Girl in Landscape

by Jonathan Lethem

  “She says I’m not over Caitlin’s death,” Clement said. “That I’m still in love with her.”

  He spoke this as though the words had nothing to do with Pella, enclosing himself in the shell of his own pain, refusing the meaning of their family the way his neighbors had refused him the meaning of the town this morning.

  I hope he is still in love with her, Pella thought savagely. He should be. He deserves to be.

  Eighteen

  In the days after the fire the valley fell into a pensive, watchful silence. The settlement, the might-be-town, was shrinking instead of growing. The spaces between things were growing instead. The silences. Diana Eastling was gone. Hugh Merrow was already forgotten, the singed scraps of his house scavenged for fuel, the ashes blown away over the wastes. New vines sprouted up everywhere out of the rubble, leaves seeking the sun, potatoes underneath, hidden, swelling in the mud. Two days after the burning Ben Barth walked into Wa’s and said he was going to Southport, to work for the window maker. Alliances might be shifting, coming apart. No one asked, no one learned more. Ben Barth packed his few belongings into his battered truck and was gone by nightfall.

  The Archbuilder corpse baked and rotted in the sun, untended, a desolate sculpture. Raymond began spending nights at Diana Eastling’s house.

  Doug Grant skulked outside Wa’s.

  The girl sensed something coming, some arrival or departure still unannounced. A figure on the horizon, a change in the weather. A shift or eclipse. Her family was no help. Like the not-quite-town, it was unspooled, all gaps and missed connections. The girl avoided her father, the other children, Wa’s shop. She tried not to think of Efram at all. She took the pills she had stashed under her bed, two in the morning, two at night, and didn’t dream, didn’t wander or spy. Instead she walked out into the valley in her human body, alone, to wonder if the figure she felt moving toward her on the lonely horizon might somehow be her mother.

  “I buy flour and yeast at Wa’s,” explained Ellen Kincaid. “Wa gets it from Southport. I buy it on my credit. Then I get eggs from Ben Barth’s chickens. Same thing—I trade for finished loaves. The rest is cake and tea potatoes.”

  Pella and David were helping Ellen and Martha Kincaid make bread, Pella and David stirring mixtures in large bowls, while Martha was rubbing a split half tea potato around the inside of a set of pans.

  A pair of household deer pottered woozily under the counter.

  “Then you sell it back to Wa,” said Martha.

  “Just for credit,” said Ellen. “No money changes hands. So we get our other groceries from him on the credit for the loaves. And other people get bread.”

  As Ellen Kincaid spoke her eyes grew distant, and her voice dimmed. Why talk of other people getting bread, when they all felt the settlement withering?

  “Also we eat a lot of potatoes,” said Martha to David and Pella. “They don’t cost anything.”

  “We eat a lot of potatoes too,” said David cheerily. “And Clement buys your mom’s bread.”

  Pella went on stirring, mashing the lumps of cake potato into the egg-and-water mixture. Ellen Kincaid poked at the charcoal through a door in the base of the oven, bunching the hot coals. A first batch of dough had risen and been distributed into six loaf pans, and now Ellen Kincaid loaded them into the upper space of the oven.

  “Who’s going to take care of Ben Barth’s chickens now?” said Martha.

  Pella whisked a handful of flour off the tabletop, in the direction of the two household deer, coating one like a powdered doughnut. It shook and ran in a circle.

  “Doug Grant, I bet,” said David.

  “What about Doug Grant?” said Pella.

  “He’s helping Efram, instead of Ben,” said David. “Morris told me.”

  Ellen Kincaid frowned. “I’m surprised Ben didn’t take his chickens with him,” she said. “Efram ought to take care of his own farm. If he wants chickens out there he ought to take care of them himself.”

  “You can’t put chickens in a truck!” said Martha, delighted. “They fly away!”

  “Doug Grant wants to live out at Efram’s farm,” said David. “He hates his dad.”

  “Shut up about Doug Grant,” said Pella.

  “Morris told me, that’s all,” said David.

  Ellen Kincaid turned to the sink. “Bring that here, Pella. It needs more water.” She scrubbed egg scum out of a bowl fretfully. “David, you too.”

  Ellen Kincaid doled out portions for each of them to knead. Pella knew they were being gently patronized. Martha’s mother didn’t need their help. Pella watched her knead dough, leaning into it as her hands briskly folded the stretched surfaces. David and Martha and even Pella, by comparison, were useless, mucking around, smearing bits of dough into the joints of their fingers and onto the floor. But the bread making was a little version of the town, Pella thought. The town that was supposed to be but never was. The four of them pounding and folding together Wa’s flour and Efram’s eggs and Archbuilder cake potatoes. It was the closest anyone had come.

  “It feels like penis,” said Martha. She tittered.

  “Shut up,” said David.

  “Martha,” said Ellen Kincaid.

  “Penis pie, with penis butter,” said Martha.

  “Quit!” said David, reddening.

  Martha giggled.

  Ellen Kincaid stepped over and tilted Martha’s head up with her hand, leaving a thumb smudge of flour on her forehead. “Whose penis?” she said, in a voice that was quiet, but focused like a beam of light.

  Pella held her breath, waiting for Martha to answer. She felt Ellen Kincaid’s fierce protective attention. This is what a mother does, Pella thought.

  “David’s!” shrieked Martha, and laughed harder.

  “Be quiet!” said David.

  “That’s enough, Martha,” said Ellen Kincaid, loudly and easily now, the moment past. “We’re trying to make bread here. Take the funny stuff outside.”

  “But I’m helping. I don’t want to—”

  “Go.”

  Slumping her head from shoulder to shoulder, Martha went to the front door and out onto the porch. Daylight flooded the damp yeasty kitchen.

  Ellen Kincaid put her powdery hand on David’s head now. “Don’t let Martha upset you.”

  “Sometimes I hate her,” said David ruthlessly, his eyes slitted. He went on kneading his portion of dough.

  Ellen Kincaid looked at Pella, her smile wry and tired and nervous at once.

  Martha edged back inside while the new loaves went into the oven. The two deer danced out as she came in, one still dusted with white. Ellen Kincaid slipped the first batch of loaves out of the pans and onto cooling racks, then cut one into fat, steamy slices and slathered the slices with potato jam. David and Martha and Pella ate silently, reduced to grateful, gnawing cubs by the hot, achingly sweet bread. Ellen Kincaid watched them eat.

  Afterward they bagged the loaves in plastic, and twisted the bags closed. “Here,” said Ellen Kincaid, giving David and Pella each a loaf. “Take these home to your father.”

  “We can buy them at Wa’s,” said Pella, confused.

  “No, take them,” said Ellen, smiling sadly. “Please.”

  • • •

  Clement was watering under his bed when they came in. He hadn’t secured the window to his bedroom on the day of the pollen storm. Just as Efram had warned, the potato vines were sprouting indoors, under his bed. So Clement watered them. For the past few days he’d been obsessed with gardening, fastidiously nurturing his tiny struggling plants, both inside and outside the house.

  “Why not?” he’d said to Pella when she first found him tending the sprouts. “Everyone else can go hacking them out of the ground, and we’ll have our own supply right here. It’s perfectly reasonable. We’ll show Efram Nugent that everything doesn’t have to be done his way.” As if Efram would ever bother to look under Clement’s bed, or be impressed to find potatoes growing there if he did. But Pella hadn’t
said anything then, and she didn’t say anything now. Water trailed out along the floorboards toward her feet, trickling into cracks where already tiny new shoots of potato vine were inching into the house. Soon Clement’s indoor farm would expand from under the bed. He’d have a whole potato room. Pella and David set the loaves of bread on the table, and David said, “Where’s Raymond?”

  “He’s ferrying stuff over to Diana’s,” called Clement without looking up. “He took the bicycle.”

  “What stufi?” said Pella.

  “I don’t know. Just some stuff, his stuff.”

  “I wish I had a bicycle,” said David.

  “There’s only one,” said Clement. “We’ve got the only bicycle in town.” He turned and grinned at David as if this were occasion for enormous satisfaction. David didn’t seem to agree. He frowned.

  “You can ride it when Ray comes back,” said Clement.

  “It’s too big for me,” said David, exasperated.

  “Maybe we could buy David one in Southport,” suggested Pella. “We could all go.”

  “I want to go to Southport!” said David.

  “I don’t know how we’d get there,” said Clement, still poking at his vines. “I don’t really see what we need from Southport that Wa doesn’t stock in his shop, anyway. I doubt there’s any bicycles for sale.”

  The house was in disarray. Jars of food sat out on the counter and the kitchen table. The shelf that had been Clement’s desk was heaped with bits of Archbuilder salvage, old implements and hardware and shards of pottery that Clement had dug out of the garden. His papers and laptop were gone.

  David seated himself at the table. He fumbled forlornly with the plastic bag that held the fresh loaf of bread, mouthing words to himself, then looked up suddenly. “Hey!” he said. “When are we going to have school again?”

  Clement got up from his knees, and went to the sink, smiling blandly. “I guess that’s up to Joe Kincaid,” he said. “He’s the teacher.”

  Joe’s a teacher, Wa’s a shopkeeper, Snider Grant is a drunk, and what are you, Pella thought? A bedroom farmer. You lost an election and you lost a wife and you couldn’t keep a girlfriend. Now Pella wished he’d married Diana Eastling. Without her, Clement was unreachable, finished. She’d been his last brush with credibility.

  Then, watching her father rinse his muddy hands at the sink, Pella felt her guilt glow inside her.

  It was in the shape of a small burning house.

  From the ridge she watched the farm change colors with the sunset, the greenhouse become a pink-and-orange prism, the windows of the house first reflect the rust-smeared sky then darken until they were lit from within, the shadows of the chicken coop and planters and kiln stretch longer and longer across the toast-colored flagstones until they crossed the line of the fence and beyond, the whole homestead like a sundial on the face of the valley.

  In an hour of watching she’d seen Doug Grant step outside once, to pour scraps of garbage into a tray in the chicken coop, then back inside. But no sign of Efram. She’d barely seen him since the day of the storm. Still, his force encompassed the days that followed the fire and the storm, just as it hung over the homestead now as she watched. Efram’s power was implicit. He’d revealed his control of the valley in glimpses and asides, stepping in to thwart Joe Kincaid or Clement here and there, then withdrawing. He commanded the valley that way, and Pella. The echo of his name, spoken by others, was stronger than any voice. He ruled by abdication.

  From her vantage Pella saw Raymond’s bicycle tracks veering off to the right, toward his mourning corner of the settlement. She saw Ben Barth’s tire marks, tracing his path away from Efram’s, toward Southport. To the east, behind a rise of towers, lay the charred and flattened remains of Hugh Merrow’s house. Farther out, the Archbuilder burial statue. The valley was a map of deaths and retreats.

  There was a whisper of pebbles tumbling down a grade behind her, something more than household deer. She turned, expecting Efram. Instead, ambling double-jointedly up the ridge was Hiding Kneel. The Archbuilder saw Pella and bowed, tendrils flopping forward, and continued up the path. Pella felt a faint shock at being visible in her real body, her verging-past-girl-hood body. She would always now. She shouldn’t miss her secret intangible deer-self.

  “Hail, Pella Marsh,” said Hiding Kneel, stopping a few feet from her.

  “Hail,” Pella repeated automatically, then felt instantly stupid about it.

  “Would you be observing the landscape?” said Hiding Kneel.

  Pella nodded.

  “My objective also,” said Hiding Kneel, moving closer. Pella stared at the Archbuilder, at the shiny, fur-ringed gaps of its eyes. It nodded at her, seeming to accept her gaze. “Your family is widely dispersed tonight.”

  “What?”

  “In passing, below, I saw Raymond Marsh also.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Making circles,” said the Archbuilder unhelpfully. Circles of photographs to sit inside? Or circling bicycle tracks in the dust? Pella didn’t bother to ask.

  Hiding Kneel brushed off a flat knee-high rock and gingerly sat, uncomfortably close to Pella, and gazed out with her over the valley.

  “Below is Efram Nugent’s house,” it said.

  “Uh-huh,” said Pella, trying to avoid conversation.

  “Have you ever been inside it?”

  She turned, surprised. “Once,” she said. “Have you?”

  “Ben Barth and myself often played backgammon, when Efram Nugent was traveling.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Ben Barth has gone.”

  “I know.”

  “Doug Grant does not enjoy backgammon,” mused Hiding Kneel after a short silence. When Pella didn’t say anything, it added, “Do you perhaps play?”

  “No,” said Pella. Seeing she was going to have to talk to Hiding Kneel about something, she said, “So you saw Efram’s walls? All the Archbuilder stuff?”

  “Oh, they were very beautiful. A marvelous endeavor.”

  “You liked it?” It seemed wrong that the Archbuilder could be so blithely approving of Efram.

  “Very certainly,” said the Archbuilder.

  “So why don’t you fix up all the wrecked stuff around here?”

  “This would be …” Hiding Kneel stopped to consider. “It would be to pretend a relation I do not have, to all the wrecked stuff.”

  “You mean it isn’t yours to fix up?” Pella turned her head at a sound. A single household deer had appeared beside them on the ridge. It danced for stability in the wind.

  “It isn’t,” agreed Hiding Kneel. “Nor is it mine to want it fixed.”

  Pella wasn’t sure she appreciated the distinction. “You could at least make yourself a place to sleep.” She thought of her own crushed Archbuilder shell. “Where do you go at night?”

  “There are various places to sleep,” said Hiding Kneel airily. “I go at night where I go in the daytime, but in repose.”

  Pella was irritated. She couldn’t sort out this answer at all. Was Hiding Kneel explaining that it slept in the rocking chair at Wa’s store? That was the main place it went in the daytime.

  “Well, Efram thinks you’re pathetic for not living up to all this stuff,” she said impulsively. She waved her hand at the ruins, grandly, the way Efram would. In the valley, night was arriving, the long shadows knitting together.

  “Ah,” said Hiding Kneel, tendrils rustling as it nodded its head.

  “You don’t care?”

  “Efram Nugent’s love of ancestors is quite poignant.”

  “He hates you.” Could she make it any clearer? Hiding Kneel should be here to keep a watch for Efram, to make sure that no fires were set, no Archbuilders murdered tonight. Instead the Archbuilder had come to admire the sunset and pine for backgammon.

  I’m the only one who understands, she thought hopelessly.

  Hiding Kneel sat staring out at Efram’s homestead, seeming not to have heard.

&n
bsp; “He doesn’t want you in the town,” she said. “If he gets his way you won’t be allowed around here.”

  “Clement Marsh is a good man,” said Hiding Kneel. “It is his town I will be allowed in. His school is where I will study.”

  “There isn’t any school,” said Pella. “My father doesn’t have a town for you. This is Efram’s place. Clement can’t make anything happen.”

  “I was assured he was a potent statesman.”

  “He’s nothing without my mother.” The words snuck out of her like a thread between her lips, a betraying filament that stretched back to Brooklyn, to Pineapple Street.

  “Your mother?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “So you too are concerned with the superiority of your lost ancestors,” said Hiding Kneel. “Hence your receptivity to Efram Nugent’s valuation of the departed Archbuilders.”

  “Caitlin isn’t my ancestor,” said Pella. “She’s my mother.”

  “Yet you speak of her as legendary, like my departed fore-cousins,” said Hiding Kneel. “And Clement Marsh, like we who remain, is correspondingly diminished. We tiptoe in the corridors of their reputation.”

  “So basically you agree with Efram that you’re a bunch of chumps.”

  “Possibly,” said Kneel, tilting its head humorously. “But perhaps those departed only seem greater to us because they are gone.”

  “You never met Caitlin,” said Pella quickly, though not before she felt a sting of doubt. Was she unfair to Archbuilders? To Clement?

  “I’m sorry to say, no,” said Hiding Kneel, as though it might have been a real possibility.

  They sat in silence, until the Archbuilder said, “Why are you so angry at your father?”

  “Because he’s like you,” she said, before she could think. Hot tears began to cover her face.

  “I do not understand.”

  “You couldn’t.” She didn’t herself. What did she mean? Were Clement and Hiding Kneel both helpless? Both sad?

  Both good?

  “Perhaps there is another reason,” suggested the Archbuilder.

  “Yes,” said Pella. “Because he lived and Caitlin died.”