by Carolyn Wall
Wing’s kitchen is purely his—white-painted wood and spoons and flapjack turners in a half dozen sizes hanging on hooks. Iron skillets and newfangled gadgets, a big enamel stove with six burners and a warming shelf. He always loved to cook, was a great hand with stirring and kneading and winding fancy braided pastry with jam in the center, or raisins and currants and walnuts. It surprises me that his breads and pecan tarts haven’t fattened up his wife. I guess nothing can save her.
I haven’t seen Miz Grace in a long time. Even when she was well, I avoided her. When I’d spot her in town, I’d nod and hurry by, and if she was at Dooby’s counter, I’d pay eight cents for a tin of something that I didn’t really need, and rush out the door. I’m sure she knows who I am—Saul knew her to speak to, and Ida did, too.
After a while, Wing comes back, and we sit looking at each other across the table. I have a hundred things to talk about, but nothing to say.
“Sugar?” he says.
I shake my head.
“You used to put sugar in your coffee.”
“So I did.” I don’t remind him that sugar costs money, and I save it now for Will’m, and to soothe Ida when she raises holy hell. I sip my coffee. His shirtsleeves are rolled up, and there’s white paint on his knuckles—and calluses, too. I wonder if Love Alice ever turns his hands over and reads the palms.
“I’m going to lose her soon,” he says. “Love Alice told me. Even if she hadn’t, I’d know.”
I nod, because a truth is a truth. Also, I have never known Love Alice to be wrong. “You’ve taken care of her a long time. What are you going to do when she’s gone?” It’s a stupid question. I can’t remember when I was this uncomfortable.
“Dress her in pink and put her in the ground, I guess.”
“The earth’ll be grateful to have her.” As odd as that might sound, it’s a fact, and I’m safe saying it.
He smiles. “I’d forgotten how you are about the earth,” he says. “How you love spring. Don’t think Grace is gonna make it till then. I hope the ground thaws.”
I nod.
“And then,” he says, “I’ll probably cry awhile. And watch the grass grow back on top of her.”
“Be nice if you played your trumpet over her.”
He takes a swallow of coffee. “Hadn’t thought of that.”
“Wing—can I ask you something?”
He looks up at me.
“I know you don’t remember my pap. He died before you came here, but—”
He puts his fingers together and his eyes focus on the wall. “Well, I heard of him, and you showed me a picture once. Tall, wasn’t he? And thin as a pencil. Fine-looking man—that’s where you get your eyes.”
Wing saying that sets my face afire.
He sees, and laughs. “I heard he was good with four-legged things. Little Ruse told me once that your pap caught him hunting in the woods, asked him what he was shooting. Ruse told him he was out to drop a few bluejays, and right then and there your pap snatched the rifle away from him. Told him not to shoot anything unless he could eat it or it could shoot back. Then he drove off in his truck. When Ruse got home, his rifle was propped up on the front porch, waiting for him.”
He looks into his cup.
“Wing, you could be boarding the people who are shooting my wolves.” I hate that I’m spoiling for a fight.
“I can’t take on every battle, Olivia. I’m too old.”
I want to tell him about the wolf, about Ida, and the pups. Once, I told Wing everything, and I want to open my mouth and let the lost decades come out in a flood. But I can’t. Instead, I say stupidly and without thinking, “Pap was the only person who ever truly loved me.”
I busy myself breaking up a bun, and wish I could take the words back.
But he smiles his crooked smile and sets his empty cup down. “I expect he loves you still.”
I let that tumble around in my head. “You don’t think we stop feeling when we’re gone from the earth?”
“I don’t know. But I believe our souls go on, and if anything, I suspect they love more. You used to believe souls come again. Brand-new lives.”
“I still do, but I haven’t thought about what happens between times. Sometimes I think heaven and hell are here on earth.”
“Maybe,” he says.
“The body can get tired of loving,” I say, and realize I’ve again been thoughtless with my words.
“Sometimes.”
I get up because I fear where this conversation is going. I stack the dishes in the sink.
“Leave them,” Wing says. “Sit here and talk to me.”
But down the hall, Grace coughs again, and Wing rubs his eyes.
“I have to go,” I say.
He nods. “I’ll take care of the quilts.”
I hurry down the hall and out the front door—into cold air that stings my eyes and burns my skin, and I stand on the sidewalk and try to get my bearings. It’s been a week of firsts. I’m fighting to save wolf cubs in my kitchen. After thirty years, I’ve been down to the basement room. And most frightening of all—a cup of coffee in Wing’s hotel kitchen is threatening to wake in me something I thought was dead.
I shake my head, and then lift it at a round of rifle shots from above my place. Another wolf is gone, I’m sure. I cross the street and open the truck door, my mittens freezing to the ice on the handle. My hands shake so badly I can hardly start the engine.
Blindly, I drive the road that runs around the foot of the mountain, and I park just beyond the bridge to Waynesboro. It’s an easier climb from here to the Ridge. I cram my hat on and make my way up the wash, using the stones for climbing until they run out. I veer to the left a quarter mile where the going is less of an incline, listening. Another shot. Two. Three. The trees are thicker here, and from the middle of this grove, I can’t see the sky.
I am too old and too fat for this, but my brain is fired up. It doesn’t take long to find the wolves. I can’t figure out why the hunter doesn’t drag them away so I don’t come upon them—then the answer is clear. He wants me to see their suffering. Does he somehow think his own suffering compares? Although I have always despised the Phelpses, if I could erase that terrible night and restore James Arnold’s life, I would gladly do it. Then I’d have Pap here with me, whole and well and making moonshine.
The grays form a circle, their snouts striped and front paws stretched out like at the last minute they decided to run. One’s pure gray, and two are darker about the chest and neck. All have been shot neatly in the head. Blood has trickled from the tiny round holes, and it glazes their eyes. All three have bloody gashes and clean white bone where their right ears once were. I drop to my knees and dry-heave tears while my body cramps as if I’m in the throes of some terrible illness.
Three more Alaskan silvers down. Before long, predators will find them, and only carcasses will be left. I wish, instead, it was the hunter lying here in the snow with his ear cut off. I’d leave him to the buzzards so they could sharpen their beaks on his scrawny bones. I can hardly make my way down to the truck. I’m fevered about the wolves, and sad for Wing, angry with Ida, and miserable for Will’m. The boy has no ma’am, he has only me. And I’m sure he sometimes feels just like one of the cubs.
31
There is no money anywhere in Pope County, nor in the rest of these United States, as far as I can see. There are government programs like the WPA, and the National Children’s Fund that sends me one dollar and eighty cents a month for Will’m’s care, but that doesn’t begin to feed him. Not that I must have a dime—I’d give up my life for the boy anytime.
On the other hand, I’d give up anybody I saw hunting on the mountain. If an eye for an eye is a biblical thing, how can an ear for an ear be any different? Perhaps I’d just shoot off the hunter’s ear, sending him bloody and howling, the way he’s done the wolves. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea. I am aware, however, that left alive, he would have me arrested, and I’d be haule
d over to Paramus where I’d sit in a cell, waiting for a trial that would put me away.
I’m sure it’s Phelps, him and his odd sayings that give me the heebie-jeebies. I’ve seen his small boot prints, and studied the boots he was wearing. And I’ve heard his laughter high on the hill. It’s a good thing it’s raining this next morning, for neither of us can go up. Which gives me time to think—some good I’ll be to the boy if I’m doing a lifetime of incarceration over at Kingston Penitentiary.
And thus my brain travels—twisting and spinning. I end up thinking that on Sunday, I’ll wring the neck of our scrawniest hen, the one that’s given up laying, and cook it for supper. Maybe that’ll satisfy my need for blood.
Rain’s pouring down. I stomp out to the barn and locate a rubber slicker that I drop over my head, and I milk the goat, sitting on the stool with my feet apart and rain running off my hat because the lean-to roof is as bad off as the barn. Thunder shakes things up good. I cover the milk bucket with a big tin pie plate and set it on the step, hike back out to the chicken pen. The rooster struts around under the coop’s overhang. Beneath the seven hens that need fattening, I find five eggs—I’ll put two in the store and keep three for us.
I hang my slicker on the porch. In the dark kitchen, I feed the cubs while the storm crashes against the windows. I rub their bodies with a cloth warmed in the oven, and give them Dooby’s tonic and oats thinned with milk. They settle down to sleep in a ball so tight I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. I stand over them, counting their tiny ribs while they breathe like each sucking-in is their last. They need true doctoring, and I need Pap’s books.
When the rain slows up, I put on my hat and cape and go out to the barn where the truck is parked. I guess Ida has been watching because she flies out of her house, her nightgown trailing in the slushy snow. She has her boots on, untied and flapping.
“I’m hungry, Olivia. Where you goin’?”
“To fetch Junk Hanley,” I tell her.
“Don’t you bring that ugly man here,” she says. “He scares the daylights outa me. He’s got no business on white man’s property.”
“I’d move him and his in with me,” I tell her. I scrape the ice off the driver’s side window.
“Wouldn’t hurt you to pay mind to what I want.”
“Stop screeching, Ida. I can hear you all right.”
She hugs her arms. “How come you don’t take me out in this truck, Olivia?”
“Tomorrow morning,” I say. “Put your clothes on, and your coat, and I’ll drive you to Buelton.”
“I ain’t goin’ to Buelton,” she says, her eyes skidding. “You’d take me back to that asylum place.”
The truck door is open, and my mouth’s open, too. “You remember the hospital?”
But she’s turned and gone, apparently forgetting breakfast, although there’s hot water in the kettle and I’ve set cold biscuits and jam on the table. She waves her hands as if she’s directing traffic, and her nightgown flaps. It’s hard to know just how daft Ida is.
32
Rain has turned the snow sloppy, but the temperature is dropping and soon things will again freeze solid. In the mist, I drive past town and up Rowe Street, thinking about Ida’s remembering. I wonder if I’ll land in the asylum someday, too. I park in front of Junk’s, get out, and knock on the door.
Miz Hanley comes to the door. “Why, it’s our Livvy,” she says, leaning on her cane.
I see she’s gotten feeble, too, but I bet she’s not one bit worried that Junk’s going to put her away somewhere.
“If you aren’t a sight for these eyes!”
I shake the damp from my hat and kiss her soft, wrinkled cheek. Her bosoms lay on her belly, and she seems smaller. Her kitchen, however, still smells of fried onions.
“I’ve come to see Junk. Is he home?”
“Sit a minute, and tell me how you are.”
Bare as it is, I love this old house. Not one thing in it has ever been painted, and every inch is silvered from scrubbing.
“I’m all right.”
“You and the boy gettin’ on fine, then,” she says.
I remember how easy it was to talk to her when I was small, how everything I said was something to be considered. “We are. Will’m’s gone and saved himself a pair of orphaned wolf cubs. I’ll swear, I don’t see how we’re gonna keep them alive.”
“You givin’ ’em mo-lasses?” she says.
“I am. And sulfur, tinned milk. Things Dooby gave me.”
“Well, ol’ Mr. Dooby don’t know ever’thang.”
Junk comes in and stands listening. He’s polite with his ma’am, not like I am with mine, sassing and saying what’s on my mind. A thought comes to me, then—it’s true that I tell Ida what I think, but I never say what I feel.
“First off,” Miz Hanley says, “that she wolf kilt whatever rat or field mouse she could find, and ate ’em, and them being in her, her babies got the same. You got to get Will’m to catch a rabbit.”
“If we had a rabbit, we’d eat it ourselves.”
She laughs. “’Pends on how bad you want ’em to live. ’Course, they also miss they mama’s lovin’. Will’m don’t know how to be a mama unless you show him.”
“Miz Hanley, I’ll tell you right now, I wasn’t a good hand at being a ma’am.”
“You took care of your girl the best you could. When she ran off, it weren’t ’cause you didn’t love her. And you done a pure wonder with that boy.”
I don’t want this wound opened, and I hate that what’s under the skin is so raw. “I wouldn’t count on that.”
Miz Hanley pinches her lips together. “Well, I’m goin’ to tell you now, like I shoulda tol’ you then.”
“I wasn’t your responsibility,” I say.
“I loved you like you was my own,” she says. “You an’ your pappy was good people all your lives. Someday before I die, I gon’ tell you more truths than your head can hold. Right now, you need to know how to do for them pups.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say.
She fiddles with the top two buttons on her dress, and Junk and I both draw back, but she laughs. Her neck is wattly and her chest is sunken. “You take one a them cubs,” she says, “and you lay it belly down on your chest. Here. Put a blanket ’round both of you. They feel your heartbeat. Yo’ breathin’. They think you’re their mammy, they might stay on this earth.”
I nod and change the subject. “Junk, it’s time I cleaned out my cellar. I’d be pleased if you’d help.”
“I wouldn’t mind at all, Miz Livvy,” he says.
Miz Hanley is buttoning her dress.
“Well, then,” I say. “We’ll start as soon as you’re free.”
“I’ll come on up when I’ve finished choppin’ for Aunt Pinny Albert.”
His mama reaches up and pats his hand.
I thank her again and drive home to make lunch for Ida and the cubs. But Ida’s asleep on her cot, her pipe having burned out in a saucer. Her soup is cold, but the buttered bread will be all right in its cloth. In the house, I put away the jam and throw crumbs to the chickens.
Junk comes in the middle of the afternoon. He’s got a wide broom, a mop, and a gallon bucket of some kind of cleaner. For the mildew, he says. I unlock the cellar door and light a lamp.
“Everything goes,” I say, following him down. “But there’s one thing, Junk—my pap had a couple of big black books, and we need ’em badly if Will’m’s to keep the cubs alive.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“This cellar’ll make a fine storeroom,” I say bravely, but the farther we descend the less certain I feel.
I pull on the light chain, and the shadows retreat, but I’m glad Junk leaves the extra lamp burning. Love Alice looks down from the doorway.
“I’ll make us tea in a while,” I call up. “And there’s a bit of sip-pin’ whiskey for Junk when we’re done. Lord knows he’ll need it.”
The whiskey is a new turn of events for me. It
riles Ida, who says it’s another rung on my ladder to hell, but a drop of it puts me to sleep when nothing else will. Right now, the important thing is to clear out this place. I lift a pair of cages from their pegs.
“Go on and take down those old shelves,” I tell Junk.
They fall apart in his hands.
I use wire cutters on the dog runs and then leave him to scrub the four high windows that will let in light when the snow thaws. I tuck up my skirt, and take a hammer to the wall that separates the room that once was my pap’s. After an hour, we’re down to the center beam. We leave it, because, as Junk says, it holds the place up. He remarks that there’s hardly any water seepage, and I ought to think about putting in a coal furnace as it would keep us warmer, but I say I’ve no way to pay for furnace nor coal. Junk says ain’t that the truth.
There are boxes of powder that have turned to solid, and bottles of crystallized liquid. Rolls of tubing and tins of syringes, dried and rusty. He piles it all at the foot of the steps, says he’ll bury it later. In the end, I’d be more help if I got out of his way, and I hand him the hammer so he can get on with the work.
Upstairs, Love Alice and I drink our tea with a drop of whiskey and a lot of sugar.
She says, “Spirits is good for our throats in this kind of weather.”
Presently the door bell jingles, and I get up to see, but it’s Will’m coming through. He pecks my cheek and puts his books on the table, seems surprised that the cellar door’s open. I tell him he can go down, see what the hammering’s about. He comes back up with a look on his face that says I should have waited till he was home, or at least told him my plan. He never gave me trouble about the locked door. I forget that when a body goes and leaps off his own private cliff, he leaves behind the people who knew him, and all they can do is stand there and mourn.
At least the cubs are familiar to him, and he goes to their box and lifts out one and then the other. He doesn’t say much, but sits and strokes the fuzz that now covers their hindquarters. Junk lumbers up the stairs, puffing, carrying great armloads of stuff. He’s already made several trips to the barn, where he’s stacking the reusable wood.
