by Sarah Willis
“Mr. Burns never argued about us leaving, although I can tell you we argued about a million things before Timothy died. But not since, not one argument. It isn’t worth it, not now. I don’t have anything against a good old-fashioned argument, at least not one that’s not mean and nasty.”
She takes a breath and wipes at her eyes, although she’s not crying or anything.
“I don’t think we’ll be coming back, Tamara. I really don’t think so. Not that we’ve mentioned it yet. I just don’t think I can.” She shuffles her feet against the hay bale, like a kid might, just to hear the noise and knock a little hay loose. She looks like a kid, she’s so small, and it’s dim in here, you can hardly see her wrinkles.
“Your son,” I say, “he’s kind of in the stuff in your house, isn’t he? In that glass and the chairs and the steps and my … his bed.” I’m surprised I’m saying this but I go on. “And there must be a whole lot of him in those boxes in the attic. I can see how it might scare you.”
She shakes her head before saying a thing. “I don’t think it scares me, Tamara, not like you mean. It just makes me so sad. There are things I wanted to do with Timothy, lots of things, if I start to think about it. And things I wish I said. We weren’t brought up to say the things I should have said, not in ordinary life. We just say, ‘Go to bed’ or ‘Are you warm enough?’ or ‘Wipe up that spill you made.’ I can remember saying a lot of that stuff, but even when he was dying I don’t remember telling him he was sweet and thoughtful, or that he had the most beautiful eyes. You would think that house would comfort me, with his memories, but it just reminds me of the things I wanted to do differently. Like the wallpaper in his room. That’s not paper for a boy. I could have done something with soldiers, or ships, but I never did.”
I have all sorts of things rumbling around in my head now. Like the idea of a room papered just for me. But the one thing that really keeps sticking in my head is that the Burns might not ever move back here. The house would be for sale then. This connects to something my mother said in her letter. Tell your father not to move before I come home. We might be here awhile. Then a quick thought goes through me: that I don’t want to move anymore and if my mother doesn’t come home for a long time, we’ll have to stay. It’s an awful thought, but I can’t make it go away now that I’ve thought it.
Mrs. Burns and I sit on the hay bales, while dust motes float around in the sunbeams. I could sit here forever, I think. If not forever, at least for a long time.
“My brother had TB,” she says. Her hands are folded in her lap. She’s just as comfortable as I am.
“Did he die?” I ask.
“Well, yes,” she says.
“I knew it,” I say.
“Well, now,” she says. “He died, but not from TB. He flew a helicopter. Crop dusting. He got better and went back to work. A blade came loose and the helicopter, it turned right upside down. It wasn’t TB that got him, and it won’t get your mom, but that’s no reason not to tell her you love her. It will make you and her feel a lot better. You know what, I’m damn sick of people dying. I’m going next.” Then she laughs. “My goodness, the things I say when I get going.”
A shadow appears in the sun-filled doorway. It’s Mr. Burns. “Well, what are you two ladies doing in here?”
“Oh, nothing much,” Mrs. Burns says.
“Well, the cow’s fine, and I checked the fences and the cattle have more than enough to eat. Your sister must be doing just fine. Give her my thanks. We better go. You coming, Mrs. Burns?”
“I am.”
“You take good care of yourself and your family, Tamara,” Mr. Burns says as we follow him back out into the sunshine.
“I will,” I say.
“I’ll call you about that cooking date, dear,” Mrs. Burns says.
“Thanks,” I say. But I wonder if she will. I think Mr. Burns gave us the time she needed, and she got everything said she wanted to. The cooking was just an excuse we don’t need anymore. Still, I will go, if she calls. I’m even a bit hungry now. After they leave, I cook the beans like she suggested. My brother and I eat them for lunch, and he says they are really good. I leave the casserole dish on the stove for my father, and go upstairs to write to my mother.
That night, I ask my father who has been milking the cow. “Helen,” he says, as if I should have known. I should have.
Nine
In the early morning, dew sticks to the tips of grass, winking and glittering like diamonds. If you stand in the right spot, you can find a dewdrop that captures the sun. It can blind you; a tiny miniature sun in a drop of water. It is the most beautiful sight I have ever seen.
The trick is finding the right spot, the right dewdrop, the right time of day. It takes so much for things to work out perfectly, and so little for them to go wrong.
Dear Tamara,
How are you? Are you still tutoring Brenda? Bought any new records? How are Edith and Kip? I miss you so much. I love getting your letters. They mean so much to me. I am feeling better bit by bit.
There are so many rules here. Specific times to eat, to lie down, to sit in the sun, to get shots, to swallow pills, even to go to the bathroom. I am not one for rules, but they have put the fear in me: they say I will not get well if I am not very good, which means to do nothing, nothing, nothing. Even eating is to be done slowly, without emotion. Fifty years ago the cure was vigorous outside exercise, even in the winter. At the moment, that sounds like a luxury I can’t possibly imagine; that is, my body actually keeping up with a routine like that. Thank goodness I didn’t get this just ten years ago. They were puncturing lungs and removing ribs! I guess I can’t complain.
They are talking about shutting down this place because tuberculosis is on the decline. I feel like an anachronism.
Yesterday a new patient came. They say she will be the very last, that her family bribed someone, but she certainly doesn’t want to be here. She sobbed all through the night. Today she is still completely inconsolable. The nurses scold her, and there are rumors she will be moved to an empty wing by herself so she can’t upset us. I recognize some of myself in her sad, pale features. She makes me wonder if I didn’t protest enough. I simply came in and lay down. It’s something to reflect on. I have much time for reflection.
I am allowed to write for ten minutes twice a day, if my temperature is close to normal. Unfortunately, that isn’t very often. I would protest so much resting and quiet, at least I hope I would, if only I weren’t so tired.
I hope you are doing well, and helping your father take care of Megan and Robert. It is much to ask, but there it is. I have no choice but to rely on you. I will get better. I will come home.
Love,
Mother
There is another letter from my mother, for my father. He is out in the pasture. I steam open his letter with the teakettle, like I read in a Nancy Drew novel. It actually works, even though the envelope gets damp and wrinkled.
Dear Stuart,
I’m sorry I haven’t written for a while, but today is the first time in five days my temperature is close to normal. They are such sticklers for rules. But it works. I tried hard not to do anything stressful, just so I could get well enough to write. (They consider rolling over in bed a stressful activity.) I will write this quickly, so I can write a letter to each of the children. I don’t want to send one letter to you all. I want each letter to be a private hug. I am afraid I am waxing on sentimentality, but I write these letters in my head for days before putting them to paper, and they metamorphose from chatty hellos to raw emotions. At this very moment I feel as if my heart will burst open with my need for each of you. I miss your touch. I miss Tamara’s smirk and her offhanded love. I miss Robert’s soft hands and his wide-eyed looks. I miss Megan’s simple need for me, the way she will crawl into my lap like a cat and I don’t dare move for fear of disturbing her comfort. I miss you wholly and completely.
The nurse has threatened not to give me your letters because I get so visibl
y upset. Your words seem to bleed onto the page. I know you are lost without me, and it should be comforting that you love me so, but it’s not. You must find a way of living without me for a while longer.
It’s strange, but I’m more tired now than I was on the farm. I wonder if it’s just the knowledge that I have TB. It’s an exhausting thought. I cough constantly, and can’t sleep, just doze fitfully in a semi-state of wakefulness and delirium. They say the streptomycin could make me go deaf. There are two patients right now that are actually losing some of their hearing. In my dreams, people’s mouths move but I don’t hear a word. The dreams are worse than the reality of what’s around me, so much so that I relish even the sound of a cough or the nurse telling me it’s time for a shot. I have no choice. I follow the rules so I can come back to you.
Here comes the nurse to take away my letter. It is my own fault for crying as I write. Tell Robert and Megan I will write tomorrow.
I love you,
Me
My mother’s letters take two days to travel fifty miles. They are like the light we see from distant stars. By the time her letters reach me, she could be dead.
I get my curse. I’m hanging the wash up, pinning pants upside down, when a thick warm wetness oozes out into my underwear. It always starts like this, a flood out of nowhere like a dam bursting. Legs slightly apart I walk inside to go upstairs to the bathroom.
“What’s the matter with you, beanbreath?” Robert says as I amble awkwardly through the dining room.
“Shut up, buttface,” I say, walking past my father, who is painting a couch picture.
“Tamara! Watch your mouth!” my father says.
“What, beanbreath is okay but buttface’s not?” I mutter as I hobble up the stairs, trying not to let my thighs touch each other. It’s dripping down my legs now. I hate being a girl. I’d do anything to be a boy. Then I think of Rusty touching me, and I waver on this thought.
There are no napkins in the bathroom cupboard where they’re supposed to be. I look in my room. Under my bed. In my mother’s room. Under her bed. Nothing. Nowhere. I begin to panic.
I go back to the bathroom, pee, and try to clean myself up. With a towel wrapped around me I go to my room, get clean underwear and clean shorts, and go back to the bathroom, where I wad up some toilet paper and stick it in my underwear like a napkin. Then I wash out my underwear and shorts and hang them over the bathtub.
I’m going to cry if I don’t scream. So I scream. “Shit, shit, and shit!”
This, I guess, is definitely worse than buttface.
“Tamara Anderson, get down here right now!”
I stomp down the stairs, which is not a good idea, since it seems to shake more blood out of me. The toilet paper is falling apart.
“Tamara,” my father says, “I have had quite enough of your foul mouth. This time you’ve gone too …” He stops, looks at me, tilts his head. Robert is standing in the passage between the dining room and the living room, eyes big, like we’re performing some horror show for him. I feel something running down my legs, out from under my shorts.
“I have my curse. I need napkins,” I say through clenched teeth.
“Oh. Don’t we have any?”
“No, obviously.” My eyes burn. I’m right between furious and tears. I concentrate on furious.
“Can you go across the road and ask Brenda or Helen?”
“No way. Not like this.” Anyway, I wouldn’t. Rusty might come to the door, or their father, and then what would I say? I’m here for some feminine napkins please? I’d rather die.
My father looks at Robert, who furiously shakes his head. “I’m not going. No way I’m asking for that stuff.”
“Are you sure we don’t have any?” my father asks.
“Yes. Unless you have some.”
He doesn’t get mad back, he just nods.
“Okay. Then I’ll drive to town and get some.” He starts cleaning his brush with a cloth. “Do they come in sizes?”
Now my eyes fill up with tears, but I blink them back. I’m standing here with blood dripping down my legs, my brother staring with a smirk across his whole face, and my father asking me about napkin sizes. I don’t know if I’m about to cry because I’m embarrassed, or because I miss my mother, or because I’m so relieved my father is going to go get me some napkins and he’s treating the whole thing so calmly, as if he’s going into town to buy toothpaste.
“Junior,” I say.
“Okay. One box? Maybe I should get a few, for next time.” He doesn’t wait for me to answer. “That’s what I’ll do, I’ll get two boxes. Why don’t you go take a bath while I’m gone.”
“Okay,” I say. “Thanks.”
“Nothing to it but to do it.” He smiles at me. “See. We’ll survive.”
I nod, but think to myself that he isn’t the one with blood running down his legs.
It is so hot that even with the windows open, I am suffocating. I kept a frog in a box once. The box had a lid so he wouldn’t jump out. It was during a summer like this, when everyone moves slowly because the air is too thick to breathe. I forgot about the frog for a few days. It was dead by the time I remembered.
Tonight, as I lie in bed, I start to cry because I once killed a frog. It’s just a little cry, and I stop myself quickly.
Megan still won’t come out of her room. I imagine she’s molding in there. My father got her books from the library, and bought her a radio, but she didn’t even say thanks. He tried to starve her out one day, refusing to bring her food, but his conscience got to him, and as it got dark he took up a tuna sandwich, fried eggs, a pitcher of milk, and an apple. She wrote him a note asking for cookies, and he brought them up too. I think she sneaks downstairs when we’re outside. My mother’s box of lined paper is missing, and the deck of cards from the dining room cabinet. I bang on her door with my shoe when I wake up in the morning. Just a friendly hello. She’s so stubborn she makes me want to spit.
Robert and I go to church with the Murphys. We missed the Sunday after my mother went to the hospital, but last week I made Robert come with me by telling him God would make our mother sicker if he didn’t. This Sunday he just gets dressed. I don’t even bother asking Megan.
At church, people talk to me, asking how my mother is, saying they hope she feels better soon. The parents of Cindy, Brenda’s cousin who got killed in the car accident, tell me to be brave and I mumble thanks. They were here last week and everyone greeted them in soft voices, touching their shoulders and hands. I can’t believe they come to church. Aren’t they mad at God? I head down the aisle to our pew, relieved when the services start. We sing songs that sound just like the songs we sang last time. Browsing through the hymnal, I see they are all very similar. At church the same things happen each week, in the same order, almost the same words. No big changes. It grows on you.
The minister’s story is about loving God. He reads from the Bible. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” I look over at Brenda with her short hair, which she curled by rolling it in rags last night, and at Rusty, who looks at me and can’t help grinning, and at Helen, who sits up straight, her eyes bright with belief and attention. Then I look at their parents, in their Sunday clothes. They have changed, the Murphys, since we moved in. We seem to have had a good effect on them.
Next, the minister tells a story about a man from his hometown who became a missionary in Africa, spending the rest of his life in poverty and filth. He says this man understood that the colored people in Africa were the very neighbors God was speaking about. He says God has a mission for each of us, and as varied as those missions are, they all stem from the love-thy-neighbor message. “If we love our neighbors as ourselves, then we will want them to believe and know the risen Christ our Lord, and find salvation in baptism, no matter their color or race. Sometimes, our missions
will carry us far from home, but home is in Jesus’ arms, which is anywhere and everywhere in this vast and magnificent world we live in.” Helen is leaning so far forward in her seat I think she might fall right off the pew.
I feel like telling them they don’t have to go to Africa to find colored people, and I wonder how they would feel if colored people moved into this town. This makes me think about my mother. Since I’m in church, I close my eyes and ask God to cure her. I wonder if praying in church is better than at home, or if all the prayers here get jumbled together into one big prayer. I guess if He can create the world, He can get the prayers all sorted out. I still don’t believe He made the world though, at least not in seven days. I don’t even think the Bible mentions dinosaurs. I’ll have to ask Helen.
I try to sing the last song, “God Bless America,” because I want to be part of what’s happening in this church, I want to enter into this knowledge that they have, but my voice is flat, even to my ears, so I stop singing and just listen. Robert is singing. His voice is flat too, but he doesn’t seem to mind.
After church, on the way to the car, a girl from my class, but not one of the popular ones, pulls Brenda’s hand, and they whisper to each other until Mr. Murphy calls to Brenda to get a move on. In the car, Brenda is unusually quiet, and I wonder what the girl said, and if it was about me.
