Twisted Tree

by Kent Meyers

  I’ve never told you something, she said. Your father left a grave unmarked himself.

  Dad?

  Cassie Janisch’s grave, she said.

  The daughter of the man he hired? You’ve told me that a dozen times.

  Never the whole story. It has to do with you.

  Cassie Janisch died before I was born.

  Audrey, my memory’s fine.

  I took my glasses off and let the whole room blur. I held the glasses to my mouth and breathed on them to moisten them, then wiped them clean, replaced them, and found my mother’s eyes again.

  All right, I said. I’m listening.

  It doesn’t have to do with you so much as with your absence. You know about that, how we couldn’t have children. But when the doctor told us? I walked out of his office thinking: We have only each other now. And, Audrey, I didn’t know if we were enough for each other. We found a little soda fountain and sat at a table and dipped our spoons and hardly spoke. We were barren together. I felt it. But I didn’t know how to speak of it.

  She had my full attention now. I’d heard about the miracle of my birth a hundred times, but never in this tone or with that word, barren.

  We never did speak of it, she went on. When the Valen ranch came up for sale, he bought it. It filled the emptiness for him. I knew it, even if he never said. Or maybe didn’t know himself. He’d spend all day out there. Sometimes, when I was alone in the house, I’d reach out with my hands—and here she reached into the air in front of her to shape a round, pantomimed nothing—and feel it. Right here. With me. Walking around the house. Not nothing, Audrey. A nothing. They’re different.

  Yes, I said. I suppose they are.

  I’d always thought my father bought the Valen ranch out of simple pragmatism. I never thought my own absence drove that buying, never imagined the work he did out there to be a charcoal pencil shaping shadows, filling in what wasn’t. After my mother gave me the whole story I drove out there. No one had lived in the house since the Janisch family left. I had this idea I’d walk through its rooms and feel some emanation of Cassie there, now that I understood what she’d meant. But after Dad died, Mom sold the ranch to the Zimmermans, and Stanley was raising buffalo on it. The herd was spread around the house, which perched over a draw choked with cedar, so close to the edge it looked like it could topple in during the next hard rain. I stayed on the road and imagined Cassie living there with her parents, and my father walking through that door. I could imagine it, but felt nothing of Cassie herself. The house gazed back at me with the indifference of all old houses that refuse to crumble in spite of storms and years.

  I was about to leave when I became aware of a figure sitting on the hillside above the herd. I reached for the binoculars I carry in my car, for birds and animals, but the moment I had them focused I turned away and laid them on the seat. It was Stanley Zimmerman. In the brief moment before I averted my eyes, I saw his bowed head, his face like something wind had worked on. I’d heard that he and Kris were having trouble with their marriage. And here he was, sitting alone, buffalo his only company. I felt obscene, to have broken his privacy and barged in on his sorrow. I stared at the door handle of the car to curtail my gaze.

  Here we were again. I’d been present when Hayley Jo was born. I’d been driving to Lone Tree to teach and saw the Zimmermans’ car parked along the shoulder of the road with the emergency flashers going and someone leaning into the back seat, only his legs showing. I knew it was serious. People don’t put their flashers on out here. They just flag you down. I was barely out of my car when I realized that Kris was giving birth. Her moans came from the car, muffled by his body. There was something frantic in his voice as he talked to her, but something utterly calm and in control—and a sense that this was hers to do. I stood stock-still near the trunk of their car.

  Should I go for help? I asked.

  No, he said. Stay here.

  Though I’d asked the question, the fact that he responded stunned me—that he’d notice me and make a decision about my presence, and still attend to her. But why did he want me to stay? What was I supposed to do?

  She screamed and gasped, and then he pushed up from the seat with his elbows, struggling, then gave up and went to his knees on the road and flopped backwards and sat down. The reason he couldn’t use his hands to rise was because they held a child slick with blood. He leaned back against the opened door and held it up.

  Well, Audrey Damish, he cried out. Would you look at this?

  I guess that’s what I was there for. I looked and looked: a child held like a chalice, as if to cup the world and pour it out again. Then he rose, from cross-legged to standing in one unencumbered movement, flowing upward. He leaned into the car and said, Here you go, Love. Here’s what you did.

  I heard Kris cooing and the baby crying, but his body muffled the sounds. I felt as if the three of them were self-contained, and I was in a different world.

  I’ll go get help now? I asked again.

  Be a waste a time, he said, standing upright. There and back. I can just drive her in.

  Of course. You get behind the wheel, start the engine, go. But how could he think so practically? He seemed unaware that I might attend to Kris. Though I’d never given birth, I felt some right, as another woman, to at least ask her if she was OK. If he had tried to prevent me, I could have insisted. But his innocence concerning any right I felt was overwhelming, and complete. It shut me out. I didn’t even have the connection of opposition.

  I’ve got a blanket, I said.

  He looked at the back seat, then replied: That’d be really useful.

  So I was allowed that: to help lift Kris and the baby off the bloodstained seat and place a blanket under them and follow them to the hospital. I didn’t understand why the needlessness of it should sting the way it did.

  Now here I was, on his land that had been mine, seeking family from my past—and finding him at the other end of where I’d found him years ago. What was I to do? Walk through that herd of buffalo and climb that hill, no more needed than I was before, and sit down next to him and say, I’ve got another blanket. I’ve got a rug to sit on?

  My father used to run his fingers through my hair when he put me to bed. Sleep like a pea, he’d tell me. But when I tried to sleep I’d think of how the peas we picked swelled inside their pods. The covers of my bed would tighten like something green around me. At the moment of dropping off I’d gasp and wake. But I could never bring myself to ask him not to say those words. And now that my mother’s spoken, I know that while I lay awake, he twirled a coffee cup at the kitchen table beneath me, watching the handle circle. I’d always wondered why the varnish was worn off the table in that single spot.

  When the work on the Valen ranch became too much for him alone, he hired Alvin Janisch and put him up with his wife, Felicia, and daughter, Cassie, in the house out there. He began to spend more and more time with them, even taking noon meals in their kitchen. Mom didn’t consider Felicia a threat. Though she sensed something different in my father, she dismissed it. As she put it, It’s hard to recognize betrayals a language hasn’t named. Of course it is—though I wonder whether betrayals that original are betrayals at all. In any case, she didn’t notice that their shared barrenness was becoming hers alone. I never thought he could become a father, she said, without another woman.

  She told me the only words she had that might locate Cassie’s grave were between those two big trees. I thought it was enough, and after leaving the Valen house, I drove to the cemetery. But my father hadn’t even named the kind of trees—as if burying Cassie stopped time, and nothing would grow or change to modify his meaning. Even if I could have been certain which trees he meant, I realized that between is meaningless, with a million gradations. I needed a map, so many steps from here to there, or three points to form a precise triangulation. With those few, unspecific words, all I really had was the hope that the earth itself might reveal her presence: the green of grass minutely dif
ferent, or a spot of soil collapsed into a child-size depression.

  I wandered around, looking, and found myself before Hayley Jo Zimmerman’s stone. It had nothing but her names on it, HAYLEY JO, and HAYJAY, and the dates of birth and death. That’s all. I stood before it. Those names told everything: all her relationships; people who knew her only by the given name, others by the nickname, formal length and intimate reduction; all the times those names were spoken by friends and family and acquaintances, in tenderness or anger or concern. It was all contained there. I felt it echoing around me.

  After she was killed a group of women came out from Minneapolis. They circled her grave and set up candles. They made speeches about solidarity and martyrdom. But they didn’t last long. The wind blew the candles out, and they hadn’t considered how little shade there was. They wilted and left not long after the TV cameras did. When Angela Morrison heard about it, she said: What bullshit. Just let us mourn, why don’t they? What right do they have to make claims to meaning?

  But what else can we do? So much seemed revealed, so much possible to claim, from those two names. For Cassie Janisch, I had no rock or reading—nothing but Mom’s words, and so many of them uncertain and secondhand, out of which to create the day she was feverish and my father demanded that Alvin go for the doctor. Alvin and Felicia had plans for a trip to the Bighorn Mountains, a little cabin there, in the lull between calving and haying. They couldn’t allow themselves to interpret the flush on Cassie’s cheeks as danger. When Alvin didn’t show up for work that day, my father went to the house and found him putting on his boots with a casual look set hard on his face. If it hadn’t been for Felicia my father might have suspected nothing. But she was a chaos of flesh. And then, surely, he must have noticed Cassie’s absence from the kitchen.

  What’s going on? he might have asked.

  Cassie has a cold, Alvin probably replied. It’s nothing.

  But Felicia’s eyes must have denied it, and my father went down the hall to Cassie’s bedroom, knocked and entered, and found her flushed in bed, the sound of paper in her lungs, her neck pulse beating, and a scythe of reflected light growing and diminishing with it on her skin.

  A fever, Alvin said behind my father. She’ll get over it.

  The room must have been claustrophobic with the three of them in it, and Felicia in the doorway.

  You need to get a doctor, my father said.

  We got work to do.

  Either you get him or I do.

  This is when it is all birthed: the cusp where the relationships writhed and then swelled into being, when all that was conceived when my parents couldn’t conceive sprang forth, and my father became a father.

  Imagine Alvin staring back, a thick log of stubbornness. This was his house. Cassie was his daughter. He must have dimly sensed the shape and meaning of the argument and weighed it against the fact of his employment. But Felicia preempted him. My father’s presence allowed her to override Alvin’s authority.

  Alvin, she said. Go.

  It had to be something like that. And so my father waited with Felicia while Cassie passed in and out of sleep. He heard her moans. He watched her thrash. His eyes met Felicia’s eyes. When the doctor arrived, he was there, and when the word pneumonia was pronounced, he was the one who asked: How bad is it?

  Not good, the doctor said. But with sulfa she should recover.

  She did. She improved as though she were swimming upward through murky water, and there she was again, appreciative for the chicken soup Felicia brought and for my father’s face above her bed. If her breathing was still like dry leaves on dry ground, nevertheless it was clear she would get well. Alvin and Felicia remembered their vacation.

  At this point in the story Mom shook her head and stopped talking. An old man with a walker shuffled by between us and the window. The low sun turned his few white hairs a flaming orange, and the shadow of those filaments wavered on Mom’s face. She watched his fragile progress. Then she said:

  They wanted to go. They asked if Cassie could stay with us.

  We had arrived at what, from the beginning, she meant to tell me.

  And? I asked.

  We said no.

  You said no, I repeated.

  He did.

  A pronoun’s change.

  Why?

  She was in a halfway world, living as much as telling the story.

  I didn’t want her, she said. Maybe he knew. Maybe he refused for me.

  I understood she was accepting all the blame, and placing it all on my father: a thing doubled in weight, or negated entirely, that still equaled itself. I let the realization fill me before I asked: Why didn’t you want her?

  A borrowed child?

  It took me a while to understand.

  It would be hard, I said. To pretend for a week.

  She lifted her hands off the chair arms and for a moment held them like she had before when she shaped a sphere of emptiness, but this time it was as if they held the words she needed. When she spoke she went on looking into the space her fingers shaped.

  I’d finally understood he loved her, she said. Her illness had freed him to talk about her. Every day it was Cassie this, Cassie that. If it had been another woman, his silence would have betrayed him. But with her it was constant stories. I’ll admit it, Audrey: I was jealous. I’d have had to watch him in our house with her, and not be part of it. I would have been the stranger there. And it would only have confirmed what I knew: I was the childless one in our marriage.

  But they never spoke of it. It was as if they each tried to protect the other. I’m left not even knowing which of the pronouns she used, we or he, is the correct one. Maybe in another language more attuned to relations there are a dozen pronouns for the nuances by which married men and women decide things, like Arctic names for snows that contain the winds that laid them.

  Maybe he refused for reasons Mom never suspected: he’d wanted the trip for Cassie and now her parents wanted to go without her, or a realization that as long as he lifted her into his arms in those rooms where Alvin commanded, he could sustain the knowledge of his unfatherhood—but if she came into his house and he kissed her to sleep at night as she rolled over and shut her eyes, he might forget she wasn’t his.

  Whatever the reasons, Alvin and Felicia decided she was healthy enough and took her to the mountains. She touched summer snow. Mom gave me a black-and-white photograph of her there, taken with an ancient camera.

  Here, she said, rummaging through a drawer, after I’d taken her back to her room.

  She handed it to me.

  I found it with his things, she said.

  It must be one of the last photos ever taken of Cassie—maybe the only one. It’s so blurry and scratched it’s like a template by which to build a picture rather than the picture itself. I’ve thought of showing it to Bea Conway, but she’d want to make it public and say something about it that would diminish or twist its truth. The truth is in what the photo doesn’t show, its black-and-white modulations leaving out the flush on Cassie’s cheeks, which, if it showed, would suggest health and vitality but would really be its opposite, the signature of coming death. And the snowball in her hand, even as she holds it cocked behind her head, is melting—I’m sure it is—too quickly.

  But who would notice that? Who would recognize fever in a snowball’s small diminishment? I think I see a glint of water on her wrist, but only because I know the end. Alvin, behind the lens, could not have. Or Felicia, watching. And even if they noticed, who would recognize the proper rate of melt for snow held in a young girl’s hand?

  She has dark hair, light eyes, some Indian features—clearly mixed blood, though I know nothing about either Alvin’s or Felicia’s heritage. She looks nothing like me at all. But what do those distinctions matter? My father loved her. She died in part because he did.

  She might have died anyway. One can always guess at such excuses. But circumstantial guilt can stain a life more deeply than intention will, ground in a
s it is with questioning and doubt. Alvin and Felicia brought her home and my father helped bury her in a small, private funeral ceremony. Mom stayed behind to cook.

  It wasn’t your fault, I told her.

  I could have said yes.

  She might still have died.

  She did die.

  She was Alvin’s and Felicia’s daughter.

  I’m too old to be chasing myself down alleys, she said.

  You never visited her grave?

  You came.

  I laid my palm upon my father’s gravestone, its rough circumference warmed by sun. I’d searched from fence to fence. Sometimes out here we’ll see people walking with their heads down in barren places, looking for fossils or agates: dull stone they’ve learned to see as something else. What I’m looking for, and now know I have been since I was five, I’m not sure I’d recognize if I came upon it.

  Alvin and Felicia trudged onward with their lives. That’s not a moral failing, but I can’t help but feel they should have stayed, tethered to Cassie’s grave up here, offering it littered mementos like the other children’s graves I find: flowers, stuffed animals, plastic dolls staring blankly, their painted eyes washed by rain. But we’re the ones who stayed.

  So much may be real and so much made up out of what my mother told me. I think myself right out of fact. But atoms themselves are more force than matter, mostly hollowness and collapse. Yet they cling to form the breathing bodies we name friends and lovers. The universe itself is a void so vast the stars are tiny things, and the planets only guessed at by the deviations they create, the anomalies of orbit. And maybe we’re all anomalies in each other’s lives, circling stars that may not be of our own choosing, sending codes into the bigness that we hope someone will decipher, to redeem us from coincidence.

  So I can imagine my father stole that photograph. He was helping Alvin and Felicia pack, and found it and held it up and stared at it, then put it in his shirt pocket. And because he did, Cassie’s un-familial eyes can now meet mine when I eat, the snowball in her hand ready to be thrown, as I place my own cup on the spot on the table he twirled bare.