Whisper Hollow

by Chris Cander

“Think I’ll be heading home,” John said. “Don’t think I could find a better dance partner, and it wouldn’t be right to claim you for the whole evening.” He made a tiny bow in her direction. “Thank you for the dance.” Then turned to Walter. “Thanks to you, too.” Walter solemnly shook the extended hand, his broad, expressionless face a blunt contrast to John’s animated one, and Alta had to look away, the shamelessness too disgraceful to watch.

  “See you next shift,” Walter said.

  John nodded and turned to go. He walked, tall and straight-backed, through the crowd, and Alta felt pulled to follow. She watched him, everything about him familiar now, except for the sight of him walking away. It had always been she who left first.

  Next to her, Walter watched John, too. He’d been stealing glances ever since they’d said hello. He’d seen the looks that passed between them. The way Alta smiled broke his heart twice: because it was so lovely, and because it was meant for someone else.

  “Would you like to dance, Walter?” she asked, after John had gone.

  He’d been focused on his shoes, the scuff marks he’d never noticed before. The wear. Now he looked into her face as though for the first time. He searched her plain prettiness for the expression she’d had for John as they’d danced, for that flicker of light that he’d seen from across the room, bright as a star.

  It wasn’t there. There was kindness; there was concern. There was even love, but it wasn’t the kind that made a woman’s face sparkle.

  His eyes slid down again to his feet, and he shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “If you don’t mind, I think I’d rather just go on home.”

  January 26, 1946

  It was Alta’s birthday, a day her husband recognized with a chaste kiss on the cheek. She picked up her French easel — a gift from John she credited to her truant aunt Maggie — and patted Walter on the shoulder where he sat reading the paper and chain smoking. He nodded in reply without lifting his eyes.

  After more than fifteen years of marriage, they treated each other with a kind of elderly respect and vague affection, but beyond the absolutely necessary exchange of information — the shifts to be worked, the few social obligations to be met, the bills to be paid — they hadn’t much to say to each other. Walter stopped asking things like where she’d been while he and Abel ate the meals she’d prepared and left for them to serve themselves, or what had taken so long in town, or why she insisted on going all the way up to Whisper Hollow to paint. He never asked to see the work she created, which was a good thing. Not only could she not have produced the copious oeuvre that would match the number of days she’d supposedly gone up the hill to paint, but she also couldn’t explain without guile the reason her subject matter had changed so dramatically over the past year. If Walter were to investigate her collection now, he would see watercolor pillows and sheets stained with human love and warmth; a bed in the middle of the woods spread with starlight; a fully-furnished tree house lifted into heaven; a flagrant portrait of herself as a butterfly, utterly changed. All difficult to explain to someone who didn’t understand what it meant to be absolutely, completely in love.

  Instead, Walter eventually began to wash his own dishes after dinner. To go to bed before she got home. If he suspected anything, he never revealed it. Alta sometimes wondered if he had some of his own secrets to keep.

  Which was why it was so easy for Alta to slip away without excuse that Monday afternoon. She smiled as she hiked through the snow, thinking of how she would translate the sharp-edged season onto the stretch of paper that awaited her, and of the fresh palette of watercolors she’d bought herself — a color for each of her thirty-four years — and of the man with whom she spent her happiest days.

  When she rounded the corner of the cabin and stepped up to the covered porch, she saw that something had changed on the south side. Where before a thin copse of trees had stood, there was now a clearing of about one hundred square feet. Four wood stakes marked the corners, and what looked like ten trenches had been carved into the snow in perfect parallel across the space.

  Surprised by the grid in front of the cabin, she didn’t hear John open the front door and come up behind her. She jumped when he slid one arm around her waist and pressed his chest against her back.

  “Happy birthday,” he whispered. He kissed her neck, which made her eyes drift closed from the sheer pleasure, the sense of peace. She wondered if anyone else had ever felt so rescued. Then he moved his other hand in front of her and when she opened her eyes again, she saw he was holding a bouquet of sorts, a bundle of something that looked like dirty tentacles.

  “For me?”

  He turned her around and gave her a long, slow kiss on the mouth. “Yes,” he said, his lips against hers.

  “You shouldn’t have.” She kissed him back.

  He pulled away and smiled. “You mean you don’t know what these are?”

  “Flowers?”

  “They don’t last long enough.”

  She leaned forward and kissed him again. “What are they then?”

  “Asparagus. Crowns and roots. For your new garden,” he said. “Our garden.”

  She bit her lip and smiled, then kissed him again. “Is that what you’ve been doing all weekend?”

  He nodded and laughed. “So now we have enough firewood to last a while, too.”

  She wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his neck. When she inhaled, she could smell the clean scent of Ivory soap and aftershave and cold and sunlight and earth. “Thank you so much.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said quietly, into her hair. “But I have to be honest, it’s as much for me as for you.”

  She straightened up and pressed the edge of her sweater sleeve against her eyes. “I know,” she said. “I love it.”

  “So … asparagus,” he said.

  She laughed. “Yes?”

  “The thing about asparagus,” he said, looking at the two-year-old plants in his hand, “is that it takes patience. Commitment.”

  She reached over and fingered the tops of the roots, their hairy offshoots. “How so?”

  “We plant them about a month before the last frost. But it takes a long time for them to produce. We can’t harvest them until the third year.”

  “That’s a long time to wait for a vegetable.”

  “Yes, but during that time, the root system is establishing itself. It grows wide and deep, and gets tangled up into the ground so much that you can’t divide it once it’s really in there. I mean, you could, but it wouldn’t be easy. The plants would likely die.”

  His tone had grown serious, and her smile began to fade. She encircled him in her arms. “Then we won’t divide them.”

  “That’s the idea,” he said, and smiled. “They’re perennial. They’ll last a couple of decades if they’re well cared for. Hopefully more.”

  “You’ll have to show me how to do it.”

  “We’ll figure it out together.”

  She reached out and took the bundle of roots from him. “I’ve always wanted someone to garden with,” she said. Walter had never shown an interest in cultivating anything.

  “Me too.” He kissed the frown off her face and as they stood there, it began to snow. Soon, the trenches he’d dug would be filled in again, until all that remained of them was the hopeful promise of spring.

  October 5, 1948

  Tribunal Diocesanum Vhelingensis

  Nullitatis Matrimonii

  Bergmann-Esposito

  Prot. no. 1944/08

  NOTIFICATION

  of

  DEFINITIVE SENTENCE

  Enclosed, pursuant to the provisions of Can. 1719; 1877; Art. 205, is the Definitive Sentence of the Tribunal pronounced in the above-captioned case by the Rt. Rev. Msgr. Hugh Wishlinske, P.A. J.C.D., Officialis, and the Vy. Rev. Msgrs. Lawrence Brey, J.U.D, and Conrad J. Altenbach, J.C.D., Synodal Judges.

  The dispositive part of the Sentence begins at page 10, paragraph 3, and may be rendered
into English as follows:

  “Having seriously considered and weighed all the foregoing issues of both law and fact, invoking the name of Christ, we the undersigned judges, constituting the collegial Tribunal in this case, sitting in judgment, having God alone before our eyes, discern, declare and pronounce Definitive Sentence in response to the question proposed:

  “In the negative, that is, the nullity of the marriage is not proven in the case. (Negative, seu non constare de matrimonii nullitate in casu.)”

  You have a ten-day period from the receipt of this letter to lodge an appeal from this Sentence of the first instance.

  Rev. Anthony Kiefer, S.T.D., J.C.D.

  Notary

  October 5, 1948

  Myrthen Bergmann

  c/o St. Michael’s Catholic Church

  Verra, West Virginia

  by Registered Mail

  November 21, 1949

  “Hi, baby,” John said when Alta stepped inside the cabin. Their paintings hung all over the walls. He was lying in their bed with the newspaper spread out beside him, writing something on a sketchpad.

  “Hi, my love.” Without pretense, she crossed her arms and lifted her sweater off. She kept her eyes on his as she reached behind and unhooked her bra.

  He slid his reading glasses down.

  She gave him a teasing smile and unbuttoned her slacks.

  He flung back the sheets.

  She dropped her clothes and strutted to the bed and climbed in, unencumbered, uninhibited.

  Five years of ecstasy. Five years of agony: stealing away several times each week to find her true self and her true love waiting like an unfinished painting, hidden away in a secluded moonshiner’s cabin in the woods. They’d harvested their first tender crop of asparagus that June.

  “Marry me,” he whispered as he pulled her in.

  “I will.”

  “Now.”

  She opened herself and held on to his back. “Someday.”

  After they made love, they rested, sheet-tangled and sweating in the fire glow.

  “What were you writing down when I got here?” she asked.

  “A poem.”

  She raised her eyebrows and smiled. “What about?”

  “You. And me.”

  “So?”

  “So what?” Rolling onto his side, facing her, he propped his head on his open palm. She noted the few new silvery threads of his thick hair at his temples, the smile lines that had gone deeper near his eyes.

  Laughing, she pushed him off his elbow onto his back and stretched over him to grab the pad off the bedside table. He reached out for it, but she touched her index finger to his lips and blew a kiss. Then she moved off him and flopped onto her stomach. Flipping the pad open, she read the title aloud: “ ‘You Are My Always.’ ”

  “Stop!” he said, grabbing it and laughing in embarrassment. “I just remembered, I’m a terrible poet.”

  “Come on, let me have it,” she said, trying to take it back.

  “It’s silly. Anyway, I don’t need to write a poem for you to know how I feel.” He brushed his fingers down her back.

  “No,” she said, pressing against him and resting her head against his chest. “You don’t.” They lay like that for a while, quiet, in their way. When he finally spoke, his voice was serious enough to surprise her.

  “Leave him.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Leave him.”

  “Baby,” she said. “Please. Not now.”

  “Yes now. I want to be with you now. Not someday.”

  She grabbed the quilt and wrapped it tightly around herself. It was a vulnerable feeling — and not a good one — that was creeping over her. “I thought we’d talked about this. I want to, you know I do, but I can’t.”

  “I’m tired of sharing you.”

  “You’re not. Not this way,” she said, indicating their naked proximity. “I love you, but I have Abel to think about. And Walter. I made it clear from the start this is all I can give you right now. I thought it was enough.”

  “How can it be enough?” he asked, his voice rising. He flung back the covers and got out of bed.

  “Don’t do this, John.” Her eyes welled up and looked at him with a pleading expression. “Don’t force me to make a choice right now.”

  He knew what she meant: that she wouldn’t, if she had to, choose him. And he couldn’t bear the idea of not having her at all. It made him miserable sometimes, how much he loved her. Finally his expression softened, though not entirely, and he simply said, “You’re right. I’m sorry.” He climbed back into bed and pulled her to him, relaxing as she let herself be drawn back, fitting herself against him the only way she could.

  September 16, 1950

  Father Timothy heard confession for thirty minutes before Mass on Sundays, for an hour on the first Thursday of every month, and for two hours every Saturday afternoon. Those Saturday Sacraments of Penance were Myrthen’s favorites. The church was quiet, the glide of penitents as steady as a stream. She was always the first in line to unburden herself of her sins, after which she would dip one knee in a graceful genuflection at the first pew, then slide onto the well-worn kneeler to pray.

  Hers was an unremitting attendance, as moored and unmoving and silent as the statue of the blessed Virgin in the sanctuary. When those seeking absolution entered the thin-walled confessional booth behind her, they didn’t bother to whisper. They trusted that her piety was as immutable as her presence. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” they would begin. And Myrthen would lean her bowed head, ever slightly, to better overhear the confessor’s opulent array of sins. Most often, they would start with something small — the profane use of God’s name, for example, or a lack of Christ-like respect toward others — and gradually empty themselves like a turned-out pocket of all the rest:

  “I’s lookin’ out the window and saw that pretty gal next door gettin’ undressed through her window — I won’t mention her name, save her the shame of that at least — and I didn’t look away. Figured then she might’ve wanted the audience, seeing as how she’d left her curtains open all the way and was just as close to the glass as I am to you right here. But I thought about it later, recognized it as shameful, her not bein’ my wife, me being pretty much best buddies with her husband …”

  “I was doing the weekly shopping downtown, buying what I could afford to, and used up near all the cash we had on hand, and well, Mr. Cantor was counting me back my change and he made a mistake — I don’t think I even realized it until later — and I ended up with $6.74 instead of just the $1.74 and, well, I just kept it.”

  “I cussed a blue streak at the children, Devil must’ve had hold of my tongue.”

  “I found myself lookin’ at … certain pages … in the Sears catalog. Women’s underthings and such. Brassieres and whatnot. You know what I’m sayin’?”

  Unfulfilled contracts, gambling, impure thoughts, petty theft, impatience, pride, envy. The salacious trespasses of the young, and the minor, indelible vices of the old. Myrthen heard them all with her eyes closed and her fingers clasped, committing them to memory, measuring the distance between the penitents and their Savior by their particular pageant of shame.

  She was not often surprised, having heard so much for so long. Along the way, she’d developed a certain desensitization to the revelations of the sorrowful. But when she heard the weak and familiar voice of her first cousin, Liam, she shrugged off her languor with new interest.

  As a child, Liam always seemed to be slipping in and out of the shadows, occupied by some mischief or other, hiding from his father, Ian, until the old man drank himself to death. His mother, her aunt Agnes, had dropped him once when Liam was only five months old — accidentally and at a disturbing angle. Ian called Agnes stupid and careless, and blamed her for nearly everything that went wrong, even his starting to drink again. When he was fired from the uranium mine, Ian told Agnes to pack: they were going to America.

  They landed
at Ellis Island in 1912, when Liam was three and Myrthen and Ruth, the twin nieces they’d yet to meet, were two. Agnes, wide-eyed and slightly seasick, held on to Liam with one hand and a bag with the other. In it was the sugar bowl that matched the creamer her sister, Rachel, had taken two years before; a few items of clothing; and a letter from her sister with the postal address: Mr. and Mrs. Otto Bergmann, Trist Mountain, Verra, West Virginia.

  They lived with the Bergmanns until Otto got Ian a job at Blackstone Coal, then they moved into a nearly identical company house in the same row. Ian, resentful of his son for stealing his wife’s affection, was more miserable than ever. He took refuge in the still he made behind the company house, but he found no joy in it. Instead, the moonshine just made him angrier in those critical years of Liam’s youth, and so Liam learned the art of disappearing very early on. That suited Myrthen, who found his reptilian countenance disturbing. He always seemed to be dirty, always watching her with those shifty green eyes. Once, when they were young, she’d caught him masturbating behind her outhouse, and he refused to stop until he finished. Later, after she’d admonished him for committing the sin of Onan, he just laughed and told her it was her fault for being so pretty.

  He’d enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces eight years ago, in 1942, and was sent to Fort Benning in Georgia to work as an electrician. She’d gotten a few letters from him while he was there, in which he’d talked mostly of his job, the weather, the training — Them parachuters get drawn up a tower two hundred fifty feet high, then get dropped down, jerking this way and that. Me, I like it better going that far underground instead of up. And he always ended with a wishful-sounding close — Ruth may be dead and gone, but you always got me or I bet you’re missing me being so far away or Someday I’ll come back and maybe you and me can share a place like we did when we were young.

  She never wrote him back.

  Subsequent letters indicated that after the United States declared war, Liam was reassigned to England. He worked on B-17s at a military base in Upper Heyford, and after the war ended, he went to a military complex in Heidelberg, Germany. She’d hoped that he — along with John — would’ve been swallowed up by the fighting, leaving her to her fragile peace. She knew he’d returned to Verra, but she’d been careful to avoid him. Even though the town was small, its inhabitants were divided into mostly separate communities according to ethnicity and faith. People could keep to themselves fairly easily that way.