On Shifting Sand

by Allison Pittman

  “Come to think of it, that might be a good idea,” I say, looking straight into his eyes. They’re rich and brown with the health of promise, and blur in the face of my own tears. “Pa needs to see a friendly face.”

  “He’s never met me.”

  “That’s why you can be friendly.”

  His smile is purely for my benefit, I’m sure. He’s not been invited up to share our Sunday dinners since that first week, and I’ve told him little about my father. I feel a bittersweet tug on my own lips, a response to his comfort. I want somebody to touch me for reassurance, to ground me before an impending shock, and with Russ encouraging everyone else around, I go limp and still, preparing myself for Jim’s embrace.

  He does not disappoint. His hand comes to rest in the soft curve of my neck, his palm warm and encompassing. I can feel my pulse throb against its heel, his fingers curl down the crest of my back, his thumb at the tip of my jaw. This he strokes, in punctuation with his words—“It’s all gonna be fine, Nola. I’m sure your pa’s fine.”

  There is a horrible, irrational, and paralyzing desire within me, and I know if I nod or speak or breathe I will be lost to a newer touch. As it is, I cannot stop the new flood of tears streaming down my cheeks, and to my near destruction, he wipes these away.

  “I have to find Russ,” I say the moment I know my mouth will not move against him. “Hope to be leaving in the next few minutes.”

  To my relief, he puts his cap on and turns away, because I don’t know that I have the strength to break from whatever was binding us up in that moment. My legs have turned to water, enough to bring rain to a million acres, and my body is chilled except for those points of fire where he touched me.

  “You all right, dear?”

  As always, Merrilou Brown’s appearance is a surprise, and what has been liquid within me turns to ice-cold fear. When I look down, I see her eyes following what mine had been—Jim’s broad shoulders receding into the crowd.

  “I’m worried about my father.” It’s enough of a truth to suffice. “He usually comes in for Sunday dinner.”

  She turns her gaze to me. “I can see you’re upset. And right to be, in these times. Everything so uncertain. Can we do anything to help?”

  “Pray.” It’s what Russ would have said. “And look in on the children if we’re not back by dark?”

  “Of course!” She claps her little hands. “Tell them to come over for supper. I’ll make butter cookies.”

  I’m promising to relay the invitation to Ronnie when Russ arrives next to me, his arm around my waist, too late to help me stand. He kisses my temple. “Are you ready?”

  “Look at you two,” Merrilou says. She steps back and cocks her head as if studying a work of art. “Like you should be in a magazine. Cover of Life. Can’t imagine a couple more attractive. Might as well be your wedding day—especially you, Nola. You look just as pink and pretty.”

  I should thank her, but we both know it’s not a compliment. Or even the truth. I’m flushed and gaunt, tearstained and haggard. There’s a fine layer of dust robbing my hair of its natural sheen, turning it two shades lighter and giving it the texture of sand. I’d be hard-pressed to find the kind of flowers that formed my bridal coronet. More than that, I don’t remember any such appreciation on our wedding day. Politeness, yes, as an afterthought over the rumbling of rumors, but nothing close to an open-armed welcome. I’m sure I’m not imagining things. Even though she hasn’t mentioned it, she watched the moment that passed between Jim and me. I prepare myself for suspicious accusations—the likes of which my father would send had he witnessed the scene. Instead, she offers a glance cloaked in a caution only she and I could understand.

  Russ tugs me closer. “More beautiful every day, isn’t she?”

  “Indeed,” Merrilou says. “And isn’t it amazing how time can leave someone so unchanged.” She winks. “You let those little ones of yours know they can come over for supper. Though I don’t suppose that boy of yours is exactly little anymore, is he?”

  “That’s kind of you,” Russ says, and the following thank-you bears his trademark tone of gracious dismissal.

  Our 1928 Chevrolet sedan was given to our family when its owner, a man who died still rich from Oklahoma wheat, willed it to Russ. He’d been a broker, not a farmer, or we might have inherited enough land to choke the life out of us.

  I’m sitting in the backseat, half-listening to Russ and Jim narrate the land as it unfolds.

  “More than a million acres,” Russ says, quoting Greg’s last letter. “Gone.” He goes on about falling prices, eroded soil, plowed-under grasslands. I look out the window, and everything I see bears witness to man’s greed and God’s judgment. I can’t separate the two.

  I’m thankful that Jim is here to absorb the brunt of the conversation because I don’t know that I’d be able to contribute much more than mewling agreement. I have my own greed to contend with, and with every passing drift, I fear God’s punishment will be revealed.

  Under the best of circumstances, the drive out to Pa’s farm takes a little over an hour. Pa has it down to the second, knowing exactly how long he can linger at the dinner table before leaving in time to be home for the five o’clock gospel hour on the radio. We’ve been in the car nearly two hours already, as Russ has to stop intermittently when the road disappears beneath the shifting soil. The car comes to a soft stop, and he and Jim get out—each with a shovel—to dig what they hope will be a clear path in the right direction. Despite his amputation, Jim handles the shovel with equal power, matching Russ in every way, and if either man views the chore as a competition, he makes no comment.

  Once or twice, when we don’t meet up with a clean patch of road, Jim uses his compass to determine that we’re off track, maybe a good quarter of a mile, leading Russ to turn the car around, find our digging spot, and start over again.

  It is a slow, frustrating, and frightening process, given that we’ve only seen three or four other vehicles all afternoon. Russ, somehow, takes it as something encouraging.

  “You see, darling?” He turns his head to speak over his shoulder. “I’m sure your pa got word how bad the road is and stayed home. Most sensible thing to do.”

  I can’t help but think that last bit was a dig at me, and I lean my head against the warm window in silent response.

  “Doesn’t hurt to check,” Jim says and asks, without turning his head, “What’s he drive?”

  “Old rust-bucket truck,” I say. “I think it was blue once, wasn’t it, Russ? Do you remember?”

  “Sounds right.” He joins us in scanning the barren prairie for such a landmark.

  “He wouldn’t leave it, would he?” Jim asks. “Get it stuck and take off walkin’ on his own?”

  I say, “No,” but Russ simultaneously says, “Maybe, given what a stubborn cuss of a man he can be.”

  Now Jim looks to me for confirmation. I’m sitting directly behind him, and he turns his head to the right so his eyes don’t have to cross my husband’s path. He can’t look right at me, not without turning his entire body in the seat, so I settle with a little more than a profile. He repeats the question: “Would he walk?”

  “I don’t know.” It’s the most honest answer I can give. These days, who among us can claim to act with anything close to reason? Three years ago I would never have taken valuables from a neighbor’s abandoned home. Ten years ago I might not have cared if my father lived or died. And last winter—or even early spring—I would have laughed in the face of anyone who said that I would ever burn from another man’s touch. Not with a man like Russ Merrill, bound to me in love and matrimony, in the eyes of God and all of his creation. “If so, it would be just this afternoon. He doesn’t leave his place ever except for Sunday dinner.”

  “Any reason he might choose not to come?”

  “Not that I know.” In fact, I’ve begun to think that his visits are something more than grudging obligation. Ariel, I know, has captured his heart, bringing out a softn
ess in him that Mother and I could never reach. On his last visit he played a game of Old Maid with her while I mashed the potatoes for our supper, teasing her that she was destined to become an old maid herself, with all that red hair. “Who wants to marry a carrottop princess?” he said, and we all—even Ariel—knew he was teasing, and decided the most likely husband would be the redheaded son of a pirate.

  “We’re close,” Russ says, easing me out of my reverie and pulling Jim’s attention to the road ahead.

  I crane my neck, looking for any kind of a familiar landmark, but there are none. No furrowed fields, rippling grass, no head of cattle wandered far from the gate. All the time growing up here, what I liked best was that our family house sat in the deepest part of a shallow valley. Coming in on the road, you might think there was nothing to be found, but then one, two more turns of the tire, and there it was—spread out like the preface art in a storybook. Our little stone house, surrounded by a picket fence, with Mother’s well-tended garden along one side. A red barn with a gray shingled roof, a chicken coop, Pa’s hay wagon and blue truck—yes, it was most definitely blue—parked side by side, waiting to be proclaimed the favorite.

  That’s the picture I’ve held in my mind, anyway. It’s the image I picture every Sunday afternoon, when Pa says good-bye and claps his hat on his head before ducking out of our apartment above the dying feed and tool store. It’s what I’ve held in my prayers every time we made another mile without seeing evidence of a dead man on the side of a hidden road. But as we crest the final hill, I look out through the grimy windshield, and I can see that my memories have been overtaken by the dust.

  There is some relief, I suppose, in seeing Pa’s rusty truck stationed between the barn and the house, but as we get closer, hope seems a frivolous pursuit. Dirt has drifted more than halfway up the tires. The barn door hangs open, a clear testimony to the fact that there’s no livestock left to escape. The picket fence is blown over, as are half the fence posts surrounding the property itself. The stairs leading up to the front porch are obscured, the door ajar, and three windows on the second floor broken clean out.

  I clap my hand over my mouth to keep from crying out. When Russ stops the car, worried we’ll get stuck in a drift, I ignore his admonishment, throw the door open, and run to my father’s house. My feet slip in the sand, making my gait clumsy and slower than I can bear. I call out, “Pa! Pa!” intermingled with quieter prayers to God to have kept him safe. When I get to the spot I remember the stairs to be, I bend over, climbing. To my relief, I see where the dust has been moved by the opening of the door, so someone has been here. Here and gone, perhaps.

  When I cross the threshold inside, my heart stops. Everything is brown. Shapes of furniture—sofa, rocking chair, wood box, side table, lamp, mantelpiece, footstool, radio—all of it covered in not merely a fine layer but a solid coat of dirt. As if somebody turned the room inside out, rolled it in mud, and set it back again. Particles dance in the air, stinging my eyes. I choke out, “Pa!” but the single syllable sends me into a spasm of coughing.

  I go back to the door and see Russ and Jim making their way in from the car, and to my relief they’re each carrying a jug of water. I take the kerchief from around my neck and hold it over my mouth and nose, and turn toward the parlor, moving slowly so as to disturb the dust as little as possible.

  “Pa?” My call is muffled now, as are the sounds of my footsteps. It’s what I imagine walking on a beach would be like, only with blue skies above and bare feet below. I make my way into the kitchen, and there, at the table, just another shape painted the same gritty shade, my father sits, still as a sepia photograph.

  CHAPTER 8

  I CALL OUT TO HIM AGAIN, and he turns his head. “Is that you, girl?”

  I drop my handkerchief, exposing my face. Oh, how I want to run to him, to fall at his feet, bury my head in his lap, and forgive or repent—whatever God wants in exchange for this reprieve.

  Russ is standing in the doorway, and I walk back to him. Wordlessly, I uncork the jug and tip it over, soaking my kerchief. Without any attempt to wring it out, I carry the kerchief back to my father. My intent is to wipe his face clean, but at the first touch of the cotton to his lips, he opens his mouth and takes the whole cloth in, sucking at it like a starving child.

  “Oh, Pa.” I look away to see Russ has done the same. I leave my father’s side and go to my husband. “What do you think happened?”

  “No telling.”

  I feel a hint of frustration at his overly calm demeanor, thinking if this had been one of our parishioners, he would have been much quicker to spring into some kind of action. Assessing, fixing, comforting. Instead, his hands are buried in his pockets as he pivots, taking in the disaster that had been my home.

  “Do you think he got caught unprepared?” I ask. “There’s usually plenty of warning time to seal up the house.”

  “This looks to be more than one storm’s doin’,” Jim says. He stands right inside the front door, a respectable distance for a man not officially invited as a guest. “You seen him just last week?”

  He speaks softly, as if not wanting my father to know about his presence.

  “Yes. He came to dinner last Sunday.”

  “How did he seem?”

  “Fine.” But that’s not exactly true. I remember thinking then that he seemed . . . well, dirty. Unkempt—more than usual. But there had been a storm two days before, and I figured he hadn’t cleaned everything up yet. In my mind, he’d been following the same pattern of behavior as everybody else I knew: hunker down while the winds blow, restore what you can in the clear days that follow, and pray that the next assault from the sky would be nothing but cool, wet rain.

  Obviously, Pa had been doing none of that. Not for a long time, anyway, and living out here alone as he does, there’s nobody to help him do otherwise. He’s been burying himself. A slow, gradual entombment.

  “Stubborn old fool,” I say—under my breath, not wanting confirmation. I walk back into the kitchen, holding my tears in check. Pa has taken the kerchief out of his mouth and twists it listlessly in his hands. He looks frightened—caught and confused. I ask, “What’s happened here, Pa?”

  “What are you doing in my house?”

  “It’s Sunday. You didn’t come to dinner.” The complaint seems so trivial, given our surroundings. In this moment, I doubt Pa knows it’s Sunday, or that he’s supposed to be in my home, or who I am, exactly.

  “You’re not supposed to come here.” His eyes are wild, searching, and his mouth is loose, overworking itself around each syllable.

  “I know, but when you didn’t—”

  “And that, that worthless—” He erupts into a fit of coughing, like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I call for Russ to bring me the jug of water and tip it to my father’s lips. He fights me at first, twisting his head from left to right, rejecting the little bit that lands in his mouth by spitting it straight in my face. Finally, he knocks the jug clean out of my hands, and I rush to pick it up as it makes a mud stream on the kitchen floor. When I stand up again to put it on the table, Pa rises out of his chair and smacks me—hard—across my face. The force is almost enough to take me to the floor again, but I grasp the edge of the table and hold up my hand against a raging Russ who is charging in, fist clenched and ready to return a blow on my behalf.

  “No,” I say, my cheek cold with pain. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Even as I speak, Pa falls back in his chair.

  “All your fault.” His voice is hoarse but strong. “Whorin’ around. Knew it the first night you come sneakin’ in.”

  “Let’s go, Nola,” Russ says. “You don’t need to listen to this.”

  By now my face is almost numb, and I’ve heard this speech from my father so many times, I should be numb to it too. But now Jim is in the kitchen, asking if there’s anything he can do to help, and everything Pa says takes on a new shadow.

  “He’s not in his right mind.” The fact that I can sa
y such a thing without incurring further wrath proves my words to be true. I go to the corner cupboard and reach to the very back, where Mother kept the two wineglasses given to my parents at their wedding. As I expected, they are relatively clean, stored rim-side down. I claim my handkerchief once again, dampen it, wipe one of the glasses, and fill it with water.

  “Drink.” I set it in front of Pa.

  “Is the glass clean?”

  “It’s clean.”

  He stares at it, and I know the longer he waits, the more free-floating particles will settle along the rim and fall into the water. Then he’ll blame me for the grit. I pull out a chair and sit across from him, hoping to make him think this is just another afternoon, the two of us, from a time before Russ took me away.

  “It’s the judgment.” Pa wraps his dry, dirt-encrusted fist around the thin stem of the glass and swirls the water within. “For what you done. God’s takin’ it all away ’cause of your ungratefulness and sin.” A thick paste forms at the corners of his mouth.

  “Pa, please. Drink.”

  “This was good land. All of it. An’ the Lord gave us plenty. But then I have a son who won’t come back to it. And you, wrigglin’ your way until . . . I guess I ain’t a good-enough man.”

  “You’re a good man, Pa.” I speak the lie for everybody in the room.

  “I ain’t. I try but I ain’t . . .” And he drifts into a different vocalization. It’s strained and rough, like two pieces of fence post rubbing together. His face contorts, and I realize he’s crying, but there’s nothing in him to produce a single tear.

  I reach over and uncurl his fingers from the glass, gently setting it on the table before gripping his hands in my own. I try not to wince at the dryness of his flesh, like a pair of old work boots, and try to connect to his mind with my touch.

  “Pa, it’s me. Nola.”

  “Ain’t a good man . . .”

  “Me, Nola. And Russ.” Saying his name is a risk, and I’m relieved when Pa doesn’t react.