by Silas House
Nell was in her usual place, sitting on the glider, smoking and reading Angle of Repose, with which she was obsessed. Only the day before, she and Mom had driven away in Mom’s Cougar and had been gone the entire day under mysterious circumstances. Mom had said they went to the Piggly Wiggly, yet they brought back no groceries. So I figured Mom had gone to the doctor with Nell for a checkup on her cancer. I had been so frantic that I had almost spilled the secret to Josie. I didn’t know why I didn’t tell her, but somehow it felt wrong. She probably already knew, anyway. She and Nell sat up every night whispering and giggling, and it was a constant source of disappointment to me that our bedroom walls were so thick that I couldn’t hear their conversations.
Nell was silent and reading when Mom came out from washing the breakfast dishes, and I was in the perfect spot to listen to them.
“Morning,” Mom said, and her voice sounded like rocks being scraped together.
“Loretta, you’ve got to go to the doctor. Listen at you. Your voice box might be shattered or something.”
Dust puffed into my eyes when my mother plopped into the chair just over my face. “It’s fine,” she scratched.
“And Stanton needs to go to the doctor, too. You know he does, now.”
Silence. Apparently my mother was giving a firm shake of the head to let Nell know that she didn’t agree because Nell spat out her words rat-a-tat-tat after that, afraid she would be cut off before she could say all she wanted. “It’s a stress disorder, Loretta. From the war. I heard about it all the time up there in DC. A friend of mine worked at the Veterans Administration.” I could almost feel the frustration sizzling on the air between them, could imagine my mother’s steely gaze. “Why are you so damn stubborn?” Nell cried out. “What’s wrong with him going to the doctor?”
“People are always saying how Vietnam vets are crazy. He’s not.” She coughed these last words out. I pictured her holding her throat as she spoke, kneading out her sentences one by one.
“For God’s sake, nobody’s saying he’s crazy. He needs some help. He’s been carrying that war around with him all these years, and nobody is going to help him unless he asks for it and —”
“Nell, I love you just like my sister,” Mom said, and cleared her throat long enough to speak clear for a few words. “But you don’t have any right to say anything to him about the war. I’ve forgiven all that stuff that happened back then, but still —”
I could hear the disbelief in Nell’s voice. “Are you out of your mind, Loretta? Forgiven me? What was there to forgive? You agreed with me back then. That war wasn’t right, and you know it as well as I do.”
“Nell —”
“And you know that I never did anything but fight to get the soldiers out of there. I never called anybody a baby-killer. Because that happened to him, he groups all the protesters with those dumb-asses who said that to him in Boston. I was for the soldiers.”
“A lot of people weren’t, though, Nell. You know that as well as I do.”
“But that wasn’t me, Loretta.”
“There were two sides in all that — the protesters and the soldiers,” Mom said. She was still scratchy-voiced, but at least she could say more than a few words in a row. Still, I could hear the frustration in her mouth; she wasn’t able to say all she wanted because her voice wouldn’t allow it. “You can’t be on both sides.”
“It’s not about sides,” Nell countered.
Another daddy longlegs marched across my mouth and was gone before I could move to sweep him away. Above me there was a long silence. I thought for a moment that my aunt and mother might have disappeared into thin air.
Finally, my mother said, in a voice choked full of grief, “I don’t know. All I do know is that he went over to fight for his country, then he found himself fighting for his own life. And you think it’s all so simple. That’s what has always bothered me about it all, how people think it’s so simple and it’s not, Nell.”
“I know that,” she said, quiet. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. I’ve never thought it was simple.”
“That’s the problem, that people want it all to be simple,” Mom said, as if she wasn’t even listening to Nell now. “And then everybody just misunderstands everyone else, and instead of trying to understand each other, we all just go to war in one way or another.”
I was aware of Nell moving — the screech of the glider as she did so was the giveaway — and then sounds as if they were hugging. My mother might have been crying; I couldn’t really tell. Even so, I pictured Nell comforting her, taking her hands and wiping my mother’s face, then cupping Mom’s chin between two fingers and forcing her to look up.
“All of the world’s biggest problems boil down to misunderstandings, then, don’t they?” Nell asked.
My mother let out a jagged, hoarse laugh. Her voice was getting worse, being erased by each word she spoke. “It can’t be that easy to explain, can it?”
“Sometimes it is,” Nell said, her voice distant.
I could hear bare feet on the floor but nothing else. After a time I realized that my mother — unable to argue properly because of her voice — had walked away and left Nell without another word. I lay very still for a time and then heard the click of Nell’s Zippo and a loud, aggravated exhalation of smoke. Then a page of her book was turned with a rough, aggravated hand.
Just as I was about to sneak out from under the porch and go about my bike riding, I heard feet shuffling on the kitchen floor and then my mother’s torn-paper voice: “He couldn’t help it, when he did this to me. That’s all I’m saying.” She must have twirled and left the doorway because Nell didn’t say a word.
Edie was much too defiant to be as forgiving as my mother. She didn’t speak to me for more than a week, which seemed like ages and ages. I walked around as if wounded in the gut, lost without her. She was the first person I wanted to talk to after Daddy’s fit, but I couldn’t run to her bedroom window and tap on the frame because I knew she would only part the blinds with two fingers and then let them snap back together. There was no use in trying to get her to talk to me because I knew she wouldn’t do it until she was ready.
She might never have forgiven me if she hadn’t been forced to seek peace at my house that night.
Nell and I had decided to sleep out on the screen porch, as it was unbearably hot. The little air conditioner in the living room had run so hard and long that it had finally frozen up, so Daddy just snapped it off for good, opened all the windows, and turned on the three box fans we owned. I spent a great deal of my time sitting in front of one fan, saying long, complicated sentences that the fan blades would distort and chop into syllables that didn’t exist. I was on the camping cot because Nell opted to sleep on a little pallet she had made on the floor. I had been raised well enough to protest, knowing that my elder should get the cot while I took the floor, but she said sleeping on the wood planks would help her back.
For a long while I sat up in my cot and wrote in my composition book. I had decided to write a short story about the little fox that I believed to live up on the ridge. I had never seen him, really, but I had felt him. I was trying out first lines of the story but wasn’t getting much past that because Nell kept interrupting my thoughts. She was still reading her thick book and had to pause occasionally to read me a line or a passage she liked. Some of them I didn’t understand, others I did, but to each I just gave a short “Mmm-hmm” so I could get back to my own writing.
We both lay down and were silent, listening to the katydids, cicadas, crickets, frogs, and other creatures that we could not name. I liked the cicadas best. They sounded ancient. The moon drifted behind a moving black sky streaked with silver clouds, only giving occasional light to us.
After a time, Nell finally said, “Sometimes I wonder why I ever left this place. Ran off to New York and DC and Atlanta and just all over hell and back. What was I thinking?”
“I want to go live in New York City someday,” I said.
“I don’t think I’ll go to college.”
“Oh, yes, you will, buddy. Your mother will make sure of that.”
“You didn’t.”
“And I regret it now.”
“You didn’t come home after a year,” I said. I was in a challenging mood and didn’t know why.
“And I regret that, too,” she said, her voice changing as she rolled over onto her side. I stared at the shadows on the porch ceiling. “Sometimes I do. But I wouldn’t change my life.”
“Did you get fired from your job in Washington?” I had been dying to ask her this for a long time. She had worked for some kind of civil rights department, editing its magazine. Matt had once told me that he overheard his parents saying that Nell worked for a Communist newspaper, but when I asked her about that, she had said Matt and his folks were idiots.
“No, I quit.” I could hear her fumbling around on the floor, then the crack of her Zippo, and for a moment her face blazed up orange as she lit her cigarette. I hadn’t realized how close she lay beside my cot. “I wanted to come home awhile.”
“You missed us all too bad?” I asked, knowing that she had come home because she was sick. I guess I wanted her to say that she needed us during her time of trouble.
“Well, yeah, of course I did,” she said, then for a long moment I was aware of her collecting her thoughts. It is strange how our senses become in the dark. I knew for certain that she was thinking, preparing what she would say next, just as I had been certain that she was still awake while we had lain there listening to the night sounds. “But I missed the trees, too.”
“They have trees in Washington, though.”
She exhaled smoke loudly. “But there’s not a tree in the world like the ones you grow up with. You never forget them, and the trees remember you.”
It seemed to me that every time I had a conversation with Nell I had another reason to worship her. I knew that my father felt as if she had betrayed him during the war, and a small part of me held that against her, but her whole being usually kept that pulsing doubt about her at bay. Besides, my loyalties to him grew weaker every summer day. I sat up on one elbow, looking down to the red dot of her cigarette. “If I tell you something, will you keep it secret?”
“You know I will.”
“I can hear the trees. If I put my hand up to them, and concentrate? They talk to me.”
“What do they say?” She was completely serious, not mocking or making fun of me the way many people might have replied to my confession.
“Well, it’s not like words, really. It’s more like a feeling, like they’re speaking to me. I don’t know; it’s hard to explain. Seems like they’re always saying, over and over, ‘I am here.’ But at the same time, I never really hear those words, but I know that’s what they’re saying.”
She was silent. There were only the cicadas and crickets, a little breeze that slithered through the valley and set the chimes to ringing out a bit.
“Do you think I’m crazy?” Sometimes I thought I might be.
She sat up and just enough moonlight fell on her that I could see her face, but her eyes were lost to the shadows. “No,” she said. “I think you’re one of the best people I’ve ever known in my life, Eli.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because you pay attention. Most people don’t.”
“You hear them, too, then?” I didn’t know why I was whispering.
She put out her cigarette and lay back down. I imagined that she had brought her hands behind her head, staring up at the darkness between us and the ceiling. A short, thinking pause. “Well, yeah, I guess I do. But I never realized it before you said that, before you explained it. That’s exactly how it feels, though, to lay your hands on certain trees.”
A great crack broke the night in two, causing the insects to momentarily quiet down but not completely stop. Nell and I both shot up in our beds before we realized it had only been the slam of a screen door, so close that it could only be Edie’s. And by the time we had collected this information for ourselves, someone was tugging at our own screen door, which I had latched against the outside.
“Eli?” Edie said, her voice full of hurt. “Are you there?”
“It’s me,” I said, so happy to hear her say my name again. I scrambled across my cot to unlatch the door for her. Nell slipped her hand inside the kitchen door to turn on the porch light, and we were bathed in its yellow glow.
Edie was not one to fall against me, sobbing, but her gathered brow showed that she wanted to. She was too stubborn to cry, but it was clear that something was wrong. It seemed to me that she had completely grown up in the week we had been apart. She knew things that I did not, and her face made this clear.
“What is it?”
“I just don’t want to be in that house with him,” she said, and looked at the floor, embarrassed.
Nell did not move from her place by the door. “Did he do something to you?”
“No,” Edie said, her big eyes touching Nell’s. “He’s passed out drunk. I just can’t stand to be in there with him like that.”
Nell came forward and leaned over to put her hands on Edie’s shoulders. “Well, I’ll just make you a pallet here beside me and everything will be all right. He’s just going through a hard time right now.”
“He must not care that I’m having a hard time with this, too, then,” she said. “He can get drunk, but what am I supposed to do?”
Nell held Edie against her, and Edie brought her hands around Nell’s waist with hesitation. She looked at me briefly, ashamed, but then she closed her eyes. “Is Loretta here?” she asked, her voice muffled against the extra-long T-shirt Nell wore as a nightgown.
Nell stepped back and looked down at her, realizing that Edie needed a mother right now but that Nell herself would not do. Nell wasn’t insulted by this, though. She understood instantly. “I’ll go get her up,” she said.
And then it was just me and Edie there on the porch while Nell went to get Mom. There were the crickets and frogs growing louder around us. She looked at the floor and I looked at her.
“Edie, I’m —”
“Don’t say anything, okay? Just forget it. I know.” She looked completely alone in the world.
I hadn’t been about to apologize because I believed that what I had said to her was unforgivable anyway. But I had wanted to say something. I sometimes wonder what words my mouth was going to conjure up in that moment.
My mother came out, looking prettier than I had ever seen her. Her hair was mashed flat in the back and her eyes were sleepy, but she nearly glowed, her skin a deep peach in the porch light. The bruises at her neck shone in the stark light of the yellow bulb. She had put on her summer housecoat and was still snapping the little pearl buttons when she came out the door with Nell close behind.
“Oh, baby,” she said, and gathered Edie up in her arms. That’s when Edie finally started crying. She hid her face from me within the folds of my mother’s silky housecoat, but I could tell by her drawn-up shoulders. Now I had seen the grief of the two strongest people I knew. And somehow, Daddy’s and Edie’s crying made them seem even stronger to me. It was better to cry than to suck it up and go around conjuring hate in your heart. That’s what I had overheard Nell saying about Daddy. Mom directed Edie toward the house and whispered to her as she went through the door. “You come in here and get in Eli’s bed. I’ll lie down with you until you get to sleep, okay?” And then they were lost to the shadows of the kitchen and Mom’s voice trailed off down the hallway.
Nell sat down on the glider and lit another cigarette. She crossed her legs at the ankle and looked down at her toes. “I swear to God, I just don’t understand that girl’s daddy,” she said. “Is she invisible to him?”
“I’m going to check on he
r,” I said, and hurried into the house before Nell could protest. I moved on into the shadowy kitchen and down the hall on quiet feet. Mom had closed my bedroom door, but a rectangle of yellow showed around its frame from the light within. I put my ear against the cool wood of the door and listened.
“I miss her,” Edie said in a low, choked voice. I imagined her sitting up in the bed, her hands to her face.
“The best thing to do is keep on missing her, honey. Until it finally dulls itself out,” Mom said. “I never even had a mother. Did you know that?”
Apparently Edie nodded.
“Not that I remember at all, I mean. I grew up in an orphanage. It wasn’t until I met Nell that I knew what a family really was. She introduced me to Stanton and her mother, and all at once I had a family of my own.”
Edie was silent, perhaps responding only with a look on her face. There was really no other way for her to reply to all of this information, though. Adults seldom spoke so honestly to children.
“Sometimes you get dealt the wrong hand and you have to find yourself a family, create one for yourself,” my mother said, speaking from experience. “So when you feel alone, you can know you have us, for one. All right? We’ll always be your family.”
Edie must have given a feeble nod.
“The best thing for you to do is to just keep crying, Edie. I hate to tell you that, but that’s the only thing that really works. Because one day — just out of nowhere — you’ll realize that you’re sick of crying over her. And in the meantime, all of us are here if you need us.”
Edie started to say something else — what was probably going to be the best part of this whole conversation — when a hand twirled me around. Nell was leaned over and her face was very close to mine. “Eli, don’t,” she breathed into my face. She grabbed hold of my wrist and pulled me down the hallway.
Once she had shoved me back out onto the dark porch — now spotted with moonlight — she sat down on her pallet and kicked at the covers with her feet, looking up at me with fretted eyebrows. “Sometimes eavesdropping is just not cool, Eli. That was wrong of you, to listen in on Edie like that.”
