A Place Of Light

by Mary Bucci Bush

  And then his face goes, like it’s an egg and somebody cracked it hard against the side of a frying pan and it just breaks open.

  I feel Maude take a step back.

  He drops down on his knees on the floor in front of her.

  “You got to stand by me,” she says.

  I look at her and think, If I had a shotgun I would kill you. I would kill him, too, on his knees like that. If I had a shotgun and that bike worked I would get out of here so fast I wouldn’t even take a breath of air.

  “God Jesus,” he says into his hands.

  “Don’t forsake me,” she says. “Everybody is always forsake me.”

  “I thought you was done with this.”

  “I love you so bad,” she says.

  If I had a shotgun, I think.

  “Don’t tell me this,” he says. He looks up out of his hands at her. “I can’t do no more.” He looks at his hands, like his face left something there for him to see, then looks back at her. “I can’t,” he says. “I can’t no more for you.”

  “Don’t forsake me,” she says.

  “Where is she?” he says, like he’s choking on the words.

  “It never lets up,” she says.

  “Where?” he says.

  “On the bed,” she tells him. “She won’t let up.”

  He is holding his stomach like he will break in two if he lets go.

  “You got to take her somewhere,” she says. “Don’t get Cardamon. It’s nobody’s business.”

  Inside me it’s like cinder blocks stacking up in my legs all the way to my stomach, each one telling me, What was done is really done. At night I stay awake and listen to hear if she’s coming into my bedroom after me because you never know when. But I could fight her. Even if she sneaked up I would be ready, I would be awake and I would fight her. And the cinder blocks stack higher, up to my chest now.

  I back up more and touch Maude. I would die if she ever laid a hand to Maude, I think.

  He stands up, staggering like a deer that’s been shot but is still trying to run.

  “You got to take her somewhere,” she says. “Don’t forsake me.”

  He stumbles for the kitchen door and we jump out away into the kitchen and he goes past us, moving his arms like a drowning man trying to come up for air. And then he’s gone down the hallway and I hear the door open down there and everything stops.

  Maude gives me a look that cuts deep. She is so cool and far away, like it don’t even touch her, and it scares me worse almost than what’s done.

  We hear him moving in the bedroom, then everything is dead still for a long time. Maude is looking at me in that cool way that fills me with shame that I am weak and helpless and it is all my fault for doing nothing. I can see into the parlor the ripped shade on the floor and the TV shut off and I feel her sitting in there, a fat pile of dough it makes me sick to think of.

  Then like out of a dream Pa says my name from down the hall in that bedroom, “Wesley.”

  I don’t answer.

  “Wesley,” he says again. I don’t know what it is he wants and I don’t want to know. I take Maude’s arm and I pull her outside and she comes.

  That broken piece of junk Cardamon sold me is parked over by the stump, the kerosene can and rusted parts laying all over. We move down the steps and go stand near that mess I been working on all these days and I try to think if there’s anybody would buy it from me for parts.

  “It ain’t going to run,” Maude says, matter-of-fact, like she’s known it all along.

  The door opens and we turn to see him standing there. I can’t move or talk with fear of it.

  “Go get me – in the barn,” he says, and I tell him, so he won’t say no more, “I’ll go get Cardamon.”

  “Never mind Cardamon,” he says.

  But I start for the road. “I’ll tell him come help,” I say.

  “Don’t you go after Cardamon, goddamnit,” he tells me.

  “Maude,” I say, and she doesn’t move.

  “Get back here,” he tells me.

  “Maude,” I say.

  “Get back here,” he says.

  And then I go back as far as Maude and I reach for her and we start running. But when we get to the road we turn toward town, not toward Cardamon’s.

  “What the hell you think you’re doing?” he yells after us. “Get back here,” he says, “goddamnit, or we’ll all end up in hell.”

  It’s warm and still where we pull off into the bushes and crouch down to wait. We can still hear him yelling after us a ways down.

  “Where we going?” Maude says.

  “Shh,” I tell her, putting my hand up to her mouth. “I got to think.”

  But all I think is crazy thoughts, like how about if we sneak over to Cardamon’s and hide in the backseat of his car with a blanket over us so after he drives to work in the morning we can get out and go someplace, like neither him nor Pa would notice a blanket with the two of us under it. Or maybe steal his car and go, which is maybe not so crazy except it’s so loud you can hear it a mile away. Or walk to town and go find a sheriff or somebody which is the craziest idea of all, since they would lock me up in a jail and put Maude in another one and the rest of our lives we would never lay eyes on each other again.

  She watches me a long time squatting there, waiting for me to say something that will change every minute of our lives so far. But I got nothing like that in me.

  I hear Pa moving around back by the house, hollering for us, and she is watching me.

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “We ain’t going back there.”

  “Where we going?”

  “Someplace,” I say. “I got to think.” But I got no idea, nothing, like we’ll just stay crouched in them bushes forever.

  Her eyes glaze over at me and she looks like she will spit that I got no answers, and I blurt out the words like they come flying from a slingshot. “We going to that old lady in the hills.”

  She stares at me like I’m one of them people at church that puts their hands in the air and babbles out tongues, then faints dead away. “The one that come that time with her husband to buy the chickens,” I tell her. “And she gave you a quarter.”

  “Why we going there?” Maude says. “We don’t know that lady.”

  We don’t know nobody, I could tell her but don’t. Instead I say, “You got a better idea?” and she gets that face on her again.

  But I would have Maude spit on me, I would have her do anything because all I can think is we got a sister at home laying dead and here we have left and are crouching in the bushes talking and who knows it could be us there. And all my insides fill up with them cinder blocks again.

  “You don’t even know where in them hills,” Maude says.

  “I been there,” I say, and it’s true, with Cardamon riding me in his car, but I’m not sure the road and it must be three, four miles at least anyways.

  “We going to walk all the way up into them hills?” she says. “We going to walk all the way there with no food or nothing?”

  Pa is quiet now and we stop and listen and I don’t know if he’s quiet because he’s taking Martha somewhere or because he’s coming after us.

  I motion Maude and we scat across the road and into the woods on the other side and head kitty-corner through them over to Oxbow Road. There’s a little creek not far before we reach the road, little enough to jump over, and I tell her drink since we been burning in the sun all day.

  But she won’t. “Cow’s gone the bathroom in there,” she says.

  I’m cupping my hands there, drinking. “They ain’t no cows nowhere around here,” I tell her. “You drink now or you gonna dry up and die.” She looks at me a long time when I say that, then she gets down and cups her hands and drinks.

  All I know is to head up the Oxbow because it goes to the hills and hope to God for the right road.

  “We got to turn at the place that’s got all them dogs,” I tell Maude. “I know that much.”

 
We walk up the steep hill, on the side of the road, with no cars coming, and the birds calling off in the trees. And I’m thinking, what’s her name, because I know it and heard it lots of times, she’s the one that raises flowers to sell and she’s so old they say maybe she was the first person ever lived in this county, before there was even a town. Sawyer, Snyder, I’m thinking. Putnam, Pullman, but nothing sounds right.

  The road is getting steeper and it’s hard to climb, if you look back you can see everything. And when we reach the top we turn to look and I point to the lake and the town way down in there and all the fields with small dots of cows. “You said there wasn’t any cows,” she says.

  “Must be new,” I tell her, like I been there lots of times and know what I’m talking about and then I get sick with myself, sounding just like Pa, lying, and I would want to shoot myself first before I ever got to be like him.

  The road evens out for a little while, and there’s fields on one side, with a tractor off in one field chugging up the rows spraying crops. A woodchuck stands up ahead of us near the road and looks at us, then dives into the weeds, its fur rippling like water on its back.

  “What you think he’s going to do with her?” Maude asks me.

  It makes me sick to think, but I can’t stop thinking anyway, all the time we been going, all day working on that dirt bike, every minute since she locked the door, all the time I haven’t been saying a word about it.

  “Will he take her to the hospital?” Maude says.

  “What for?” I say.

  “Will they go to jail?” she says. “Will they put them in the electric chair?” And that’s the first I know that she really knows the all of it, because up till now our baby could have been sick like they said about the other two, who they said died in their sleep. But not how they think, I could’ve told them.

  “I hope they put them in the electric chair,” Maude says. I look at her my sister swinging her arms and walking on the side of the road like some young girl that lived up in them hills talking about going to the county fair or berry picking and it makes me go cold.

  I could curse myself, I could beat my own self black and blue for not knowing how to fix that bike or not having the guts to steal Cardamon’s car or, worse, for not getting out and taking both of them with me and it may as well have been me that done it, and I can’t bear it, I can’t bear to think that way, but it won’t stop.

  “The next house we pass,” I tell her, “I’m stealing their car if they got one. I’m getting me some money and driving us to Florida.”

  She looks like I just told her Santa Claus is here and she don’t know if she should believe me or not. “They got coconut trees there,” she says. “I want to see a coconut tree.”

  “You look see if there’s a car I can steal,” I tell her.

  But when we pass the farm I am too scared and ashamed of it and we don’t say nothing, we just keep our eyes on the big old brown car parked by the road with no people around, not even a dog, and we just keep walking.

  Pretty soon there’s a road up ahead, with a faded sign with no words left on it and she looks at me to see what I will do.

  “This ain’t the one,” I say, but I’m not sure anymore, and we keep going.

  I watch her trudge along, looking like she will go anywhere and not even care how long it takes. She is a little girl, but she will go anywhere if I tell her it’s okay and then that awful feeling comes back, that I am supposed to know things and I am supposed to keep them from getting hurt, but I don’t know nothing and they are hurt to death anyway.

  A car comes up the hill behind us and slows down and looks. It’s a boy with his long hair combed back with his sleeves rolled up and his skinny arm dangling a cigarette butt out the window, and music playing on the radio. He scowls like he’s pretending he wasn’t looking at us and speeds off straight ahead. He flicks the butt out the window into the road and it’s out by the time we get there.

  Then we just walk a long time without talking.

  When I look up, there’s that pen up ahead on the corner where they keep all them dogs.

  “That’s the road,” I say. There’s nothing inside the pen but tall weeds and a couple plastic bowls and some worn-out spots in the weeds, with a broken-down shed on the side of the pen and a run-down house. We stop a minute and I try to think, left or right. I try to remember in the car with Cardamon, which way we come from and which way we went, and first I think it’s got to be one way, but then I don’t know, it seems the other.

  “Don’t you know where it is?” she tells me. “This ain’t even the road, is it?”

  Then out the blue I think of that boy and that’s how I know to turn left, because he threw his cigarette that way and he is in a car speeding down the road somewhere and he is free.

  “I know where I’m going,” I tell her, and we go that way where I probably never been before. But at least we are going.

  “I wish’t I had a baloney sandwich,” she says.

  “Why you always talking about food?” I say, but I wish’t I had something, too.

  “Will they put us in jail with them?” she says.

  “We ain’t done nothing,” I tell her, but I don’t know. And it’s not the police I am afraid of, because he was going to the barn not the hospital, so nobody would even know, like if a cat got run over in the road and he went to bury it. And I wonder if already he’s out there coming after us, afraid what if we tell somebody.

  “We ain’t done nothing,” I say.

  “We almost there yet?” she says.

  “Almost,” I tell her, but I don’t know nothing, just like Pa.

  Up a ways a dirt road goes off to the right and the road goes up a hill just a little bit, with trees hanging over, making like a cool tunnel. It’s a nice road and I turn onto it, I don’t know why. The trees make everything seem darker, though it’s not dark. It’s like being inside some place, out of the light of day.

  “It’s spooky in here,” Maude says. And it is, so quiet and covered that I look into the trees and wonder if they been following us, if Pa’s in there right now with his eyes on us, ready to do something.

  But then the trees widen out and up ahead is a house.

  “It’s a dead end,” Maude says. We walk up to the wood fence along the road in front of the house and stop. “You took us to a dead end,” she says.

  The house is a plain little shack of gray boards with no paint, with a dirt path from the road to the steps. On one side the path is some tomato and cabbage plants. On the other side is flowers. Sweet peas and weeds grow tangled on the fence, and we stand there at the end of the road looking at that beat-up house.

  “Them’s the flowers she sells?” Maude says.

  “I told you I knew how to get here,” I tell her. But all I can think is this is not the place, that’s not enough flowers to sell, and now we got to turn around and go back all the way down to the other road and hope it don’t get dark. And I think for real this time if I see a car I will steal it.

  “You going up there?” Maude says.

  But I stand looking at the house, not moving, and my feet just want to lay down and not go anywhere for a long time.

  “You gonna knock on the door?” she says.

  “Hello,” I say. “Anybody home?” But not loud enough for anybody to hear.

  As soon as I say it a big dog comes pushing its way out from around the house and trots down the path to us, all the tags on its collar jangling, like it’s been waiting for us to get there. It stops and shakes its big head, jangling, and looks at us like it’s saying How you doing, What’s new with you, a big red long-hair dog.

  Maude backs up a step, he’s so big. Then she says, “You could ride him. You could put a saddle on him and ride,” and she touches him on the top of the head.

  There’s a funny sound from the side of the house, like some kind of bird I never heard before and the dog looks, and me and Maude look. But it’s not a bird, it’s an old lady calling, “Here, Bo
y. Where are you?” in a voice I never heard nothing like before. She comes around the side of the house, walking slow and carrying a wicker basket. She strains to see us and keeps coming, saying, “Who’s there? Francis Beal, did you finally come to mow my lawn?” in that voice way up high like a bird.

  We don’t say nothing, we just stare at her. She’s tiny and shriveled up inside a blue sack of a dress, and she’s wearing socks and corduroy slippers. Her hair is fluffy and jumbled like the inside of a bird’s nest.

  “What did you find, Boy?” she says, looking at us, and the dog jangles his chain and looks at her like he’s the happiest dog that ever got born on earth.

  When she’s halfway to us, I see some flowers sticking out the wicker basket and all I can think is God Almighty we’re here.

  “You bought them chickens from us,” I shout at her, like we been looking for each other our whole lives and she should run up and throw her arms around me. “We come to the right place,” I tell Maude.

  The old lady stops and looks at us funny. “Last week at the store?” she says.

  “Down on the farm on Glass Factory Road,” I tell her. “Two, three years ago.”

  “Only it’s not a farm no more,” Maude says.

  “Why it’s a couple of children,” she says. “Two or three years ago?” and she just looks at us blank, like her whole face is under water that she is trying to see through. The lines on her face run so deep you could plant beans in them, and she is small and frail like a bird, it makes me wonder how she can even stand up.

  “You say you’re looking for chickens?” she says. And then she shakes her head, looking at us like there’s something pitiful in us being there.

  Which there is, more than she’d ever want to know.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t have any chickens.”

  I look at Maude and see her face go soft, like one by one those strings holding any kind of hope to her are snapping away.

  “You say you’ve come all the way from Glass Factory Road?” she says, and her head shakes and then I see her arms and hands shake, too, trembling like she’s so old she’s coming apart. “Well, I don’t know where you got the idea I had chickens.”