by Carolyn Wall
Easy as that, Miz Grace Harris passes, on Main Street, with every light winking and blinking, and Wing trembling at her feet, his face buried in her lap.
35
There comes a thaw over the next day and a half that surpasses record, and I am able to trek down and bring home the truck. The sun is brilliant, and it warms the kitchen, even though we’ve still only one window because I’ve not fixed the other. In the box by the stove, the cubs are fading. Will’m’s anxiety is enormous. Something has shifted in me, too, maybe from watching Grace Harris leave this earth. I believe she wanted to go on and be done with it—for herself and so’s Wing could get on with his life. Maybe she contrived the whole thing, and if that’s the case, I admire her more than I’ve admired another soul.
All this coming after so many years of don’t-utter-his-name, when I’d have fallen to the floor in a lovesick heap if Wing had so much as walked through my door.
We are quiet, the two of us, Will’m with a bit of a cold—and me ladling up oats. I’ve kept him home from school today, lest he take the croup, the possibility of which he’s not yet outgrown.
I give him blackstrap molasses on a spoon, and there’ll be a poultice around his neck at bedtime. Come right down to it, I’m terrified of losing him. He says nothing when I set his bowl in front of him, and I put on my cape and carry Ida’s dollop of oats and a bit of bread. A cup of weak coffee. I cross the yard. It’s dark in her cabin, the single window covered with an old sheet. Inside, I pull it back to let in some light. But Ida’s not in her bed, nor in the chair, nor rooting around in her moldy boxes. She’s not in the cabin at all—and she wasn’t in the outhouse, which I’ve just passed. I set down the breakfast things and go back out, calling her name.
“Ida?” I stump off to the barn. “For God’s sake, Ida, where’ve you gotten yourself off to?”
But she is not there, nor in the toolshed, or sitting in the truck—places I’ve sometimes found her when she was mad at me. I study my own boot tracks, winding ’round and messing up the snow, which is rapidly turning to water in the sun. There are no clear prints that match Ida’s tiny feet, and that turns my stomach cold. It’s still early. She may have been gone for a while—but where? Up the mountain?
“Ida!”
Along the road? Maybe she’s taken off across some pasture, forgotten where she lives, gotten into a car.
“I’m going to look for her,” I tell the boy.
He sniffles and runs his hand under his nose.
“Use your handkerchief, Will’m. She’s wandered off, I guess. Can’t imagine anyone taking her.”
He’s done with his oats, and pushes back his chair. “I’ll help.”
“No you won’t,” I say. I can feel the pulse hammering in my neck. “I’ll take the truck, ask if anyone’s seen her. Get dressed, Will’m, and mind the store. Weather’s broken, there ought to be customers today.”
He nods.
I back the truck out and head into town. There are cars everywhere, women taking covered dishes into the hotel. Doc, who doubles as undertaker, came early yesterday and filled out a death certificate. I’m sure a half dozen ladies have already arranged Miz Grace Harris for viewing. I wonder if all this puts a damper on Wing’s business, and if he’ll ever sleep in the rosebud room again.
I stop in at the drugstore, but Dooby shakes his head. “Ain’t seen her, Olivia. But I’ll put out the word.”
“Dooby, Will’m’s got a cold, don’t know if he’ll be worth anything tomorrow—”
“With the funeral and all, there won’t be much business. I’ll send a powder up for him. It’ll ease his throat.”
I take my coin purse from my pocket and open it.
“No, no,” Dooby says, handing me the paper. “I take care of my employees.”
If Ida has walked the highway, I cannot tell. There are no boot tracks along the side of the road. No one at the gas station has seen her, nor at any of the other places where I stop. I head back, this time taking the county road, stopping three or four times to shade my eyes and study the fields. I pull into our driveway, imagining her tucked in her smelly bed, complaining of cold coffee and sucking on her pipe—but she has not come home.
Will’m has two customers, and is doing well behind the register, even with his red nose and watery eyes. He sees my question and shakes his head. I take off in the other direction.
No one on Rowe Street has seen her. She has not been to Doc’s, nor the schoolhouse where the teacher looks up at me but goes on reading aloud. Nor is she at Meltons’ Garage, nor the pawn shop, nor Ashy Rosie’s, which is a juke joint for coloreds. She’s not wandering in the graveyard or along the creek bed. There are no holes in the ice so she hasn’t fallen through and drowned. I pass Phelps’ place, its driveways all cleared and looking like a postcard, and on out the winding road. About a half mile east, on the steps of the First Baptist Church, I see Ida hunkered down with her nightgown tucked around her ankles. I pull in and park next to the porch.
“About time you got here,” she says when I get out and come around. “My feet are cold.”
“For God’s sake, what are you doing here? And where are your boots?”
She looks at her feet. They’re dirty and bleeding and purpled up, great gashes crusted with mud and grime, the nails broken off. “I’ve lost my boots—”
I take off my cape, wrap it around her twice. “You can’t go wandering off like this. You scared the bejesus out of us. What were you thinking?”
“You never take me anywhere, Olivia. God knows what a disappointing daughter you turned out to be.”
“For the love of God—”
How ragged she is, so sad and lost that I can’t even look at her. How has it come to this—Ida with her accusations and me hating her so much I can’t be anything other than what she says I am. “Let’s get you in the truck—”
“I can’t walk in bare feet!”
“You got this far, didn’t you?”
But I lift her in. Her nightgown is muddy, her hair matted. She weighs almost nothing, her legs so thin I could snap them like twigs. When did this happen, all this thinness, this loss? And how am I to keep this from happening again? I imagine tying Ida to her bed, putting her on a tether like the goats, running chicken wire around her place. She huddles on the other side of the seat, and I drive carefully so as not to jolt her, or break her.
“I know what you did, Olivia,” she says.
I’m suddenly so tired I could slump over the steering wheel and go to sleep.
“What have I done?”
“You wanted me to leave.” At first her voice is thin and wavering, but it strengthens, fueled by a new accusation. “You followed me. You made sure I lost my boots.”
I work at keeping my eyes on the road.
“I didn’t lose them at all!” she says. “You stole them!”
There’s nothing for me to do but keep driving, although I want to leap from the truck and watch it carry Ida across the field and into the creek. What possible debt are we laboring under that makes us think we must care for old people?
I stop at Dooby’s to say that I’ve found her, and I’m grateful that he asks no questions. Although my breath turns to ice on the inside of the windows, I’m not cold at all. There’s a burning in my stomach, and in back of my eyes. I take her home. There’s no point in talking to her—she’s concerned only about her boots, and not much about them.
In five minutes, I’m taking off the cape, setting the tub in my bedroom, heating water for her bath. Outside the door, Will’m is weighing out two pounds of peanuts, from time to time blowing his nose and talking with a customer. Ida steps into the tub and sits, and I take a washcloth and soap to her, scrubbing as if she’s a great stubborn stain, until she winces. I lather her hair, and pour from a pitcher, telling her, for God’s sake, to hold still.
“You have no right to do this,” I say when I’m toweling her off and she’s gotten lost inside one of my flannel gowns. “It’s not
right, after all the misery you’ve dealt me, to be this needy.”
Ida looks at me, her hair white and flying off in seven directions. At least it’s clean. She smells better than she has in a long time.
“Olivia,” she says darkly, “I am not just a beggar off the street. God will punish you for the way you treat me.”
Although I’d cut out my tongue before I’d say it out loud, she might be right.
36
It is almost five o’clock by the time Ida’s had supper and is tucked in her bed. I turn up the electric heater in the corner, and set Will’m’s old boots inside her door in case she needs to go to the outhouse. I don’t know what else to do. The basement’s too cold, the alcove belongs to Will’m—and if the four-poster were a half mile wide, it wouldn’t hold both Ida and me.
Still, I stand looking around at her sagging paper boxes, the unpainted walls, the rag rug. Perhaps we should have done more, Saul and I, built shelves and cupboards, unpacked her things. Back then I could not. I had needed to remove her from the house, and that much I had done. I turn out the light.
Will’m’s worked hard in the store today, and I imagine he’s worn out from his cold. I’ll bring from the bin two of the biggest potatoes I can find, light the oven, and bake them for supper. But he’s standing on the back porch. I wave him inside.
But he’s not seeing me, and I can’t make out what he’s looking at, for the sun’s going down. I stomp on through the snow. When I come upon the thing that lies in the snow, I cannot focus, can’t draw a breath. Here at the foot of my back steps is a small silver-face, shot in the forehead, its snout still lathered with red foam. The right ear has been cut off, and there’s a long smear of blood to show for its dragging. Couldn’t have been more than six months old. I am sickened in my heart and soul.
“Will’m!” I shout, as if he isn’t ten feet away. “Hand me down a goddamn shovel!”
“Gran—”
“I’ve got to bury it, don’t want things comin’ in our yard to get at it.”
“Somebody already came in our yard,” he says, handing me the spade. “Gran—how many do you think are left?”
I search the hills. “Don’t know. If they’re smart, they’ve gone farther up. Anyway, it’s late. I’m gonna take him a ways and bury him deep, so you go on and light the oven, put in two potatoes, then get into bed.”
“I’ve got to feed the cubs,” he says, shivering.
“All right, but I’ll take the night feeding. Now get in out of this weather.”
I set out, dragging the wolf by a hind leg. One of the hunters has taken home a fine silken ear and my anger could fill all of Pope County. A terrible truth comes to me then: I’m sliding into a place as bitter as the one in which Ida lives.
37
A new morning. I milk the nanny, feed the goats, scatter corn. Chop the ice on the water pans. Four more eggs. Last fall I had Will’m tack a horsehair blanket to the walls and floor of the coop, just in case. I’m glad I did.
When I come in, he’s rummaging the larder. He finds an apple and while I boil water for the oats, we talk about Ida, and Miz Grace Harris, and the funeral being at eleven o’clock.
It was not until the middle of the night that I remembered the poultice for his throat, and, in my boots, by the light of the stove I mixed dry mustard and water, slathering it between layers of flannel to lay on his chest. It seems to have done the trick, and my worry over him settles.
“Put the apple back, Will’m,” I tell him. “Breakfast is coming.”
He looks into the box where the cubs are sleeping, their bellies still full of the vegetable broth I fed them before daylight. “I’m sorry I said what I did, Gran.”
“What’s that, boy?”
“That if Miz Grace would go on and die—you know. You and Wing.”
“It’s all right.”
“After the funeral, I’ll go on over to Dooby’s and get in my hours.”
“You feel up to it?”
He nods, and doesn’t say another word, not even later when we sit at the table over our breakfast, pretending the wolf’s blood has not stained our window frame and the wall underneath.
There are no shots in the hills today. The cubs are moving around in their box. Will’m picks them up and holds the soft things, stroking them, forcing oats in their mouths with his little finger. I tell him what Miz Hanley said about broth. For a minute he looks hopeful, so I hurry and remind him that there isn’t any meat, not so much as a chicken beak.
“I could kill a rabbit if I had a gun,” he says. “I bet I could keep us in meat all winter. I know I could.” But he’s half pouting because he knows the answer.
“We’ve got a while before the funeral. Go on out and check your traps if you’re feeling like to it. You might’ve caught something, and when I’ve put it in the pot, you can have some of the gravy.”
He nods, and I know what he’s thinking—the cubs could also have his share of the meat. I lace up my boots and fetch my cape. “I’ll take Ida’s tray across to her now.”
“What if she’s not there?” he says. “What if she’s gone off again?”
It’s a fear I have, too. But I can’t tie her up.
Fortunately, Ida’s sleeping. When I wake her, she turns away. She’s still mad at me for ransacking her place, although I’ve put everything back and done up the boxes.
She says, “Where’s my glass of milk?”
I let in some daylight and sit on the edge of her cot. “There’s no milk, Ida. I’ve put honey in your tea.”
“Well,” she says crossly, “Doc Pritchett says I should have my milk.”
“So should Will’m.” I tell her about Miz Grace Harris, and that I’ll be in town awhile.
“It’s time that Wing Harris was punished,” she says, folding her arms across her nightgown. “Don’t think I didn’t see what the two of you were doing.”
She’ll drag up every sin I’ve committed. No point in being embarrassed about it, all these years later. Still. “You followed us?”
“As any decent ma’am would. I knew when he stuck his business in you and made you bleed.”
“I’m starting a new quilt,” I say, to change tracks. “Another wedding ring, in blues and violet. Love Alice tells me—”
“Alice Hanley is an addlepated half-wit,” Ida says. “She talks like a screech owl.” She flaps her arms for effect, and frowns at her bowl, but does not eat. I wonder why I hold out hope for Ida, thinking someday she might fall down and hit her head the way Junk once did, and it will change her forever. I hate that I do that, that I keep coming back to her, whining like a child, wanting my mother. “Ida—”
She smooths her flannel gown. “Don’t say anything that will give me a headache, Olivia. You’re so mindless about that.”
It’s a long time since I’ve looked directly in her face, into her eyes, and what I see is dreadful—dried cheeks and chin, like grapes left hanging too long. She’s bone thin, and her eyes are dark, not blue like Pap’s or mine, but sunk into bottomless sockets.
I want to ask her if she’s sorry, if she ever feels pain at what went before—not wanting me, the accident that put me in the hospital, Pap’s death, his unmarked grave.
“These oats are cold,” she says. “I really wanted coddled egg.”
“Ida, please.”
She sighs. “What?”
“You must remember something good about Pap.”
“Lord love us,” she says. “Not this again. There at the end, you spent more time with him than I did.”
“He’s been gone thirty years—”
“Well, you went and kilt him,” she says, reminding me.
“What was he like when you married him?”
She looks away to the frosted window, but she’s seeing something farther out. “William Tate Harker was a handsome man. A fine dancer, and all the girls made eyes at him. They threw elegant parties, and we were invited to them all. Tate would twirl me out on the floor. Oh, I
was a picture in fluted organdy and pink ribbon bows.”
I can’t imagine anyone having money to put on elegant parties. Nor can I picture Ida, who came from a dirt-poor family, dressed in such. “Tell about him,” I say.
She lifts her chin. “He was so taken with me, at first I was blinded to his faults.”
“He had no more faults than anyone else,” I say, although being taken with Ida is fault enough.
“He kept you poor, and he dressed you in ugly clothes.”
“We weren’t poor. He worked at two jobs. People paid what they could for his doctoring.”
“He’d come dragging home those flea-bitten beasts. Or he’d go to them. Sometimes he’d be gone for days, come home bloody to the elbow, wantin’ me to scrub the blood from his clothes. And all he’d have to show for it was a handful of carrots and rutabaga. He thought himself to be a fine, fancy doctor.”
“How did he know what to do for hurt things?”
She shrugs. “That first year, he asked if he could take a few things from the cupboards. So I gave him needles and thread, a scissor, spoons. But it was never enough. He’d call up to me—‘Ida Mae, bring me a saucer, fetch me an egg yolk, throw down a blanket.’ Thought if he snapped his fingers, there’d I be. I bet he’s sorry now.”
If Ida were any more wicked, she’d burst into flame. “Tell about when I was born.”
“Oh, that,” she says. “I don’t see how those primitive women had babies in the field and then went back to hoeing corn. You had a big head—and arms and legs like a monkey. The whole thing was a shock to my nervous system. And your father did nothing but hide out in his still and play in the basement with those filthy creatures. Later, he dressed you in trousers and left you to run. You hadn’t the slightest idea how to be a lady. When I came home, I had my work cut out for me.”
I gather the things for the tray. Someday, when she tells me what an ugly, wild child I was, I will slap her silly, maybe even throw her down on the floor and put a pillow over her face. But today I asked for this. I get up.
