by Tom Drury
“We have lots of trails,” said Carol.
Mary and Louise walked a curving cinder path to the point where it forked, and said good night. Louise’s cabin was stone, and had a soft blue light above the door, which was painted red with six panes of glass near the top. Louise ran her hand along the rough cool walls and went inside. Fireplaces built of sandstone blocks stood at either end of a big open room. There were bookcases and window seats with linen pillows. Above one fireplace was a deer head mounted on a wooden shield. The ceiling was made of wide boards resting on rough rounded logs. Louise hung her shoulder bag on a hat rack made of deer feet. She washed her face and brushed her teeth. Carol wrote poetry for the local newspaper, and taped to the inside of the medicine cabinet was one of her pieces, called “May Day,” which went,
Workers rejoice ‘round the world;
In U.S., baskets for the girls!
Which way better?
Sure don’t know—
It is interesting,
Though!
The bed did not utilize any deer parts, and the sheets were stiff and cool on her feet. She thought about Mary and Carol, and how they did not always get along. Louise thought they had got more antagonistic in recent years, but it may have been that she was noticing it more. The turning point, Louise thought, had been the tablecloth Carol sent Mary for her sixtieth birthday. It was a white embroidered tablecloth. Mary said it was beautiful and that the pattern reminded her of some blue napkins she used to have. Louise thought nothing of this, but in several days Mary called and asked her to come over. She had dyed the tablecloth blue, or tried to, and cut it into jagged pieces.
“What should I do?” said Mary.
“What did you do?” said Louise.
“I don’t know what to tell Carol.”
Louise examined the remnants of the tablecloth. “Just say you purposely destroyed the tablecloth she gave you.”
“It was not on purpose,” said Mary.
“Well, you didn’t leave much doubt,” said Louise.
“To color something is not to destroy it,” said Mary. “People color things every day. The dye must be defective. I should go to the store and demand my money back.”
“You are amazing.”
“It could be something wrong with the fabric,” said Mary.
“Don’t say anything to Carol,” said Louise.
But for some reason she did. When Carol and Kenneth came down that Thanksgiving, Mary brought out the blue squares and laid them on the table. “What do you make of this?” she asked Carol.
“Your whole life, no one has been able to trust you with good things,” said Carol. “That’s what everyone used to say. ‘Don’t give Mary anything you value.’ Why do you think I got an ample trousseau when Kenneth and I were married, and you and Dwight got a shoe tree? A shoe tree! Did you ever stop and consider why that might be?”
“A shoe tree is not all we got,” said Mary.
“You got a shoe tree,” said Carol.
“You know damned well we got some beautiful porcelain,” said Mary.
Of course, the two sisters were capable of friendship. They enjoyed playing cards and trying to remember what had happened to people they knew from the old Grafton School in the forties, before the war took away the boys.
“Guess who I saw the other day,” Mary would say.
“Who?”
“Bobby Bledsoe.”
“Didn’t he play baseball with Dwight?”
“Yes, he did. Every town had a team back then.”
“Not Boris.”
“Well, not every town.”
“Didn’t Dwight and Bobby get arrested?”
“They got arrested in Davenport.”
“What was that about?”
“They would never say.”
“Bobby Bledsoe …”
“Now, do you remember Nick Bledsoe? You remember Bobby. What about Nick?”
“Yes! Poor Nick had braces on his legs.”
“That’s right. Bobby was a good ballplayer and Nick had the braces.”
“I liked Nick better than I did Bobby.”
“Bobby was all show.”
“But not Nick. Nick was kind.”
“Nick would do good deeds without seeking recognition.”
“I wonder what happened to Nick.”
The next morning Louise woke early and went outside in her robe. The grass was cold and wet on her feet as she walked down behind the cabin to a stream that must have run to the lake. Moss covered the banks, and a bridge made of rope and boards crossed the stream not far above the water and the round stones in the streambed. Louise walked onto the bridge and lay face down with her forehead resting on her fists. Between the boards of the bridge she could see the water coursing over the worn-down stones.
The sun came through the trees and belled on the water. Louise lay there shivering in her robe. She could hear the rushing sound of the water and the sound of her own breath, which rose as steam past her ears. Her breasts felt large and unfamiliar against the wooden slats. She wondered if they would ever go back to their former size. She felt or imagined a pull between the water in the stream and the water in herself. She considered how it is taken for granted that water gets to go wherever it wants. Sometimes water got in the basement of the farmhouse, and she and Dan once had to have the fire department pump it. “How can we keep it out?” she had asked Howard LaMott. “Oh, it’s going to get in,” he said. Now a dragonfly hovered under the bridge. She saw momentarily the blue wires of its wings. Then it was gone.
She got up and went inside. From her suitcase she took the blood–pressure cuff and stethoscope that she had brought along on the advice of Beth Pickett. She hooked the stethoscope in her ears, fastened the cuff around her upper left arm, placed the black bulb in her left hand, pumped the cuff up to one hundred and sixty, and slowly let the pressure escape. Where the thumping began in her ears was the high number, where it stopped the low. Later, she lay on the unmade bed and chose a thin green book from the nightstand. The book, called The Assurance of Immortality, was published in 1924 and written by a man named Harry Emerson Fosdick. She opened the book and read this: “A traveller in Switzerland tells us that, uncertain of his way, he asked a small lad by the roadside where Kandersteg was, and received, so he remarks, the most significant answer that was ever given him. ‘I do not know, sir,’ said the boy, ‘where Kandersteg is, but there is the road to it.’”
On the second day of her vacation Louise found a pair of hip boots in the closet of her cabin, and on the third day she put them on and walked up the stream. The cold water pressed against the rubber of the hip boots, and the rocky area near the bridge gave way to smooth sand where the stream widened. Clouds moved fast across the sun; the light and the shade swept across her path in alternating bands. A muskrat dived into the water, and a stranded orange traffic cone had washed down from somewhere. She waded awkwardly to the bank and stood there crying for a half hour. Her tears fell into the stream. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand, and washed her hands in the water.
When she got back, Carol and Mary were waiting to take her fishing. Carol suspected that the bandfish were still in the lake, but grouped together as if preparing for a counterattack from the other fish they had driven out. So the three women went across the lake in a Boston Whaler and dropped anchor not far from a shady spot under a weeping willow on the far bank. Looking back at the camp, they could see the tiny figure of Kenneth carrying something across the grass.
“Cast at the tree,” said Carol.
“I’m afraid I’ll get tangled in the branches,” said Louise.
“There’s no way,” said Carol. “I’ve put too much lead on the line. You couldn’t reach it if you tried.”
They cast for a long time with no response. There was a light breeze, and swallows dipped over the water.
“How are you, Louise?” said Carol.
“I’m good,” said Louise.
“Mary said
you’ve been waking up early.”
Louise squinted and dropped her lure into the dark water beneath the tree. “Yeah.”
“Well, why don’t you come along on my paper route?” said Carol. “I’d be glad for the company.”
“I don’t think that’s very advisable,” said Mary.
“What time do you go?” said Louise.
“Four o’clock,” said Carol. “It’s a pretty time of day.”
“That might be fun,” said Louise.
“Louise, you just cast right over my line,” said Mary. “All right. Don’t move. Hand me your rod and reel.”
“Where?”
“Hand it to me.”
“You’re not tangled,” said Carol.
“And I’m not going to be,” said Mary.
It was not long before Louise was running Carol’s route on her own. There were seventeen papers every day except Sunday, when there were forty-eight. Carrying a pair of snips in her hip pocket, she picked up the newspapers in the parking lot of a natural-gas substation next to a bean field in the middle of nowhere. She liked the sound when the yellow nylon band that had held the bundle together broke. She would often be there waiting when the guy who brought the papers to the substation arrived. His name was Monroe, and he was a bald man who stood in the back of his truck in a white canvas apron. Sometimes he would ask after Carol. He never seemed to quite understand why Louise was doing the route. That was all right with Louise. “Carol is taking a little vacation,” she would say, smiling up at Monroe, waiting for her papers like someone about to take Communion. Then Monroe would toss the papers out of the truck and they would land with a slap on the pavement.
All the customers lived in the country and had mailboxes, so after picking up the papers and breaking the band, Louise never had to get out of the car. She drove Carol’s old beige Nova, which had a bench seat and an automatic transmission on the column. Carol had demonstrated how to drive and deliver newspapers at the same time. You sat in the center of the seat, left hand on the steering wheel, left foot working the pedals, right hand flipping open the mailboxes and putting the papers in. Louise liked driving this way. She had a much clearer sense of where the car was in relation to the ditch.
For most of the route the sun lit the sky from below the horizon. This light was either white or pale blue, and the trees were black against it. Louise listened to the radio. She had to dial away from the bland and voiceless junk preferred by Carol. She and Carol were destined to fight a war of the frequencies for some time. Louise found a station out of somewhere in Wisconsin that played stark Irish songs about the difficulties of that poor land and its wretched inhabitants.
There was a town to the north of Seldom Lake, and after the papers were delivered Louise drove there for coffee and hash browns. She sometimes went into a consignment shop near the diner to look at the children’s clothing. She found some incredible buys, and she bought a tiny yellow dress, which she hung on a deer hoof back at the cabin. The woman behind the counter was indifferent to what happened in the store and did not seem to notice or care whether Louise bought anything. One day the telephone rang in the shop, and the woman picked it up and listened, then said, “Don’t call me here, Susan. I mean it… I understand that, but not here. Goodbye.” Within seconds the phone rang again. “All right, Susan,” she said. “I’m not joking with you. I am very serious.” Louise edged toward the door, knowing, as anyone would, that the phone would ring again. “This is too much. My God, Susan, it has to stop!”
When Louise got back to the camp, Carol was waiting outside her cabin with a bundle of overalls tied with string. “These are my old ones,” she said. “They haven’t fit me for years, but they should be about right for you. They’ll keep the ink off your clothes now that you’re doing it every day.”
After the two weeks that Mary always stayed, they decided to stay another two weeks. This was what Louise wanted, and Mary said that whatever Louise wanted was fine. Louise knew on some level that her staying away would bother Dan, but she avoided that level by making her letters to him kind of impersonal. They were reports of her days. He called sometimes to find out when she was coming home, but she never gave a definite answer.
Being an older newspaper carrier, Carol also was responsible for supervising the paperboys and papergirls in the towns around Seldom Lake. So one night she asked Louise to come up to the house and help put together the packets for a subscription drive. Each carrier was to receive a manila envelope full of information. They had just started when the telephone rang and Carol went to answer it. Then Mary came in to make a drink, and Louise was working alone in the living room.
“Now what does she have you doing?” said Mary.
Louise explained.
“Well, Jesus Christ,” said Mary.
“What’s wrong with that?” said Louise. She licked an envelope.
“You are here to rest,” said Mary.
“I am putting sheets of paper in envelopes,” said Louise. “What is your problem?”
“I don’t have a problem,” said Mary.
“You sure act like it,” said Louise.
“Well, I guess I am mistaken once again.”
“What is wrong with you?”
“What do you think?” said Mary.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think you’re the only one who’s sad?”
“No, I don’t think that.”
“That baby should be here.”
“I cannot believe you.”
“She should be, Louise.”
“She is mine. Don’t you bring her into this.”
“I think she’s already in this,” said Mary. “I wanted you here because you were sick—not to run a paper route and pretend everything is fine.”
“Oh, I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” said Louise.
Right about this time Carol came back into the room. “Come on,” she said. “That was Kenneth. He’s down at the boathouse. The fish have come back.”
“What fish?” said Mary.
“Hurry,” said Carol. And Louise and Mary were so embarrassed to have been surprised in the middle of their fight that they went along.
The dock system was complicated, and although they could see Kenneth standing out there against the dark water, getting to him was like going through a maze.
Hundreds of fish were swimming just beneath the surface of the water, forming a river of silver in the moonlight.
“What kind of fish are they?” said Louise.
“Northern pike,” said Kenneth.
“I am going home in the morning,” said Mary. “Good night, everyone.”
Louise and her mother had fought before, of course, but they had never really had the ready option of putting hundreds of miles between them. Louise stayed on at Seldom Lake. Her cabin had a gas heater that she began using in September, with the red and yellow leaves batting against the windows. She kept doing the paper route, and ran the subscription drive herself. She handed out all the packets and sat with the carriers in Carol’s car as they looked over the prizes they might try for.
“Let me ask you something,” said one boy with owlish glasses. “Me and this girl were pen pals all summer. So she always signed her letters by saying ‘Love you always,’ and I did the same. But now that we’re back in school she won’t even look my way. Not only do I not think she will love me always, I don’t even think she loves me right now. So I was going to get her a present, and I see that if I get three new subscriptions I win a stuffed dog with an AM/FM radio inside.”
Louise looked at the picture of the dog. “Yes, but can you get three subscriptions by the contest deadline?” she said. “This is a pretty small town, and right in the instructions they say don’t shoot for the moon.”
“I think I can,” said the boy. “But what about that idea? Would you like a dog radio if you were a girl? I mean, you are a girl. Would that sort of thing appeal to you if you were my age?”
“Let�
�s see,” said Louise. Her opinion was that the item shown would probably not be a very good dog or a very good radio. She looked at the paperboy and said, “If I was your age, I would really want this.”
With Louise handling the paper route, Carol had hoped to write more poetry. She had a lot of ideas about autumn. But once the northerns had returned to the lake, so did the customers, and Carol and Kenneth found themselves working from dawn until nine or ten at night to keep the place running. And Louise, being Louise, did what she could to help out.
FIFTEEN
ELECTION SEASON came to Grouse County, bringing unusual weather. The leaves hardly changed color and fell abruptly, almost overnight. Miles Hagen, the Republican candidate for sheriff, ran his usual campaign, with no chance of winning, no desire to win, and no particular platform beyond advocating the construction of a new jail on the northern bank of the Rust River in Chesley.
This land was owned by one of his relatives, but Miles was a handsome and venerable figure who had propped up the two-party system for years, and the proposal would never get anywhere, so no one cared.
Dan Norman campaigned sufficiently but with a distance between him and the voter. One Monday morning he went to the Valiant Glass Company in Wylie and shook hands at the factory gate with the men and women of the seven-thirty shift. It was a clear October day, and the workers were reluctant to leave the light so late in the year.
“With winter coming up,” said a fat man in worn overalls, “I guess my biggest concern is my mailbox. I live west of Boris, and every snowfall without fail the county plow comes barreling along and knocks my mailbox down. Yet when I call the county recorder’s office to straighten this out, I invariably reach a curt young woman who gives me the runaround.”
The proper response was obvious. Dan should have taken the man’s name. He didn’t have to do anything with it. He could even throw it away once the man was out of sight. But standing at the plant gate, he should have written down that name. Instead, he said, “Well, see, you’re calling the wrong people. The recorder doesn’t have anything to do with the snowplow. Try Public Works.”
