATED it that she made me cry. I thought she was going to run off with him isn’t that what you thought yourself? All that tragedy and why? He liked men. Okay so it’s deeper than that deep like the river those Nazi bastards drowned him in while my story isn’t deep at all but more like a muddy puddle and telling it is like stirring with a stick until the mud belches out words.

  Can’t tell a story like she can. The orphan business for starters. I wish I HAD been an orphan. I remember reading Hansel and Gretel when I was little wishing I had their evil stepmother for my mother it would be such an improvement over who I did have. Slapping me around when she was drunk and worse than that from the man claiming to be my dad. He got a bright idea when we bombed Nagasaki. He was working building ships on the coast and he decided the future was in building atomic bombers on the other coast and so we piled into our Chevy and headed West. After about six hours we stopped here in the middle of nowhere. They said let’s take a pee break but when I came back outside from the diner they were gone in a cloud of dust and I never saw either one of them again.

  I was sixteen. I went back in the diner and asked for a job. I was Dorothea when I went in and Dottie by the time I tied the apron on since no one ever waitressed named Dorothea. My first customer sat hunched over the counter leering at me through the ketchup. Big man a lot older than me driving a logging truck idling outside.

  “What’ll you have?” I said all nervous and shy it being my first time.

  “Steak?”

  “Sure.”

  I wrote it down on my pad.

  “Eggs?”

  “You bet.”

  I wrote it down on my pad.

  “Fuck?”

  He said it loud making sure all the men in the place heard. What I should have done was take the coffee pot and pour some on his crotch. What I did do was stare right back at him and make my voice go flirty.

  “I’d love to grandpa, but I’m menstruating.”

  The men in the booths howled and right there and then I got the reputation as being funny and tough and an egghead since I don’t think any of them had ever heard that word out loud before. One of the youngest sitting sideways in the corner by the jukebox was dressed in uniform since he’d just been discharged. “He’s Perry Peach,” the other waitress giggled and I couldn’t help be interested in a name like that. Not just Perry but Perry PEACH. He looked like Dana Andrews who was my favorite movie star with medals on his chest Silver Stars and the same waitress told me he’d come back from the Pacific with skulls as souvenirs. Once I got to know him he was always talking about Japs which was the worst thing he could say about somebody that he or she was a Jap. On our wedding night I flat out asked him about the skulls and he said sure he had them only he didn’t want to frighten me so before the wedding he took them down to the river patted them on top for good luck and chucked them in.

  I wasn’t very pretty then but most men didn’t lift their eyes much higher than my chest. I know Perry never did. He took a job with the highway crew which was considered practically an executive position up here ever since the Depression. It was enough to marry on and he didn’t expect me to work. Bullshit on what I remember thinking. When you leave me what will I do starve? It’s strange but I thought in those terms right from the start. He was the kind of man who’s hot to trot before the wedding and Mr. Dullsville after. It was only a question of whether he would cheat on me and run off or whether I would cheat on him and run off and whether he would come after me and shoot me like he had all his Japs.

  There was a community college starting up and they had a course for nursing aides. The classes were held in an old high school they were renovating and though I didn’t know it at the time it was the school where Beth had gone on her milk train every morning. I got the best grades in class and one of my teachers said why stop at aide so I went back and got my RN. I guess I’m the nurse type alright. I don’t care much about strong people but weak ones break my heart.

  So I walked the same halls that Beth walked maybe sat in the same desk. I even found a book of hers here in an upstairs closet called “Tennyson’s Gareth and Lancelot and Elaine and the Passing of Arthur Idylls of the King” with her name written in front. That was in 1958 when we first moved in and I didn’t think anything of it but chucked it in the trash. I was following her footsteps before I knew she even existed and when I started reading her story felt I understood her right away. Did she write the truth on the walls to get them arrested? You probably wonder about that too. Or did she write it down because she would have burst if she hadn’t written it down????? Joke’s on her either way because the next person who lived here papered right over HER wallpaper without stripping it off and the lazy bitch who lived here after that papered over THAT paper and it wasn’t until I started stripping the layers just before Andy escaped home that anyone read it which means not until 1969 and now of course you’ve read it too so we’re twins.

  That was some summer that 69 summer. August especially. They had just made me assistant head nurse in cardiology but I told them I needed two weeks off first to take care of my garden and put up some wallpaper and celebrate my 41st birthday. The wallpaper was still the same drab stuff that was here when we bought the house from lazy Sally Bruckner and her even lazier husband. It holds the walls together I used to joke and I was always too busy bringing up the boys to bother about it one way or the other but now I could. I bought new paper at Real Value the best I could afford. Premium Pine one pattern was called and the other was Queen of Sheba. Brown would make the walls look warm on the cold side of the house and white would make the walls look cool on the warm side of the house and other than that I didn’t give it much thought.

  As for my garden it was dying right under my eyes. It hadn’t rained since May and the weatherman claimed it was hotter here than in Texas and every day I had to go outside and pull up another wilted flower or turn under another dead plant. The afternoon of my birthday I stood in what was left of my zinnia bed feeling more blue than I usually allow myself. I remember thinking something that hit me pretty hard though I tried making a joke of it. “I’m an abandoned woman,” I told myself. “Dorothea Elizabeth Peach that’s what you are, an ABANDONED WOMAN.” Abandoned just like when my parents dumped me here and drove west into the sunset.

  I always knew Perry would run out on me so that was no surprise. We had some good years together but that was when the boys were little and after that it was just him moving mechanically in the dark and me on my back trying to remember what it had once been like and between his hunching and heaving and my remembering and sobbing we sometimes managed to find love again but in the end it wasn’t worth much just a note on the door one Christmas saying “Back later” which I knew meant “Back never.”

  The great love of his life was Danny and when Danny died there was nothing left to keep him here. Andy he never cared much for and didn’t pay him much attention which was how everybody treated Andy myself included. But Danny! They were best pals from the time he was three months old and even when he was a toddler he wouldn’t do anything unless Daddy did it too. Hunting fishing camping. I was all in favor of it and he was such a good student in school top of his class right through high school and his hair was the reddest anyone ever saw and
he acted in plays and could do a hundred push-ups without puffing. Then his junior year he and Perry started watching Westerns together on TV and somehow that led them to getting involved with a “fast draw” club which was where you wore a six-gun on your hip like a cowboy and faced down someone else wearing their own revolver and saw who could yank their gun out of the holster first.

  Danny was good at this like he was good at everything. Fast lickety-split fast. He wanted to add some tricks and learn how to twirl the pistol around on his finger but somehow the gun got loaded and somehow went off in his face and the next thing I know the phone is ringing in the hall and Tom Bottle our constable is screeching up out front to fetch me and we drive crazy fast to the gymnasium and what followed after were the worst hours of my life. I didn’t know before that that I had a soul. All that fancy talk about souls and I used to listen skeptically because I never felt I had one but seeing Danny lying on the gym floor with his face covered by a cowboy bandanna taught me about souls and what it taught me was that souls exist alright but only to torture us.

  That left Andy and then Andy left too. Drafted. There were hardly any young men left around here so who else could the draft board take? He once told me he wanted to be an astronaut but other than that he had no plans. He graduated high school on a Friday and Sunday he was on a train heading south to Fort Polk in Louisiana which the soldiers called Fort Puke. They had a mock Vietnamese village there called Tiger Land where troops got training before shipping out and the nearest town to the base was called Leesville which the soldiers called Diseaseville he wrote in his first letter home.

  Andy was always in Danny’s shadow and this made him quiet but he never gave anyone trouble but always went along with anyone and anything so following orders in the military wasn’t going to be any problem just more of what he’s good at. If teachers wanted him to study he studied and if friends wanted him to goof off and smoke dope he goofed off and smoked dope and if I wanted help raking the garden he was out there raking. But the funny thing is he never does any of those things with any kind of excitement or enthusiasm or interest he just puts his head down and does them and that is pretty much his entire philosophy of life. “She’s a girl who can’t say no,” they say and they never apply it to a boy but they could apply it to Andy because whatever the situation is he always goes along.

  So that was how things stood on my birthday. Only eight weeks ago but it seems eight years. “Don’t torture yourself!” I remember thinking. I said it several times over as I walked past my wilted zinnias dusty petunias dead dahlias trying to make it my motto. DON’T TORTURE YOURSELF!!! And the truth is except for the pain over Danny which I know is permanent I didn’t feel as lonely and abandoned as you might think. My dead flowers bothered me. The heat bothered me. And very faint and almost forgotten that other kind of heat the kind that comes with needing a man.

  Okay so I’m crying on your shoulder. Let me cry. I needed a friend and still do for that matter. There’s Mrs. LaBombard up the road and the nurses at work but not many besides that. YOU NEED ANOTHER FRIEND! I told myself and no sooner had I wished it than it happened.

  She was delivered by bus that was the strange thing. Buses never go by here except when there’s construction out of the highway and they use our road as a detour. A big Greyhound so silver and shiny it seemed to push away the heat stopping right by my house which surprised me considerably. The brakes squealed the door swung open and in the whoosh of cool air emerged a girl of about eighteen or nineteen. She turned around to take the knapsack the driver handed out to her which was the Boy Scout kind crammed so full it was impossible to understand why it didn’t burst.

  I knew from that first glimpse of her she was the prettiest girl who ever stepped foot in our town. She was barely five feet high and seemed even shorter because of the dress she wore which was soft and summery and clung to her in a way that was Kewpie doll perfect. Her hair was long down past her waist and straight as you can imagine not a curl in sight being the color you would get if you mixed buttercups with silk. Her face was round and full almost Russian I thought with eyes so big it was like she carried her own mirrors. Not mirrors she could stare into like so many vain girls but mirrors you could stare into yourself lit up by her warmth. She had that way about her. Freckles clustered around her nose just the right number and old-fashioned Valentine-shaped lips.

  “Can I ask you a question?” she said in the softest voice imaginable. She set her knapsack down on the grass.

  “You just did.”

  She turned and pointed. “How come those dark splashes appear over the hills and go away and come back again? Some look like maps and others look like butterflies. I watched them all the way along the highway. I never took my eyes off them.”

  It was a silly question a lot of her questions were silly and yet she always asked them with so much curiosity they didn’t seem silly after all.

  “Shadows from clouds,” I said. “The hills are down here, the clouds are up there, and the sun is even higher so when they blow apart that’s what happens.”

  She took that in very gravely hugged herself almost shivered. “It’s the most beautiful sight I ever saw.”

  Probably nobody in three hundred years had stared at these hills without either hating them for blocking their way or appraising their potential to generate money. After all these centuries they had their first lover.

  “Dottie Peach,” I said sticking out my hand.

  She smiled at the Peach part then hesitated. “My name is August,” she said at last. “August,” and she nodded emphatically up and down.

  “Augusta?” I said.

  “August.”

  Don’t ask me how but I knew right away she had just invented it on the spot. New name new place new life. She put her hand on my shoulder for balance stooped down took off her city shoes and threw them as far as she could into the meadow so she was barefoot. She had taken the bus from New York she explained and now if I could help her with directions and maybe fill her canteen she would be on her way.

  She had a map the kind the gas stations issue and she kneeled down to spread it open across her knapsack. “I need to find the Wooden Shoe,” she said which was funny because the last place that would be plotted on any map was the Wooden Shoe.

  I knew as much about the Wooden Shoe as anybody in town which means not a lot. Most people call it a camp because of the young people living there or because they use an abandoned logging camp as their headquarters. It’s a huge piece of land they’re squatting on maybe three thousand acres butting up against the border though it’s all cut down and burned over and not much use to anybody. Dr. Goring went up there to stitch somebody’s ankle after they’d nearly cut it off with an axe and he came back with some pretty strange tales. “It’s a commune,” he said making a face. “They wear beads. They eat straw. They’re digging a moat.” He swore he’d never go back up there again because they tried paying him in piglets.

  The Wooden Shoe comes from a carved Dutch shoe hanging as a sign on the only road in. Now that people knew it was a commune and not some kind of fruity summer camp they became more suspicious since commune sounds like communist. The young people come into town to buy supplies and they look harmless enough dressed like pranksters and jesters with bows and ribbons and floppy hats. They operate a flatbed truck that barely bangs along and you can see it coming miles away with the exhaust it spews but it’s decorated with the craziest brightest paint job you can imagine. “Psychedelic,” Dr. Goring called it and we all thought that was a funny word that fit perfectly.

  The being scared of them part started when Sheriff Bottle went up there on a tip and vowed never to return. “They don’t pay me enough to deal with that shit!” he said and it was clear he was talking about drugs and guns and smuggling. It was hard to picture since the kids came to town so friendly and polite. The one thing people notice is that they’re especially nice to old folks really courting them wooing them learning everything from them they po
ssibly can. All the old-timers nobody cared about anymore were suddenly getting lots of attention and all the forgotten skills like sheep shearing and barn raising and cider making these Wooden Shoe kids were trying to learn because they HAD to learn if they were going to survive their first winter. NEVER TRUST ANYONE UNDER SEVENTY is their motto and they mean it.

  They’re all supposed to be equal up there brothers and sisters but you know as well as I do that never works out. Their leader the one they look to for every decision is a young man named Isaac Rosen who’s about Andy’s age but looks much older. You hear stories about Rosen most of which are probably made up but even so. There’s one about his getting into a dispute with a Canadian smuggler over a busted drug deal and strangling him nearly dead and another’s about getting in a fight with a black bear that tried breaking into their potato cellar and strangling it all the way dead. People say he’s not only ruthless but smart and even has informers working for him in the Border Patrol and state police.

  I’ve only seen him once or twice. He’s rail thin razor thin thin as barbed wire or a very tough weed. His beard is the fuzzy kind they all wear only blonder and his mustache is like a whisper of contempt added across his lips. His eyes are the angriest I’ve ever seen on a man and I’ve seen plenty of angry eyes. A Civil War soldier is what he looks like one who fought on the losing side and doesn’t intend to let that happen again.

  Hunters in town went up there looking for deer and were met by Rosen and two of his disciples toting shotguns and steered right back out again. One of the hunters Ethan Whitcher had been going up there all his life so he tried to reason with them and what he got for an answer soon made its way around town. “We’re an independent nation,” Rosen told him. “You go back to America before we blow you all to hell.”