“I can’t,” I answered, but she didn’t mean me.
“I think she had marmalade.” The confusion concerning Mother’s toast perplexed her. She charged out of the bathroom and down the stairs. “Evelyn,” I heard her call. “Evelyn, did you have marmalade or apple butter?”
Later, when I thought about what happened to Arlen in our house, I realized anger was the only thing that had kept her strong. She had to fill her head with nonsense; the steady buzz stopped her from thinking about her husband and sons making love to Lyla Leona, kept her safe from the blinding memory of the day they pulled Jesse from the lake.
I learned something that winter: when things go bad, they can always get worse; misfortune has its own momentum. A week before Christmas, a second storm hit. This blizzard took its toll. In the fields beyond the edge of town, snow blew over the frozen bodies of cows and sheep, the ones that didn’t make it to the barn before dark.
Two days after the storm my father roared into the drive. He slammed the door so hard it popped open again, so he gave it a kick and stomped into the garage instead of the house. He growled and knocked cans of nails off the shelves, mad as a bear with a bullet in its hind end. Mom and Arlen and I sat in the kitchen, peeling potatoes and carrots for a stew, leaning over the trash barrel as if it held some magic life-giving flame.
Finally Daddy filled the doorway. The cold air hung in the room, a cloud he dragged behind him. “Red Elk’s back,” he said. Mother dropped her potato in her lap. “Josh Holler hired him back at the mill. He says if there’s any trouble this time, the Indian won’t be the one to go.”
Red Elk, the man my father had tried to drive out of town, had returned at last. I saw Daddy huddled at the kitchen table with those men, their boots thick with muck, their words loud and slurred: We showed that red devil. The night I heard that I was only seven years old. I thought they’d driven him down to the swamp, left him to die for the crime of making a white woman want him. But he rose from the sludge, nose broken, eyes full of mud. Now he was back. Red Elk was respectable, a working-man just like my father, no better, no worse.
Daddy had to treat him right or leave the mill, the only job he knew or ever wanted. He had to look this big Indian in the face, a man he despised even before Billy Elk took Nina in his arms and made her disappear.
Arlen looked from Mom to Dad and back again. She pressed one hand to her mouth. I could see she was about to burst into one of her fits. If she got laughing now, there’d be no stopping her. Mother stood, slowly, watching Daddy the whole time as she walked toward him. Arlen said, “Are you—are you gonna kill him, Dean?” Then she broke up, giggling and puffing.
Mom slipped her arm around Daddy’s waist. “I don’t want to kill him,” he whispered.
Arlen quieted herself, but her mouth still had that funny look.
Mother led Daddy to the living room and sat him down. “I don’t want to kill him,” he said again.
“Of course you don’t. Arlen doesn’t know what she’s saying.”
“I did at first, him and the boy too, but it wouldn’t change anything, would it?”
“Not now,” Mom said, rubbing his red hands.
I glanced at Arlen. She wasn’t paying any attention to my parents. She was crying as she chopped the onions.
We never ate dinner that night. I hid in my room, but around nine I got so hungry I had to sneak downstairs and grab a bowl of stew. Arlen sat in the kitchen with the lights off. “Close your eyes,” I said. But she didn’t, and she blinked hard in the sudden glare of the overhead light.
“Did you eat?” I said.
“I don’t remember.”
I looked in the sink: there were no dirty dishes. The drainer was empty. “I don’t think you did.” I dished up a bowl of stew for each of us. The stew was lukewarm and unseasoned, but I was hungry and shoveled it down. Arlen took three bites and stopped.
“What does he look like?” I said.
“Who?”
“Red Elk.” I wanted to know this man if I ever met up with him on the street. Aunt Arlen looked at me as if she were going to start hooting again. “Don’t you know, honey? Don’t you know?” I shook my head. “Then you must be the only one in town who doesn’t.” She leaned close to me. “Like an Indian,” she said, “he looks like a goddamned Indian.”
“I know that.”
“No, I mean a real Indian—big and dark, no white blood, still wears his hair in a braid down the back, still wears a blanket instead of a coat, still pisses in a hole in the ground.” I wondered how she knew. Arlen cocked her head. “Listen,” she said. I didn’t hear anything. “They’ve been at it all night.”
“Who?”
“Your parents.” She clamped her hands over her ears. “How can they?” The sounds of imagined lovemaking echoed in her head. Grandmother’s room was above us, and that room had been dead quiet a long time. “I can’t stand it,” Arlen said. “I can’t listen to that.” She pushed her chair back and let it fall, ran through the living room to her dark den where she was safe from voices, dreamed or real.
I turned out the lights, moved to Arlen’s place and finished her stew.
I couldn’t sleep that night. I was thinking about the night nearly seven years before when my father and his gang had chased Red Elk up the mountain. I could almost hear the joyful barks of the dogs as they caught the Indian’s scent.
I stood at the window, my nose touching the cold glass. A new moon cut the hard winter sky. I imagined how tired Red Elk must have been. Perhaps all he’d wanted to do that night was to lie on the cool rocks of the mountain. If it had only been the dogs on his tail, he might have given up. But Red Elk knew the men were close behind, so he kept climbing.
The dogs grew weary and took the men in a circle. Those dogs never made it off the mountain, and Mother told me and Nina what the men had done.
Later we heard how Red Elk went home that night and sat with a rifle across his lap. He hadn’t bothered to wipe his bloody nose or change his clothes.
Mary Louise Furey told him she wanted him out of there before Billy woke up. No boy of hers was going to see his daddy like that. She let Ike Turner know she’d made the man leave. She said she pulled the gun off his lap and threatened to shoot off his toes.
“They didn’t catch him,” Mary Louise said, “but they killed him all the same.” She talked to Ike because she knew he was the only man in town who wouldn’t be glad the Indian was gone. And she knew Ike couldn’t keep a secret. She wanted folks to believe that Red Elk had left her. She was tired of his kind of trouble.
Just before dawn the day the Indian disappeared, Mary Louise Furey heard ten shots. By the time she got out of bed, Red Elk had vanished and there were holes in the porch, one for each toe, a perfect outline. “He must’ve come damn close,” Mary Louise told Ike.
It was strange that the woman was the one to make him go. Red Elk could hold his own against any white man, but the white woman he loved made him hide out for seven years. I didn’t understand why Mary Louise blamed him for the sorrow my father and his friends had caused.
I was cold, standing there by the window, so I went back to bed, but I still couldn’t keep my eyes closed. I was remembering my father at church the morning after he’d tried to run the Indian out of town. I saw Nina skipping up beside him as we walked home, Nina who could forget so easily, Nina who didn’t know enough to be afraid of our father that day. And I saw my mother and myself behind them, looking at Daddy’s back, seeing him exactly as he was.
11
STORIES SPREAD about the way Red Elk got his wife to take him back. Mary Louise Furey told Ike Turner she’d been finding gifts on her porch and tracks in the snow for several weeks. There were three skinned rabbits with their eyes gouged out, a venison rump roast, and a string of sausages hanging in front of her door.
Ike Turner was proud of the fact that he was the first person in town to see Red Elk—besides Mary Louise, of course. Every customer who stopped in at the
truck stop that day heard about Ike’s conversation with the Indian.
He offered Red Elk a job pumping gas, but the man told him working the pumps was a boy’s job, and Mary Louise would never stand for it. “I might as well go back to the reservation as come home smelling like gasoline every night,” Red Elk said. Ike Turner understood; Mary Louise Furey was no easy woman to please. But when he found out Red Elk meant to go back to the mill, Ike Turner said he wished he believed in God so he could say a prayer for his friend.
The day after Joshua Holler gave Red Elk a job, Daddy didn’t come home from work. At seven, Mother called me and Arlen to dinner. Nobody said a word until Arlen blurted, “He’s done it. He’s gotten into it with the big Indian. He’s drinking himself blind or digging himself into a hole to die.”
“Shut up, Arlen,” Mom said. “Shut your goddamn mouth.”
Arlen straightened her back and sat stone-still, holding her breath, waiting for the ill wind to pass. Finally she dabbed both sides of her mouth with her napkin, said “Very well,” and waltzed her way out of the kitchen. A moment later Mother got up too, bundled herself in an oversized coat, and slipped out front to sit on the porch swing.
From my bedroom above the porch, I watched the road. When I cracked the window open, I heard the whine of the swing, my mother rocking—rocking slowly to make time pass more slowly. I felt her fear: a stiffness in my joints like old age springing suddenly upon me, and I lay like a shell across my bed, unable to move.
I tried not to think about what might have happened to my father, but I imagined him changing his mind, deciding he wanted Red Elk dead after all. He might have rounded up his old gang, Dwight Carson and the mangy Foot brothers. Perhaps the men waited for the Indian after work. They might jump him in the parking lot, pull a garbage bag over his head and tie it at the knees, heave him into the bed of a pickup and head for the frozen lake. I wondered if my mother was troubled by the same visions.
An hour passed, and still Mother sat outside in the cold, waiting for the moment of my father’s return. Somehow I knew he was near; I felt him just as I felt her. I crawled over my bed to the window. A car whizzed by, but the lights were too low, too close to the ground for me to mistake it for my father’s truck. Then I saw him at the end of the block, on foot, lurching against a light swirl of snow.
Mother did not rise to meet him. She let him reel and stumble. Fool. She watched him. I thought she must hate him for making her so afraid, for letting her think he might be dead when all the time he was drunk and very much alive.
Now he was at the bottom of the steps, looking up at her. He didn’t try to climb onto the porch; he only mouthed her name. “You should be ashamed,” she said.
“I am,” he whispered.
“Drinking yourself dumb.”
But he wasn’t drunk. He swore, no, not a drop, “I couldn’t.” And yet he said, “Who will forgive me?”
She knew him too well to think he lied. Her rage spilled on the steps, useless now, leaving her as weak as he was. She pulled him toward her. It was a long time before he spoke. And it was a long time before she asked.
At last she said, “Tell me”; and he answered, “Lanfear Deets lost his hand. Lanfear Deets cut off his damn hand because I got him promoted.”
“You can’t blame yourself for doing a man a favor.”
“For the wrong reasons.”
“He deserved the raise.”
“I told the sonuvabitch a thousand times if I told him once, ‘Watch what you’re doing.’ But he wasn’t watching. He was gabbing with Vern Foot, clucking like a damn woman. You can’t hear a thing in there; the fool was leaning over so far he practically had his nose stuck in Vern’s ear. Saw caught his sleeve, Jesus, pulled him halfway onto the table.”
“He’s to blame.”
“I knew he was an idiot. But she, the way she looked at him. She’ll never forgive me. She forgave me for twisting his arm to get my twelve dollars out of that worthless weasel, but she won’t ever forgive me for cutting off his hand.”
“You didn’t.”
He stared at his callused palms. “Everything I touch,” he said.
In the morning the sun fell through the blinds of the kitchen window, throwing rails of light on the floor. My father didn’t go to work that day or the next, or the one after that. He chopped firewood for three days straight, brought home four truckloads of logs and split them all, then piled them along the side of the house. He rarely rested, and when he did, he didn’t eat; he just sat on a stump and smoked. Mother and I watched the stack grow. “At least we won’t freeze,” she said.
I was sure people would figure out why my father stayed clear of the mill. He wasn’t the kind to take a sick day. But of course no one pieced it together. No one blamed him as he blamed himself. Lanfear Deets wasn’t the first man to mangle a limb at the Willis mill, and his wounds weren’t the worst. “Lucky to have his arm,” some folks said. “Lucky to have his head,” someone added. And everyone laughed. The only people who weren’t laughing lived in my house.
That was the same week Arlen’s chickens died and she went home. The night the temperature dropped to 20 below, Lester Munter left the door of Arlen’s chicken coop open a crack—an accident, he said. He claimed he flicked off the lamps just by habit. In the calm of morning, Arlen spotted the open door, the wind-drifted snow. She found her chickens this way: rigid, destroyed, blocks of chicken-shaped ice that would be rotten by the time they were thawed enough to bleed. She cleared the snow from a circle in her yard and gathered two armloads of my father’s wood, stacked a triangle on the hard earth, and stuffed the holes with newspaper. Two by two, she carried her chickens out by their legs, tossed them on top of the logs until she had a three-foot pile of frozen fluff.
She spent hours fanning the pale flames in the cold, but when the pyre finally caught, the inferno looked as if it would burn for days. Thick smoke rose and hung above the house, a blue cloud that refused to scatter or drift. The stink of singed feathers and scorched skin filled the neighborhood, squeezed under door-frames, seeped along the sills of closed windows.
By nightfall, when the bonfire flickered low, when her precious chickens were nothing but ash and charred bone, Arlen packed her bags and went home. I was glad when she left, glad there was no one else to hear our secrets or our silences.
12
GWEN HOLLER could have rescued me during Christmas break. Running through the gully with her might have made me forget about my father. I could have gone to the gully alone, but when I was by myself, the stripped tamaracks and the crunch of frozen snow under my boots only reminded me of what Daddy had done. I blamed him for Lanfear Deets’s hand—not because the poor man had lost it and couldn’t work, but because the saw kept whirring in my brain. I saw Lanfear Deets’s fingers, fat as sausages, guiding the rough boards. He remembered a joke and looked over his shoulder to tell Vern Foot. And they laughed, too hard; Lanfear jerked his hand away just in time. That was a warning, a little scare before the real thing. I imagined the second joke, minutes later, Lanfear glancing sideways, the unstoppable saw lifting his body onto the table, the bewildered look before the pain, the bad joke untold.
By then I knew that Red Elk had saved Lanfear Deets. He’d ripped the bandanna from his neck and tied a tourniquet at Lanfear’s elbow. Blood spurted on Red Elk’s hands and thighs, spit all the way to his eye when he cinched the cloth tight—that’s what my father said. When I closed my eyes, I saw Lanfear Deets’s blood spreading on the floor, a giant poppy slowly opening.
I was almost relieved to go back to school. The first Friday, Mr. Lippman told the class to choose lab partners for our science project: on Monday, each pair of students would have one frog to dissect together. I stared at Gwen, but she leaned across the aisle to tap Jill Silverlake on the arm. They giggled and squeezed each other’s hands as if they’d just agreed to go steady.
The room buzzed and I waited. Finally Mr. Lippman thumped his desk with his fist and told us
to raise our hands if we didn’t have a partner. Only two other hands wagged in the air: the five dimpled fingers of Marlene Grosswilder and the dark hand of Claude Champeaux, one of the three Indian brothers who was brave or foolish enough to come to our school. Mr. Lippman assigned Marlene to me and took Claude as his own partner. He didn’t want any hysterical mothers calling him in the middle of the night. He didn’t want some hefty mill worker standing at his door with a rifle, asking where he got the nerve to let a white girl work with an Indian boy.
“It’s a sign,” Marlene said, cornering me by my locker. “The Lord wants us to be friends.”
“Bug off, Marlene.”
She covered her ears. “I don’t hear nasty language.”
“How about this,” I said, grabbing her collar and pulling her toward me until our noses nearly touched, “can you hear me now? Does your God think that after we whack a little frog on the back of the head, stab a needle in his brain and slit his gut, we’ll be pals for life?”
“Stop it. You’re choking me.” I let her go. Marlene shook her finger as she backed away from me. “I’m still praying for you. I’m praying for you, Lizzie Macon.”
I opened my mouth and stuck my fingers inside to show her that the idea of her praying for me made me gag.
“The Lord tells me that you must be suffering in some way.”
I kicked my locker shut. “Yeah, I’m suffering, all right. I’m suffering being forced to talk to a stupid cow like you.”
“I forgive you for what you just said. And the Lord forgives you too.”
Now that she’d swallowed religion, Marlene Grosswilder was impossible to rile. I said, “The Lord has nothing to do with anything that happens between us.” Marlene was the only girl in the eighth grade who was as tall as I was. We stood nose to nose and I peered through her thick glasses thinking how strange her eyes looked, magnified twice their natural size.
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