Martha Calhoun

by Richard Babcock

  She drowned on a cool overcast day—the kind of day that seems impossibly misplaced in summer. A few people were swimming despite the weather, but most of us were sitting along the grainy beach at the end of the pond near the parking lot. Bobby Peterson and Wayne Turner were out in a canoe and started hollering. They’d found her behind the big, wooden float. She was lying face down in the water with her arms and legs spread out as if she were making a snow angel. The boys tipped the canoe over trying to bring her in, and finally Mr. Malm, the gym teacher, had to swim her to shore using the cross-chest carry. He gave her artificial respiration, but you could tell it was too late. She’d always been pale, but stretched out on the beach under an overcast sky, her skin was the same steely color as the water in the pond. Her lips were a dark, purplish blue. She was the first dead person I’d ever seen, except at a funeral. It was the same for a lot of the kids.

  Standing in the circle that gathered around while Mr. Malm worked on her, I had a painful feeling, totally selfish. I kept thinking that I’d lost a chance to do something good. I wished I’d said something to her—anything, a compliment on her bathing suit, a warning not to go in the water for an hour after she ate. I wished I’d noticed her, just that day. Later, walking home, I remember thinking that all of us who’d been there were tainted—that we’d allowed it to happen, and now our lives were forever changed. But the next day was sunny and warm. School let out, the lines grew at the Dairy Queen, the city pool opened, summer carried on. The only remembrance was a story in the paper in which Dr. Baker said Sissy hadn’t been eating anything and hadn’t got a cramp. He said he didn’t know why she’d drowned, that it was an anomaly. I didn’t know what the word meant until I looked it up in Bunny’s dictionary. Then I understood perfectly.

  Anyway, Sissy was seriously religious—even at school, she’d talk about “putting herself in the hands of God.” (After she drowned, Tom went around saying that God must have held her under too long.) She and her mother belonged to a strict Protestant church—something Baptist, with no dancing, no makeup, no card-playing—that met in a small, converted barn just outside of town. The church—the barn—was terribly plain. Someone whitewashed it periodically, and a large, wood cross had been fastened to the door, but there were no stained glass windows, no soaring arches. The yard had even been cleared of trees. Every now and then, Bunny and I would happen to be driving by on a Sunday when people were streaming in or out. I would watch them and feel so sorry. Compared to my life with Bunny, their lives seemed so empty, so flat—as barren as the stark, white building in which they worshiped.

  When I moved into the Vernons’ house, they put me in Sissy’s bedroom, on the second floor, at the end of the hall. The room, at first, was startling. Sissy had filled it with an enormous collection of religious figurines. All the shelves and tops of things were covered by little statues, most of them of Jesus. The statues were everywhere, lined up like toy soldiers. Mrs. Vernon said they were imported from Mexico, where artisans made them from plaster and gave them their bright coats of paint. Sissy ordered her collection from catalogues, starting when she was five. By the time she died, she’d put together a collection that ranged all over the life of Jesus. He was there as a baby—in a crib, being stared at by farm animals, or sitting in Mary’s lap under a halo. As a teenager, He was portrayed pacifying beasts and doing carpentry and just talking to a few old men. And then there was the adult Jesus section, lots of statues of Jesus carrying the cross, or blessing someone, or simply standing in His robe, His arms stretched at His sides, and His palms open. With His long, solemn, bearded face, Jesus looked about the same in all the figurines except one—a little statue of Him walking along a rocky road. Sissy placed that one facing the wall on the end of a shelf above the bed. One day, as I lay there it occurred to me that something was strange: Why would she have Him walking into a wall? So I stood on the bed to get a better look. It was Jesus, all right, the robes were flowing behind Him, and His palms were open. But in this figurine, He didn’t have a beard and His hair was short. He looked young and ordinary and a little like George Gobel. Sissy must have been embarrassed for Him.

  Two other girls had stayed in Sissy’s room since she died, but Mrs. Vernon told me she hadn’t changed a thing. The room seemed that way—neat and perfectly arranged, like a room in a photograph. There was a wooden bureau, crowned with a doily, a small wooden desk with drawers underneath that still held Sissy’s school papers and report cards. (One day, when I was bored, I thumbed through them—she got mostly B’s and C’s and incompletes.) Her teddy bear still sat in a chair in the corner. The bed was covered by a yellow crinoline spread. And circling all around the room was some terrible, light pink wallpaper, decorated with bunches of daffodils tied by a ribbon. Two pictures cheered things up a bit: a painting of Man o’ War, standing in the winner’s circle with a wreath dangling over his neck, and Sissy’s fifth-grade class photograph. I was there in the second row, a skyscraper against the horizon.

  The room had one window, just above the bed, and for my first few days, I spent most of my time staring out. The window faced the back yard, looking into a creaky oak tree with a branch like an old gray dog’s leg that passed just beside the house. On the other side of the lawn, over a fence, was a house belonging to the Porter family. Their only son, Ernie, was Tom’s age and had joined the navy. Mr. Porter’s mother now lived in Ernie’s room. She was very old and sometimes, looking out, I’d see her staring back across the yard at me.

  That first weekend, Mrs. Vernon came up every few hours to see how I was doing and to urge me to come down. She was a thin, pale woman, always wearing an apron and constantly wiping her hands on it. I kept telling her I needed time to think. As the hours passed, she became more persistent. Finally, she knocked and stepped tentatively into the room. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  “Okay, thank you.” I still couldn’t say more than a word or two at a time. The effort was too exhausting after all the thinking I’d been doing. I felt cut off, though. I wanted her to go away, but to like me.

  “I’m sure everything will work out,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “I’m sure,” she repeated. She relaxed slightly and looked around the room. It was early afternoon. The air was so still I could see dust particles in the light shafts, and the only sound was the angry buzz of flies against the window screen. “I get such pleasure out of this room,” she said. “It has so many memories. Sometimes, it seems that Sissy and I spent days up here together without ever coming out. I suppose you think that’s silly.”

  “No, not at all.”

  “She was always so delicate.…” Her voice trailed off, then came back. “She thrived in this room, like a hothouse flower. I wish you two had been better friends.” Mrs. Vernon took a few steps toward the end of the bed and placed her hand on the wall, touching it gently, as if it were a living thing. “Sissy picked out the wallpaper,” she said. “Do you like it?”

  “Ahh.…” I should have lied and said yes, but my mind was so tired I couldn’t think quickly enough.

  “I know,” she said, smiling, catching me before I’d had time to recover. “There is a lot of pink.” With her finger, she traced one of the bright yellow bouquets. “But Sissy loved daffodils. They were her favorite flower.”

  “They’re beautiful.”

  “We were rather lucky to find this print,” she said, stepping back to inspect the wall. “We got it from Fanzone’s Hardware, but Mr. Fanzone was keeping it in the stock room in back. One Friday night we went down to the store and looked over everything. Nothing was quite right. Mr. Fanzone wanted to close up, but the Eberhardt girl was working there then. You know, the one with the port-wine stain on her cheek.”

  “Rosie.”

  “Yes, Rosie. What a shame. Such a pretty girl otherwise. Anyway, she’d remembered seeing this in back and finally brought it out. As soon as they’d blown off the dust and unrolled it, Sissy yelled, ‘That’s it!’ She was so happy.
”

  I could see it all: Sissy, the dust, the Kleenex squeezed in her hand. There was something deathly about the scene. “Gee,” I said.

  “Yes.” Mrs. Vernon folded her hands at her waist and for a moment drifted with her thoughts. Suddenly, she stiffened and walked over to straighten the Man o’ War picture. Then she fluffed the teddy bear and propped him up again in the chair. “Well, I’m glad someone can use the room,” she said. “It’s a room that’s meant to be lived in.”

  “Yes.”

  She moved to the bureau and ironed the wrinkles out of the doily with her hand. “Now, I’m off to do some weeding,” she said. “Would you like to join me? The fresh air and sunshine would probably do you good.”

  Her back was turned, and I quickly grabbed a book from a shelf under Sissy’s nighttable. “I thought I’d do some reading,” I said. She pivoted and I waved the book at her.

  “Oh, how smart of you. What is it?”

  I had to look. It was En Français, Sissy’s French text. I held it out for Mrs. Vernon to see.

  “Why, that’s Sissy’s book.” Her face lit up, then darkened suddenly. “I suppose I should have taken it back to the high school.”

  “I’m sure they don’t mind.”

  “You’re probably right.” Once again, her face swelled with happiness. Her body was so thin and fragile that the least emotional change was immediately visible. “And this way, you can bone up on your French,” she said. “What a good way to spend your time. Mrs. O’Brien will be pleased.”

  “I hope.”

  “Were you in Sissy’s French class?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I took Spanish.” No one who spoke French ever came to Katydid, but there were lots of Mexican pickers and factory workers. I’d thought I might be able to speak Spanish to one of them, but I never had the nerve to try.

  “Oh, well, French is a beautiful language,” Mrs. Vernon said. She backed toward the door. “I’ll leave you now. Goodbye—how do the French say it?”

  “Toodle-oo?” It was all I could think of. She didn’t notice, just waved and closed the door.

  On Saturday evening, she brought me dinner on a tray. Later, she sent up her husband, Walter, a big, growly man, who was a foreman at the KTD. He knocked and then filled the whole doorway, his chest hairs spilling out of a tattered, sleeveless T-shirt. He’d obviously come on this mission reluctantly, and he stumbled around trying to make conversation, asking me things like whether I was good at geometry and did I think President Eisenhower was going to dump Nixon. I couldn’t talk to him, and finally he blurted out, “Well, do you want to come listen to the Cubs’ game on the radio?”

  I shook my head, and he went away.

  Mrs. O’Brien called once, to see how I was getting on, and Bunny came on Saturday and again on Sunday afternoon, between shifts at the country club. By Sunday, she was smoking cigarettes, something she does when she’s nervous. She stomped around Sissy’s room, flicking ashes on the floor and stubbing out her butts in a manger that was part of a religious scene. She didn’t mean any harm by it. She was distracted, and the thing looked like an ashtray. She kept talking about how the people of Katydid were against her and how we should have moved out after they sent Tom to jail. After a while, she started going on about how Eddie Boggs had said they couldn’t do this to her, and how Eddie had said she should sue Mrs. Benedict and Chief Springer, and Eddie this and Eddie that until I started feeling worse than ever. Finally, I told her that Eddie had enough problems of his own without advising her on mine. Besides, I asked, what does Eddie Boggs know about anything? Her head snapped up, and she paused and looked around the room. “Ugh,” she said. “What hideous wallpaper.”

  At night, I lay on Sissy’s bed, stretched out on my back. I’d think for a while—and then, when it got bad, I’d try not to think. Before all this, the idea of suicide had never occurred to me. The thought was simply beyond my realm. People, animals, plants—every living thing fights to continue life, not to end it. But lying in the darkness on Sissy’s bed, I became convinced that I had ruined everything for me and, worse, for Bunny. I felt so weak and hopeless that it seemed my life would end, whether I did anything about it or not. The string would simply run out, and that would be all. Later, after I’d lived with the situation for a few days, I started to daydream back, imagining that time had returned to Friday morning and that I was again biking up to the Benedicts’ house. I’d have another chance, and everything would be different. But over that first weekend, the truth of what had happened was too close for there to be any comfort in imagining.

  At about 8:30 Sunday night, after Mrs. Vernon had removed the tray of pork chops—still untouched—that she’d brought up earlier in the evening, the lights went out all over Katydid. I was already in the dark in Sissy’s room, but outside, in the dusk, it was as if night had fallen very suddenly. I could hear the Vernons scrambling around on the first floor beneath me. Out of the stillness, a siren sounded, then another. The phone rang and, seconds later, Mrs. Vernon appeared at the door, holding a candle. Her face was a skeleton behind the flickering yellow light.

  “Are you all right, dear?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Something awful’s happened.” She moved closer, and I could see that it wasn’t simply the candlelight—her face had tightened with fear. “Someone’s hit a light pole out on Willow Road. A terrible accident, they’re sure to be dead.”

  Around us, the light from the unsteady flame made the statues move.

  “Are you all right?” she asked again.

  “Yes,” I said. In fact, I was surprised at how calm I was. For two days, I’d been preparing for death. Now, it had turned out to be someone else’s.

  “Do you want me to leave you a candle?” she asked.

  “No, thanks, the dark is fine.”

  “Sissy hated the dark. She always slept with a nightlight,” Mrs. Vernon said. She added quickly, “I wish you’d take a candle.”

  “No, thanks, I’m just going to lie here.”

  “Well, all right. Call me if you need anything.… Call me.” She looked at me longingly. For a moment, I thought she really loved me.

  “I will,” I said.

  After she’d gone, I let myself cry at last. The tears poured down my face, soaking Sissy’s pillow. I cried so hard and long I amazed myself—where does all this liquid come from?

  The sirens carried on for an hour or so. Then everything was quiet again, except for an occasional motorcycle gunning down Oak Street. After a while, I started to notice a humming sound, a low, mechanical noise that almost made the air vibrate. The noise seemed familiar, like something I’d heard long ago, but I didn’t recognize it until I sat up in bed and put my ear to the windowscreen. It was the sound of the machines down the street at the KTD, working right through the weekend and the blackout. Walking past the factory, I’d heard that sound a thousand times before, but only close up. The other noises of the town drowned it out as soon as I was a block or so away. But now, with the rest of the town silenced, the sound took over the neighborhood, covering things like a light snowfall. Later, at midnight, the factory whistle blew a moist, promising toot, and I imagined a whole shift of men stepping away from their machines and sitting down with their black lunch pails and pulling out the sandwiches that their wives had made up and wrapped in wax paper earlier that evening. And thinking about how things just kept going down at the KTD finally helped me fall asleep.

  FOUR

  On Monday, Mrs. O’Brien arrived to drive me to court. “Achhh,” she said, as we walked to her car, a maroon station wagon with wood paneling painted on the sides. “I never should have eaten that second corn muffin this morning.” She patted her stomach. “It’s just sitting there like a brick.”

  She motioned for me to get in front and then slid behind the steering wheel, hiking her plain white dress up above her knees. The back seat of the station wagon was piled with files and notebooks, ma
ny of them spilling papers and documents. The materials were stamped here and there with seals and covered with bold, black type. They seemed to come from some place new and threatening, and I was cheered to see on the floor a child’s baseball mitt, its worn, brown fingers splayed open.

  “Did you hear about the accident?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Was your electricity out?”

  “Yes, most of the night.”

  She shook her head slowly. “A boy, probably hot-rodding. He hit a utility pole so hard he knocked it down. He was killed, of course. Michael Cooper. Did you know him?”

  “A little.” For a moment, I thought that knowing Michael Cooper might be held against me. He was a thin, sandy-haired boy with pockmarks on his cheeks. He was two or three years older than I, but his sister was in my class.

  “Well, it’s a shame, of course, but I don’t see why every teenager today has to run around in a car.”

  She guided the station wagon toward the square, traveling slowly and making looping turns around corners. “Do you have your license?” she asked after a short silence.

  “No.”

  “You’re sixteen, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, but I don’t know how to drive.”

  “Nobody’s taught you?” She sounded pitying.

  “Eddie took me out a couple of times,” I said, eager to show that I hadn’t been neglected at home. “He tried to teach me, but I wasn’t very good. He said I was too uncoordinated.”

  “Eddie?”

  I realized that mentioning him had been a mistake. I have to think harder, I told myself. Guard things. “He’s a man, a friend of Bunny’s.”

  “Oh. He’s not your friend?”

  “No. I mean, yes, sort of.”