by Tim Johnston
It did not look like the place to him but he killed the engine and got out and collected her crutches from the back and stood by as she wrestled herself up out of the car, and when she was up on her one foot he handed her the crutches. She took a few steps on the blacktop and stopped and lifted her face to the sun and breathed slowly.
“You get used to them,” he said.
“I know. I remember.”
“You remember?”
“I had them when I was seven.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“I do.”
“What happened?”
“Dad ran over my foot.”
“Dad ran over your foot.”
“I came running out of the house and he backed over my foot. My own stupid fault.”
“Was he drunk?”
She shrugged. “All I remember was he was leaving and he hadn’t said good-bye.”
They stood in the sun. There was the smell of the desiccated needles and of the sap weeping from the pines. Then they left the blacktop and made their way through the pines, Caitlin choosing her steps carefully and Sean following, ready to reach out but knowing he would not have to, that already she’d integrated the crutches into the thoughtless mechanics of movement, as she’d integrated the absence of one human foot and would integrate the mechanical one when it came.
They entered the glen and sat on the stone bench in the freckled light. The white and maimed Virgin stood as before amid the white trunks of the aspens and the chalky headstones. There was the weird sense of being back in time, at the beginning, a sense of knowing what was coming. Everything in the glen had an arranged, artificial look to it, like staging—even the light, even themselves. She was winded and as she caught her breath he leaned to look
for the plaque, expecting it to be covered in growth as in his dream, but it wasn’t.
She saw him reading the plaque and turned to read it herself.
Right Reverend Tobias J. Fife,
Bishop of Denver, Mercifully Grants,
In the Lord, Forty Days of Grace
For Visiting the Shrine of the Woods
And Praying before It,
1938.
The little aspen leaves stirred and they felt the breeze, brief and cool.
“Go ahead if you want to,” she said.
“Go ahead and what?”
“Eat your Snickers.” She smiled and he tried to smile back.
He dug the cigarettes from his pocket and got one into his lips and lit it and blew the smoke away from her. They were quiet. He looked once at her bandaged stump where it lay atop the opposite ankle, the way anyone would sit. After a minute he said, “The old man we were staying with, the sheriff’s father?”
“Emmet.”
“Emmet. He told me this story one time about his great-grandfather busting up his son’s foot, Emmet’s grandfather’s foot, with a hatchet, the blunt end, when he was just a boy. To keep him from going off to war and getting himself killed like his brothers. He’d been the last boy left.”
“Did it work?”
“I don’t know. Emmet found out later that his grandfather made the whole thing up. I still don’t know what to believe. Sometimes I wonder if I dreamed it.”
She sat looking at the face of the Virgin.
“When you were little,” she said, “I’d hear you through the wall at night, talking. I’d come into your room and sit by your bed and you’d go on talking, as if you knew I was there. As if your eyes were open. I’d ask you things and you would answer. You’d say the most hilarious things.”
“Like what.”
“I don’t remember. I just remember wanting to laugh so badly I thought I’d pee myself.” She looked at him, her eyes bright.
“I don’t remember that,” he said.
“You never did, the next morning. But you knew, when you were sleeping, that it was me. You’d say my name.”
They were silent. Sean smoked. He looked at her bandages again and she saw him looking and elevated the stump a little.
“It doesn’t hurt,” she said. “Not much. It just kind of pulses. And itches.”
“The stitches,” he said, remembering his own.
“No. My foot. The bottom of it. And my toes. I swear I’m wiggling my toes and I look down and there’s nothing there. And still I swear I’m wiggling them. Like they’re invisible. Like there’s some kind of hole in my vision.”
He thought about that. Then he said, “Why didn’t you bring it?”
“Bring what?”
“You know what.”
She looked down at the stump. “I don’t know. I could have. I thought I would. But when I saw it sitting on that floor, in that place, I didn’t want it anymore. It wasn’t a part of me anymore. I don’t know how else to explain it.”
He drew deeply on his cigarette and blew the smoke.
“I saw him,” he said.
“Saw who.”
“That man.”
She turned away.
“When he hit me with the car, I saw him,” he said. “I saw his eyes. I tried to tell you but I was so—Jesus, Caitlin I was just so . . .” She put her hand over his fingers and squeezed. And when she did this he was a boy again, and she was eighteen, up there in that mountain hollow while their parents waited below at the motel, and everything that had happened did not have to happen but could be altered by some simple act, by some slightest change in the unfolding of the day, and there would be no man in yellow sunglasses and there would be no crushed knee, no months and years of pain and no raped girl in an alley and no Emmet and no Billy and no girl on a horse nor girl on a ledge and no shack and no chain and no ax either, and they would come back down the mountain together and Caitlin would go on to college and she would run and the world would not miss it, the world would not care if these two young people slipped away and lived that other life instead.
She squeezed his fingers and there was no sound in the glen but their own breaths. At last she released his fingers and picked up her crutches and began to haul herself up, only to abruptly sit down again.
“I’m so weak I can’t fucking stand it,” she said.
“Just sit,” he said. “Just rest.”
“No. I want to go now. But I need a favor, Dudley.”
He turned and she looked at him.
He hooked one arm under her knees and the other around her ribs and he lifted her from the bench and she was so light this girl, this stolen sister, this king’s daughter sacrificed for what offense and to appease what god or gods he didn’t know, and he swung her around so her back was to the statue and the headstones, and when they were under way she said with her arm around his neck, “You think they’ll still give me that track scholarship?” and he said, “Maybe.” And then he said, “Maybe half,” and she laughed, and she weighed nothing as he carried her back down the trail, careful of her head, careful of her invisible foot, back to the car.
74
They sat drinking coffee in the motel coffee shop, staring out the window at the passing cars and the reflections of the passing cars in the glass of the building across the street, and each time the cafe door opened they turned to look and each time it wasn’t their children the air darkened and the blood emptied from their chests, and there was time enough to see themselves on that other morning long ago when they’d stood naked in the motel room as the world instantly became something else, themselves with it, time enough to see all that had passed since then too, their two lives playing out between them like silent film, one imposed upon the other as if those two histories were a common one after all and could never be viewed except together—until at last and when they thought they could not bear it another second the cafe door opened and there he was. Blond like his mother, holding the door for his dark-haired sister on her crutches, and the blood poured back into their hearts and they stood and Grant left twenty dollars on the table for two cups of coffee and the four of them went together out to the parking lot and a few minutes
later they slipped into the traffic going east, into the dusk. Grant at the wheel and Angela beside him and Caitlin in the backseat with her leg stretched out. Behind them, for now, was Sean and the old green Chevy, and behind the Chevy was the lit and diminishing city and beyond the city were the high summits, undiminished by distance, and beyond these the sun was falling into the west but they did not see it—nor the mountains nor the city but only the darkening sky ahead and the climbing moon and the road, and it was a road as straight and flat and bare as any they’d ever seen and it raced away before them over the plains, hiding nothing.
Acknowledgments . . .
. . . is a poor word for what I owe so many, beginning with my father, Joe Johnston, and stepmother, Amanda Potterfield, without whose dream of Colorado this book never would have been written, period. Also: nieces Brenna and Chloe, who grew up waiting for me to finish; and their father, my brother Tyler, who believed and safeguarded all along the way. And my mother, Judy Johnston, whose constancy and bone-deep goodness have meant more than I can say.
For years of friendship, shelter, and wisdom I thank Mark Carroll, Carmela
Rappazzo, Jim Hodgson, Nancy Russell, Nicolette and Henry. I thank Chris Kelley, steadfast reader and countryman; I thank Mark Wisniewski, P.D. Mallamo, and deep snow consultant Ted Mattison. I am forever indebted to my teachers and friends David Hamilton, George Cuomo, and Roberts French. I thank Thomas Mallon, Faye Moskowitz, and the George Washington University for a life-changing year in DC. I am deeply grateful to the MacDowell Colony, the MacArthur Foundation, David Sedaris, Don Foster, Erin Quigley, and Marianne Merola. For all the beautiful hard work she put into my manuscript I thank Genevieve Gagne-Hawes, and I thank my agent, Amy Berkower, for being the finest advocate a book and its author could hope for. I thank my editor, Chuck Adams, for taking such good care of this story, and I thank everyone at Algonquin for an exceptional book-making experience start to finish.
Lastly and ongoingly: sister Tricia, brothers Tad and Harris, Uncle Rick and Aunty Kathy, for all the love, complexity, and humor of family, amen.
TIM JOHNSTON, a native of Iowa City, is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of Memphis. He is the author of a young adult novel, Never So Green, and the story collection Irish Girl, winner of the prestigious Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. Descent is his first adult novel. (Author photo by Dave Boerger.)
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Published by
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
WORKMAN PUBLISHING
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2015 by Tim Johnston.
All rights reserved.
A portion of this novel appears, in slightly different form, as the short story “Up There” in the author’s story collection Irish Girl, 2009, University of North Texas Press. Another portion first appeared, in slightly different form, on NarrativeMagazine.com as the short story “Two Years,” and was then anthologized in Best of the West 2011: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri, 2011, University of Texas Press.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ISBN 978-1-61620-430-3 (ebook)
