by Chris Cander
“I had a telephone conversation with the Mother Superior after I received the letter. I knew if Myrthen came home she’d come back to St. Michael’s, and I felt I needed to hear both sides of the story. Not for any punitive reason, of course …” He sighed. “I wanted to be able to support her if I could. She’s had a lot of … disappointment … in her life. So I thought if I knew what had happened …” He opened his hands in a gesture of resignation. “The Mother Superior said it was mostly that Myrthen didn’t get along well with the other sisters, didn’t seem suited for community life. Apparently she had some trouble with her pride, too. God wants us to take a certain contentment in our abilities, but all our good qualities come from Him and must be attributed to Him. Our faults and sins are our own.” He smiled at that and lifted his glass toward her, then took another drink. “According to the Mother Superior, Myrthen had a tendency to attribute all her good to herself and shift blame for her not-so-good to everyone else. She seemed to have missed the spiritual sense of peace she might have gotten if she’d been able to see herself as small in the eyes of God.”
Lidia nodded, but didn’t really understand. She’d always felt small in the eyes of God and nearly everybody else save her husband and son, but she didn’t have much peace to show for it.
“So they kicked her out?”
“Essentially, yes. It was a shock to me, I’ll tell you. Being a nun was all she ever wanted. She lost her twin when she was a little girl — about Gabriel’s age, in fact — and she had it in her mind that she wanted to become a sister again, in the monastic sense, and devote herself to God, probably to make up for not having Ruth. Didn’t want to get married, even though that nice fellow seemed to be genuinely devoted to her at the time.” He stared at something on the wall. “I can still see her standing next to him during the ceremony. Eyes glassy and red from crying, blank expression on her face. She went through all the motions, but …” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Well, she was never the same afterward.”
After a moment of reverie so still she wondered if he’d fallen asleep, he sighed and lifted his hands in submission and said, “But everything that’s happened is according to God’s will.” Then he reached across the desk, past the empty glass and half-empty bottle, and put his cool, dry hand on her wrist. She could feel the slight tremor coming off his bones, like the rattle of a train cutting through the mountain. “Faith in God doesn’t give us immunity from suffering. And the things that make us suffer in this fallen world don’t always happen because we’ve done something wrong. You’ve done nothing wrong. Gabriel has done nothing wrong.”
She had to look away. There were so many secrets, ill begotten and intertwined. Would Father Timothy still say she’d done nothing wrong if he knew them all?
“As for Myrthen, I’ll have a word with her, ask her to show more grace where Gabriel’s concerned,” he said. “You just be strong in your love of God and patient with those whose fears or greed create trouble.” Then he clasped his hands again and smiled.
June 3, 1969
“Want to go visit Mimi today?” Lidia asked. She glanced out the window at the steady pelt of rain. “It’s awful wet, but we can wear our boots.”
Gabriel spoke through a mouthful of pancakes. “Can we look for frogs?”
“Sure. I bet Alta’s got a whole lot of them in her garden.”
“If I find one, can I keep him?”
Lidia laughed. “You really want a frog for a pet?”
“Yes!” He clasped her cheeks between his palms.
She peeled his hands off and pressed one of them to her lips. “Okay, okay. But you’ll have to take care of him, you know. Make a little nest for him, find him bugs and grass, fill a little dish with water.”
His three-and-a-half-year-old face grew serious with the honor of responsibility. “I can do that.”
After she cleaned up the breakfast dishes, they put on clothes and galoshes and raincoats and took off hand in hand up the hollow to Alta’s. By the time they arrived the rain had all but stopped, and into the shiny, wet quiet that ensued, bullfrogs cacophonied about the weather and their need of a mate.
Alta, as usual, stood on her porch waiting for them. Gabriel ran up and hugged her around her long legs. Lidia kissed her on the cheek and handed her a towel-covered loaf of fresh bread to go with whatever soup Alta would have been cooking since early in the morning. “I can’t believe you came out in this rain, but I’m glad you did. Always glad to see my two favorite people. Now come on in before you catch your death.”
“Mimi, I’m going to find a frog in your garden. Mama says I can take him home.”
Lidia shrugged. “He says he’ll take care of it.”
“Abel used to do the same thing. Catch frogs and put them into his daddy’s dinner bucket.” She laughed at the memory. “I can’t tell you how many times I opened up the lid to pack Walter’s lunch and found some pathetic little thing in there looking up at me like I was the Savior.” She turned to Gabriel, who surveyed the asparagus leaves from the porch steps. “Go on then. Let us know if you find one. We’ll be inside making you some lunch.”
They’d hardly had time to slice the bread before they heard a little-boy voice above the brassy clacking of frogs. “Mimi! Mama! I found one!” Gabriel stood amid the tender shoots with both hands raised and wrapped around a gloomy-looking frog that must have weighed a pound at least.
“That sure is a big one!”
“Can I keep him, Mama? You said I could.”
Lidia looked at Alta, who winked and nodded. She crossed her arms. “Come on then, bring him up here. Let’s see what you got.”
He high-stepped through the croaking and the bright green of the garden, squeezing that poor old frog all the way up the steps to where Alta and Lidia waited, then he thrust it out toward his mother and said, “I named him Henry Donner.”
“Where’d you ever come up with a name like Henry Donner?”
“He was my friend,” he said.
“ ’Course he was.” Lidia sighed and turned to Alta. “Do you have anything we can keep Henry Donner in?”
“I just threw out a box that would’ve been perfect. And I have a bucket, but it’s full of manure for the garden. I could dump it out, but it might still stink a bit. Let me think.” She looked around her tidy porch. “Well, what goes around …,” she said, and lifted a finger. “I’ve got Walter’s dinner bucket. Seems appropriate to house old Henry in that. No doubt some of his ancestors took up residence in it one time or another.”
She went inside and opened a closet and pulled on the string for light. Then she stood on an unopened box and stretched high up to a shelf, moving aside the miscellany that she’d brought with her when she’d moved into John’s cabin almost eighteen years before. Finally, she found the metal pail with a lid and wood handle and brought it down. She stood holding it with both hands, staring at it beneath the bulb light as though it were a time capsule or a present or a bomb. Then she blew off a coat of dust in a firm discharge of air and handed it to Lidia.
“I haven’t looked at that thing in nearly twenty years. They brought it back to me after they died, along with their other personal belongings. I couldn’t even bring myself to open it. Compartments are probably all rusted shut by now.”
“You sure you want Gabriel to use it? Seems like something that special shouldn’t be used to carry frogs around.”
Alta smiled. “I can’t think of a better use for it.”
They walked back onto the porch and put the bucket down, and Lidia pried off the lid and handed it to Gabriel. “Here you go.”
He looked at it. “It’s like Daddy’s.”
Lidia nodded. “Sure is. It belonged to Alta’s husband a long time ago. Here, you give me Henry Donner and I’ll watch him while you take out that top compartment where the sandwiches go and put some water and leaves down at the bottom of it for him.”
Alta and Lidia went into the kitchen to find something to keep him in until Ga
briel got the bucket ready. When Gabriel sat down on the porch steps and carefully pried out the inset compartment, he discovered it wasn’t empty.
He reached in and found two small folded scraps of paper. He unfolded the first one, which was smeared with too many words for him to read. Then the second one, which had only four. Those he could sound out, even if he didn’t understand them.
“Mimi?” he said when Alta came back out carrying a soup pot with the frog inside.
“Humm?”
“ ‘You are my always.’ ”
Alta stopped so fast it was like she’d run into a glass wall. The pot slipped from her hands and clattered to the porch floor and the frog tumbled out and sat, stunned, where he landed. When she spoke, one hand across her chest, her voice was a hoarse, breathy whisper. “What did you say?”
Gabriel bowed his head, and shrunk just slightly, toward the floor. “ ‘You are my always’?” Then he handed her the folded papers. “This was inside. I didn’t know how to read the other one.”
With trembling hands, she took the papers from him. “You found these inside the dinner bucket?”
He nodded. “At the bottom.”
All of a sudden, the pain of doubt and mystery and fear surrounding the explosion in 1950 felt like an old wound split open again, all the gangrenous viscera exposed anew.
She had never opened the dinner bucket. She had never thought to look inside.
A growl of thunder overhead silenced the chorus of frogs. Rain began again to fall. Lidia stepped quietly around and righted the soup pot to put Henry Donner in it. Then, without a word, she took Gabriel by the hand and led him into the house, leaving Alta standing next to the rain, stricken and clutching the decades-old notes.
Alta looked at the words written on the paper, the deliberate and masculine handwriting. She could hear John’s voice as though he were standing right there, speaking those words he’d said to her so many times.
You are my always.
The title of that silly poem he’d written for her so long ago had become their endearment. They used it so much they finally shortened it, even signed their paintings that way: Alta was Always, and John, Forever.
“And you are my forever,” she whispered.
She unfolded the other note, stiffer and more wrinkled than the first. It must have been on the bottom, with just enough water left in the bucket to run some of the words into a faint blue bloodstain on the paper. But she could get the gist:
I had to get John to write for me, my hand’s not right. Not much time now but wanted to tell you I loved you all these years. I know it wasn’t like what you had with him and it’s okay. If he gets out of here, I want you to be happy with him. He tried to save us … I promised your daddy I’d get you out of Verra someday. I’m sorry about that. Sorry I didn’t make you a happier life. You were a good wife to me. Love, Walter.
She folded the notes back to their creases and sank down into the rocking chair that John had carried over Trist Mountain that autumn day in 1944, the one he smashed the night before he died, the one she spent months rebuilding and restoring when she moved back to the cabin, once she had time and patience and distance from grief enough to do it.
Alta thought of her son, the pain of his loss ever present. Even now, when she saw a troop of miners after a shift, she couldn’t help but feel some low-slung anticipation that Abel would be among them, hungry and coal-black and tired, heading home to her.
Then she thought of Walter, that good, distant man she loved like one of her brothers and with whom she shared a house and a son and nearly every meal for twenty years. Twenty years. He’d been gone now nearly as long as they’d been married, but still he held a post at the kitchen table. How long had he known the truth?
And she thought of John, remembered finding him asleep in the rocking chair she now breathed back and forth in, and his waking up with that sleepy smile that became as familiar as her own hands, as essential as air. He hadn’t done it; he hadn’t killed them.
The relief was overwhelming.
In all those years since they died, she’d wondered many things. Their last words, their final thoughts. Who’d been responsible, and why, and how. She’d had countless conversations with their ghosts, all of them unsatisfying and unfinished. There was so much she would’ve liked to ask of them all. So much she would’ve liked to say.
I love you.
You gave me purpose. And strength. You taught me what it means to love.
Did you do it? How could you?
How dare you?
I miss you.
Did I love you enough?
I love you still.
And now, at last, this.
When the rain stopped once again, and the frogs started up their dyspeptic trills, she remembered that Lidia and Gabriel and Henry Donner were still there; she could hear them inside. She knew Gabriel wanted to take the frog home and make a pet of him. But she decided that she wouldn’t allow it. Who knew whom that frog had been looking for when Gabriel found him? Who knew who would miss him if he were gone?
Later, after she was alone again, she sat back down in the rocker. The sun sank with the weight of all that was still and silent, casting a heady glow on the rain that covered the ground. She thought of them all one by one, Walter and Abel and, finally, John, and she held the image of him in her mind until it was too dark to see anymore, running into the depths of the mountain, trying to save them all.
June 28, 1969
There’d been no peace for a month. People ringing the bell at all hours, waking the neighbors’ dogs, begging Lidia or Danny to pass along a question to Gabriel, or to let them talk to him directly. “Where did Daddy go after he left town?” a middle-aged spinster wanted to know. The younger sister of a Korean War veteran asked who’d killed her brother and how. An older woman hoped to be reassured that her daughter had made it to heaven after flinging her brokenhearted self from the top of Queen’s Point. A young man who suffered from claustrophobia and desperately wanted to avoid working in the mines asked whether he should bet everything he had on a Thoroughbred racehorse named Arts and Letters in the Belmont Stakes that month. Mothers wanted to know the gender of their unborn babies. Wives wanted to know if their husbands were stepping out. Some wanted simply to know the most auspicious day to plant a garden or plan a wedding or conceive a child.
The constant interruptions exhausted Lidia, the incessant insistences that her son was either a prophet or a soothsayer or an oracle — or worse, a son of the Devil. She stopped answering the door, stopped going out unless someone went with her, preferably Alta, whose elusive calm and imposing height gave thoughtless intruders pause. If someone did dare approach Lidia with Alta at her side, they’d most often sidle off after she shrunk them with her pale, unflinching gaze and a single admonition: You should be ashamed of yourself.
“Why don’t you go spend the evening with Peggy?” Danny suggested that morning. “Get away from all this nonsense for a while. Go into Charleston and see a movie. Somebody told me True Grit was a good one. Or anything. Just get your mind off all this for a night.”
“But what about you? I hate leaving you here with nothing to do. Or worse, having to manage anyone coming around.”
“Oh, now, don’t you worry about that. First of all, traffic’s gone down a lot since I put up that do-not-disturb sign on the door. And folks don’t bother with me as much as they do you. I’ve been practicing my go-to-hell face. I think it might be working.” He set his mouth into a hard line and flexed his eyebrows into two stern-looking ridges. Through a squint, he bore his eyes into hers until she began to squirm. Then he broke into a laugh. “See? It does work.”
She allowed herself a half smile.
“Go on, call Peggy. Gabe and I’ll do man stuff around here tonight. We’ll work in the yard and wrestle and eat TV dinners and skip baths. He’ll be fast asleep by the time you get home.” Danny leaned over and kissed her, quick, then looked at her deeply tired eyes and kissed her
once more, slower this time.
“Thank you,” she said in her languid, sad voice, and placed her palm against his bearded cheek. “I don’t deserve you.”
“Yes you do,” he whispered, his face only a few inches from hers. Then he straightened up and smiled and gave her a playful swat on her behind. “Now go call Peggy before she makes other plans.”
“Oh, Daddy! I see one!” Gabriel squealed. “Oh! And another one!” He dashed around the freshly mowed lawn between their garden and the back door of the house, leaping and snatching fistfuls of night. The tiny strobes of light escaped each grab.
Danny set his beer bottle on the grass and pushed himself out of the lawn chair. Coming up behind Gabriel, he said in a soft voice, “Watch here for a second.” Gabriel stopped and Danny crouched down beside him. “Keep your eyes peeled in one spot and wait for one to light up. Now, when you see it, don’t go right after it. Watch to see what direction it’s moving before it blinks off again. That’s where you need to go, too. Then you hold your hands cupped together like this, and when he blinks on again, you can reach up and catch him.”
Gabriel, solemn with the weight of instruction, did as Danny said.
“I can’t! I missed him again!”
“Let me show you.”
Gabriel watched his father as he stood still and followed the trajectory of a firefly, then cupped his hands over and under it — like catching a pop fly — the instant it flashed again. “Careful now. We don’t want to squash him.” He held his hands toward Gabriel. “Do you want to hold him?”
Gabriel shook his head, smiling in the glow of porchlight. “Let’s put him in the jar.”
“Oh, you must have done this before with Mama. And here I thought I was showing you something new.”
“No, I didn’t do it before.” Straight-faced, serious.
“Well, how’d you know about putting fireflies in jars?”
Gabriel shrugged.
Danny sighed and looked down at him, sweat-matted hair unmoving in the faint breeze, sturdy little arms and legs, grass clippings stuck to his bare ankles, faint mound of belly giving little-boy shape to his favorite blue T-shirt. Then he shrugged and smiled. “Well, let’s go inside and find a jar for him then. You lead the way.”
