The End of Always: A Novel

by Randi Davenport

  When Mrs. Muehls gave up and went away, Martha laid the skates on the kitchen table. There were three of us and only two pairs of skates, but Martha said she had no interest in skating. She said she would spend the morning with Mary Johnston’s To Have and To Hold. This was a novel about kind colonists and noble Indians. Martha loved that book. I imagine she believed that if she memorized it, the story would belong to her.

  I turned to the table and unwrapped the skates. They were heavy old-fashioned things, boots with blades and laces. I picked them up and carried them into the front room, where Hattie lay on her stomach with her feet in the air and her paper dolls spread out before her.

  Outside, the fields were white. The sky was white. The roofs of the houses were white. The dark woods that spread out around Waukesha were white. The river snaked below the bluffs under a white mantle, as if nothing living had ever passed this way. We walked up the road from our house and crossed the mill bridge and followed the road out of town until we came to a church and a field that had flooded and frozen. Skaters moved in a circle around the field, and barrels of orange and blue fire stood in the snow, heat shimmering upward in trembling veils. A man with a fiddle walked up and down. The music came to us and then disappeared and then came again. Soft white ash turned in the air and twisted away, the church gray against the cold gray sky. A bony brown dog moved along the edge of the ice and boys pulled sleds up a hill and skaters slid by and music wafted away.

  I set one blade on the ice where the snow ran out and the ice took over and trapped yellow grass below like frozen hair. I pushed off, and pushed off again. I watched one foot and then the other. My breath caught in my throat and I clutched the air with my hands.

  Hattie followed me. She started out slowly but soon skimmed past, her coat blowing like a bell over her skirt.

  “Marie,” she called. “Come on. Keep up.”

  She slid away from me and I pushed off with my left foot. I could not get my right foot to move at all. My dress clung damply beneath my coat. Little boys flailed their hockey sticks at me and girls skating in pairs split to go around me and gave me annoyed looks.

  In Waukesha in winter you can see many days without snow, but when snow comes, it comes for hours at a time, and when it ceases the world is soft and white. When you walk outside, you see nothing but that whiteness. On sunny days you can be blinded. You have to squint until your eyes get used to the bright light, and it will be painful until your eyes adjust. It helps to wear a hat with a deep brim so you can shade your eyes. This was just my condition, snow-blind and sweaty, when I saw August Bethke on the far side of the field. He was just a shape at first, his dark coat and his dark hat and his light canvas workingman’s trousers, but I steadied myself and squinted and he came into focus. I looked around for Hattie but she was far away. Then August leaned over and said something to the two boys nearest to him and they glanced at me and shrugged and skated away. When August came across the field and slid to a stop in front of me, his gray eyes shining, his hair caught under his black hat, a package of Cracker Jack poked out of his coat pocket, creamy except for its bright red lettering. He smiled and took my hand.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  He put one hand on my waist and took one long step and I felt my feet go out from under me. I grabbed his coat to keep from going down. He laughed and took hold of my forearms until I could steady myself.

  “Okay,” he said. “I will teach you. Just take long steps. Pretend you’re flying. Right? Pretend you are a bird who can fly. Like this. See?” He pushed off and showed me three long, smooth strokes. Then he took three strokes back to me.

  “Okay?” he said. “All right?”

  I pushed off. Below the dark green ice, fissures of white where the water had thawed and refrozen, and below that, the dark gray of the wild fields frozen over.

  He watched me. Then he came up beside me. “Use both feet,” he said.

  I wobbled. He grabbed my elbow.

  “Look,” he said. “Do what I do.” He took one of my hands and put his arm around my waist and propelled me away from the tattered edge of the snow. His coat smelled of wood smoke. His shoulder pressed mine. I felt the moving muscles of his thigh. I felt each stroke as he pushed off.

  Across the field, Hattie waved to me and made a perfect round O with her mouth and then grinned and skated away.

  August held me closer. “Who is that?” he said.

  “My sister.”

  “In the blue coat?”

  I nodded.

  “She is pretty,” he said. Then he put his mouth next to my ear. “But she is not as pretty as you.”

  The sound of his blades on the ice sharp and crisp. The wan fields and the white sky and our breath in clouds around our heads. Everything a rotating blur and my spine tingling from his touch. My heart lifted and I stretched my arms wide and he pushed me and the air parted and the wind stopped and nothing had ever happened but this moment. I began to laugh and it seemed to me that I laughed against my will and then it seemed that I could not stop laughing and all because I sailed under August’s hand.

  He put his mouth in my hair again. I felt myself go nearly limp. “See?” he whispered just above my ear, his voice moving through me like a swell. “It’s easy. We’re flying.”

  The fiddler dropped his violin to his side. He went to stand by a barrel of fire. He laid the violin on a blanket on the snow and stamped his feet and waved his hands over the flame in just the way a magician uses his hands to conjure something out of thin air. The skaters kept skating in their slow spiral around the center of the field.

  August kept one hand at my waist and I stepped unsteadily, feeling his hand palm down at the small of my back and the snow under my skates. We picked our way over to an old board that had been laid between two upended farm pails. He brushed the board with the edge of his hand. “Here,” he said. Then he sat down beside me.

  He told me that he had been born in Pomerania and had sailed to New York from Hamburg on a ship called the Polaria, arriving on a hot night near the end of the summer. He had been almost four when they arrived, and he remembered the steel floor of the ship with its bolts as big as baseballs and the black water and white foam passing far below and the smell of the docks when they came off the boat in New York, the press of people around them, and the hazy heat on the wharf with the sun a hot, dim sphere rising in a white sky. Their heavy clothes. The crying seabirds overhead. He came with his father, Wilhelm, who was a carpenter, and his mother, Auguste, who kept house for them, and his little sister, Olga, still a baby on the boat but who now worked as a dressmaker. The ship also carried his father’s younger brother, Karl, and his father’s mother, Johanna, who helped with things for a time but died when August was eleven.

  Hattie turned in a circle, her coat open over her knees.

  I told him that my mother was dead and no one knew how. Then I went quiet. He had been there that day so I imagined he had seen the whole thing. That he was well aware of who my father was and of what he had done and how he had managed to get away with it. But I did not say any of that. I dug the blade of my skate into the snow and traced a line and then another line and then drew crosshatches through that.

  August said that the day he had first seen me, he had been moving a load of lumber from the yard down by the train station to a building site on the north end of town. And then he started to look for me but he could not find me and when he did, I vanished. I disappeared into the shadows that night by the river. I ran away from him up the road just as the snow began to fall. His brothers told him to forget about me but he could not.

  I turned my blade flat against the snow again and smoothed a flat sweep of snow and then stabbed it with my toe.

  Down the road my father’s house, spare and blocky and filled with secrets.

  “You do not know me,” I said.

  “I know you,” he said. He touched my sleeve, my wrist. He turned toward me. He took my head in his hands and leaned forward.
Our foreheads touched. “We know each other,” he whispered.

  I could not believe that he would be this bold out here in the open air while the skaters slipped by in their circle, while the daylight came down around us and the afternoon turned flat and broad and bright, while Hattie skated across the field and every so often cast looks our way. But I did not stop him. I could not stop him. If he wanted to be reckless, I would be reckless, too.

  His eyes gleamed. I could feel his breath on my mouth, his fingers in my hair. I wanted to kiss him but I forced myself to turn my face away. Then he reached over and picked up my hand and squeezed it.

  Far away from us, the fiddler started on a polka. The skaters moved in their measured ring, the men in trousers tied off below the knee and round hats, the dark skirts of the women blowing out behind, their little hats loosening and growing jittery on their heads.

  “You will change your mind,” I said.

  “Never,” he said. He leaned against me. I felt the shock of him again and watched his bright face grow tense and his eyes darken. “I will never change my mind,” he said. “Not about you.”

  “August,” I said. I stopped. How could I ask him? How could I not? He held my hand and I thought of my mother in his arms and Hattie on the ice. The day rising over us like a faded dome. It was impossible to put my question into words. For his part, August watched me and waited and did not speak.

  Finally I stood up and brushed the snow from my skirt and he stood up next to me. “We should skate some more,” I said.

  “If you call that skating,” he said. And then he laughed.

  Far out across the field, August’s brothers skated up and back among a pack of youths. One reached into his pocket and unscrewed a flask and drank from it and then wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and skated away. Hattie glided toward me, her cheeks red, her skirt ruffling. She stopped at the edge of the ice. She watched August’s hand on my back and his hand when he took mine. She looked at me.

  “Hattie,” I said. “This is August.”

  He dropped my hand so that he could reach for hers. “I am very glad to meet you,” he said.

  “August who?” she said. She stood with her hands burrowed into her pockets. Her breath made a veil around her hair.

  “August Bethke,” I said. “I met him.” I stopped. There was no way to explain how I had met August Bethke.

  “I see that.”

  “Do not be suspicious,” he said. “I am in love with your sister.”

  “Really?” she said. “In love?” She poked me in the arm. “With Marie?”

  “Why do you laugh? I am very serious.” He took my hand in his and held it palm down over his heart.

  I stood next to him in the daze made by his heat and by the feeling of his shoulder pressed against mine and by the scent of his warm breath and by the cold air and by the sound of the music that came across the ersatz pond below the mean little church on the edge of the great wide world. August, I thought. August Bethke. At that moment, his name contained all of the answers. I felt certain I could walk next to him and away from my father and away from my mother, or the ghost of my mother, which flickered through our house like a shadow without a name.

  “I am going to give your sister a skating lesson,” said August. He smiled at Hattie. “You come, too.”

  “I’ll watch,” said Hattie. She turned toward me. “And then we need to go.” She did not try to conceal her concern.

  “I know,” I said. “I promise to be quick.”

  It was late afternoon when Hattie and I made our way home, over the bridge and past the burned-out shell of a farmhouse, where I could smell the blackened wood under the cavernous cold air. When we got closer to town, we passed a box of a building where two young men in rough coats and caps squatted beside a galvanized steel tank and used a black rubber hose to decant a colorless liquid into a washtub. They watched us as we came by and one of them stood up and leaned against the wall and after a minute lit a cigarette and stared after us as we made our way away from him.

  The road curved toward the river and the water lay before us for a time, glinting with a leaden sheen like an object gone dull in the fireplace’s ash. We passed the park in front of the biggest springhouse, and the path to the front steps was broken by footsteps that turned into black holes in the snow. A man and woman walked together, her hand clasped in his and her dark green skirt dragging behind her and her hem blackened with a fan of water, like she had been walking for a while and the snow on her skirt had had a chance to melt in the sun. Even from the street, I could see that it was Martha. Even at a glance, I could tell that it was George. They did not see us. They just walked away from the road with their heads bent together and crossed into the blue shadow next to the springhouse. The park road rose along a shallow slope and then turned at the top of the hill. They followed the path and passed back into the fading light and started up the rise.

  “Martha,” I muttered. “You are such a liar.”

  Hattie turned around to face me. “Did you say something?”

  I shook my head. “Go on,” I said. “Never mind.”

  When we got home, I put the sack with the skates in it on a shelf in the mudroom. Hattie hung our coats on their hooks. My father sat at the kitchen table, the newspaper open over his lap, a bottle beside him on the table. He turned toward us when we came in. “Did you see this?” he said.

  “We’re cold,” I said. “Can’t you let us warm up first?”

  I had not thought before I spoke. I had simply spoken. I had merely said the words.

  He let his paper fall loosely to his knees. He squinted at me.

  “You watch your step, girl,” he said. There was no mistaking the edge in his voice.

  It hardly mattered. August told me that he looked for me on every street in town. He walked up and down the main roads. He searched for me along the sidewalks in front of the drugstore, the bank, the police station. He never forgot the look in my eyes when he saw me standing in the yard. One day he thought he saw me when he was riding in the front car of the interurban. He put his hand flat on the glass, just in case it was me.

  When he took me out on the ice I felt his thigh on mine. I would have done anything to make sure he kept touching me like that. He did not cross our arms in front of us like two people on a promenade. He put his arm around my waist. He showed me how to skate, stroke by stroke, until I pushed off when he pushed off, and let myself glide when he did. We picked up speed around the field, and he leaned into me to show me how to take the corners, each stroke warm and hard and alive.

  In the trees behind the church, a flock of starlings gathered in the branches. When the wind picked up, Hattie waved to me from the snowy slope and a cloud passed in front of the sun. The birds lifted from the trees. I felt August beside me, his body, his heat, the absolute truth of his heart.

  Now I turned my back on my father, on his hard voice, on his hard eyes. I could not believe I had said what I had said. Still, the fact of the matter was that I had talked back to him and I had not died. The fact of the matter was that I was entirely alive.

  8

  When my mother was a girl, she waited for the equinox, when it was said that eggs would balance unbroken on their broad ends and animals would talk. But she had never been able to stay up late enough to hear her mother’s chickens tell stories in the dirt lot next to my grandfather’s house. Spring came with planting and she mostly remembered walking behind my grandfather as he dug the holes for potatoes. She dropped an eye into each hole and then covered the eye with dirt.

  I suppose this is why she grew potatoes in our yard. Don’t we always do what we’ve always done? It seems our habits are set in this regard in our own long-ago times, before we have even become aware that our behaviors are being fixed in place.

  I stood over the rusty barrel and let the contents of my dustpan fall in a gritty cloud. When I turned to go back inside, August stood before me, a match flickering in his cupped hands. The cu
pped match went out and he popped another against his thumbnail and the flame flared and lit his face.

  “Marie,” he whispered.

  He seemed to hold the yellow flame in his fingers. I looked back over my shoulder. Martha was a shadow who moved around in the kitchen light.

  “You should not come here,” I said, but I said this very softly. I did not want him to leave.

  “I had to see you,” he said. His breath came in misty waves and rose in clouds and disappeared.

  I could hear him breathing. Our neighbor next door stepped onto her back steps and held the screen door open. Her dog ran out to the fence and lifted its leg on a post. She pretended to watch him, but I knew she had her eye on my garden, where I stood with August Bethke. After a minute, she whistled to her dog and the dog ran inside and she followed it and closed the door. August let the match in his hands go out.

  He wore a long woolen coat that came down past his knees and a soft hat. He reached over and brushed my hair from my eyes. Then he took my hand.

  The frozen night road was dark and cool and the fields fell away on either side and the woods lay before us in a great black shape. The lights of town glittered like the lights of a ship rising and falling far away on the sea and then dropped behind us. We left the world of fields and houses and walked with the woods crowding up beside the road until we came to a break in the trees where the parted way seemed as a split in the world, darkness on each side but the trail and the sky beyond glowing with the first light of moonrise. August tightened his grip and helped me step up onto a fall of logs. He held a branch back until I had passed. He stood in his boots in the shallow torrents of a stream and held my hand while I stepped from rock to rock. He lifted me over a stretch of wet earth.

  He came for me again and again, even though I told him it was not safe. But the truth was simple. I did not want him to stay away. One night he took me to a low cave in the bluffs. He lit a fire and then took a burning stick and held it up to the walls, where thin charcoal outlines of pregnant deer and huge birds with broad wings and narrow men drawing bows at the deer had been left by some long-lost Indians when they were in charge of this land. The little figures were scorched and plain, stick figures with large bows, bulbous deer looking back over their shoulders. The men had square heads and large astonished eyes.