Dispensations

by Randolph Thomas

  While he talked, May looked at him, chewed her bottom lip, and nodded.

  “I don’t need any fencing,” she said. “I don’t need anything.” She bowed her head as if she were getting a close look at the many scuffs of the tile floor.

  “He’s hard up, Miss Prescott,” the man continued. “I don’t know if you heard, but Charlene is laid up in Roanoke, and it looks real bad for her. I’m sure he’d do about any kind of job you could come up with.”

  May nodded, but didn’t answer. She headed down an aisle toward the back of the store, stopped at the wall, held herself and closed her eyes. I followed and stood near her. She stood very still like she was concentrating on something.

  “What are you looking at me for?” May said, when she opened her eyes. “Why didn’t you get a cart?”

  I shrugged, knowing something was wrong but not understanding what.

  “I’ll go,” she said, and she headed back to the carts at the front of the store. She had a list of things we needed, and she began gathering them from the aisles and putting them in the cart. I followed her but she was ignoring me as the cart clattered along the aisles. I felt useless and a little worried, guilty but unsure of what I’d done. I wandered back outside. The two boys were still across the street. They looked like brothers, and one of them was a little taller, maybe a year or so older, than the other one.

  “What are you doing?” the older boy said.

  “Waiting on my aunt,” I said.

  “We’re waiting, too,” the boy said.

  They studied me. I glanced up the post office steps.

  “What’s up there?” I said.

  The older boy shrugged and then the younger one shrugged, imitating him.

  I wandered up the steps. Gradually, they followed me. I opened the glass door and went inside.

  Except for us, the post office was deserted. I pointed to the wanted posters on the bulletin board. We stood there a moment, until the younger boy said, “What does it say?” The older boy didn’t say anything, so I read a couple of the wanted posters to them and began looking through some armed forces literature that was stacked on one of the tables. I showed them a picture of a new fighter jet and explained that my father was an officer in the air force. Once, on the base where we lived, he had taken me to see this very jet; I sat in it and pretended to fly it. I was just a kid then. The older boy nodded and shrugged, and the other watched him to see how he was supposed to act. I was staring down at the brochure when May grabbed my arm. She took hold of me with both hands and shook me. Looking around her, I saw the two boys dash out the door.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she said. “What do you mean running off like that? I can’t watch you every second.”

  Her face was very red and tense. I didn’t know if she was going to start crying or hit me. I didn’t move. I made myself go limp as she held me and shook me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think you wanted me around.”

  “We’ve wasted enough time,” she said. She pulled me down the steps of the post office, her grip tight on my arm. May was practically dragging me. I turned and saw the man from the store watching us through the window. May opened the car door and said, “Get in.” Then she stomped around to her side, climbed in, and slammed the door. The tires squealed and stirred up a cloud of dust, erasing Bangs as she pulled out.

  May barreled along the road, her gaze fixed forward. We drove about a mile out of town at breakneck speed. Even after she slowed down, May was off in her world. She wasn’t talking during dinner, and there was no Ouija board that night. Later, after we had gone to bed, I heard May crying beside me. Her back to me, I reached over and touched her face. I held my hand against her cheek. She turned around and put her arms around me. She said over and over that she was sorry, but I was careful during all of our other trips to Bangs. I stayed close to May but tried to stay out of her way. She was always tense in town, moving her head strangely and rolling her eyes like she was having to talk to several people at the same time, like she was nervous about every step, like every word that was spoken by anyone was a sharp blade cutting her. I was determined never to get in her way or give her the opportunity to get mad at me again.

  Our days and nights at the farm continued with few interruptions, but I was changing. One afternoon in late July, after we had been swimming and while we lay on the bank drying ourselves, I propped myself up on my elbows and stared at May. She was lying flat on her back beside me, her eyes closed. I watched her breasts and her flat stomach move as she breathed. Her nipples were wide and dark through her shirt. Her shirt was short, and her belly button was exposed. I reached out and tickled it lightly with my finger.

  May laughed and spoke my name. I put my hand flat against her stomach, and May laughed again.

  “Stop,” she said, “your hand is cold,” but she didn’t open her eyes, and I began to move my hand, walking it like a spider. May giggled. I moved my hand faster, up under her shirt toward one of her breasts.

  “Cut it out,” she said. She sat up. Her brow wrinkled, and her hands locked on my arm, forcing it down and out of her shirt.

  “Ow,” I said, because she was bending my arm backwards. I wrenched my arm free, stood up, and started running.

  “Stop,” she said. “Wait for me.”

  I was stumbling over rocks, not staying on the path, and she caught up with me.

  “Hold it,” she said. She grabbed the back of my shirt, but I pulled, stretching it.

  “Wait.” She grabbed me around the shoulder, circled her other arm around my waist, and knocked me off balance. We rolled on the ground and she pinned me.

  “Listen,” May said, “I’m sorry I hurt you, but there are things you’re not suppose to do. I know you come from a place where there aren’t any girls.”

  I still wouldn’t look at her and pretended not to listen, since I knew all along what I was doing. Finally she let me go and I stood and we walked together, a short distance apart.

  Before bed, May said that I should sleep in the room downstairs. I stared down at my drawing and didn’t speak. The next day, we did our chores, rode to the river, picnicked, and swam. At night, after the stories or games or the Ouija board, May retired to her room upstairs, closing the door behind her.

  August was dry and hot. As the date of my return to school drew near, we talked about my visiting the next summer. The length of a school year seemed impossibly long to me, and the impending schedules and assignments were now as foreign as life on the farm had seemed before I came. A few nights before I left, I caught May cheating with the Ouija board, pulling her edge of the glass to make answers that were spooky, or mysterious, or would make me laugh. In truth, I had known it wasn’t real for some time and this night, maybe because I was angry for having to leave, I lifted my fingers from the rim of the glass. It tipped from the pressure of May’s fingers, rolled across the board, and dropped to the floor.

  “I caught you,” I said.

  “What?” May said.

  “You were cheating.”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you were. You were making it all up.”

  “I wasn’t making it up,” May said. “How can you sit there and call me a liar?”

  “I’m not doing that.” I shrugged.

  Her eyes narrowed watching me. Her face reddened.

  “These are the spirits of this house,” she said. “The spirits of these walls. You doubt the words of the spirits?”

  “You were moving it,” I said. “Why else would the glass have gone off the table like it did?”

  “Because you doubted the spirits,” she said, “and it made the spirits nervous.”

  I laughed, and May stood up. She picked up the board, bent over, and picked up the glass from the floor.

  “All right then,” she said. “You believe whatever you want.” She headed out of the room.

  “Come back,” I said, but she was heading up the stairs. “I didn’t mean it,” I call
ed after her, but then I heard her footsteps cross the big hall upstairs, and heard her bedroom door slam. That was the last night the spirits of the house spoke to us with the Ouija board, and in my few remaining days there we never spoke openly of them or it again.

  The day I left to go back to school, May was quiet but cheerful. My breakfast was on the table when I came into the kitchen. She watched me eat and afterwards we drove to the bus terminal in Roanoke, where she put fifteen dollars in my hand and gave me a bag of egg salad sandwiches. We pulled my trunk inside, and both of us even laughed when I bumped into a man because I wasn’t watching where I was going. Before I got on the bus, May hugged me hard. She told me to write to her and to mind my father. I said I would. When I’d found an empty seat, I propped open the window just as the bus began to move out of the terminal. There was a small crowd of people outside watching the bus leave or waiting for the next one. I looked for May, but I could not find her among them.

  That was August of 1974, and I did not return to the farm for seventeen years. When I did, I came in a station wagon with my wife and young children one afternoon following a week-long drive across the country. As I showed my family into the living room, I was overcome by the place—it was exactly the same as I remembered. I had planned to give them a tour, but my voice faltered. Melissa, my wife, sensed that I wanted to be alone. She took the boys—Michael and Todd—outside. Upstairs, I found the door to May’s room open. On her desk by the window, I found a wide vase full of letters bound in rubber bands. More than half of the letters were from me, and I was surprised by the number of letters I had sent her.

  I began writing to May the day I left, while on the bus to northern Virginia. After I returned to school, I missed May and the farm. I became bored with my schoolwork, and my grades slipped to just above the passing mark. May and I wrote to each other at least once a week, telling each other about our days. I looked forward to her letters like nothing else because they freed me, if only for a short time, from the strictness and monotony of my life. That spring, my father was promoted to full colonel and given command of a base in Hawaii. Although I wanted to go to the farm and see May, my father was adamant that I join him. I wrote to May, and she replied that my father was right, I should be with him. She said perhaps I could come the following summer instead.

  In Hawaii, I felt that May and the farm had been in some distant world. This depressed me, but I enjoyed spending time with my father. We played tennis almost every day. In the fall, I wanted to enroll in a non-military private school, but my father resisted, telling me I needed preparation for the Air Force Academy, which was only a few years away. He made me adhere to rigorous study hours in the evening, coached me with my homework, and my grades gradually did improve. One night he came into my room without knocking and found me writing a letter to May by flashlight.

  “I thought I said lights out,” he said, but after I told him what I was doing, he smiled. He took the letter from my hand and glanced over it.

  He said, “It’s good of you to keep up with your mother’s family.”

  I nodded and looked at the letter in his hand.

  “When I was your age, your grandfather had to make me write to the relatives. He made me sit down at the dining room table and do it.”

  I was looking at his face. My father was a very tall man with a broad forehead and a receding hairline. His eyes, though, were small and he squinted nervously.

  “This would make your mother happy.” He turned his head away, set the letter on the table, patted my knee through the sheet, and composed, looked at me again. “All the same, I said lights out. You can finish that letter tomorrow.”

  He cut off the light and went out of the room. I knew I had been close to May in a way he didn’t realize. From the beginning, I knew I would never tell him I had slept in the same bed with May. Now I understand I was right not to tell him, that he would have misjudged May for clinging desperately to the only family she had, treating me as though I were her own child, a child she did not know exactly how to love. She had meant nothing sexual or hurtful. But I had fallen deeply in love with May. She was the first woman I ever fell in love with.

  That was the fall I turned fourteen and got drunk for the first time, while spending the night at a friend’s house. That was the year of my second crush on a girl a few years older than me who worked as a lifeguard, and who let me kiss her one night after I stayed late helping her close down the pool. That same spring, my father told me at breakfast one morning that he had heard from the attorney in Roanoke who was looking after my trust. A neighbor had found May wandering in one of the pastures. She seemed confused when she spoke to the neighbor. Worried, the neighbor had telephoned the sheriff, who found May in her bathtub a short time after she had slit her wrists. May had been hospitalized in what my father called a sanatorium.

  My father came over to my side of the table, awkwardly put his arm around me and said he was sorry. I sat stiffly at the table and didn’t acknowledge his embrace.

  He said that May had mental problems.

  “Yes,” I said, “I know that.”

  “She can’t cope with people,” he said. “She shuts herself up on that farm. Your grandparents knew she had problems, but they didn’t do anything about it. They didn’t know what to do, and they were ashamed. They wouldn’t take it seriously.”

  He kept looking at me like he wanted me to say I was okay about it, that I was sad, of course, but I’d live. Then, I suppose for lack of anything else to say, he shrugged.

  Of course there would be no trip to the farm that summer. I saw this, and was disappointed by it. At the same time, I felt ashamed at my selfish disappointment. Having lost my appetite, I said I wanted to go to the pool. My father seemed pleased that I wanted to do something. But instead, I walked to the ocean and lay on the sand in my clothes for the rest of the morning.

  Sometimes, as I was drifting off to sleep, May would return to me, her voice speaking or laughing inside my head, or I would see the outline of her body beside me. I thought of us lying beside the river drying ourselves, and of her laughter during our sunny days together.

  I worried about May. I continued to write her, although I didn’t know what to say in my letters except what I had always said. I told her how I was feeling, described what I was doing and studying, and went back over the experiences I most enjoyed when I had stayed with her. I didn’t hear from her for nearly two months, and then she wrote to me from the farm. In the letter, she sounded fine. She said the hen hotel was doing better business, but that the cow refused to be milked by anyone but me. The letter cheered me up. I wrote her back immediately, but May was hospitalized again and again. Gradually our letters dwindled to a couple each year.

  Ultimately, I failed my father by refusing to go to the Air Force Academy. I did not even apply. Instead, I eloped with Melissa. We flew to the mainland, to Los Angeles, where we stayed with Melissa’s sister until we found our own place. Over the next six years, both of us attended UCLA part-time and worked. I finished a degree in journalism and found a job working for a trade journal. I kept in touch with my father regularly, although we fought bitterly at first. Over the years, especially after my boys were born, we grew a little closer again. Once, though, when we were in the midst of a heated long-distance argument, he said, “You’re one of them, all right.”

  “What’s that?” I said. It was three o’clock in the morning. I was sitting on the fire escape, with the kitchen window closed on the telephone cord so only the neighbors, not Melissa or her sister, could hear me arguing with my father.

  “Unreasonable,” he said. “You’re irrational. Crazy. Prescotts.”

  I have since forgiven him for saying this. I know he truly loved my mother, and except for that one angry outburst, which came from his disappointment in me alone, he has always held a silent reverence for my mother’s family.

  But he was right, I am one of them. Maybe not completely. Maybe only half. At the farm, while the boys p
layed on the lawn and while I was looking through May’s papers, I came across a stack of family photographs. There were only ten or eleven, some of them of people I did not recognize, but I found the photograph of my great-grandfather, the one May had promised to show me, but never had. He was a boy, wearing shorts and the white smock shirt children wore at that time. He was sitting on a fence, and there was a hunting dog staring up at him. His hair was parted in the middle and combed neatly, slicked down. Besides the styles that separated our times, we bore a striking resemblance.

  I also found a picture of my mother and father, taken shortly after they were married. They were standing in the living room downstairs, and they had been fishing. My father held a net in one hand, a rod in the other. I realized for the first time how much my mother looked like May Prescott when she was younger. May would have been five or six at the time the photograph was taken, and I wondered if she had been in the room hiding behind a piece of furniture, her face buried in her hands.

  My father settled in San Diego after he retired. He never remarried, and his face took on a haggard redness. When he called me one morning and asked me to meet him for lunch, I was sure he was only going to brood and complain about the world and speak at length about the dwindling greatness of our family. As was the case each time I had seen him since his retirement, he was drinking gin and smoking cigars. We were in a windowless dining room with ceiling fans. From the moment I sat down, his small bloodshot eyes stayed fixed on me, and I expected some speech was imminent. Before I could touch my food, he said as though I wouldn’t even remember her, “And I have some bad news. May Prescott, your mother’s sister, has drowned herself.”

  When I’d finished looking at her letters, I put them back. Outside, walking to the river with a bouquet of wildflowers Melissa had picked, I saw a neighbor in the distance mending a wire fence. He waved and I waved back. The river smelled fresh, and I could smell the pungent manure of the animals. I wondered how May could have suffered so terribly here, could have perished here, in the first place I had felt alive.