Homesick Creek

by Diane Hammond

  Warren had loved Christmas too. Every year the First Church of God had collected Christmas gifts for charity, and he and Bob always got at least one present apiece. Sometimes the gifts were used things, a scuffed-up basketball, maybe, or a pair of roller skates with a wobbly wheel. Sometimes they were given new things—usually clothes in sizes the church had announced to the congregation ahead of time. You could map the economic health of Hubbard by the gifts Bob and Warren were given over the years.

  He watched the rain and drank his last two beers, ones he’d stolen from the Quick Stop after even Dooley Burden had refused to lend him any more money. He hoped Patrick would be sending another check soon from over there in Germany. He was a good boy, his son, but he acted like Bob embarrassed him. He’d come home the week after Anita died, but he stayed only a couple of days and went back to Germany early. There hadn’t been much to say. Anita, not Bob, was the one who’d always found things to say.

  He lay back and felt his mind get cloudy. That happened sometimes now. Then he must have dozed, and when he woke up, he thought he heard footsteps in the kitchen. Anita must be fixing something to eat. Why was everyone always trying to get him to eat all the time? Anita was probably making stew, his favorite thing. But no, she was dead. She was dead, and Warren was dead. How could he forget something like that? God, but he wished Anita could come back to visit him, or Warren. He was too drunk to be horny, but it would be enough just to see their faces and to hear them say they loved him.

  Hack opened the door for Shirl just as Bunny set dinner on the table.

  “Hooey,” she cried, shaking water off her plastic rain bonnet. “It’s raining like a son of a bitch out there. Coast guard’s posted storm warnings again. Winds to a hundred miles an hour on the headlands.”

  Hack hung her wet jacket on a coat hook behind the door. Crystal hid behind his legs; Shirl still scared her. Nevertheless she held out her Santa Bunny for Shirl’s inspection. Shirl fell heavily to her knees for a better look.

  “Well, will you look at that. Now isn’t he a fine one?”

  Crystal nodded solemnly.

  “You think he’s ready for Christmas yet? It won’t be long now.”

  Crystal watched her, transfixed.

  “Are you ready for Christmas?”

  Crystal nodded emphatically.

  “Well, sure you are, honey.” Shirl patted Crystal’s cheek and then held out her hand so Hack could hoist her up off the floor. “One day I’m going to get down there and never get up again,” she puffed. “I swear to God.”

  “Come eat,” Bunny called. “Crystal, if you’d like to set a place for Santa Bunny, you can. Get a plate from your tea set, and we’ll put a little dinner out for him.”

  Crystal fetched a china plate the size of a half dollar that Bunny had bought for her when she first came to live with them. Most of the toys Anita had gotten at the Goodwill were broken or soiled, and even though Bunny knew Anita had done her best, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to keep them. Now she spooned two peas and a shred of pot roast onto the tiny plate. “Do you think that’s enough?”

  “Yes.”

  Bunny spooned some pot roast and vegetables onto Crystal’s bigger plate. “Now, you need to set a good example for Santa Bunny by staying right here and eating all your dinner before you get up.” They’d had some trouble getting her to sit at the table until she finished her meals. Bunny figured she’d always been fed in front of the television, off a TV tray, eating and wandering as she pleased. They’d made progress, but it was slow, especially on days when Crystal wasn’t hungry to start with. Bunny and Hack had been talking about getting her evaluated by the children’s services people to make sure she was okay. The staff at Head Start had told them she seemed to be coming along more slowly than they’d expected with her letters and coloring. Bunny thought Crystal knew more than she was letting on, but still, Doreen had drunk a lot more than she should have when she was pregnant. Anita had always worried about that. Now Bunny was worrying about it.

  Shirl hitched up her chair to the table. “This looks real good,” she told Bunny. “I always was one for pot roast. Your daddy couldn’t stand it, but I always fixed it on the night he left. You remember that?”

  “Yeah.” The nights when her father went back to the boat after being home for a month or two were always celebratory, even though Shirl and the kids would never say as much out loud. They’d have pot roast, hot buttered rolls, and vanilla bean ice cream, just like a party.

  Shirl smacked Hack’s forearm. “So what’s the latest? You see him today?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He still bad?”

  Hack looked pointedly in Crystal’s direction: not in front of the child.

  “I was just asking,” Shirl said huffily.

  “Yeah, he’s still bad.”

  “So you think he’ll get that AIDS soon too?”

  “Jesus, Shirl,” Hack said.

  Bunny gave Shirl a look across the table and turned to Crystal pointedly. “Honey, if you eat nine more peas, you can be excused from the table. Can you count them?”

  Together they counted. Those Head Start people could say what they wanted about her letters, but Crystal knew her numbers all right.

  “How about one more for good luck?” Bunny proposed. Crystal ate one more pea. “Is Santa Bunny done with his food? All right, then you can both go watch TV. You did a good job.”

  Crystal hopped down and left the room with her doll tucked firmly beneath her arm, giving Hack a baleful look as she slipped past.

  “You’re doing a fine job with that little girl,” Shirl said to Bunny. “I want you to know that.”

  “It hasn’t been easy,” Bunny said. “I could just take her m-o-t-h-e-r and shake her sometimes.”

  “Well, she’s young,” Shirl allowed. “And with that Danny and all.”

  “Shhh,” said Bunny.

  “She couldn’t hear that.”

  “Even so,” said Bunny.

  The table fell silent. After a while Shirl said, “You know, I’ve thought about it over and over, but I still would never take him for a fairy.”

  “He says he got it from giving blood,” Hack said.

  “And you believed that?” said Shirl.

  “Well, if he is, he never told me or anyone else,” said Hack. “I’m just saying.”

  “I read the papers,” said Shirl. “All those little fairies in San Francisco are getting sick just like Anita did, dropping like flies.”

  “Mom—” Bunny said.

  “You think you can get it from the public john?” Shirl ruminated. “I’ve worried about that. I can tell you I always lay toilet paper down first now.”

  “You can’t get it from a toilet seat,” Hack said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I asked the nurse. She said it didn’t work that way.”

  “Well, I’m not about to take any chances. Those people don’t know everything, for your information.”

  “Hell, Shirl, it takes up to ten years before you even get symptoms,” Hack said.

  “You saying I’m too old to worry about catching AIDS? Well, my life’s still worth something to me, mister, even if it isn’t to you,” Shirl said hotly. “Anyway, it’s easy for you men to say don’t worry. You know why? Because you don’t have to sit down, that’s why.”

  Bunny shot a look at Hack, barely suppressing a smile.

  “Will you listen to that wind,” he said.

  Lately Bunny had begun to understand that when she’d missed Hack over the years—when he’d gone so far away from her that he only brought his sex drive home—she hadn’t missed him so much as she had hoarded the scraps of him he’d left behind in hopes he’d come back for them someday. With Anita, she’d never wanted anything more than exactly what Anita had had to give her, even including Anita’s caustic temper. Grief, in Bunny’s experience, was like quitting smoking. You reached for a cigarette you could no longer have before you were even aware that yo
u were longing for one, and every time the dawning understanding came as another small death, another awful parting.

  It had taken Bunny nearly a month to decide not to press charges against Bob for neglecting to provide Anita with adequate medical care. Hack had been the one to convince her. If you loved someone once, no matter how long ago or under what circumstances, that had to be worth something. If you couldn’t do them good, you could at least decline from doing them harm. He said he hadn’t always known that, but he knew it now.

  Tonight he went to bed before Bunny. That had been happening more and more often lately, when before it had always been the other way around, and not just when she had to work the opening shift down at the Anchor either. She’d become a regular night owl, and at her age. Now she sat in her sewing room, listening to the rising wind rattling the birdhouses in the trees, thinking that if any birds actually took shelter inside them, they’d be knocked silly by morning. The birdhouses were one of Bunny’s projects with Crystal. The True-Value had had a special on unpainted pine ones, two for nine bucks. She and Crystal had painted six of them in a rainbow of colors and decorated them with hand-drawn birds (Bunny) and stick figures (Crystal). Crystal painted two kinds of people, tiny ones and huge ones. The huge figures were grown-ups, bulbous and looming. The tiny figures were Crystal, stem-thin and brittle. It didn’t take a lot to figure out who was the victim here.

  Now, in the warm light of her sewing room, Bunny brought out a last Christmas gift she was making for Crystal, a family of rabbits. Almost as soon as she began working, though, she heard Crystal wake up, as she often did, crying in the dark with an odd, dry, hopeless keening that Bunny took to be grief. She dimmed her work lamp and padded down the hall that always looked different in the dark, as though she’d never made the trip before. She lifted Crystal gently and settled them together in a big soft chair Hack had bought on sale at Meier & Frank for a steal. Crystal tucked her head under Bunny’s chin and, slumping, fell deeply asleep again, a warm, damp, breathing weight safe in Bunny’s arms.

  As she had been doing lately, Bunny closed her eyes and listened to the hundred small sounds of her household. There were the obvious ones like the refrigerator’s hum, Hack’s light snores, Crystal’s tiny sighs, the rasp of numbers turning over on the cheap digital clock at her elbow. But beneath those noises there were others that were older, fainter, vestigial: the thousand remembered sounds that Vinny had made within these walls; the whistle Anita used to make when she blew cigarette smoke out of the side of her mouth; the curses and jokes that Bob and Hack had made over sixteen years of work on cars and trucks and dirt bikes in the garage. The remembered sounds of Bunny herself as she had moved through her empty house, trying in all the wrong ways to fill it. And now she had become this woman who used her belly and arms and bosom to keep from harm a little girl who was not her own; who was somehow more than her own. Vinny had always reached out and taken what she needed, secure in the knowledge that in most things she came first. Crystal had none of Vinny’s strength or confidence. Crystal had learned very young what it was like to be left out, left behind, left alone to coax her own pale green shoot from parched and barren ground.

  Honey, there are two kinds of people in this world, whole people and damaged people. People like Bob and Warren, they’re the damaged ones. God made them take on more than was fair, and I don’t claim to understand why. I just know that they’re laboring under a mighty load of scars and shortage. And here’s the thing, Bunny, that nobody ever gets: The damagedones, the ones like them, work at love the hardest.

  Bunny was getting used to hearing Anita here in the dark. Hack?

  Hack, yes.

  You never told me.

  Would you have believed me if I had?

  I don’t know. No.

  And now?

  Crystal stirred, pushing free of Bunny’s encircling arms. Bunny tucked her into bed again with a goodnight kiss she would never remember receiving, her small head damp and smelling of Barbie shampoo. Bunny closed the door softly and went back to her sewing room, picking up where she had left off an hour before. She loved this part of the work, pairing up legs and arms and seeing the small bodies take final shape in her hands.

  Do you believe me about Hack?

  Bunny thought. That he’s damaged?

  Yes.

  I do now. I didn’t, before.

  Then you weren’t ready before. Or he wasn’t.

  It’s an awful story.

  They’re always awful stories. That’s why they’re hardly ever told— sometimes only once in a lifetime, sometimes never. You have to be ready to hear them, and they have to be ready to tell them.

  It had taken Hack nearly two hours on the cabin steps beside Homesick Creek to tell her about Cherise and the Katydid and Minna Tallhorse, and half that time he hadn’t been talking at all, only thinking he was talking; Bunny could tell it from his eyes. And the whole time he never looked at her once, not really, not until he was finished. Then he’d looked at her all right, and his eyes had been like holes in the universe, places where you could drop all the way through to oblivion if you didn’t hold on, and then it was over. But in that time Bunny had seen things she’d never dreamed of and would never forget. Pain, suffering, recrimination. Rage, not all of it spent. She had knelt in front of him, wrapped her arms around his head, and said, I’m so sorry. God, I’m so sorry. He had held on to her like someone afraid of dying, scaring her so badly she had had to get up and go pee, and when she came back, it was over and they’d gathered their things, closed up the cabin, and gone home.

  See? You think you know all there is to know about someone, and then it turns out you didn’t know a damn thing.

  Nita, all those years, and it was never about Vinny at all.

  Evidently not.

  I should have known. Shouldn’t I have known?

  No, because he didn’t want you to know, honey. People protect their secretslike birds incubate eggs. Bird spends all her time sitting and waiting, making sure so no one can get at them until it’s time. Well, it wasn’t time.

  I feel like a fool.

  You’re not a fool.

  I miss you, Nita.

  I know you do, honey.

  I love you.

  Well, that’s how it begins.

  How what begins?

  Everything.

  How many times had she and Anita sat here together laughing about some dumb thing while they sewed Halloween costumes and cheerleading skirts, baby quilts and holiday crafts, the two of them peering like blind men through cigarette smoke so thick it made them cry? In this room they were the best they ever were, making things for people they loved, no matter how imperfectly. Now, enveloped at last in a silence as deep and pure as forgiveness, Bunny leaned alone into a pool of light, stitching together a family with a million pieces of love and remembrance, stuffed only with soft things, pliable things, things that could cushion a fall.

  homesick creek

  DIANE HAMMOND

  A Reader’s Guide

  A CONVERSATION WITH DIANE HAMMOND

  Q: How did you first come up with the ideas or stories for Homesick Creek?

  A: My books always start with characters rather than plots. In the case of Homesick Creek, I began with Bob and Hack, about whom I knew just one thing apiece. Hack had been responsible for the death of the one person in his life he loved completely, and Bob, who was married, had had a long-term, clandestine homosexual affair from which he’d contracted AIDS. Neither Bunny nor Anita, their wives, knew either of these things. One of them never would know.

  Q: Why those two events?

  A: Most of us experience a defining moment, event or circumstance that we then spend the rest of our lives integrating, processing, getting over or running from. For a sixteen-year-old girl in my hometown years ago, that defining moment was a car accident in which her younger brother and sister were killed. The girl was driving, and had had her driver’s license for just one week. I’ve never forgotte
n her. How would you move on from something like that? How could you? I gave this dilemma to Hack.

  In the early 1980’s, a distant relative-in-law of mine who lived in the country’s heartland died of pneumonia after a year-long, wasting intestinal illness of unknown origin. It didn’t seem to add up—he was only in his late thirties—until I remembered that when this man and his family had visited my husband and me in Washington, D.C. several years earlier, he had left his wife and children in a motel room each evening and ventured forth alone “to explore.” What if he had been seeking out gay men on the sly and had contracted AIDS? The disease was just emerging then; it was possible. From that departure point the dilemma grows and grows. How do you tell your spouse, if you are deeply closeted? Do you tell your spouse? If you do, awful things may happen. If you don’t, awful things may happen. I don’t know whether or not this was actually the case for my relative, but out of such speculation Bob was born, and with him, a set of harrowing choices.

  Q: How could you let Bob keep his HIV status a secret from Anita when he knew it would kill her?

  A: I had always assumed that at some point Bob would tell Anita about his HIV status and what had led up to it, but in the writing I kept putting it off. I finally realized that that was exactly how Bob would deal with the problem, too. The soundtrack playing behind most of his adult life was a love song to Anita, a nearly-beautiful woman who had chosen him over other men. He knew he was weak and ineffectual: he drank too much, he couldn’t hold down a job, he disappeared regularly. And yet, she stayed with him. He didn’t fear his own death—or Anita’s— nearly as much as he feared the thought that Anita might die seeing him for what he really was. In his own words, he “couldn’t have that.” So instead he arranged for her a death of transcendent beauty in a house that was, if only for a few hours, her own. In the late 1980s, AIDS was not only a death sentence, but the death itself usually followed protracted and terrible illness. By handling things as he did, Bob spared her from knowing what she faced, and ensured that the end came fast and with dignity. Are these acts of cowardice or strength? Do they damn or redeem him? I don’t know.