Patchwork

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “What reasons?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you’re not like that.”

  “But I might get like that.”

  “No, you won’t. That’s crazy.” Cobb caught himself saying the wrong word. “No, that’s ridiculous,” he said. “You won’t get like that.”

  “When I started seeing those pictures at work I’d imagine pictures of my—if my mother had succeeded that day.”

  Cobb watched the feather loosen from the leaf and begin to float away in the little trickle of water in the creek bed. He tried to comprehend all that might happen to that feather as it wore away to bits—a strange thought. In a dozen years, he thought, he might look back on this moment and know that it was precisely when he should have stopped and made a rational decision to go no further, but he couldn’t know that now.

  She said, “Do you have any idea how complicated it’s going to be?”

  Cobb nodded. “That’s what I like,” he said confidently. “Down here, we just call that taking care of business.”

  Tufts of her hair fluttered slightly in the breeze, but she didn’t notice. She couldn’t see the way the light came through her hair like the light in spring through a leaving tree.

  Bumblebees

  FROM Love Life (1989)

  From the porch, Barbara watches her daughter, Allison, photographing Ruth Jones out in the orchard. Allison is home from college for the summer. Barbara cannot hear what they are saying. Ruth is swinging her hands enthusiastically, pointing first to the apricot tree and then to the peach tree, twenty feet away. No doubt Ruth is explaining to Allison her notion that the apricot and the peach cross-pollinate. Barbara doesn’t know where Ruth got such an idea. The apricot tree, filled with green fruit, has heartshaped leaves that twirl in clusters on delicate red stems. Earlier in the year, the tree in bloom resembled pink lace.

  Allison focuses the camera on Ruth. Ruth’s hand is curled in her apron. Her other hand brushes her face shyly, straightening her glasses. Then she lifts her head and smiles. She looks very young out there among the dwarf trees.

  Barbara wonders if Ruth is still disappointed that one of the peach trees, the Belle of Georgia, which Barbara chose, is a freestone. “Clingstones are the best peaches,” Ruth said when they planted the trees. It is odd that Ruth had such a definite opinion about old-fashioned clingstones. Barbara agrees that clingstones are better; it was just an accident that she picked Belle of Georgia.

  They were impatient about the trees. Goebel Petty, the old man Barbara and Ruth bought the small farm from two years before, let them come and plant the trees before the sale was final. It was already late spring. Barbara chose two varieties of peach trees, the apricot, two McIntoshes, and a damson plum, and Ruth selected a Sweet Melody nectarine, two Redheart plums, and a Priscilla apple. Ruth said she liked the names.

  The day they planted the trees was breezy, with a hint of rain—a raw spring day. Mr. Petty watched them from the porch as they prepared the holes with peat moss. When they finished setting the balled-and-burlapped roots into the hard clay, he called out, “Y’all picked a bad place—right in the middle of that field. I had fescue planted there.” Later, he said to them, “The wind will come rip-roaring down that hill and blow them trees over.”

  Barbara could have cried. It had been so long since she had planted things. She had forgotten that Georgia Belles were freestones. She didn’t notice the fescue. And she didn’t know about the wind then. After they moved in, she heard it rumble over the top of the hill, sounding like a freight train. There were few real hills in this part of Kentucky, but the house was halfway up a small one, at the end of a private road. The wind whipped across the hickory ridge. Barbara later discovered that particular kind of wind in a Wordsworth poem: “subterraneous music, like the noise of bagpipers on distant Highland hills.”

  Now, as Ruth and Allison reach the porch, Ruth is laughing and Allison is saying, “But they never teach you that in school. They keep it a secret and expect you to find it out for yourself.” Allison tosses her hair and Barbara sees that several strands stick to the Vaseline she always has on her lips to keep them from chapping. Allison brushes the hair away.

  “Ruth, do you remember what you said that day we planted those trees?” asks Barbara.

  “No. What?” Ruth has a lazy, broad smile, like someone who will never lose her good humor—like Amelia Earhart, in one of those photographs of her smiling beside her airplane.

  Barbara says, “You said you wondered if we’d last out here together long enough to see those trees bear.”

  “I reckon we’re going to make it, then,” Ruth says, her smile fading.

  “Y’all are crazy,” says Allison, picking a blade of grass from her bare knee. “You could go out and meet some men, but here you are hanging around a remote old farm.”

  Barbara and Ruth both laugh at the absurdity of the idea. Barbara is still bitter about her divorce, and Ruth is still recovering from the shock of the car accident three years before, when her husband and daughter were killed. Barbara and Ruth, both teachers at the new consolidated county high school, have been rebuilding their lives. Barbara took the initiative, saying Ruth needed the challenge of fixing up an old farmhouse. Together, they were able to afford the place.

  “We’re not ready for men yet,” Ruth says to Allison.

  “Maybe in the fall,” Barbara says idly.

  “Maybe a guy will come waltzing up this road someday and you can fight over him,” Allison says.

  “I could go for that Tom Selleck on ‘Magnum, P.I.,’” Ruth says.

  “Maybe he’ll come up our road,” Barbara says, laughing. She feels good about the summer. Even Allison seems cheerful now. Allison had a fight with her boyfriend at the end of the school year, and she has been moody. Barbara has been worried that having Allison around will be too painful for Ruth, whose daughter, Kimberly, had been Allison’s age. Barbara knows that Ruth can’t sleep until Allison arrives home safely at night. Allison works evenings at McDonald’s, coming home after midnight. The light under Ruth’s door vanishes then.

  “I never heard of two women buying a farm together,” Mr. Petty said when they bought the farm. They ignored him. Their venture was reckless—exactly what they wanted at that time. Barbara was in love with the fields and the hillside of wild apples, and she couldn’t wait to have a garden. All her married life she had lived in town, in a space too small for a garden. Once she got the farm, she envisioned perennials, a berry patch, a tall row of nodding, top-heavy sunflowers. She didn’t mind the dilapidated condition of the old house. Ruth was so excited about remodeling it that when they first went indoors she didn’t really mind the cracked linoleum floors littered with newspapers and Mr. Petty’s dirty clothes. She was attracted by the Larkin desk and the upright piano. The barn was filled with Depression-style furniture, which Ruth later refinished, painstakingly brushing the spindles of the chairs to remove the accumulated grime. The house was filthy, and the floor of an upstairs room was covered with dead bumblebees. Later, in the unfinished attic they found broken appliances and some unidentifiable automobile parts. Dirt-dauber nests, like little castles, clung to the rafters.

  On the day they planted the fruit trees, they explored the house a second time, reevaluating the work necessary to make the place livable. The old man said apologetically, “Reckon I better get things cleaned up before you move in.” As they watched, he opened a closet in the upstairs room with the bumblebees and yanked out a dozen hangers holding forties-style dresses—his mother’s dresses. He flung them out the open window. When Barbara and Ruth took possession of the property two weeks later, they discovered that he had apparently burned the dresses in a trash barrel, but almost everything else was just as it had been—even the dead bumblebees littering the floor. Their crisp, dried husks were like a carpet of autumn leaves.

  Ruth would not move in until carpenters had installed new plasterboard upstairs to keep bees from entering through the
cracks in the walls. In the fall, Barbara and Ruth had storm windows put up, and Barbara caulked the cracks. One day the following spring, Ruth suddenly shrieked and dropped a skillet of grease. Barbara ran to the kitchen. On the windowpane was a black-and-yellow creature with spraddled legs, something like a spider. It was a huge bumblebee, waking up from the winter and sluggishly creeping up the pane. It was trapped between the window and the storm pane. When it started buzzing, Barbara decided to open the window. With a broom, she guided the bee out the door, while Ruth hid upstairs. After that, bees popped up in various windows, and Barbara rescued them. Ruth wouldn’t go outdoors bareheaded. She had heard that a sting on the temple could be fatal. Later, when the carpenters came to hang Masonite siding on the exterior of the house, the bees stung them. “Those fellows turned the air blue with their cussing!” Ruth told friends. In the evenings, Barbara and Ruth could hear the wall buzzing, but the sounds gradually died away. One day after the carpenters left, Barbara heard a trapped bird fluttering behind the north wall of the living room, but she did not mention it to Ruth. This summer, Barbara has noticed that the bees have found a nook under the eaves next to the attic. Sometimes they zoom through the garden, like truck drivers on an interstate, on their way to some more exotic blossoms than her functional marigolds, planted to repel insects from the tomatoes.

  Barbara’s daughter has changed so much at college that having her here this summer is strange—with her cigarettes, her thick novels, her box of dog biscuits that she uses to train the dog. The dog, a skinny stray who appeared at the farm in the spring, prowls through the fields with her. Allison calls him Red, although he is white with brown spots. He scratches his fleas constantly and has licked a place raw on his foreleg. Allison has bandaged the spot with a sanitary napkin and some wide adhesive tape. Allison used to be impatient, but now she will often go out at midday with the dog and sit in the sun and stare for hours at a patch of weeds. Barbara once asked Allison what she was staring at. “I’m just trying to get centered,” Allison said with a shrug.

  “Don’t you think Ruth looks good?” Barbara asks Allison as they are hoeing the garden one morning. Allison has already chopped down two lima bean plants by mistake. “I like to see her spending more time out-of-doors.”

  “She still seems jittery to me.”

  “But her color looks good, and her eyes sparkle now.”

  “I saw her poking in my things.”

  “Really? I’m surprised.” Barbara straightens up and arches her back. She is stiff from stooping. “What on earth did she think she was doing?”

  “It made me feel crummy,” Allison says.

  “But at least she’s coming out of her shell. I wish you’d try to be nice to her. Just think how I’d feel if you’d been killed in a wreck.”

  “If you caught me snooping, you’d knock me in the head.”

  “Oh, Allison—”

  Allison lights a cigarette in the shade of the sumac, at the edge of the runoff stream that feeds into the creek below. She touches a thistle blossom.

  “Come and feel how soft this flower is, Mom,” she says. “It’s not what you’d expect.”

  Barbara steps into the shade and caresses the thistle flower with her rough hands. It is a purple powder puff, the texture of duck down. Honeybees are crawling on some of the flowers on the stalk.

  Allison picks a stalk of dried grass with a crisp beige glob stuck on it. “Here’s another one of those funny egg cases,” she says. “It’s all hatched out. I think it’s from a praying mantis. I saw it in my biology book.” She laughs. “It looks like a hot dog on a stick.”

  Every day Allison brings in some treasure: the cracked shell of a freckled sparrow egg, a butterfly wing with yellow dust on it, a cocoon on a twig. She keeps her findings in a cigar box that has odd items glued on the lid: screws, thimbles, washers, pencils, bobbins. The box is spray-painted gold. Allison found it in the attic. Barbara has the feeling that her daughter, deprived of so much of the natural world during her childhood in town, is going through a delayed phase of discovery now, at the same time she is learning about cigarettes and sex.

  Now Allison crushes her cigarette into the ground and resumes her hoeing, scooping young growth from the dry dirt. Barbara yanks pigweed from the carrot row. It hasn’t rained in two weeks, and the garden is drying up. The lettuce has shot up in gangly stalks, and the radishes went to seed long ago.

  Barbara lays down her hoe and begins fastening up one long arm of a tomato plant that has fallen from its stake. “Let me show you how to pinch suckers off a tomato vine,” she says to Allison.

  “How do you know these things, Mom? Did you take biology?”

  “No. I was raised in the country—don’t you remember? Here, watch. Just pinch this little pair of leaves that’s peeping up from where it forks. If you pinch that out, then there will be more tomatoes. Don’t ask me why.”

  “Why?” says Allison.

  In her garden diary, Barbara writes, “Thistles in bloom. Allison finds praying mantis egg carton.” It is midmorning, and the three of them are having Cokes on the porch. Ruth is working on quilt pieces, sewing diamonds together to make stars. Her hands are prematurely wrinkled. “I have oldpeople hands and feet,” she once told Barbara merrily. Ruth’s face doesn’t match. Even at forty, she has a young woman’s face.

  A moment ago, Allison said something to Ruth about her daughter and husband, and Ruth, after pausing to knot a thread and break it with her teeth, says now, “The reason I don’t have their pictures scattered around the house is I overdid it at first. I couldn’t read a book without using an old school picture of Kimberly for a bookmark. I had her pictures everywhere. I didn’t have many pictures of him, but I had lots of her. Then one day I realized that I knew the faces in the pictures better than I knew my memories of their faces. It was like the pictures had replaced them. And pictures lie. So I put away the pictures, hoping my memories would come back to me.”

  “Has it worked?”

  “A little bit, yes. Sometimes I’ll wake up in the morning and her face will come to me for a second, and it’s so vivid and true. A moment like that is better than seeing the pictures all the time. I’m thinking the memory will get clearer and clearer if I just let it come.” Ruth threads her needle in one purposeful jab and draws the ends of the thread together, twisting them into a knot. “I was at my sister’s in Nashville that night and we stayed out late and they couldn’t get in touch with us. I can’t forgive myself for that.”

  “You couldn’t help it, Ruth,” Barbara says impatiently. Ruth has told the story so many times Barbara knows it by heart. Allison has heard it, too.

  As Ruth tells about the accident, Allison keeps her book open, her hand on the dog. She is reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It isn’t just about motorcycles, she has told them.

  Her needle working swiftly, Ruth says, “It was still daylight, and they had pulled up to the stop sign and then started to cross the intersection when a pickup truck carrying a load of turnips rammed into them. He didn’t stop and he just ran into them. There were turnips everywhere. Richard was taking Kimberly to baton practice—she was a third-place twirler at the state championships the year before.” Ruth smooths out the star she has completed and creases open the seams carefully with her thumbnail. “He died instantly, but she just lingered on for a week, in a coma. I talked to that child till I was blue in the face. I read stories to her. They kept saying she never heard a word, but I had to do it anyway. She might have heard. They said there wasn’t any hope.” Ruth’s voice rises. “When Princess Grace died and they turned off her machines? They never should have done that, because there might have been a miracle. You can’t dismiss the possibility of miracles. And medical science doesn’t know everything. For months I had dreams about those turnips, and I never even saw them! I wasn’t there. But those turnips are clearer in my mind than my own child’s face.”

  The mail carrier chugs up the hill in his jeep. Allison stay
s on the porch, shaded by the volunteer peach tree that sprang up at the corner of the porch—probably grown from a seed somebody spit out once—until the jeep is gone. Then she dashes down to the mailbox.

  “Didn’t you hear from your boyfriend, hon?” Ruth asks when Allison returns.

  “No.” She has a circular and a sporting-goods catalogue, with guns and dogs on the front. She drops the mail on the table and plops down in the porch swing.

  “Why don’t you write him a letter?” Ruth asks.

  “I wrote him once and he didn’t answer. He told me he’d write me.”

  “Maybe he’s busy working,” Ruth says kindly. “If he’s working construction, then he’s out in the hot sun all day and he probably doesn’t feel like writing a letter. Time flies in the summer.” Ruth fans herself with the circular. “He’s not the only fish in the sea, though, Allison. Plenty of boys out there can see what a pretty girl you are. The sweetest girl!” She pats Allison’s knee.

  Barbara sees the three of them, on the porch on that hillside, as though they are in a painting: Allison in shorts, her shins scratched by stubble in the field, smoking defiantly with a vacant gaze on her face and one hand on the head of the dog (the dog, panting and grinning, its spots the color of ruined meat); Ruth in the center of the arrangement, her hair falling from its bobby pins, saying something absurdly cheerful about something she thinks is beautiful, such as a family picture in a magazine; and Barbara a little off to the side, her rough hands showing dirt under the fingernails, and her coarse hair creeping out from under the feed cap she wears. (Her hair won’t hold curl, because she perspires so much out in the sun.) Barbara sees herself in her garden, standing against her hoe handle like a scarecrow at the mercy of the breezes that barrel over the ridge.

  In the afternoon, Barbara and Ruth are working a side dressing of compost into the soil around the fruit trees. The ground is so hard that Barbara has to chop at the dirt. The apricot is the only tree in the orchard with fruit, and some of the apricots are beginning to blush with yellow. But the apple leaves are turning brown. Caterpillars have shrouded themselves in the outermost leaves and metamorphosed already into moths.