by Abi Maxwell
If you can, please tell your mother I love her.
Love, Jennifer
Malcolm,
There are dogs here that are big and fluffy. They are not allowed inside the house. Instead their job is to sleep all day and then circle the property at night to guard the livestock. They bark through the whole night, but it does not bother me. Do you know how it is to sleep close to our lake, and listen to the waves against the shore? It feels like that. But last night I woke up to the most terrible sounds. At first I thought it was my own screaming. But when I sat up I knew that the sounds were of something dying. And then I fell right back to sleep. Isn’t that strange? I keep thinking of it. I sat up, I knew that something was dying, and I lay back down. It’s cold here at night, and I keep afire in the woodstove. All the heat drifts to the loft, and I get so hot.
When I woke up I remembered what I had heard and I looked out the window. In the meadow there was one of the dogs. She stayed there all day. Sleeping by her kill, the landladies told me. A deer had crossed into the meadow and headed for the barn, and that dog had killed her.
I think of death a lot here. In the barn I have to open the hatch on the second floor to throw hay down to the goats, and I always imagine myself falling through the hatch and breaking my neck. There are two sows here that are huge and pregnant, and when I climb into their pen with the pitchfork to muck it out, I see myself tackled and eaten. It could happen easily enough.
The truth is that I keep hoping for a letter from you. You can give my address to your mother if you want. You can show her the letters if you want. Forgive me for my mistakes.
Love, Jennifer
The first freeze of the year had come a few weeks ago, and now, in the evening sunlight, the moss on the rocks sparkled with a wet cold. Malcolm walked slowly through the cemetery before heading to the grocery store. Karl’s ashes, Malcolm knew, were still in a box in his mother’s bedroom. The name was typed and pasted to the top of the box: KARL OTTO WICKHOLM. Upon this box Sophie kept a pile of fresh laundry, a way to spare her husband. Malcolm hadn’t said anything, but he wanted a stone put here, in the Kettleborough graveyard, for his brother. In fact, he pretended that one old grave that no longer showed a name or a date was his brother’s. That stone had been placed flatly into the ground, and its edges were now soft and deep in the moss and grass. Malcolm had taken to speaking to it. “At school they feel bad for me but they are afraid to talk to me,” he said. “I would say they like me a little more but a little less since you died.” And once, quietly, “Mother seems to have gone a bit mad.” Today Malcolm told Karl of the letters from Jennifer, all of which his mother had now given him. But Malcolm didn’t say what he really wanted to say: Tell me now that you left this earth before your baby was deposited into the boathouse. Tell me that had you lived, she would not have been in a canoe on the cold fall water. Malcolm didn’t say that. But he wouldn’t write back to Jennifer, either. What she had done, no. Malcolm would have no part of her.
From the edge of the woods he tore off three branches that had given birth to bright red berries. He surrounded them with gone-by golden ferns, a sort of bouquet, and he placed it atop the grave.
Passing Clara and Paul’s, Malcolm decided to stop in and see if they didn’t need anything. From the front step he could hear the baby wailing. He knocked and knocked and when no one came he opened the door and stuck his head in.
Paul held screaming Alice in his arms. Malcolm had never heard her cry so hard.
“It’s not a good time for a visit,” Paul told him, but Malcolm didn’t budge. “Malcolm,” Paul snapped. “Shut the door and be gone.”
Where was Clara? “Higher,” Malcolm said through Alice’s wails.
“Excuse me?”
Malcolm pushed the door wider and walked right in, his arms held out for the baby. Paul backed up and told him again to leave, but Malcolm kept reaching for the child, and when Alice’s cries got so loud and so fierce that Malcolm worried she would choke, finally he shouted, “For God’s sake, lift her higher over your shoulder!”
“Out,” Paul said steadily. “You get out of this house.”
Malcolm had tears now, too.
“Don’t you ever come here again,” Paul said. He put his hand on Malcolm’s shoulder and began to shove him toward the door.
Malcolm didn’t fight back, but he did yell as he was pushed through the house. The words came out quickly and repeatedly, and it wasn’t until he was back in the fall air that he realized just what he was saying, and how awful it was. “That baby belongs to me, that is my brother’s baby, that baby belongs to me, that is my brother’s baby,” over and over again.
“Never come back,” Paul said.
The door shut and the secret was out and Malcolm looked up to the sky and thought, Dear God, help my mother, for the indecency is upon us.
In town Malcolm was standing at the grocery store with his hand wrapped around the doorknob, unsure if he was ready to see anyone, when he heard his name called.
“Father,” he said desperately, for it had sounded like him, and Otto’s store was right next door, and how Malcolm had wanted to go in there and sit down and be loved, but he had been ashamed of his own tears. Now, thankfully, here his father was.
“Malcolm,” the man repeated. Malcolm looked up and his face reddened. Not his father at all. Still, this man placed a hand upon the boy’s head and gave his hair a tousle. In his adulthood Malcolm would realize that at that time, the man could not have been much more than twenty years old, but now, standing on Main Street in the fall wind, Malcolm believed the man to be weathered with age, and wise. Mike Shaw, his father’s boathouse tenant.
“I heard you like babies.”
“Sorry?”
“Babies?”
Malcolm shrugged.
“Clara Thorton. She says you got a way with the little shits.”
“I’ve got to get a turkey for my mother.”
“Woods got turkeys,” the man said.
“Yes. There’s a whole family of them at my house. Thirty, my mother watches and keeps track.”
“You wants a turkey you shoots a turkey,” the man said. Slowly he removed a bag of tobacco from his back pocket and opened its flap. Inside he already had a few cigarettes rolled. He took one out and put it to his lips. Then the man turned and unbuttoned his top button and lifted the loose slack of his shirt to his face to block the wind and in one try, using only one hand, he lit the match to light the cigarette. Even to Malcolm there was something attractive in these easy movements.
“Turkey got your tongue?” Mike Shaw asked. The cigarettes were without a filter and on the tip of his own tongue there lay a shred of tobacco. He pursed his lips and pointed his tongue and gave a little blow and that took care of it. “Old enough to smoke?” he asked the boy.
“I’ve got to get my mother a turkey.”
“Ain’t nothing a woman likes more than fresh hunted meat, believe you me. Come over, why don’t you.”
“I couldn’t.”
“I’ve got a baby and I need your help. My woman’s in a mood and it’s aimed straight at me. Heard you’re the one to look for, so come over. I’ll teach you how to get yourself a turkey.”
“I’d like to buy my turkey.”
“Go ahead in there then. I’ll wait right here. Tell you now they don’t got one, you got to order them ahead, don’t you know that? Your mother knows that. Go in and come back out and then we’ll see if you trust me.”
Malcolm went in. He looked in the freezer and he kept looking and finally Mr. Potter asked if he couldn’t help and Malcolm found out that Mike Shaw was right, you’ve got to order them ahead.
“What else goes in a Thanksgiving dinner?” he asked Mr. Potter.
“Potato, squash, don’t your mother grow that?”
“My mother keeps flowers mostly.”
“You know what a lady likes? Cornstalks, a little decoration. I got a barrel of them a dime a piece but I’ll give you two
for free.”
“All right,” Malcolm said. He left the store with one big squash and two cornstalks and outside Mike Shaw told him that it did not look like his Thanksgiving dinner would turn out to be much, which made Malcolm want to sob right there on the street.
They rode silently in Mike Shaw’s truck. It was only a minute or two anyway. When they pulled up in front of the boathouse Mike leaned over and opened the glove box and took out a map and told Malcolm to go up and meet the missus, but Malcolm just sat there. Mike Shaw got out and unfolded the map and spread it upon the hood of the truck. The woman came out onto the high porch then, and from the way she stood with her hand placed gently at the base of her stomach, Malcolm felt sure that she was pregnant again.
“Go on,” Mike Shaw said, and pointed his chin quickly upward, toward the porch, then let it fall slowly back into place. To Malcolm that was such a sure and firm motion, and in the coming weeks he would practice it in front of the mirror.
“I don’t remember her name.”
“She don’t know what’s right for a man, Malcolm. Go on up and fix her. Take the baby. Make her smile.” He set the map on the dirt driveway and placed a rock over it so it wouldn’t blow away, and then he punched the hood of the truck to make it open. “June,” he said. “June’s her name.”
When Malcolm approached the staircase she had already gone inside and the baby had begun to cry. He hadn’t spoken with these tenants before and his father had told him expressly not to. At the door Malcolm stood for some time, and when he looked down to Mike Shaw, the man pointed his chin again to say to just go in. Malcolm pushed the door open and called softly, “Sorry.”
“Well come in or come out,” the woman said.
The room was a flood of yellow—yellow linoleum floor and yellow countertops and one yellow metal table with two yellow metal chairs. The color was broken only by one wall lined with skis and trophies and medals. Malcolm stood in the doorway and gazed toward that wall. Karl had been a skier. He would have liked to know that the man who rented out their father’s boathouse apartment was the very same man who won every single race at the ski area.
The woman cleared her throat and Malcolm looked at her. “Sorry,” he said again.
“Shut the door behind you.”
“I’m Malcolm,” he said.
“I know who you are.”
Suddenly the baby wailed. There was an old, worn curtain patterned with cartoon racecars that hung from a doorway off the big room, and Malcolm could tell the boy was in there. The woman’s face was so red and so taut that he could see her veins.
“May I?” he dared. He was already across the room, had already lifted the curtain. Now he put his hands on that body, and there, Malcolm felt good once more. The life and sweetness of it filled him right up. He pulled the baby to his shoulder, and didn’t this one smell just like his brother’s? Yes, this one was just as good. There now, yes. You’re okay.
“Tea?” the woman said.
Malcolm shook his head.
“Coffee?”
“No thank you.”
“Well sit down why don’t you.”
With the baby in his arms Malcolm sat down at the table. This was the first apartment he had ever been in. It was in a cove—there was no vision of the open water from here—but still the view lifted Malcolm up in some real way. The front of the building was lined with windows and if Malcolm were to walk out of them he would fall and land straight in the water.
“He’s not even my husband,” the woman said as she handed Malcolm a bottle. “People in this town think we’re married but he wouldn’t have me. Do you think that’s terrible?”
“There,” Malcolm said, and rubbed at the baby’s cheek. “There now.”
Mike heard that. He had come up the stairs and now he came fully into the room. His footsteps made the floor tremble. “So you’ve got a way with the shits,” he said. “June ain’t got that.”
June rose and Mike Shaw took her seat and spread his legs and untucked his shirt. “She’s got another bun in the oven and she’ll need your help, June will.” June was at the window now, looking out to the lake. “A deal,” Mike Shaw said. “Malcolm, let’s us men talk outside.”
The deal was that Malcolm would come in and check on June each day after school while Mike Shaw went out west to make a real go at being a ski racer. Malcolm was to play a game with June, see that the baby, Todd, quieted and she had her rest. See that she didn’t get into any funny business.
“Do you know what that means?”
“Indecency with a man,” Malcolm said quickly.
Mike Shaw hooted at that, and gave Malcolm’s back a tap so hard that the boy keeled forward. When he came back to, Mike Shaw said, “Out west, Malcolm. Open road, open land. A man needs his freedom, you understand. You like babies now but you’ll be a man one day.”
Malcolm said yes and asked only, “How long?”
Mike Shaw said, “Nope.”
That gave Malcolm courage. Or a kind of anger that he had not felt before and that certainly disguised itself as courage. He asked how Mike Shaw would hold up his end of the deal.
Mike Shaw clapped his hands together and gave a little laugh, and then, seeing the boy was serious, he said, “Anything you like.”
To care for his mother, to be a man, that is what Malcolm would like. He said, “A gun. I would like a gun and I would like to learn how to shoot it.”
“Well then,” Mike Shaw said.
They shot off the dock, with Malcolm saying a silent apology and prayer about the noise and the danger of it. It was a rifle and the first shot made him buckle back and fall into Mike Shaw’s firm body and Mike Shaw said, “There we go. Now you can protect my woman.” Next shot he told Malcolm to kneel down so he didn’t fall again.
“I am not a child,” Malcolm said, and he shot the gun and did not waver and next he said, “I would like to take it home with me.”
“Your gun,” Mike Shaw said.
“You cannot expect me to carry a gun through town.” Where had his bravery come from? Malcolm could feel it, a slow boil in his chest.
“Well then,” Mike Shaw said, his voice lofty, a way to put an end to the child’s demands. Still, he went to his truck and found the boy a duffel bag, which fit nearly the whole gun into it, along with the squash and cornstalks. It would do.
“Look,” June said when they returned inside. She was at the window and Malcolm went to her just as a loon made its dive under. “Guess where it will come up,” she said.
Malcolm pointed and together they counted and in forty-eight seconds the loon rose just where he had said it would. Mike Shaw tapped the boy on the back and the boy slung the bag over his shoulder and it was the last Malcolm would see of him for years and years to come.
In his mind, things had been much different. Perhaps the turkeys will emerge sometime before Thanksgiving, he thought once, but the thought was fleeting. Mostly Malcolm thought that sometime in the future he could learn to hunt. First he would put the gun in the woodshed, where Sophie would not find it. Slowly Malcolm would grow accustomed to the weapon. He would carry it in the woods. The Randolph boys, they must know how to hunt, and Malcolm rather quickly imagined asking those boys to teach him. With this skill, oh, how he could impress his father. Perhaps even teach his father. Shooting a turkey for this holiday was not something Malcolm had expected to do.
The lane of old maples stopped just as the hill crested and the land spread open and the two houses—Malcolm’s own and the Randolphs’—came into view. The Randolphs’ house lay to the west and Malcolm’s tall white colonial just twenty steps above. To stop and simply watch the sweep of the land—Malcolm was not accustomed to that, but now he did it and it felt the sort of thing a man would do. Standing in that way he decided that his house was beautiful, strong and solid, and that it looked like it had come from the time of the revolution. Instinctively he began to march his feet. Inside he hummed. The wind swept from the north, up through the l
ane of trees. Malcolm turned. There the biggest of all the turkeys stood perched on the stone wall. The gun was loaded. Without thought or complication Malcolm took the gun from the bag, aimed, and shot. The turkey’s chest rose outward like a balloon and then sank in a series of convulsions. The flutter of her family behind her was loud and quick. Now, alone, that great big turkey lay. From where he stood he could see a small red stream emerge. Was it a leaf? Yes, surely a red maple leaf. No blood, not even a trickle, Malcolm told himself. I did not shoot that animal. But already Malcolm could sense that never again would those turkeys return. Slowly he put the gun back in the duffel. He walked to the dead being and picked it up by its neck, then brought it in close to his body. It was warm against his chest and for a moment he believed he could call it back to life. “Forgive me,” he whispered. He put his nose into the animal. It smelled of deep, untouched forest. He held his breath so as not to cry. As he walked toward his house, Mrs. Randolph stood and moved her head in a slow, womanly way. It was not a message of approval.
Sophie was inside, at the kitchen sink, that old cookbook Hjalmar had given her all those years ago open beside her. She had meant to choose something to cook for her son but had gotten caught up watching those turkeys instead. When the largest fell, Sophie squeezed the glass in her hand until it splintered into pieces.
“Mother,” Malcolm said when he found her. He had left the dead turkey in the woodshed. He had forfeited his own wool jacket for the bird, wrapped her up in it and placed her on top of the woodpile. Now his mother’s own blood painted the dishwater that filled the sink. He reached for her hand but she pulled it back. It was clear that a piece of glass was lodged deep in her finger. “Mother,” Malcolm said again. “We’ve got to get you to the doctor.”
“Call Signe,” Sophie said. Once more when he reached for her she flinched. “Don’t you come near me. Call Aunt Signe and don’t you ever come near me.”
