I blink and I’m still seeing all them white things I touched, and the hooks and snaps. Something comes up in my throat and sticks there, and now I’m stuck too, all the way inside an old lady’s bedroom with her blocking the door and looking like she thinks I’m fixing to kill her.
“I ain’t here to hurt you,” I tell her, and it sounds funny the way it comes out, and I’m looking at her like maybe she can do something to help.
The dog’s standing there, the both of them watching me.
“I got to get me and my sister out of here,” I say, the words choking out of me. She just wobbles her head and moves her eyes trying to see.
“Lady,” I tell her, “I got to have some money.”
She looks at me relieved, like I just told her the best news of her life.
“Why didn’t you say so before?” she says. “Instead of going through my things. You could have mowed my lawn.”
“I’ll mow it for you now,” I tell her, thinking why not, for a blind lady who can’t see how bad it’ll look.
“It’s too dark for you,” she says. “Come out of my bedroom.”
“I’m coming,” I tell her. “But you got to move.” I’m scared she’s going to grab me or do something, feeble as she is and I could knock her down if I sneezed hard. But she backs on out into the kitchen and the dog with her, and I go too.
I’m trembling almost as bad as she is from being in there. Maude gives me a scared look like she can’t believe what I done and maybe the lady will call the police now.
“He didn’t mean nothing,” Maude says.
“Honey, it’s all right,” the lady tells her.
But I’m wild inside. I look to Maude and I know we got to get before something big goes wrong.
“What’s happened to you?” the lady says. “What do you need money for?”
I wave my hand at her like she can see to say it don’t matter, nothing don’t matter. “To live,” I say. “That’s what for.”
I put my hand on that can of peaches I took down and hold it. “Ain’t nothing happened to me yet,” I tell her.
“You’re a good boy,” she says. “I know you are.”
I look at her and shake my head, lost.
And then it comes to me like a flash, that she is crazy and anything could happen. So I tell her, “I’ll come back tomorrow and mow your lawn. If you pay me now.”
She wobbles her head at me a long time, like if she looks hard enough she’ll start to see something. Finally she says, “I’ll pay you half. I’ll give you one dollar now.”
It feels like my stomach just sunk to the bottom of the ocean. A dollar, I want to say. What the damn good’s a dollar going to do? I look over at Maude and she’s got that blank face on her again, like she don’t want to let herself believe any of this could turn out good.
“I’ll come do it in the morning,” I tell the lady.
She trembles her head and gets up. She creaks over to the sink and pulls out a tin mop pail from underneath. Inside the pail is her pocket-book, after all the damn snooping I done and going through her bedroom dresser too. She pulls it out right in front of us and brings it back to the table.
It takes forever. She’s got to sit back down and fumble to open it and then fumble to pull out her money purse and fumble to feel through that. Finally she takes a bill out and lays it on the table, a twenty-dollar bill.
Maude starts to open her mouth, but I stop her.
The old lady sits there wobbling, and I can’t tell if she knows it’s a twenty and she’s up to something or if it’s just that she can’t see nothing.
I touch the money to see what she’ll do, and I go weak, I never touched that much before. She sits there nodding her head and does nothing.
I look over at Maude, and then I pick up the money and hold it a minute. It feels heavy.
“I’ll mow that lawn good,” I tell her.
“I know you will,” she says.
I dangle the money at Maude, and I want to jump up and shout over it. But Maude just looks dumb at it like it’s a dream and she knows it.
“We got to go before it gets dark,” I say, trying to keep the fire out of my voice so she won’t know.
The old lady stands up. “I don’t even have a flashlight to give you,” she says.
“That’s all right,” I say. “I can see.” I fold the money and put it in my pocket. I want to get out of there before she takes it back, so I take Maude’s arm and pull her to the door. The old lady’s pocketbook is sitting on the table and I glance back at it, wondering what else is in there.
“I’ll come in the morning,” I say.
“You’re a good boy,” she tells me again, and it stabs right through me. I open the door fast and we go out.
“Thanks for the pie,” Maude tells her.
It’s pretty dark, but we can see the path and the fence and the road. Maude hangs close to me as we stumble down the path. I keep one hand in my pocket, around the folded-up money.
When we get on the road it’s even harder to see because we don’t have the light from the house. A few stars are out, and a little chunk of moon is starting to get its glow.
“We can’t go nowhere,” Maude says. “We should go back.”
But we keep going, down through them trees overhanging the road so it’s near to pitch black in there and we have to feel with our feet if we’re on the road or not. It’s the spookiest place I ever been, yet I’m not even that scared with the money in my pocket. I can feel by the way she holds on my shirt, though, that Maude is, but she just goes with me and don’t ask no more questions.
About halfway down the road we come to a dead stop from the blackness. Trees block out the sky and there’s nothing we can do but stand there.
“We gonna wait it out,” I tell her.
“Here in the road?” she says.
I start shuffling us over to what’s got to be the side of the road, and I’m holding her with one hand and waving my other arm out in front of me to feel the way. I touch branches.
“In here,” I say. “Off the side.”
We move into the woods a little ways, feeling for trees and shrubs, stumbling over everything that’s growing. I come up to a tree. “Right here,” I say. “Sit down.” And we feel our way down and sit there in the pitch black.
I can feel them woods full of living things, maybe in the trees too, who knows what’s hanging over our heads. There’s croaks and chirps and moving sounds. I’m straining to make sure the sounds are from what lives there and not from Pa sneaking around looking for us. I am blinking, trying to see, but there ain’t no seeing.
“We gonna sleep here?” Maude says.
“We gonna try.”
“Then what?” she says.
“Then I’m gonna find them underground tunnels so we can get. You heard that old lady. They go all the way to Georgia. Even to Florida.”
I touch the outside of my pocket and feel the lump of folded-up money in there.
“Ain’t you gonna mow that lady’s lawn?” she says.
“I don’t know,” I tell her. I’m wondering if we go back would she trick us and call the police to take us, or would she give me the rest of the money like she said, and would it be one dollar or another twenty.
“Why’d she give you all that money?” Maude says. “‘Cause she’s a blind old bat,” I tell her. But I don’t know if that’s why.
Then we’re quiet, listening to what’s out there in the woods making sounds. My insides go all hollow on me, like I’m floating out in the middle of nowhere, with no land underneath me and no way home. I see a picture of Pa crashing down the shades, and her sitting there in the chair with her big fat face after what she done and it’s like I never lived in that house and never had no sisters but this one. It’s like I never lived nowhere.
I look up but don’t see nothing for the trees. I know there’s stars out there, though, and that piece of moon, even if I can’t see them. Maude settles back into the tree. “That pi
e was good,” she mumbles.
I touch the money that lady give me. I don’t know what I’m gonna do in the morning, go back to her house or head straight for them tunnels. Maybe there’s an old railroad car left down there we can get into. Maybe there’s things people left we can use.
I hear a sound and jump to, but it’s only crickets out there. After a while I ease back against the tree and listen to them, and to Maude breathing.
I’m free, I think, free as that boy riding in the car with the radio and the cigarette, free as anybody. I can feel them tunnels under me, running through the hills like a good road to somewhere.
Publisher Information
Guernica Editions Inc. acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
visit Guernica Editions
The author is grateful for permission to reprint stories that appeared, sometimes in slightly different form, in the following publications: Black Warrior Review (“Muskrat”), Missouri Review (“A Place of Light”), Plainswoman (“Rude Awakening”), Sing Heavenly Muse (“Cure”), and Syracuse Scholar (“Difficult Passage”).
Originally published in 1990 by William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York.
Copyright © 2007, by Mary Bucci Bush and Guernica Editions Inc.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law.
Cover art by Hono Lulu
Antonio D’Alfonso, editor
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First edition. Printed in Canada.
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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2006929303
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Bush, Mary Bucci
A place of light / Mary Bucci Bush. (Picas series ; 56)
ISBN
1-55071-219-5
978-1-55071-219-3 Paper isbn-13
9781550717570 Epub
9781550717808 Mobi
I. Title. II. Series.
PS3552.U8215P55 2006 813’.6 C2006-903612-8
Each of these impeccably crafted and sensitive stories is built around the outstanding ordinary individuals, the eccentrics of the rural working class of Mary Bush's native upstate New York. These are gritty depictions of the day-to-day lives of the hardworking poor, carrying with them their secret burdens. At the cores of these wide-ranging narratives are moments of surprise, illuminations that stun the thoughtful central per sonalities themselves.
"Like Richard Russo, Carolyn Chute, and Robert Olmstead, Mary Bush carves out compassion and richness from a stony and forested world of lives lived in isolation from the urban mainstream. She renders the justifiable rage of those lives, of the women and men trapped in their harshness, but more, finally their enduring and redeeming ability to forgive" Douglas Unger.
Mary Bucci Bush received her M.A. and D.A. from the grad uate program in creative writing at Syracuse University, where she worked with George Elliott and Raymond Carver. She lives in Pasedena, California.
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