The End of Always: A Novel

by Randi Davenport

  Another night we came to the top of a rise. August led me by the hand into the center of the clearing. He took his long coat off and spread it on the dead grass like a blanket. He lay down next to me and held my hand. He told me that he intended to build a good house for himself. He told me about the work he did with his father. He could not wait for me to meet his sister. He planned to make a trip in summer to a place up north where there were said to be a thousand lakes for fishing.

  The sky brightened and darkened, just the way in sunlight a cloud casts a shadow, and then an evenly curved arc of blue-green light extended from horizon to horizon and to the very top of an endless curve of sky. It rippled like a curtain under a breeze, as if a whirlwind had come from the north with a fire folded in on itself and a strange brightness all about it. The world seemed infinite then and all because August was with me.

  I shivered.

  “You are cold,” August said. He rubbed my arms and smiled and tickled me and pulled at my hand and I fell down with my head against his shoulder. He put his arm around me. “I need to warm you up,” he said.

  The metal smell had gone from the air. Spring would come and then summer and then it would be a year since the doctor had come and scolded my mother about Alvin, who had died anyway. And three weeks after that, it would be a year since my father had come behind the men who carried my mother into our house and laid her in her blackening dress on the bed. A year since my father held the door for those men, one of whom was August, who lay next to me now.

  I propped myself on my elbow and asked him if he remembered. He sat up and pulled a long piece of sweet grass from the ground and sat chewing it thoughtfully. The sky flickered above us in undulating bands of green and blue.

  He said he remembered the day. He remembered carrying her. But he did not remember anything else. He did not remember how she came to be there. He was sorry but he did not know what had happened.

  “Why do you want to take his side?” I said.

  “Whose side?” He seemed confused. He pitched his piece of grass into the night and turned to me and hugged me closer.

  “My father’s side.”

  “I am not taking your father’s side,” he said. He put his face in my hair. “I do not know your father’s side.”

  “Then why will you not tell me?”

  He sighed and nuzzled my hair again, and I went stiff with something I could not fail to identify as irritation.

  “I cannot tell you because I do not know,” he said then. “I was driving a load of lumber. A man stepped into the street and waved me down. That was your father. That was the first time I ever laid eyes on your father. He said he wanted to put a woman in the back. She was bleeding. So we took her. He sat in back with her. He was talking to her but I could not hear a word he said. We drove to your house. We carried her inside. He never said what happened. He told us there was an accident. That was all he ever said. I do not know anything else. I swear to you. I would tell you if I knew.”

  I listened to August breathe for a minute and then I stood up. I could see a yellow glimmer in the woods far off to the south, where someone must have had a house, a shed, a barn. Someplace they had made for themselves. Someplace where they intended to be safe. Maybe they had come across an ocean to put their house in that very spot. The grass rustled behind me and I heard August get to his feet. He shook his coat out and came to stand behind me. He put his coat over my shoulders. He turned me to face him and he put his arms around me as if he would warm me to my core. He told me he loved me. He told me he would always love me. He told me he would keep me safe. I leaned into him, into the warmth of him, into the scratchy comfort of his wool coat. He reached down and took my hands in his. Then he gripped them so tightly that the bones moved beneath the skin and I nearly cried out, and then I did cry out. He smiled a little and said that I must like that and then I grew angry and leaned into him harder and into the bottomless pain that felt so familiar and so much a part of me that I knew he truly loved me.

  If I smiled to myself at the laundry and Inge and Johanna and Ella watched me with open curiosity as I turned to my work, I did not care. I climbed the ladder and stirred the vat. I dipped the pole and swung steaming sheets into my basket. I scrubbed the sheets until my hands bled. I saw William Oliver. But I was in the laundry room with Inge and Johanna and Ella and all he could do was come and stand next to me and examine my work. When he gave up and walked away, I smiled and shook my head and sometimes laughed. One day when I did this, he turned in the doorway and fixed me with his stare, one eyebrow raised. I ignored him. But he stayed in that doorway for a long time.

  If I stood on the back steps and watched the deliveryman load the brown paper parcels into the wagon while the western horizon turned rosy with the light at the end of the day, it was only to see that night was coming. August was coming. I felt an ache in my chest like a string wound taut and taut until it is so tight and wired that it cannot slacken except if it is plucked by the right hand or else snapped in two in the waiting.

  A slice of blue moonlight lay across the bottom of the garden and the wires for my mother’s bean plants carved a thin shadow across the back fence. Everywhere the night, still, cold. I worked my broom under the kitchen table. Reached down and fished a button out of the dust. Martha hummed while she washed the supper dishes. Wait till the sun shines, Nellie. My mother’s clock ticked in the front room. Hattie went up the stairs and after a minute, I heard her braces fall to the floor.

  Something tapped on the glass over the kitchen sink and Martha bent over the dishpan to peer out the window. She was wearing an old skirt that had belonged to my mother. I do not know when we started to go into her room, when we started to take her things and wrap them around ourselves, but we had. We did not talk about it. We just did it. Hattie wore my mother’s old blue coat. Martha had her skirt. I wore her shoes. The day I took them, I told myself I was just borrowing them, that it was foolish to let a perfectly good pair of shoes go to waste, but I found a reason to wear them every day.

  I could see August through the window, his shoulder and a wedge of his arm. Then he stepped away and the window went blank and glassy. I made one last pass with the broom and carried it along with the dustpan to the mudroom, where I set the dustpan on the floor. I lifted my coat from the nail by the door. Martha stepped into the doorway.

  “Who is that?” she asked.

  “It is nobody,” I said. “Do not think about it.”

  She looked at the coat in my hands. “Where are you going?”

  August tapped on the glass again.

  Martha reached out and touched my sleeve. I could see that she meant to calm herself, as if self-control was something she had practiced so long and so hard that she fell into it the way another woman might fall into a bath. But she was not entirely successful. “I hope you know what you are doing,” she said. Her voice went up a little in pitch when she spoke and that was the giveaway.

  “You do not need to worry,” I said.

  She rolled her lips together as if considering what she might say, but she could say nothing that would matter. I was not to be stopped.

  “You make that hard,” she said at last.

  “Pretend you do not even know.”

  “But I do know,” she said. “I do not know everything but I do know something.”

  “Pretend you do not,” I said again. And all the while I was thinking: Pretend you never saw him. Pretend I go out to fly through the night. Pretend I haunt the woods by myself. Pretend I am just wild. Pretend you do not know me.

  She watched me button the last button on my coat. Behind her, August stepped off the porch and stood in the yard with his back to us. “What if I tried to stop you?” she said.

  “You can try,” I said. “But I am going.” In my mind, I was already gone. I was already running through the darkness holding August Bethke’s hand. I was already kissing him beneath some tree only he knew about.

  “Do you know what will happen
if you get caught?”

  “I won’t get caught,” I said. Confident as death.

  The house creaked like a ship coming undone from its moorings.

  “At least tell me who he is,” Martha said.

  “A boy,” I said. My boy, I thought. My August.

  “I can see that,” she said in a cutting voice.

  I smiled. “A carpenter.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “What is his name?”

  “August,” I said.

  “August who?”

  “Bethke,” I said. I pronounced it the way August did so it sounded like Bait-ka.

  “Bait-ka,” she said slowly. She stood in the doorway and turned the name over in her mouth, but this time said August Bethke and pronounced the last name the way Americans would say it, so it sounded like Beth-key. She repeated the last name again with a puzzled look on her face.

  I reached for the doorknob but she suddenly took hold of me and tried to pull me back into the kitchen. “Stop,” she said, her voice urgent and fierce. “Please stop. Do not go with that boy.”

  I pried her fingers from my arm. “Cut it out, Martha,” I said. “I am going.” I heard footsteps on the porch steps. August tapped on the glass again and said my name and I turned toward his voice.

  “Please,” she said.

  “You cannot stop me,” I said. “Do not even try.”

  We walked out into the night. August took my hand and I felt the great shock of him jolt my bones. When I turned to look back, Martha stood on the porch and watched us, her thin frame tall and narrow against the dim clapboard of the house, deep shadow falling between us, my mother’s skirt blowing around her knees.

  Down by the river, August led me over a gravelly beach to a small wooden boat. In the daytime these shores were bright with dry yellow reeds, and red-winged blackbirds trilled in the tall grass. At night under the moon the river shallows were gray and foamy and the marsh grasses crackled and settled and no birds flew. The river glinted silver. August pulled the boat into shore and once I stepped in, he waded into the river to lift the anchor. Then he hoisted himself over the side and dropped into the hull. He took up the oars. With even strokes he pulled us out to where the current caught us. His dark hair fell into his eyes and he pushed it back and he reached over and put his hand on my skirt. In one quick gesture, he ran his hand up my inner thigh. He let his hand rest there. I felt nothing but the thrill of that gesture and the weight of his palm. When he smiled and lifted his hand and leaned back and put his hand back on the oars, I could still feel the heaviness of his hand on me and the weight of its promise. The boat creaked beneath us.

  He stroked downstream. We slid past the tall brick machine factory and the town park with its circle of benches and then past the biggest of the springs, where the springhouse was closed up tight for the night but where in the morning people would walk to take the waters for their health or have themselves driven there in wagons and in cars. August pulled the oars into the boat and dropped them into the hull and we floated in silence. He pulled a candle stub from his pocket and lit the wick. He poured some of the wax onto the seat beside him and stood the candle in the wax. The flame flickered and went out. He popped another match against his thumbnail and lit the candle again. I wondered what people along the shore must have thought when they saw us, a boat the same dark color as the night and so invisible and yet a single light moving gently along the surface of the water.

  The candle went out again and this time he did not relight it. When we came around a curve, he searched the shoreline. Then he pulled us out of the current to a rocky beach that was more shore than sand, just tall grasses waving and small stones and the dark pines falling away. He threw the anchor into the water and let the boat drag against its weight. He crawled over the bow and tested the line. Then he stepped to the side of the boat and took my hand. I cautiously stepped onto a rock and then another and then down until I stood next to him in the shallows, my boots wet, my stockings wet, my skirt wet almost to the knees.

  He had brought us to rest in a tiny cove that seemed carved by some ancient hand from the determined lines of the riverbanks. He told me to wait and then he crossed the beach and stepped through the branches into the woods. I was left by the river in silence, wringing the water from my hem, my shoes soaked and my hair coming unpinned. The wind tossed the branches and tossed the trees where August had disappeared. I could not see him nor could I see the place where it seemed he had stepped off the face of the planet. No light or house or farm or factory nearby, only the dark, moving river and the boat bumping lightly against the gravel.

  I stood under the stars and breathed in the watery river air and waited for him to come back. I felt myself all the more alive because I was alone and waiting. I felt myself all the more free because the river breeze lifted my heart and sent it sailing. My father was like bad news from a faraway place and completely missing on this early spring night. When I stood on that beach, it seemed to me that I had never met him and all I knew was the wind and the water and August.

  He led me across the grassland to a faint trail that led upward under the trees. We climbed past old limestone shelves that ran with trickles of water and grew dank with moss. We climbed above the shelves to a place where the forest floor softened with fallen pine needles and drifts of leaves, all brown and dry and yet still yielding, August’s hand on mine as the trail rose steeply into the night. At the top, he stood breathing and I stood breathless next to him. We looked back over the way we had come. He put his arm around me and I leaned my head against him. He told me that it was not much farther and it never seemed this far in the daylight. I nodded. Far below, I saw something glint in the grass by the boat. August turned away from me but I hung back. He turned toward me and asked me what was wrong.

  “I saw something,” I said.

  We stood together and looked over the limestone cliffs to the grassland below the woods.

  “Do you see the boat?” I said.

  He nodded.

  “It’s by the boat.”

  He squinted into the darkness.

  “I do not see anything,” he said.

  “Wait,” I said. And just then in the darkness a small flash of light, like a reflection in a tiny mirror on a bright day.

  “I see it,” he said.

  We watched but the light did not come again. The grass near the boat rippled and flattened and the wind pushed against us.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “It is nothing.”

  “August.”

  “It is nothing,” he said.

  We stood on top of the cliffs and looked down into the river. The grass moved and the boat rested and no light came.

  “You see?” he said. “Nothing.”

  He pulled me after him and I followed him along the top of the rocks to a place where the trail disappeared and nothing but a great dense wall of brush and undergrowth and tall pines stood before us. And then we stepped into the brush and there was a shed. When August lit a match and put it to another candle stub, I saw that the shed was fitted with a slatted board door that hung by hinges made of strips of raw deer hide. A crude window had been papered over with greasy butcher paper. August let the match burn down and then shook it out and put it in his pocket. He stepped forward with the flame of the candle stub before him and pulled the door open. It scraped dirt and then the inside of the shed bloomed with a dark yellow light.

  We sat on a pallet made out of tattered ticking and straw that someone had pushed against the back wall. Nothing before us but the dirt floor and the candle stub standing in a puddle of wax on a tin plate. A pile of leaves blown up into the corner, as if the door had come loose in the fall and stood ajar long enough for some of the forest to come inside. August told me that this was a hunting cabin built by his father and his uncle. They came up here when they did not have work. They used the boat to bring back the deer they had shot. In town, they would hang the carcasses from the limb of a tree behind their house until the deer wer
e drained and done. Then they would skin them and butcher the meat. They would make a fire in the middle of the yard and lay thin slices over the smoke on a chaffer they had taken from an old combine. While the meat smoked, they packaged the roasts in bags made of flour sacks, which they bound with twine and hung from the rafters in the root cellar under the stairs. He said the roasts tasted best right before they turned. He always looked for the pieces that had been brined and hung and dried and had developed a crust of blue mold, like a country ham. That might be six months after the deer was killed, if the root cellar did not get too wet. He stopped.

  “I do not know why I talk so much,” he said. “Maybe you make me nervous.” He picked up my hand and held it up in the candlelight. “Poor thing,” he said. “Poor hand.” He ran his thumb over the healed scalds now white in the dark light. He stroked my red and weeping wrists. He flattened my hand between his two palms as if the heat from his hands could heal it. I felt the heat and the pressure and the thick, smooth calluses that crossed his palms.

  “When we are married, you will not have to work like this,” he said. “I will take care of you forever.”

  He put his arms around me and held me in the flickering light of the candle and then he kissed me. He kissed me until I felt my blood and bones and skin and muscle turn to shivering water and the water that I had become flooded toward him. He kissed me harder and I surged around him, as if I had become a tumult of currents and deep places. I made a sound that I had never heard before and we lay down on the pallet and he moved over me. His face was fierce and tender. His eyes suddenly dark and intent. I felt his hand at my waist, his fingers on the buttons of my blouse, my blouse rising under his hand until he could slip his hand under my chemise. My heart pounded and I closed my eyes and my spine became a tight wire arcing, with my hands on his back.