Meteors in August
A Novel
Melanie Rae Thon
for my mother and father
Weep not for him who is dead, nor bemoan him;
but weep bitterly for him who goes away,
for he shall return no more
to see his native land.
JEREMIAH 22:10
1
I WAS seven years old the night my father chased Red Elk out of the valley. Afterward he sat huddled at the kitchen table with a pack of men, their boots caked with mud, their whiskey bottle amber in the light. My sister, Nina, and I crouched on the stairs, shivering in our thin nightgowns. Voices slurred until the men all sounded the same.
“We drove that red-skinned trash out of town once and for all.”
“I would’ve killed him with my own hands.”
“Damn dogs.”
“Hardly worth the trouble to kill an Indian.”
“Well, it would’ve been worth my trouble.”
“She’s just one of Harley Furey’s girls—let him have her, and that bastard boy too.”
These men worked at the lumbermill with my father. Vern and Ralph Foot were a hulking pair, with black beards and scraggly mustaches that covered their mouths. I could tell them apart only when they laughed. Vern had no front teeth ever since the night he fell on his face on Main Street and didn’t stand up till morning. The third man was Dwight Carson; he was burly, but his pale, pinkish skin made him look exposed and weak despite his size. Father was their foreman and had little use for them when he was sober. During lunch breaks, he was glad to take their money at poker: that was the extent of the pleasure he found in their company. Except tonight. Tonight they had a single purpose.
“Don’t matter who she is,” Vern said. “Sets a bad example.”
Ralph agreed: “Nothing but white scum.”
“Stupid mutts,” my father muttered. “We almost had him.”
“Here’s to the next time.” Dwight Carson raised his drink. All four glasses clinked together. “To the next time.”
They downed their whiskeys and poured another round.
Mama caught me and Nina on the stairs. Nina took the brunt of the scolding because she was going on fifteen and was supposed to know better. “Fine thing for you to let Lizzie see,” Mama said. “Well, I hope you both remember it. I hope you remember the way men look when they’re full of hate and liquor, so full of their failure to kill a man that they’d shoot their own dogs and leave them in the woods to rot. You take a good look at your daddy, then you get your butts back upstairs. And don’t let me ever hear you talking about what you saw in this house tonight.”
We did look at our father, his face slack from whiskey, his hair matted flat to his scalp, his brow cut with dark creases even when he laughed. Blood spattered his pant legs and we knew Mama spoke the truth. The dogs were dead. The dogs were lying up there in the woods with their tongues hanging out of their mouths and all their yellow teeth showing.
We scurried up to our room, but we didn’t sleep. Later, when the men were gone, we heard Daddy pounding at Mama’s door. She’d locked herself in the bedroom where her own mother had died the year I was born. He started out yelling and ended up crying. We knew he was on his knees.
It was almost dawn when he came to our room. The air was gray and watery, a sticky film. He leaned over our beds, watching us while we pretended to sleep. I wanted him to go away. I didn’t know where. I wanted him to burn his clothes in the woods so I could stop thinking about the blood on his pants and the mud on his boots. I wanted him to bury those dogs so that I wouldn’t find their bones someday, so that I wouldn’t stumble on their carcasses and remember.
Nina sat up and rubbed her eyes. “It’s okay, Daddy,” she said. He turned and disappeared so fast I wondered if he’d been there at all. I was hoping he hadn’t. I was hoping this whole night was just something I’d dreamed.
When we woke again, hours later, Daddy was already dressed in his black suit and white shirt, ready for church. He stood in our doorway, acting as if he were a different man than he was the night before. But his eyes looked sore, and his hair had not been combed. He didn’t have to tell us to hurry.
At the Lutheran church, Mother sat between my father and me, her back rigid, her eyes on the pulpit. I looked at Daddy’s big hands as he cradled the hymn book; he still had dirt under his nails.
Nina sang in the choir. Her golden hair made her shine, and I believed I heard her pure strain above all others, a solitary soprano, sweet and clear.
Reverend Piggott rose slowly so that we had time to anticipate the seriousness of today’s business. He warned that we must be prepared to meet our Maker at any time. He was a bald, bony man who trembled when he spoke: “Would you want to face your Heavenly Father stumbling drunk and muttering obscenities? Would you want to hear His call while you lay in the bed of a woman who was not your wife or with your hands in another man’s pocket, your fingers on his last dollar? And what if God should send His angels down to earth just as you raised your gun to take the life of one you despise? What if you blinked and found yourself before the Lord, with your barrel aimed between His eyes? Pity the man who dies with murder on his mind. Pray for the man who lives with lust in his heart or a belly full of rage.”
I don’t know if the reverend had heard of the night’s escapades, or if he had chosen the day’s topic by chance. Whatever the case, my father took it personally: he tugged at his pant legs as if his clothes were suddenly too tight.
During the minutes of silent prayer, Daddy clasped his hands together with a violence that made me think he believed the left one could keep the right from doing evil. Mother bowed her head and closed her eyes. I’m sure she did not pray.
I hoped that Father was asking God to purge the hatred from his heart so that he might love his red brother as himself, so that he might never again raise his hand in anger against another man. As we said the Lord’s Prayer in unison, Mother’s lips barely moved, but my father’s voice was low and fervent. I thought his eyes brimmed with tears of repentance, but now I wonder: perhaps they only stung from whiskey and lack of sleep.
I imagined he had made a bargain with God, agreed on the terms of atonement. I had to trust Father’s sincerity and God’s mercy. My own salvation depended on it. From Reverend Piggott I had learned that I was born wicked, tainted by original sin, my father’s and my mother’s crimes of knowledge. I prayed that I would be spared the burden of Daddy’s latest transgression. I had been blessed and baptized, but somehow this protection seemed far too slight to save me from the stain of murderous intentions.
Years later I would realize that my father did not regret what he’d done to Red Elk. He did not long to change his ways or expunge the wrath from his soul. He’d lived with rage so long he could not even imagine himself free of it. So he asked only to be forgiven. Should he die that day, he wanted to enter Heaven in a state of grace. And should he live till evening, he wanted to enter my mother’s bed without an argument.
God might have been willing to give Daddy another chance, but Mother was not so easily fooled. She refused to slip her hand around his elbow as we left the dark church. As much as I wanted to believe in my father’s enlightenment, I couldn’t trust the man Mama spurned. He tried to take my hand, but I pulled away from him, clutching Mother instead.
Nina ran to join us. She looped her arm through Father’s and kissed his cheek before he asked. I thought she must have forgotten what we’d seen the night before. I envied her for her laughter, her easy faith. Mother and I dropped behind, and I watched Nina bounce along beside Daddy. Her hair glistened. Her beauty and her simple joy filled me with jealousy. If Father and I had died that day, neither one of us would have b
een in a state of grace.
Mother squeezed my hand too tightly. I felt an unbearable weight that filled my shoes like stones until I could barely walk. When I was old enough to explain it, I realized this weight was my mother’s doubt: she did not believe God had the power to save my father.
I wanted to skip ahead, to feel Daddy’s huge, callused hand around my own. But I kept remembering him at the table with those men. I saw the blood on his pants. I thought about the dogs in the woods.
Soon Nina and my father were a block ahead of us. Mama clung to me as if she thought I might charge in front of a car to tease her. She didn’t know that I was just as scared as she was.
When I was as old as Nina was that day, I found myself trying to understand why she had to leave us. I kept thinking of the look on Daddy’s face when he said he would have killed the big Indian with his own hands. That was before he even knew what was going to become of Nina. But no matter how far back I went, I could never quite see how it all started, and I still haven’t figured out why Nina, who loved Daddy and always forgave him, was the one who had to go, while I was the one who stayed.
Two months later Mama caught Nina in the shed with Rafe Carson, the son of one of the men in Father’s gang. I’d been spying on the two of them for a good half hour, peering through a knothole in the side of the shed. Rafe’s hand was stuck down Nina’s bra, so Mama had time to give him one good swat on the head before he pulled himself free. He made a run for it and hit a stack of wood in the dark. Sprawled on the ground, he was an easy shot. But Mother had already forgotten him. She backed Nina into a corner, pinned her to the wall with one hand and slapped her with the other, four times, hard across the face, slaps that stung just to hear them. Mother who never struck, who only threatened us with Father’s fury, our mother waled on Nina, her blows all the more cruel because they were so unexpected, and so rare.
Mama got her voice back in time to say, “Aren’t things bad enough? Your daddy ever catches you like that, he’ll be a murderer for sure.”
Rafe Carson was on his feet again. He didn’t need to hear anything more.
Nina crumpled in the corner, sobbing, and Mama just left her that way. I sneaked into the shed and tried to comfort my sister, but she couldn’t stop crying. Her whole body heaved. I curled up, close as I could. I was small and warm. That’s all I had to offer. I stroked her blond hair with my clumsy hands. It was snarled from rolling around with that boy, and my fingers snagged in the knots. I kissed her wet cheeks, licking at the salt because it tasted good. But everything I did only made her shake harder.
Finally she shivered and fell asleep, all of a sudden, as if she’d cried herself to death. I felt her shallow breath and knew she was still alive. Her blouse was unbuttoned and one breast had been pulled free of her bra. Her chest flushed, speckled with a heat rash. I touched her skin, lightly, with just the tips of my fingers. She didn’t wake.
2
DAYS PASSED slowly in Willis, Montana, when I was a child. We had one movie theater and a musty library. The dust on the shelves revealed how seldom books were borrowed. Sunday service at the Lutheran church was the social event of the week. When the reverend had finally worn himself down and let us go, we gathered outside to catch up on the news. Women admired one another’s hats in false, girlish voices, then drew into tight clusters to whisper about daughters who stole their sleeping pills or husbands who stayed out all night and never explained. They touched their friends’ arms or their own mouths as they talked. The men stood in larger groups and maintained a dignified distance from one another as they debated the merits of clear-cutting or the best bait for rainbow trout. Now and then they eyed their wives impatiently, wondering why women always had so much to say.
Willis sprang up in the shadow of the Rockies. A glacier cut this valley, moving mountains by inches through the years, leaving everything in its path forever changed. But even the greatest force cannot escape time: the frozen blue sea turned to muddy water and seeped slowly into the earth.
The first white men slashed through the underbrush with the glint of silver in their eyes. They crouched in the forest, squatting like old men beneath the bristling pines. By instinct, they climbed toward the timberline, where the dwarf trees clung to brittle rock, wrapping their roots around the stony soil, growing twisted and gray, no taller than children.
When the men stood at last on bare rock and saw below them green slopes and glacial pools, glistening jade and turquoise under a blazing sun, they must have thought they were little gods. Not one of them could imagine the disappointments of the future: the shallow veins of silver, the barren mines closing, all the big-shouldered men condemned to labor among the trees, giving up their dreams of sudden wealth to lumber in the hills and live as mortals.
The town of Willis never boomed, but Main Street got busy enough to hang a traffic light in November of 1966. Our Main Street was actually a highway: anyone going to or from Canada had to pass through Willis; now they had to stop. The light was set to change so fast that almost no one could sneak through town without slamming on his brakes and taking a good look at the Last Chance Bar and the Lutheran church. A person on his way to the border wouldn’t realize, of course, that two years before we had a light this very corner had been the scene of one of the town’s most bitter disputes.
I was almost nine the summer Elliot Foot cleared out the shelves of Pike’s Grocery and replaced them with barstools. The Saturday afternoon he raised his sign, the men, women and children of Willis were split into two groups: on one side of the street, a rowdy band cheered on Elliot Foot and his two brothers; on the other side, an inspired mob shouted that a bar facing a church was an affront to God, and we were certain to bear His vengeance.
I preferred the excitement of the joyful crowd, but I watched the frenzy of the Lutherans and their leader, Freda Graves. I knew Mrs. Graves the way I knew most people in Willis. It wasn’t a town where a person could be a stranger, unless you were an Indian and folks made a deliberate effort not to learn your name or mind what you were doing.
Now I think that was the day Freda Graves got a hold on me. At the time, she seemed like a crazy woman. If not for her desperation, she would have looked just plain foolish. But later, when everything she said came true, I started thinking about her more and more, remembering how she saw the future. And I came to believe she was the one person in Willis who might help me understand what had happened to Nina, and to me.
Reverend Piggott was nowhere in sight. He couldn’t afford to get folks riled. The same ones who drank themselves silly on Saturday night might drop an extra dollar in the collection plate on Sunday morning. So he left Freda Graves to do his dirty work. She was the Lutheran church’s most active member. She pounded the organ with a passion that shook the rafters; she sang with the tremor of the saved. I had seen her at least once a month my whole life, but I had never seen her like this. She feared Elliot Foot would steal her thunder by securing his sign before dawn, so she’d slept all night on the steps of the church. beneath the great white arch of the door. Her hair was matted flat to one side of her head and stuck out in a sharp peak on the other. She rose to her full six feet, her chest swelling, her wide nostrils flaring.
Elliot Foot had no intention of raising his sign in the weak light before sunrise. He wanted an audience. He longed for the fierce glare of noon. Freda Graves was doing a fine job of whipping up more business.
By eleven-fifteen the crowd began to grumble, fretting about the heat. Women pushed their noses against the smoke-tinted windows, trying to catch a glimpse of the Foot brothers. Several of the men muttered about popping the damn lock and helping themselves. When Sheriff Wolfe caught wind of that idea, he brought their nonsense to a halt. He could change a man’s mind with a glance. I trusted the sheriff to do his job and hoped he’d never have reason to come after me. Other than the Indians, Caleb Wolfe was the darkest man in Willis. No one dared say anything outright, but in private people questioned the purity of his bloo
d, the skin of his grandfather and the morals of his grandmother.
As I grew older I understood that our tolerance for the sheriff depended on the fact that he had never married. Over the years, plenty of Indians drifted through Willis, hoping to find work at the mill. They lived at the foot of the hills on the west side of town. Their houses were abandoned trailers and plywood shacks. When one family moved out, another moved in. Most disappeared within the month, and few of their children ever attended our school. Children from the reservation had to be tested. They rarely passed, of course. Many of us wouldn’t have passed either; but as far as I knew, no one ever suggested the tests might be unfair. Thirteen-year-olds were placed in fourth grade. Humiliation kept them home. Occasionally administrators slipped: One year a light-skinned woman came to the school alone to register her three sons. The last name was a French one; no questions were asked, no tests demanded. But there were plenty of complaints when teachers discovered the Champeaux brothers favored their red father rather than their fair mother.
Daddy said Indians were born lazy, that they turned tail at the first sign of trouble and headed back to the reservation, where they got a government check every month for doing nothing but sitting on their hind ends.
I watched Caleb Wolfe hold back the crowd and remembered the trouble Father had caused a certain Indian just a year before. I thought about the dogs in the woods and the mud on my father’s boots.
As we waited on the hot street no one dared to cross Sheriff Wolfe—despite the color of his skin. He was short and bowlegged. His stomach hung over his belt, but his fat was hard, not sloppy, the kind of fat a man can use like muscle: for weight and force. The people who’d been talking about busting locks were suddenly nowhere to be seen.
The white light of noon stripped us, left us without shadow or weight. A dangerous fervor swelled through the crowd and threatened to pull us off the ground, a hundred helium balloons cut free. Gwen Holler stood next to me, poking my ribs with her elbow every time light wavered in the glass. I told her to stop, but she didn’t hear me, so I jabbed her back and she got the idea. My cousin Jesse darted through the crowd, pinching girls’ butts so they jumped and squealed. The air was full of their little pig cries. He gave my bum a squeeze and I whirled, smacked him up the side of the head hard as I could. Jesse only laughed at me.
Meteors in August Page 1
