Life on Mars

by Lori McNulty

  He can see the storm coming. Just like Marcus, I think.

  Marcus could dab his tongue into a palm full of earth to tell the exact measure of sand, silt, and clay. He predicted cracked soil and cloudless skies in Vermouth long before most. On my sad, listless nights, he wiped my tears before they hit the pillow.

  Maybe it’s the ancient church pipes or the reverend’s sharp shiny heels, but I swear even the old ranchers can hear the drum-tap of rain. When the reverend finishes his sermon, the Graysons both rise, walk straight into the arms of the supporters who guide them to into the blue-velvet prayer room. No one sees them again that night.

  In the grocery the next day, the Graysons tell me they’re going to auction for more feeder cattle. Town’s hearing a clatter on their rooftops, and shouting from them, too, they say. Talk has turned to expanding the herds with yearling and young red Angus.

  “A terrible gamble,” I say. “Farmers’ Almanac has been calling for long-range dry spells,” I remind them.

  The taller Grayson gazes down at me, a wounded look crossing his face. “You can’t always tell what’s coming, Thérèse. Look at what happened to Marcus.”

  “Jesus is on the phone again, Ma!” Zane shouts, hopping from foot to foot, then slinging his arm around my waist.

  Reverend Evan Nack tells me he wants to meet my boy if I’m willing. Says that he’s got hand-pulled saltwater taffy that’s been stretched from the Utah Valley to Vermouth. I tell him no. He replies that he only wants to offer comfort and promises to leave his Bible in the back seat of the sedan. Warily, I agree to have him join us for dinner.

  My son leaps around the room like some band-winged grasshopper when the reverend shows up at our door that night. The man’s buffed and pressed into a checked suit, holding a yellow carnation spray for me, a box of waxed paper-wrapped taffy for Zane.

  He bends to the boy and offers the gift to him like he’s conferring the king his crown.

  “Did you know that this taffy is so special it only comes in chocolate, caramel, and cherry and is traded like money in New Jersey?”

  Zane beams at him.

  Sitting next to Evan Nack on the porch later that night, I tell him that he can’t drive drought-stressed cattle with a swing of the good book. Faith may be faltering, but not good old-fashioned common sense.

  “If it’s hope you’re peddling, we’re still not looking to buy,” I say.

  Wearing a faint grin, loosening his tie, he assures me that faith isn’t something you visit, like your aunt Alice after hip surgery.

  “You’ve got to hold your faith loosely in your hands,” he says, folding my hand in his.

  My body bends forth like a young poplar to the wind, and soon my lips are grazing his ruddy cheeks. His skin smells of sugary coffee and baby powder.

  “We cannot ask for answers,” he whispers, “cannot count the reasons when there is so little time left to repent.”

  “I want in the room,” I tell Evan Nack before Zane awakens the next morning, imagining the blue-velvet prayer room shrouding me in its quiet cape.

  “You’ve not been abandoned,” he tells me, his breath quickening in my ear. “You belong to Him. God’s mercy will rescue you from the clutches of sin.”

  “You don’t know,” I say, thinking about all the love forsaken in me.

  “You’re not lost, Thérèse,” he says again, “only lonely.”

  Endless the rooms, I think. Endless the false passageways through which we walk blind. Endless the nights when Marcus comes to me, tremulous and tired. Endless the perilous judgments, my brutal Fall, the anxious swim back to earth. Endless the savage dawn rising in me. Endless the disease that’s spreading through these prairie souls like clubroot to cruciferous crop. Endless the hours in Evan Nack’s hotel later, when he covers my sins in kisses, his hands exploring my body in His name. My earthly sins rock back and forth in these rooms. Lust and love, good and evil, my vexed spirit, my eternal salvation. In thy name, I’ll pray. Praise will shake the rhythm of these rooms from me.

  There are things no man can understand. How a woman can be a false prophet preying on the weak. How desire in her is seen as a damned river, while a man’s fire can rage free. Why life after Marcus will never be the same for me in Vermouth.

  Marcus hovers in my dreams, will defy anyone who tries to wash me clean. The holy waters are rising in me. Quench my spirit at God’s fountain, the reverend insists. If she thirsts, God tells us, let her come.

  “He’s no local man, now is he?” Miss Morris complains later at the co-op while I run her order through, sliced bologna, whole milk, a two-pound bag of russet potatoes.

  “That doesn’t mean he isn’t raised right,” I offer. “Reverend’s a heartbeat from his people no matter where he goes.”

  She leans forward, so her basket wedges against my waist. “Tell me, Thérèse, who leaves his heartland behind? Who drives all the way up from Utah in a blue sedan to some nowhere town like Vermouth? You telling me Utah is fresh out of sinners?”

  Who wouldn’t want to escape? I think but only bow my head.

  Miss Morris raises her voice, slapping her hand on the conveyor. “He’s got the Graysons building a new barn. My Charlie’s talking about adding a heifer to a dying herd.”

  When I reach out to pull her basket from the conveyor and replace it on the pile, she takes hold of my wrist.

  “And what’s this I hear about the reverend helping you nightly?” she says, shaking her empty basket at me with the other hand. “People talk.” She continues, before storming away, “This town is no place for private, Thérèse. Believe me.”

  Here’s what I believe.

  I believe that the gates of hell were forged by man, and guarded by him. That time will uproot truth, turn the soul’s salvation to dust if you learn to read the signs. That inside my woman’s soul, lies the Devil in dungarees.

  On Saturday morning before the last Meeting Day, Marcus’s mother calls me from her care home, invites me to come down for tea. Her husband long since passed, Marcus was her sweet summons, a reason to face the day. She serves me vegetable and barley soup on a TV tray in her room, with thick slices of homemade bread she butters on both sides. Since Marcus left, she confides, she can see stars in her soup.

  “You mean twinkling in the night sky? Up there with Mars?”

  “Absolutely not. What have they got you believing in Vermouth?” she snaps, with a vigorous head shake. “And not floating, star-shaped noodles either. Movie stars. Ernest Borgnine, Tallulah Bankhead, and such.”

  She sifts through the broth, spooning out faces. “Marcus watches the TV with me you know,” she adds. “He sits right over there on the couch while I watch my shows.”

  “Yes,” I confide, “I see him too.” In Zane’s smile, in the dented tool box we keep in the kitchen.

  “Well, she had the double pneumonia you know,” she replies.

  “Who?” I ask, confused.

  “Tallulah,” she answers, indignant, “star of stage and screen!” She dunks her spoon into the broth, stirs up another celebrity constellation.

  “Listen,” she confides after a while, hovering so close to the steaming bowl her chin glistens. “Not everyone can commune with the famous.”

  “You must be blessed,” I say, thinking the coarse and willing woman should never betray her real guide.

  She only smiles back at me, holding her prayer hands together, rocking in her chair, imagining the winter will bring her more soup, more signs.

  Roundup Sunday. Hundreds settle into steel chairs, more line the back wall, in dungarees, battered workboots. Farmers, shopkeepers, homemakers, knit-one-purl-two-ers, seed sellers, bankers, colluders and crooks, all streaming south off Highway 21.

  Hope clings like frost to the branch when the reverend tells us today we will see what remains of those who sin.

  “Let the droughts come,” the reverend exhorts. “Let the wind blow and batter your houses down, still you will not fail if your foundation is r
ock.”

  Evan Nack’s body, lit by a blue-tinged light, is beautiful, can hold all creation.

  I watch the farmers’ faces strain. Each one asks, how far am I prepared to go? Where is redemption, if not here, if not now?

  The reverend raises one hand, the look of anguish in his eyes. “Those who lose faith will harvest the consequences of decay. Those who call the Spirit can harvest everlasting life. Ask your fallen brother Daryl Jane.”

  Women cry, men tighten their faces.

  Rooted, his body still, Evan’s raised branch arms spread into every weary soul. As he stands and sways, the tall grasses of those prairie fields stretch out, each rolling hill a footstep, a fateful climb toward the blue-velvet sky.

  “Let us strip off every weight, every sin that slows us down,” he urges, removing his jacket, like a man intent on leaving no soul behind.

  Men and women in the crowd rise.

  One by one they come. They come to him.

  “Only God can free man from the power and penalty of sin,” he urges. “It’s time to awaken the Holy Spirit within.”

  No one was awake the morning Daryl Jane set off to round up his cattle. Another Alberta freeze-up, three days running. Temperature dropped to a skin-biting minus thirty. Then the season’s spell broke. Wet snow came drifting in on chinook winds, soft as steam, silent as sin. A thin layer of ice had formed across parts of the Bow, hidden by a thick coat of snow.

  The radio announcer kept reminding cattlemen wintering their herds to check on them regularly, make sure they had enough water and feed. So when Daryl rose at dawn and pulled on his boots — his wife told me later — he braced for a hip-deep crawl in heavy snow to the dugout.

  Daryl had built the dugout with a hand from Marcus a few years back. A wide, deep basin about the length of a full-size skating rink, the dugout collected runoff from the creek to keep the large herd watered in summer. When the waters froze over, Daryl would drill a hole to forge a water line. Most winters, the same ritual. He and Marcus would set up the sump pump, hook up the generator, and lay a water line fifty feet long to fill two bathtubs full of fresh water for the herd. Daryl would keep an eye out for leaks while Marcus filled the tubs. That winter, though, full of flu, crippled by a greasy bowel, Daryl had let the herd roam free a few extra days. Snowfall was clean enough to drink, he reasoned; the herd would be okay for a while.

  Over the hill Daryl climbed that morning, headed for the dugout. When he reached the first clearing, Daryl told his wife afterward, he saw what looked like a cluster of shorn stumps off in the far distance. Must be the sun’s glare, he thought, and pulled down his ball cap, as he crept on ahead toward the basin’s edge.

  It was after eight the morning Daryl’s wife called our house in tears, saying she had the little ones crying, her husband had been out in the fields too long. Could Marcus come and see? Of course, I told her. Marcus picked up some tools from the shed, sped on his way in the truck.

  As I heard Daryl tell it later, Marcus must have tried to trace Daryl’s footsteps to the clearing, but the wind kicked up a fury behind him. Marcus wandered snowblind for a while before Daryl finally spotted him, then lost sight of Marcus again. The two called out to each other until Marcus found his way to the dugout edge.

  When Marcus finally joined Daryl, he dropped to his knees, staring out at the calamitous scene. All two hundred and twenty head of cattle were dead.

  Desperate for water, the herd had wandered out into the middle of the dugout and fallen through thin ice, Daryl told me, hardly finding the words. Marcus had wept seeing their torsos partially submerged, locked in, halfway between frozen and free. They must have struggled for hours, as the ice began to coat their shivering bodies, a filmy haze creeping over their eyes. Finally, too cold and confused, each dropped where they stood. Daryl described the scene as a frigid mass of death.

  Marcus left a stunned Daryl back at the house, with the wife and baby at her breast, bawling, the whole house in shock, disbelieving. Daryl’s wife said she saw Marcus jump into his truck and speed off like a man on fire. The heavy snows had finally lifted, but Marcus was already in too deep. Two clear lanes, no traffic. Where the road split, a fork at the edge of the Bow, four wheels pointed straight ahead. Truck went in clean, never came up.

  Waist-deep in supplicants, Reverend Evan Nack drifts through the crowd toward me. They all part to make room. I wade through a field of clapping hands and waving arms when the supporters lift me up to the reverend, then lower me on bended knee at the altar.

  You’ve got to love the lost only so far, I think, only as far as your own weakness.

  My fingers tingle as the reverend pulls me forward.

  “Do you hear the trumpet’s call, Thérèse? Are you listening? Can you hear?”

  I kneel before Evan, bury my head in his worthy hands. His whole body shakes as he invites me to take in the Word, his breath falling softly on my skin.

  Look down, reverend, I think. Can’t you see with me all the way to the bottom? See how the sky falls, the shadow walks? The truth is coming. Wait and see. Marcus may have never seen the light, but his eyes were always wide open. He knew the darkness would never lift from his heart, so maybe he took the plunge. Left me unwashed, monstrous, and free.

  I look up at Evan, see the glory shining brightly in his eyes.

  I’ll stay with him. Cross my heart I’ll pray for him, when my holy spirit drags him under.

  Fingernecklace

  Peppermint saliva lips. Two numb bums. Joe and Gus glance up from their work, exchange cutthroat looks across the salvaged oak dining table. First one to stuff and label one thousand envelopes gets an extra twenty bucks, plus his pick of the fresh cod Mrs. B. will serve tonight with garlicky roasted red peppers.

  “All good, my jumblies?” Mrs. B. pokes her head in, scanning the mail metropolis forming at their elbows. “Break for fresh air?”

  Joe stomps his feet. Gus pinches a threefold letter that he slides into a number ten envelope, keeping his head low. Tacky-tongued, the loose flesh beneath his chin feels itchy and two feet thick.

  “Suit yourselves.”

  Mrs. B. has been group home supervisor since her husband accidentally shot himself eight years ago. Now she pitches lifebuoys in a sinking, four-storey heritage house in Greektown that Gus calls the HMS Shitstorm. If she had eyes in the back of her skull, she’d notice how closely Gus watches as she prepares dinner, manages intakes, soothes cries and tempers in the middle of the night. Tomorrow, when she’s bat-blind and flatlining on the couch with a throbbing migraine, he’ll try to kiss her on the lips.

  “Pass the stamps,” Joe says, flicking back the loosely braided hair that dangles down his spine like a grizzled cat tail. Whenever Joe squirms, Gus feels the creature claw up his own back.

  Joe yanks away the cereal bowl between them when Gus pitches the stamp coil over.

  “Don’t steal my Cheerios,” Gus slaps Joe’s hand, pulling the mournful face that makes him look like a plumpish fifty, though he’s only thirty-six.

  Joe licks oat dust from his grinning lips.

  “You chew like an Indian,” Gus snaps.

  “You smell like rat piss,” Joe hoots, stomping his lizard-skin boots. His cheekbones, heavy lined with sun and age, are soft as kid leather.

  Marlee enters, slumps down next to Gus, who is quietly nibbling at the edge of an o.

  “You got my cigarettes?” she asks Gus, folding herself inside a long black knit sweater that exposes only her face and feet.

  “You smoked ’em Tuesday. Better cut back.”

  She pulls out a bottle of nail polish from her jeans pocket and begins painting a hot-pink helmet on her big toe.

  Marlee and Gus grew up on the wrong side of sane, so they’re next-door neighbours. Nuthouse Knobs. Crackpot Criminals. The Deranged. Marlee came in off the streets, the thing men fucked behind dumpsters. Now, she’s on low-grade watch at the home. Not that she’d ever go through with it, but one rainy afternoon she swallowed
a half-bottle of toilet cleaner just to clear the stench from her throat. The last time Gus acted out — packed his life up in an old hockey bag and hitched the Don Valley to his brother’s place — Donny sent him back on the Greyhound from Peterborough, pronto. That was two summers ago. He’s been good all year.

  Mrs. B. returns with a glass of water in her hand, gesturing to Gus with her wristwatch. He nods, plucks from his silver pillbox two skinny whites that he washes down in a long gulp. He’ll be slo-mo soon, bleary by dinner.

  The rice is one item on the plate. The rice is yellow and smells like buttered bones. The red peppers curl, sodden and sad in their oily, garlic swim. Gus pokes his rumpled fish at the kitchen table, feeling his organs flip. He spikes a red pepper that he sniffs, drops and then pushes the plate away.

  “Come on, Gus,” Mrs. B. says, dropping her own fork.

  Gus lowers his eyes.

  “Last time.”

  She sighs as she rises to fix Gus a peanut butter sandwich she glues together with clover honey. With a quick flash of her blade, she splits the sandwich four ways.

  “Okay,” she turns, dropping the plate in front of him. She taps the table. “Eat what you can.”

  Gus’s torso sways, his arms remain motionless at his side.

  “Come on, Gus.” Mrs. B. says, rapping the table with her knuckles. “Take a bite.”

  Gus squeezes his head, muffling the edge in her voice. He sees his mother’s fingers tap-tapping the cigarette on the lip of a blue glass ashtray. She is butting the stub out, covering her ears.

  Joe finishes the last of the cod while Gus looks down, begins sorting patterns on the yellow linoleum in the kitchen, kneading his plump cheeks with his fingers.

  Mrs. B. slides her chair over and pulls Gus’s hand away from his face. She rubs her thumb over Gus’s raw red knuckles and lays his hand down on the table.

  “It’s okay, hon. Save your energy. Donny’s coming tomorrow.”

  Donny’s greasy jeans are tucked into oil-stained workboots. In the home’s sparse living room, he paces between two brown curbside couches with water-stained cushions. He checks his watch. Crew’s on site. Fuck. Christ. Piss. In his aching jawbone, he feels the hammer of hydraulic pumps and half-dug trenches. He’s got the engineer’s change orders. Cost overruns. Goddamn job is killing him. Looking up he sees Gus lumbering slowly down the stairs, still wrapped in his white terry-cloth robe. Big as a hollowed oak, premature belly spread. Donny shakes a full prescription bottle at him.