Here on Earth

by Alice Hoffman

  “Some people don’t like to hear the truth.”

  And, Hank thinks as he watches Ken drive off, some people don’t like to tell it. Hank, for instance, hasn’t told anyone about the old man who has taken to following him. He didn’t even notice at first, but for the past week or two he’s felt someone watching him. He heard noises when he brought old Geronimo and Coop’s ornery pony out to the pasture. A branch breaking. An intake of breath. He has taken to looking over his shoulder, even when he and Gwen are walking home from school on the deserted High Road. Recently, he’d begun to see bits and pieces of the old man. A footprint in an icy field. A thread snagged on some witch hazel.

  Hank tried to train his eyes to look beyond what he saw. A twisted oak had hands. A stack of hay wore worn leather boots. Then. one day, Hank looked behind him on the road and there was the old man, thin as a stick, pale as winter, with an unkempt beard and clothes far too big for his frame. Hank felt panic rise in his throat. He had the urge to grab the old man or to run away, but he did neither. He kept walking, and before long he realized it was his father who was following him. He knew because the old man would not cross onto Hollis’s property; instead he disappeared into the Marshes, without a sound.

  What would be the point of having a father now? Hank’s all but grown, he’s managed without; he’d be embarrassed to be claimed by a pathetic drunk who doesn’t seem to know when his boots are on the wrong feet. It makes no sense; not now. It’s Hollis who raised him, Hollis to whom he owes his allegiance. All the same, Hank finds himself thinking of his father, the way he used to examine a bottle of gin before he began to drink, as if there was some promise deep inside. Well, there are no promises, that was the problem; not in drink and not in life, not now and not ever.

  The door to the empty house is rattling as the wind picks up; March must have forgotten the latch. Hank is on his way to check when he sees the old man. He just won’t stop. He’s everywhere.

  “What do you want?” Hank shouts.

  The Coward is wearing a thick black coat Louise Justice brought him one year when the Judge grew tired of it.

  “Stop following me around.” Hank can feel his face flush with anger. He doesn’t owe this guy anything, after all, not even courtesy.

  The Coward is tall, like Hank, but he weighs perhaps a hundred and twenty pounds. He wants to say something, but instead he stands there, silent, his hands in his pockets.

  “I want you to cut it out.” Hank’s actually sweating. Crazy, but he’s nervous being alone with his own father, not that he thinks of him that way. “Okay? Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Hank wishes he could be nastier, but it’s not in his nature. He could, if he wanted, blow this old man over with one breath. He could break him in two.

  “Do you understand?” Hank asks, and for some reason he feels a burning behind his eyes, as though he might cry.

  The Coward finds his son to be so beautiful it seems inconceivable that they could be the same species. Yet they are; they’re flesh and blood. What he would not give to embrace this boy, to be a father for a minute or a day. But they are at a standstill, with nowhere to go. Here is the most difficult aspect of forgiveness: You have to ask in order to receive it. This, the Coward cannot do. He can stand there, on this cold November day, but he cannot ask for what he needs. And so it is his fate to wait in silence for another day, done in by his own fear, once again.

  By the time Hank is done latching the door, the Coward has disappeared back into the woods. Since the hour when Hollis came for him, Hank has never looked back. But he’s looking back now, and when he does he sees that the man on the floor they stepped over when they left that shack was consumed with grief, sick with alcohol. Hank can’t help himself, he pities his father. He almost wishes he hadn’t chased him off. Oh, he knows Hollis would consider this a weakness in him. Pity is for women, and babies, and fools. Your father got what he deserved, that’s what Hollis would say.

  No one gets what he deserves, that’s what Hank is thinking now. Things happen, and sometimes it all goes wrong. An entire life can become a dead end. Hank considers this for a very long time, and by the time he’s done thinking, he’s no longer sure that Hollis has all the answers. Before he leaves, Hank goes to the garden shed for the ladder he always used for cleaning out Mrs. Dale’s gutters. It’s a heavy old ladder, but reliable and strong. He leans it against the chestnut tree and climbs up carefully. By tomorrow, Ken Helm will finish lopping off most of the branches, in the hopes that the blight will be stopped and new growth will begin in the spring.

  For as long as he can remember, Hank has done as he’s been told; a good boy, dedicated as a dog, thankful for scraps. A fact from Hollis was a fact indeed; no questions asked, and none need be. Now he’s wondering if he’s been misled, and if judgment is not such a simple thing. If he’s a good boy, why did he steal the letters March meant to send? Why, on that day when Hollis came for him, did he not kneel down beside his father and kiss him goodbye, the very least any son could do?

  As he goes higher on the old ladder, Hank is unsure of what he believes, but he does know one thing—everyone deserves at least this: fresh air, clear skies, the sight of the earth from the vantage point of an old tree. His hands tremble when he takes the nest, but he’s careful as he comes back down the ladder. He places the nest on the ground while he carries the ladder over to a tall crab apple tree he helped Mrs. Dale plant a few years back. It was one of her favorites, an early bloomer with huge white flowers. Hank brings the ladder over, then grabs the nest, climbs up, and positions the nest into place. When he’s back on the ground, Hank claps his hands together to clean off the dirt. He may not have accomplished much, but at least that’s done. March won’t have to worry about the doves, although, in Hank’s opinion, she had better start to worry about herself instead.

  19

  Hollis has begun to have his dream about the horse again, that awful dream that always wakes him in the middle of the night and leaves him out of breath and sweaty and ready to run. He supposes that you cannot really murder a horse; that is something humans do to each other. You kill a horse, just as you would a cow or a sheep, but somehow it’s not the same. It’s uglier. It gives you nightmares, year in and year out and maybe even for the rest of your life.

  If you are going to do it, Hollis knows, do it speedily and in the dark. Plan it out carefully, and be aware of what hours the grooms and the trainers keep. Make certain to get half your money up front, and be sure it’s a great deal of money. After all, the owner of a dead racehorse stands to collect quite a bit from his insurance company. That’s why he’s paying you. All you have to realize is a single indelible fact: Just because you walk away after you’ve been paid doesn’t mean you won’t be dreaming about it afterwards, when you’re no longer as hungry or as young.

  Here’s the thing about killing a horse—its screams are far worse than any sound a man can produce. Wear earplugs, work fast; be sure you’re done and over the fence before they realize their pain. It’s a lot of money for someone with no education and no training and no heart at all. It’s a small fortune, if you can stand the way they scream when you shatter their cannon bones and knees with a hammer or a wrench. When you start to have bad dreams, go back and ask for more money from the owners. Don’t call it blackmail; it’s simply an extra payment for a job well done. After all, the horse wasn’t running well, and that’s what such horses are meant to do. Invest your money wisely, in land and condominiums and the market, and do it before you get hurt, because there will always be a horse who will fight for its life.

  That is the one he always dreams about, the last one in Miami, a job so botched the owner never collected, even though the horse had been a Preakness winner and was insured for two million. Horses have hotter blood than humans, that’s what Hollis believes, and he was covered with blood by the time he was finished. He had to stand in the shower for hours, and even then the cold water was a pale remedy. That horse, a white th
oroughbred, had refused to go down. Hollis had blood under his fingernails and all over his boots; two weeks later, after he’d headed back to Massachusetts, he was brushing his teeth in the bathroom of his rented rooms above the Lyon Cafe when he found horse’s blood in the rim of his ear. A single red thread which couldn’t tie him to any crime, and could be easily scrubbed away with a damp washcloth, and yet that mark seems to have been a curse. He still does not like to look at himself in the mirror, for fear he’ll see blood, and to this day he despises the color red. That horse continues to follow Hollis while he sleeps. He runs in pastures that are as red as blood; he races through guilt and grief. Kill something, and it’s yours forever. At night, you will be at your victim’s mercy, but that’s only temporary. Dreams, after all, are worthless things-Hollis knows that. They can’t reach you on the street where you walk; they can only torment a man with a conscience, any fool who allows it.

  Now that the dream is back, Hollis often gets out of bed in the dark. He leaves March sleeping, and goes to sit in Mr. Cooper’s parlor, in the leather chair where Mr. Cooper liked to relax and smoke his cigars. He watches the light break through the sky above the Farm. Blood buys things and it always has. It was his dream to stand on top of Fox Hill and own everything in sight, and now he has made it all so real that if any trespasser comes by he’ll find himself hauled off to jail. It’s his, the acres of woodland, the houses, the fences, even this chair, where Mr. Cooper liked to read the Sunday paper, unaware that he was being watched through the window by a boy who owned nothing, not even the clothes on his back, which had been paid for out of the goodness of Henry Murray’s heart.

  “Everything you have I own,” Alan Murray told Hollis when he came back from his father’s funeral.

  Well, he’s fixed that, hasn’t he? Sitting in the dark, Hollis thinks about his money. He thinks about the woman, asleep in his bed. Why is it he continues to feel so poor? Why is he waiting for March to bolt out the door? He’s been worrying about Richard Cooper, who’s not giving up so easily and who has taken to calling. Hollis has been hanging up on him, but sooner or later March will answer the phone, and that won’t do. He’ll see to it the way he’s seen to the mail, so that March hasn’t received any responses from the stores that want to sell her work. A woman who has her own money can leave you when you least expect it; she can walk off anytime.

  Long before anyone in the house is awake, before Hank has fed the dogs, before Gwen has written a letter to her father or March has set about making a cranberry coffee cake to bring to the Justices’ Thanksgiving dinner, Hollis has taken care of the phone lines.

  “Must be some wire down,” he says, when March tries to contact Susie to ask if there’s anything else she should bring to dinner.

  “Are you sure you won’t go with us?” March asks.

  “Dinner with those old coots?” Hollis grins. “I don’t think so. I’ll stick to frozen food.”

  Hollis has actually encouraged March to take the kids and go to dinner; their absence will give him the chance to look through her suitcase and her dresser drawers to make sure she hasn’t managed to receive any letters from Richard before Hollis could retrieve the mail.

  “I want you to have fun,” Hollis tells March. “Enjoy yourself. Take Hank—he can eat the Justices out of house and home for a change.”

  “Remember,” March says when they’re ready to leave, “you can always change your mind and come for dessert.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Hollis tells her, even though he’d rather be tied into a straitjacket than have a meal with the Justices.

  “Hollis isn’t going?” Hank asks when March comes out to the car.

  Hank is in the backseat, and March hands him the coffee cake. “He hates polite society. You know that.”

  “Well, I’m sure it hates him right back,” Gwen says. She’s sitting in the front seat, with Sister on her lap.

  “You’re bringing the dog?” March asks.

  “I’m not leaving her here.”

  Hank looks over his shoulder at the house. “Maybe I should stay.”

  “Oh, no you don’t,” Gwen says. “Don’t you feel sorry for him.”

  “It’s not that,” Hank insists.

  Gwen smiles in spite of herself; it’s exactly that.

  “It’s a holiday, that’s all,” Hank says.

  “Well, you’re coming with us,” March says. “Hollis wants you to. One of the reasons Louise is getting a twenty-five-pound turkey is because I’m bringing two teenagers.”

  When they get to the Justices’, Gwen and Hank take Sister for a walk, since March wants the dog to stay in the car during dinner. Actually, it’s a pleasure for the two of them to be alone in the smoky air, because today everything smells like roasted chestnuts and burning wood and cinnamon wafting from the windows of the bakery, where they’re working overtime to fill holiday orders.

  “I wish you wouldn’t be so concerned about Hollis,” Gwen says as they walk past front lawns and fences. They’ve let the dog run on ahead through the last of the fallen leaves, those which haven’t been blown away or turned into dust. “He still hasn’t given me the ownership papers for Tarot.”

  “He will,” Hank tells her. “He keeps his word.”

  “Yeah, right. I’ll bet he does.”

  “He does,” Hank vows. “You’ll see.”

  Hank and Gwen take a longer walk than they’d intended, but the Justices’ house is crowded even without their presence. Dr. and Mrs. Henderson are there, along with the Laughtons, Harriet and Larry—all of them so polite and stuffy that Hollis would have gone nuts in their presence. The Hendersons’ daughter Miranda is there, free as a bird since her divorce last spring. Ed Milton has of course been invited, along with his twelve-year-old daughter, Lindsay, as has Janet Travis, the new attorney in town—since a resident of ten years is still considered a recent arrival—and her husband, Mitch, who teaches social studies at the high school.

  “Where were you this morning?” Susie asks, after she’s hugged March and taken the coffee cake out of her hands. She can’t help but wonder if March knows that some of the white in her hair has grown in; March looks older with her hair like this, and her face seems drawn. “I’ve been trying to call you to ask you to pick up some eggnog.” Susie lifts the foil and peers at the cake. “Cranberry,” she says. “Yum.”

  “I was home.” March hangs up her coat and follows Susie into the Justices’ kitchen. “Baking that cake.”

  “Well, I called and called and no one ever answered.” Susie pours them each a glass of red wine. “Do you believe how many old folks are out there?”

  “Ed Milton’s not old.” March samples the sweet potato casserole cooling on the counter. “He’s cute.”

  “Don’t get all excited,” Susie tells her. “It’s not serious.”

  Louise Justice comes into the kitchen, catching that last bit of conversation. “That’s what Susie always says. You’d think she was a frivolous person, if you didn’t know her better.”

  “Here’s a drawback,” Susie says. “His daughter hates me. If she keeps being so nasty, I’m going to be nasty right back.”

  “She’s twelve,” Louise says. “In six years she’ll be off to college and you’ll see her at Christmas vacation if you’re lucky. And for now, she lives with her mother in New York. They moved to Roslyn, out on Long Island, this past summer, and Lindsay likes seventh grade a lot more than she thought she would.”

  Susie and March both give Louise a look.

  “I didn’t pry,” Louise swears. “Lindsay volunteered the information. Which she would with you too,” she tells Susie. “If you gave her the chance.”

  Louise now sets them to work. March is to ladle corn chowder from the pot into a tureen. Susie is to remove the oyster stuffing from the cooling turkey.

  “I guess Hollis decided not to show,” Susie says. “Surprise, surprise.”

  “He’s opted for a frozen dinner and peace and quiet,” March says.
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  “At least he let you come,” Susie says.

  “You wouldn’t have wanted him here, considering how you feel. Both of you.” March is looking straight at Louise.

  “I told her about your theory,” Susie admits to her mother. “About Hollis and Belinda. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m glad you did,” Louise says.

  “You are?” Susie is surprised and rather relieved.

  “I am, although I know that March will make her own choices no matter what we say. Won’t you, dear?”

  “That’s right,” March agrees. “So I’d appreciate you butting out, unless you’re willing to let me take over your lives.”

  “Touché,” Louise says.

  Susie pours herself and March more red wine, and gets some cold Chablis from the fridge for her mother. Louise nods and takes a sip of wine. Sometimes, in the old days, the Murrays would bring Judith Dale with them when invited to the Justices’ holiday dinners. Judith would bring her special dishes: her apple brown Betty, her green beans with almonds, her onion soup with its delicious, thick crust. She worked well beside Louise in the kitchen, and Louise always told the Judge how lucky the Murrays had been to find Judith. Why, one year, before she knew anything, she sat Judith next to the Judge, and if she’d been more observant she would have noticed that neither of them spoke a word throughout that dinner, as if proximity and desire had made them mute. For all Louise knows, they may have been holding hands under the table all through dinner. She does remember how surprised and pleased she was when the Judge offered to help Judith clear the table, since he usually didn’t think to attend to household chores.

  “Are you okay, Mom?” Susie asks as she slips the bowl of stuffing into the oven to keep warm.

  Louise has a house full of guests and she’s standing there, doing nothing, with a glass of wine in her hand.

  “Perfectly fine,” Louise says.

  She goes to help March take out the soup bowls from a high cabinet. Every time March reaches for a bowl that emerald ring which used to belong to Judith shimmers, as if it were made of some mysterious liquid. Louise tells herself she’d better snap out of her reverie and stop the self-pity; a ring, after all, is not a heart, it’s not a soul or a husband beside you in bed every night. It’s a rock that’s only worth something in the first place because someone has decided to give it value.