by Brian Payton
Easley tries it and agrees. There’ll be a proper feast tonight.
“We’d better stay inside. Watch our backs for a while,” Easley says. “Wait ’til dark to light the fire.”
The boy wipes his hands on his trousers. Then, with no small measure of pride, he picks up the ptarmigan and walks over to the fire pit. He sets about plucking the bird, then stops and looks up.
“Maybe the young hunter gets to rest while the old man cleans dinner. It’s the least you can do for my goddamned birthday.”
“Today?”
“Believe so. And here I am stuck in a hole with you.”
“Well, that solves it. I’ll take care of dinner while you tell me something of your short yet undistinguished life.”
The boy retires to his hammock. He climbs in and pulls the extra material around himself until only his face protrudes from the cocoon.
Easley plucks and guts the bird, then, as dusk falls, builds and lights the fire.
Despite improvements, the emotional comfort afforded by their fire pit far outweighs its usefulness for warming skin and bones. Easley waits for the coals to glow. Shadows shift and parry in the honey-colored light as the wet walls refract and reflect their fire, like stars on a cloudless night. How long will they survive when the wood runs out? A week? Two? With the supply on this beach nearly exhausted, they will have to travel increasingly farther afield. He skewers the two chunks of hindquarter and sticks them out over the flames.
The boy is pensive, uncharacteristically silent.
“When I was your age, I was in art school,” Easley says, to prime the conversation. “I wanted to be a painter. Still life. Natural history. The new Audubon.”
“New what?”
“An artist. Thought I’d travel the world, then hole up in some garret in the city—drinking and screwing. I even grew a little beard.” Easley looks over at the boy and catches him in a smile. “Didn’t do much painting, though. That was part of the trouble.”
“What’s the other part?”
The bird’s fat bubbles. It runs down the skewer and sizzles on the coals. The smell is overwhelming. It speaks to a part of Easley’s being unconnected to mind or soul, something deep and compelling he is only now getting to know. He turns both pieces over to expose a fresh side to the heat. Fat dribbles down his hand, he licks it off like gravy.
“The other part was what my favorite teacher said to me. One day, he took me aside and said that I had just enough talent to torture myself for the rest of my life but not enough to make it as an artist. Said I was old-fashioned. Lacked vision. Showed no real promise of developing a style of my own. He told me to look for something else. It’s not too late to be good or even great at something, he said. If only I’d put painting behind me.”
“Mean old coot.” The boy slowly licks his lips in anticipation.
“He was about as old as I am now.”
“Still, couldn’t’ve felt good hearin’ it.”
“So I became a writer, of sorts.”
“But do you have any talent for it?”
Easley gestures around the cave. “Enough to pay for all of this . . .”
“What kind of stories you write?”
“Articles about wildlife, people. Heard of the National Geographic Magazine?”
“Yeah, they even have those in Texas. Good pictures.”
The bird is not quite ready. Easley sticks the knife into the little thigh and the juice runs quick and opaque. He tosses a few bulbs of the wild celery up into the hammock. “Salad,” he says. “Main course will be served directly.”
“College wasn’t for me.” The boy gets out of the hammock and comes down next to the fire. “Too many rich boys for my liking.”
“What did you study?”
“History, English, a little chemistry. Had no idea what I was doin’.”
Easley hands the boy a hindquarter, puts the other aside for himself, then sets the breasts on to roast.
“When I turned twenty, my friends took me out and got me drunk,” Easley says. “Woke up on the floor of a stranger’s house. Had no idea how I got there . . . Ended up walking home with no shoes or wallet.”
“My last birthday, I was in basic training,” the boy says. “I didn’t tell nobody. The birthday before that, I had a fight with my mom. She wouldn’t leave me alone.” He takes a bite of the meat and his eyes light up with the flavor.
“Wouldn’t leave you alone . . .”
“My mother ruined my life is the easiest way to tell it,” he says. “She ruined me.”
Easley bites into his chunk of meat and considers options. Pick up the scent and follow the trail where it leads, risk fouling the day, or gently shift things in another direction.
“We’ve all got parents,” Easley offers.
“No we don’t.”
Easley stirs the coals as the words hang in the air.
“My daddy left us when I was three. I was the only child. He couldn’t stand my mom no more so he just walked away one night. Left everything. All his money, clothes, you name it. Never came back. Well, she couldn’t take it. She never treated me right. Like a boy. A son. She always doted on me like something else. Like she needed me too much. She wanted me to sleep with her all the time, keep her company. Then, when I got older and needed my privacy, she couldn’t take it. I stayed in my room and she let me alone from the time I was twelve until I was about fifteen. She had a man part of that time. Then he left too. Soon after that, she started cryin’ and beggin’ at my door.”
The boy takes another bite and Easley does his best to keep his eyes focused on the fire. The boy sighs heavily.
“She was on me all the time. She’d buy me little gifts when it wasn’t even close to my birthday. We spent every night in her bed. Early on, she’d just hold on to me until she fell asleep, but then she started gettin’ worked up. Then one night, that was it. She’d even change the sheets in my old room now and then to make it look like I was sleeping there, in case anyone noticed. I tried chasin’ after girls from school, like my buddies were doin’, but I felt dirty. Like some kind of criminal.” He runs out of steam and pauses, staring into the flames. “I’ve never told anyone else, but I figured this might be the last chance I get. You don’t really want to hear all this, do you?”
“I’ll listen to anything you want to tell me.”
“I’ve never had a regular girl. A girl my own age who cared for me and wanted me. I have no idea what that’s like. My mother took all that from me. I’m ruined for it.”
“So you joined up.”
“So I got away from her.” The boy takes a bite of meat. “If we ever get out of here, I have to see what that’s like. I got to try.”
Easley planned to tell the boy more about himself, his home life, which now seems so fortunate by comparison. How he had met and fallen in love with Helen. The surprise of it all when he was just coming to terms with the idea that—at the advanced age of thirty-two—he might be destined to live his life alone. How timing was everything. If he had met Helen a year before or after he would have likely missed his opportunity. How happy they’d been, until the babies failed to come and the war put such notions into perspective. How the memory of having left the way he did gnaws at him day and night. But timing is everything, and this is not the time.
“Karl?”
“Yeah.”
Easley sucks the marrow from a tiny bone, then tosses it into the fire. “We’re walking through life in the present, changing along the way. The past is something somebody else did long ago. What happens tomorrow is someone else’s problem. All that’s real is the here and now.”
“You believe all that?”
“Sounds good, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” the boy agrees. “It surely do.”
THE FIRE FADES to ember glow. Past the pit, the mouth of the cave yawns to the nighttime sky. The boy is already asleep, his breathing shallow and steady. The roasted stones below their hammocks have long since coole
d. The cold tests the limits, pacing, creeping up inch by inch. Easley’s mind wanders—between Karl’s sad story and the nearby Japanese, past huge stacks of tinder-dry wood, then down belowdecks of his father’s old sloop.
The summer had been exceptionally warm. He and Helen shared a picnic in the August sun, watching little boats make the most of meager wind on English Bay. It seemed all the world was out on the water that day, but the cabin was theirs alone.
They drank wine and laughed about drifting out past Vancouver Island to Hong Kong before the month was through. She nodded at his tumble of words, enjoying the awkwardness. He stood in the hatchway, trying to keep an eye on the sea. She rose from her seat in the galley, unbuttoned his shirt. Ran her hand across his belly and chest, then pulled him below as the boat turned into the wind.
He has allowed himself the luxury of her remembered presence, the disappeared past. A betrayal of the sermon just preached, it is a comfort all the same. Hiding in the dark and the cold at the edge of the world, are memories all that is left to him?
The wind sweeps down the hills and howls across the lip of the cave. Nose, chin, cheeks grow numb as the coals grow weak and perish.
FOUR
JOE CONNELLY MOVES THROUGH HIS HOME LIKE A man determined to make a good first impression. He tops off Helen’s cup before she’s had three sips of coffee.
“Sit down, Daddy. You’re making me nervous.”
He is showing off for her, as he did with the doctors. He moves with care and purpose, anticipates what he will need to carry or lift, uses his left hand gracefully in the hopes of drawing attention away from the right. He moves in such a way as to mask any sign of weakness.
Joe was kept in the hospital for two days. Helen felt helpless, watching him sit up in bed, unable to form words or squeeze his right hand, eyes wild with confusion. And yet before the day was through, he was forcing out discernible sentences. The following day, he was—with effort—able to lift his right arm and extend a tremulous hand, but admitted the numbness persists. The doctors were surprised to see his speech return so rapidly. Whether the arm will follow suit is anyone’s guess. Despite medical advances, they say stroke remains a mystery. He may have another one at breakfast tomorrow, or live to see his hundredth birthday, never having another stroke again. There is no treatment available, nothing to do but wait and see.
Helen made the decision to break her lease the moment she arrived at the hospital. Hired boys from the high school helped her pack up the contents of the house she and John had shared. She tried and failed to keep them from taking a shortcut through the flowers as they loaded the truck. She stood aside, imagining John’s expression, should he return and find another family living in his home. A few hours later, she watched her father step aside helplessly as the boys carried her boxes and furniture down into his basement. She saw him fight the urge to pitch in, do his part, lift, lug, and stack.
From the stowed possessions of her married life, she carried a single suitcase up the rough wooden stairs from the basement. She shut the door and switched off the light.
Upstairs, the hall, kitchen, living room—every surface seems rubbed with the patina of history. It is not so much that the walls or furnishings themselves are particularly ancient or worn, it’s more the sense that everything seems to belong to another era—props left over from the first act of her life. She cradles the cup in her hands.
“I hate the reason, but I have to say it’s good to have you home.”
“Daddy . . .” She is dizzy, from the sudden telescoping of time. Her mind races forward to his next stroke, which she fears will kill him, back to visions of him as a younger man, when she believed he could protect her from all possible harm. Then to where she sits today, being forced to choose between caring for her father, or setting out to find her husband. Forward again—should their grandfather pass before they arrive, how will she describe him to her children?
“You’re doing me the favor,” she says, “saving me from being alone. Put your feet up. I’ll make some supper. Anything in the icebox?”
“You make supper? One hand tied behind my back and I’m still twice the cook you’ll ever be. Don’t forget who taught you what little you know.”
He gets back up and disappears into the kitchen.
Even before the stroke, Joe’s arthritis had slowed him down. Regardless, he filled his weeks down at St. Brigid’s Catholic church with light carpentry, maintenance, restoration. He won’t take a nickel for his time. Helen had hoped that volunteer work would afford him opportunities for conversation and sociability. He chooses instead to haunt the church early in the week when even priests are hard to find. He asked only to be allowed to work at his own pace and sees no reason why this has to change. He will find ways to compensate for his insubordinate limb.
In both reputation and fact, Joe Connelly has been hard at work since childhood. He tells of splitting shakes from rough cedar blocks, dawn ’til dusk, when he was twelve years old. At thirteen, he graduated to cutting shingles with the saw. When the call went out for volunteers for the Great War, Joe signed up immediately—as if it were a one-time, limited offer. At forty, he was considered too old for combat duty and was trained as a radiotelegrapher instead. En route to Europe, he shattered his right hand aboard the transport ship during a storm in the North Atlantic. He spent the balance of the war in a remote communications post in Normandy. Following the armistice, Joe came home with a French bride, their two small boys, and a fantastic tale about how he broke his hand on the jaw of a Hun.
Two months after the family arrived in Seattle, Helen was born. Joe found work in the mill. The year his young daughter started school, his wife died of cancer. Helen had always believed that it would have made matters simpler by far if she too had been a boy. There were womanish secrets and mysteries he spent her formative years avoiding. She learned the facts of menstruation from a bald and bifocaled physician. Helen had made the appointment herself because she thought she might bleed to death and was too embarrassed to tell anyone the location of her injury. Joe made up for these shortcomings in countless other ways.
His sons grew up and moved on years ago, unable to restrain themselves from challenging his supremacy any longer. Together, they moved clear across the country and established a small construction firm in New Jersey, as well as families of their own. The day of Joe’s stroke, Helen called her older brother, Frank, who promised to pass the message along to Patrick. He said it was a relief to know that they could trust she had the matter “well in hand.”
In the kitchen, potatoes and onion are on the fry. Joe stands at the stove with his good hand stirring the pan, his right hand weighed down like a plumb line to the floor. Helen gently nudges him aside. A pair of chops—probably his entire meat ration for two weeks—sit open on wax paper.
“How did you cut the potatoes and onions?”
“Chop in half,” he says, “pin halved potato under a second chopping block. Cut, shift, repeat.”
“Sounds like an accident waiting to happen.”
He finds himself leaning against the sink. “You stay as long as you want, now. This is your home, especially with John being gone.”
“Careful what you wish for.”
Potatoes browned, she lays the meat in the pan.
Eventually, he asks, “Got any plans? Other than hovering over me.”
She turns to meet his gaze.
“You’ll be the first to know.”
He glances at the grandfather clock. “The Shadow’s starting soon. You listen much?”
“No, Daddy. But you go ahead.” She switches on the radio, then moves their plates to the table.
“With all this nonsense I forgot to ask, heard anything at all?”
He refers, of course, to John.
“Not a word,” Helen replies. “And you know he would contact me if he possibly could.”
“It’s a war, sweetheart. He could be out in the trenches right now. Bogged down. Trying to file a repor
t . . . These are tricky times. We have to be patient.”
Helen smiles weakly. She asks if they still have trenches. This elicits a scowl.
At the table, she watches as he eyes the meal before him, playing out possible plans of attack. She reaches over and cuts up the meat on his plate. He tries brushing her hand away but she persists.
“Please say a prayer for him tonight.”
Joe nods, but the announcer is introducing the program, his attention already drawn away. She observes him negotiate food and fork, his right hand asleep on his lap. She finishes her meal, kisses him on the forehead, and leaves him to his show.
Upstairs she discovers a vase of daffodils on the nightstand beside her bed.
* * *
THE RECRUITING OFFICE of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps hums with newly directed energy. The address matches the one in the handbill she’s been carrying around for over a week. She scans the windows—now covered with posters imploring women to do their bit for their country. She recalls the old placards that hung in the windows of this storefront just a few years ago, promoting voyages to the exotic Orient and sunny South Pacific. Inside, women rush around with file folders and envelopes like they’re placing last-minute bets at the track. One of them waves Helen over to her desk.
The woman seems so pleased to see her, it’s as if she’s been expected. Helen remembers the face from catechism, half a lifetime ago.
“Edith Brown,” the woman says, hand stuck out straight from the shoulder. “And you’re Helen . . . Corrigan?”
“Connelly . . . At least it used to be. Now it’s Helen Easley.”
“Have a seat. Can you believe you’re the third girl to walk in here today that I already knew?”
Helen flashes back on her father, fumbling with his wallet before they left for his doctor’s appointment this morning. How he must now balance it on the wrist of his stiff right arm while he picks through the bills with his left. She has hardly opened her mouth and she already feels like a traitor.
