by Brian Hart
“I didn’t know her when I walked in. She didn’t look like herself.”
The doctor reached out to put his hand on Duncan’s shoulder, but he dodged away instinctively. Haslett hovered his hand over the boy’s head. He wanted to touch him. “I’m going to the market, and then I’ll be back. Wait here.”
Duncan nodded but didn’t speak. His hands trembled at his sides.
Duncan
The doctor left and I sat there and listened to my mother’s breathing. I had to cover her eyes with my hand, cover the bruising, so I could look at her. Her lips were dry. Her callused hands, resting on her stomach. The blankets were tucked around her body and her feet pointed skyward. The picture in my mind was one of a carved saint. I lifted my hand from her face and it hurt me to see her. As I was watching, her lips cracked and began to bleed the slightest bit. I wet a washcloth in the water glass on the table and wet her forehead and then her lips, and despite myself I thought of Teresa. I felt bad for thinking of her. I held the damp cloth in my lap and looked away to the steamed window and let my mind wander because anywhere would be better than here.
The new schoolhouse had been built over the summer and when we got there on the first day the floors were still sticky with paint. It was supposed to be the good school compared to the old but it was just the same. That first day the paint burned my eyes and I was targeted for being weepy. Oliver Boyerton had lost his eye and wore a patch. Everyone knew that I’d done it to him and it brought me a little bit of fame. I wasn’t getting picked on so much any longer. My pals were wicked through except for Zeb, who was dull but kind, a good friend. Oliver was older so we didn’t have class together. The patch made him look angry but I figured that’s the way a patch makes you look. He asked me once if I wanted to go fishing sometime but I said I was busy because I felt bad about what I’d done. The McCandlisses were watching us, and Oliver was one they liked to pick on. He walked off and I followed him and aped him and Joseph and Ben both laughed and laughed until Oliver turned around. I felt low when he eyed me.
I was in the same class as his sister, Teresa. We sat in the same aisle, she had the seat behind me and I could feel her eyes staring at the back of my head. Joseph said she loved me. I went to talk to her once but she laughed at me and pinched my nipple through my shirt and called me Double Ugly and laughed some more. She was sticking up for her brother, and that was admirable enough. I didn’t try to talk to her again. I avoided her like an anthill but felt driven toward her the same way. Meaning, I suppose, I wanted to poke her with a stick.
Joseph was the first with her out of our group. Then his brother, and then Zeb, of all people. I’m not saying they went for the final stop, just a tour round. A couple older boys from South Harbor were after that. To be sure, these were all rumors. Joseph and Ben were big liars, and Zeb just did what we did, said what we said. But something was happening with her. She burned at the edge of my world.
Walking home one day I met her on the road. She had mud on her hands and her dress was stained at the knees. Oliver was walking a few hundred feet back like she was a flock and everywhere, and he was herding her.
“What’re you doing?” she asked.
“Goin home. What’re you doin?”
“Running away.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is Oliver going with you?” He’d stopped walking and was watching us.
“No, he’s trying to stop me. Do you want to run away with me?”
“Do you know where you’re going?”
“No.” She turned and looked back at her brother. “He’ll follow us, so you have to run fast.” And she ran from the road into the forest. Before I could think, I was right behind her. I looked back once and Oliver was there but he wasn’t running. It wasn’t long before we were all by ourselves.
When we stopped we were looking across a wide and secret field of grass hidden in the trees. I knew somewhere before us there was a creek, but you couldn’t tell from where we were. If it weren’t for the creek, this would be my way home. I’d gone that way before, figuring that it was better to swim the creek than to walk, but I was wrong. The water was cold, and even though I’d stripped naked my clothes stuck to me afterward and made it not worth it.
Teresa sat down in the grass. I stood ten feet off and waited.
“Do you think he’ll find us?” I asked.
“No, he’ll go back.”
“How do you know?”
“He gets scared in the woods.”
“He’s older than me, and I don’t get scared.” I was like the schooner that sank last week in clear sight of the dock where it’d been moored because it’d been overloaded, except I was full of shit, not lumber. She didn’t know that. One thing my father told me is that people only know what they’re told.
She smiled. “I think I scare you.”
“No.” I couldn’t say anything else, thought of a few things but couldn’t slide them out of my mouth.
“Come and sit with me.”
When I sat down, she took my hand and held it in both of hers.
I had to swallow hard before I could speak. “I wish we were at the beach.”
“Speak quietly. My brother might find us.”
“I thought you said he wouldn’t.”
“It’s not like he’s a monster. He’s not as awful as you.”
My blood went hot, and I took back my hand.
She sprang toward me and kissed me and held me there until I kissed her back. She pushed me down and we were lying in the grass and it sheltered us from the wind and from sight. My lips ached fiercely and my pecker was swollen to bursting and embarrassing there in my pants. Then someone was crashing through the woods and into the field. Teresa jumped up because it was Oliver. We could hear him yelling. She pushed me down so I wouldn’t stand up. She walked away. I heard her say something to her brother. I waited for them to come back but they never did. When I stood up, they were gone.
After school we’d run from Oliver, and after a couple more times he quit following us. Teresa said that her mother was a lady of the darkened room. Meaning she hid out and didn’t bother anyone with the hope of not being bothered. Her father was always working. She didn’t have to go home. The housekeepers didn’t tell on her. We didn’t know or really care what Oliver would do.
“Your family is rich,” I said.
“Yes.”
“It makes you different.”
“Not as different as you.”
“Here we go.”
“Put your hand there.”
I did as I was told. She kissed me and I tried to crawl on top of her, but she pushed me off.
“I didn’t say to do that.”
“Sorry.”
“Show me it.”
“Show you what?”
“You know what.” She reached down and touched my crotch and then started to undo my belt. I helped her get me unhitched and pulled it out. After a few long seconds of staring, she finally grabbed it. “Don’t tell anybody.”
“I won’t.”
“You’re all liars. Every last one.”
“Not me.” I had my hand down the front of her dress to the elbow, and I could hear the stitching begin to tear.
“Stop that and lie back.”
It didn’t take long and when I was done she left me out and sticky and wiped her hand on the grass, musky as a fox trap. I was taking a chill, so I stood and shoved my slimy pecker into my pants and buckled up.
“Where are you going?”
“There’s a creek. I’ll wash up.”
“Not now. Sit with me.”
I sat. After a few minutes of staring at the grass and the clouds that were rolling in, I asked if she liked it.
“Doin that to me.”
“It’s fine.”
“Do you like it when somebody does it to you?”
“If they do it right, and they don’t have dirty hands or scratchy nails.” She picked up my hand an
d inspected it. “Not good.”
“I’ll cut my nails tonight and wash up.”
“All right.”
The clouds were dull and heavy and the ripe green grass smelled of yesterday’s rain. “We used to be rich. Not as rich as you, but my father was a doctor. He owned a whole city block.”
“Why isn’t he a doctor anymore?”
“I don’t know. Some people still call him Doc.”
“Oliver told me that your father never went to school to be a doctor. He just told people he was.”
“How’d he buy a city block then?”
“He was fooling people.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. He’s a logger now, anyway.”
“My dad says loggers are one generation from being wild beasts. He says they prove Mendelian inheritance.”
“What’s he mean by that?”
“He means two black dogs don’t have white puppies.”
“Loggers don’t marry loggers.”
“In a way though, they do.”
I was just smart enough to be insulted, which didn’t do me any good at all. “I’m goin to wash up. I’ll be right back.”
“All right. Hurry, though. It’s going to rain.”
She was my girlfriend. We met every day, but we had to be sneaky or her father would find out. Zeb and the McCandlisses learned to keep their mouths shut about her. To them I think I existed somewhere between pity and wonder. She made me late for supper, but it didn’t matter because my father was always gone, and Mother didn’t keep me to schedules. Sometimes I’d sneak out to see her and she wouldn’t be able to get away to meet me, so I’d just go home, walk miles in the dark, scared of bears and everything else, for nothing. Once I left the lights of town, I was alone. No one there except the ones that’d like to do me harm. Your mind tells you this: darkness keeps danger. You can’t listen to your mind. It took everything I had not to break out and run. I would think of her so I would be brave. I would’ve walked ten times as far in even darker woods to get the chance to see her. I wanted to see her now, but she was in Seattle with her mother and wouldn’t be back for another week.
I decided then that my mother would live if I left. I was afraid of what would happen if I stayed. She couldn’t die if I wasn’t there. I had to leave before the doctor returned.
In the street I looked back at the doctor’s house, with its six different styles of shingles. The windows mirrored the gray sky. Painted on the side of the shingle mill at the waterfront, it said: “We Do It All.” She was still in there, deep sleeping, as if she’d never lived. They do it all.
The McCandliss brothers, Ben and Joseph, spotted me down the hill and took off their hats and waved and yelled at me across the busy street. They didn’t have a mother either and would surely like to compare loss to loss. Ben was trying to grow a mustache and looked like an ugly bearded woman, with his long hair grown past his shoulders. Joseph looked the same as he ever did in his too-tight clothes. His thick hands hung from his cuffs, curled and meaty. I waved and made like I was crossing the street, then cut between Weatherby’s horse barn and the empty corral and hit Front Street running. Ben and Joseph’s father, August McCandliss, was in the penitentiary for murdering a cattle rancher in Tacoma. And mine should be. We’re none of us so different now. Somewhere out of my mixed-up thoughts rose the idea that life wasn’t so much of a thing, you couldn’t hold it except in your own body, but more of a season and too short, because when it ended everything changed and looked different and smelled different and that’s where you were, you couldn’t go back to where you’d like to be. You wake up one day and it’s winter. You wake up one day and somebody is dead, and it might be you.
I went at a fair pace, with my back bent and my arms swinging. People on the street mostly stepped out of my way. A man dressed in a stiff and burned-smelling suit pushed me, and I smashed into the wall of Fitzgerald’s Lodging House and spun and glared at the back of the man’s head and his cauliflower ears sticking out from under his derby. I went on, both inwardly more scared and outwardly bolder than before. A black-haired girl blocked my path, plump in a blue dress with blood rising in her cheeks. I charged right at her and she slipped trying to avoid me and fell down in the mud, and I stepped over her legs like she was deadfall. When I looked back, I saw the ghost of my mother there on the ground. A skinny man dressed in black with a long beard came out of the crowd and leaned over her and offered his hand. A parental visage: death reaching.
So I ran. My lungs felt wooden and cracked. I hoped I’d be trampled by a horse, or fall somehow into the harbor and drown. I thought I could go with her, like I’d gone with her to town and to church. All the people had stopped talking and going wherever they’d been going and were watching me now. Birds watched me, horses and dogs. My strides lengthened, and I ran faster until I was at my ultimate, elemental pace, full, brimming; and I kept at it although I could feel it slipping; I ran as if I could run from this life to another. I could run to death, into its open arms, but I didn’t want that. Fearfully, no.
At the intersection I stopped and huffed and hawked up stringy phlegm and wiped my eyes. It seemed the options weren’t left and right but future and past. I walked up the street breathing and blinking and stretching my jaw, spit a yellow lunger from the very bottom of my lungs and wiped my chin on my jacket sleeve.
Bernice Travois, the old midwife, adopter of the McCandlisses, half-mother to all, was sitting on her porch. Someone had painted her house up to the height of a man but stopped there, no ladder. As I approached, she offered me a piece of bread from the basket on the porch. In the yard were six, maybe seven toddlers, wobbling and crawling in the trampled grass and mud, runny noses and scabby foreheads, pinkeye, jug-eared mud babies. I went into the yard and took the hard bread and bit into it and mumbled a thank-you through my chewing. I looked at the children in disgust. I was little once.
“I’m so sorry for you, Duncan,” the old woman said. “I’ll say a prayer so that you’ll be safe.” Bernice used to help teach school, but she didn’t any more. Ms. Kletchko was the teacher now. Bernice raised the whores’ unwanted children. Raising bastards up like corn, I’d heard said. The McCandlisses slept here.
I couldn’t swallow, so I spit the bread at her feet and then scraped the wet crumbs from my mouth with my fingers, tasted my dirty hand. “I don’t need nothin from you. Not yer pity or yer bread.”
“Heh,” the old woman said, sneered, showed missing and black teeth. Ben and Joseph said she was mean as a snake once the door shut you inside.
“Heh, yourself,” I said, and went on my way.
Since I missed the ferry, I took the road. I didn’t have any money anyhow. I could sneak on, could free-hire a skiff, but I’d be against the tide. There was no stopping me from doing any of the wrong things anymore. The McCandlisses said that Hank Bellhouse told them that in wartime boys my age would be soldiering by now, saluting and marching and killing. “And what is peacetime soldierin if not criminal?” Joseph McCandliss said.
“If there’s money that’s not blood money,” his brother said, parroting Bellhouse, “I ain’t seen it.”
Crossing the bridge, I spotted someone up ahead and was ashamed of myself, so I left the road and went overland, hiding, and not hurrying either. There was a path but I avoided that too. The rain made no difference to me. I hadn’t even taken it into account until I was soaked through. The trees offered shelter and I zigzagged between them, more for the stillness than the dry. I rested for a while and the tears came back. The squirrels chattering in the trees and the lulling rain settled the question of my significance. I wished my father wouldn’t have left me too.
Hours later, I came up from the river bottom and stood at the edge of the clearing and looked at the house. There was no smoke coming from the chimney. Our three remaining sheep stood rooted in the corral among the stumps and rotting logs, the standing water, looking in my direction. The milk cow must’ve heard me because it began to low. I wondered if
the cow would miss her; if the birds might, the sheep, the mud, and the garden, the parsnips: the little old men.
The kitchen table and chairs had been pushed aside, and Uncle Matius’s and Jonas’s things filled the room. Their cases stunk of grease and woodsmoke and there were drag marks in the soft wood floor. Hay from the barn was scattered about and stamped into muddy footprints, but nothing in the bedroom had so much as moved. Father’s rucksack, muddy and threadbare, was at the foot of the bed. He hadn’t left at all. He’d be in town, lurching from bar to bar, moaning at the streetlights like they were burning him.
Father, get up. Mr. Bennet put you on his crew, remember? Mother promised him you’d be there.
Get away from me. I know when I leave. I know what. I know. I’m the best faller they got. I’m the bull of the woods.
Then get up and show them.
Show you.
Mother’s brush and a paring knife, a file for her nails, were on her dresser. Next to the bed was a small wooden box with hairpins and some tin jewelry, her diary. She had two dresses besides the one she had on, and they were both hanging in the closet.
If Father left, he didn’t take anything, and if he didn’t take his bindle, he wasn’t gone. They’d lied to me. He couldn’t have gone without that. Now he was going to show up and ask for what? He wouldn’t ask for anything. He never did. Relief was what I felt, and it made me sick. Don’t be glad if he comes back.
I sat at the table in the corner with the shotgun and watched the door. The sound of the fire in the stove went on and on like there were tiny men working in there. I told myself that I was ready to kill him, and I’d do it too. I’d sit there and wait and when he came in I’d shoot him like he was an animal and I didn’t know him and it was nothing. But sitting there I was as scared as I’d ever been.
The sound of the wagon and horses outside woke me. I waited, ready, while the wagon was unhitched and the horses put away. Jonas, the big cousin, came in first, and then Uncle Matius. They were both carrying crates of supplies. Neither of them saw me in the corner, both barrels aimed at the door, my finger on the trigger. The small heat from the fire was quickly sucked out into the night. Jonas saw me first. “Your father isn’t with us,” he said. “It’s just the two of us.”
