“That you always get to the laundry on time and that you always come home on time.”
“That should have satisfied him.”
“He did not believe me. He raised his eyebrow. You know how he does that.”
I shivered.
“I told him again,” said Martha. “But he said that someone told him they had seen you down below the mill bridge at night. Or a girl who looked like you. And you were not alone.”
Smoke curled up from the barrel and drifted away on the small breeze. I wrapped my arms around my waist and rocked silently and studied the wooden step under my shoes. My mother’s shoes. A dead woman’s shoes, as if her every footstep would turn into my own.
“I do not know how you think you are going to get away with this,” Martha said. She pushed herself up with her hands. “But I wanted you to know.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him that the man who said this was mistaken. I told him that you were here. I told him that I saw you with my own eyes.” She began to cry. “You have made a liar out of me.”
“I did not mean to,” I said.
She wiped her eyes with the hem of her dress. “You are arrogant and selfish,” she said. “You have put me in harm’s way.”
“The responsibility for that lies with someone else,” I said.
She wiped her eyes again. “You are being very foolish,” she said. “All this for a boy you hardly know.”
“I know him,” I said.
“Then where is he?”
“I do not know,” I said. I thought she would reply but she just turned from me with her face wet. She climbed the steps and went into the house.
The next night, I waited on the porch again. My father came from the kitchen and gave me a hard look, as if he knew I had done something wrong, and then thumped down the back stairs. He went briskly around the side of the house and I heard his footsteps fall away as he passed from our yard to the street. Night was falling, and after a minute I followed him down the drive and stood at the curb and watched him until he disappeared. Then I turned up the road and went the other way.
I walked to the lonely church where August and I had skated together across a flooded field. The church door gave a little when I pushed against it but it was locked. I leaned my forehead against the wood. Above me, in the stained glass windows, apostles turned to their work with great purpose, in scenes gone glittery gray under the starlight. Behind the church, the graveyard shimmered, its faint tombstones a fence between this world and the next. I followed the gravel path into their midst and then sat down and leaned against a headstone and looked up. I followed the stars until I found Polaris, a pinprick of light high atop the vault of the sky like the sharp point of a far arrow. But it showed me no road. My mother was forever beyond my reach. My father went about his business without scrutiny or inquiry, as if this was the just way of things and did not even bear mention. He was entitled to do with her as he pleased, just as William Oliver thought he was entitled to do with me as he pleased.
I could not read the inscriptions on the headstones around me, but I knew they marked someone’s beloved, the lost one more loved in absence than they had ever been in life, as if this was the true condition of all families, as if this was the place love invariably arrived. Deep in the heart of my mother’s stories was the long-shot promise that we could make our way out of the forest. Each tale offered the same idea: even when hope ends, hope survives. But she was gone and I could not see how.
Something rasped along the path behind me. It could have been leaves blown along the dirt in the wind. It could have been a dog on its way home. The sound came again but no wind moved the trees. I held still. I heard footsteps. When he walked up to me it was as if he already knew where I was. I got to my feet and brushed at my skirt.
“Edwin?” I said.
His lips curved. A smile.
“You frightened me.”
“You come,” he said.
“Did you follow me? Have you been following me?”
He patted his thigh with the flat of his hand. “You come,” he said.
He led me to a door under the church. He jiggled the latch and pushed with his shoulder until the door gave with a thump. We stepped into a room where rakes and scythes leaned against the wall. A cot in the corner, with a crate next to it, and on the crate, a dirty china cup. Edwin picked up the cup and reached into his pocket for a piece of candle. This he stood in the cup while he searched his pockets for a match. Finally he pulled a paper box from his trousers. His hands shook. He turned and held the box of matches out to me and I lit the candle and stood the cup on the crate between us.
He sat down on the cot.
“This is your house?” I said.
He nodded.
“I thought you lived at that house in town.” James Pulliam’s house, with its fetid odors and gloomy rooms and cold, dank kitchen. The room under the church was clean and dry and smelled only of earth.
“Prison.”
“That house is a prison?” I felt like I had to translate everything he said.
His face stilled and he looked away. “They have an executioner,” he said. “They kill children.” He tapped his thigh and moved his lips and looked hollow-eyed. Then he grinned. “I saw you.” He ducked his head.
A wind came up and fell away and the trees out in the churchyard shifted and creaked. The candle tipped in its cup and began to smoke. I reached over and straightened it. There were stains on the brown blankets, a threadbare rag rug on the floor. The cot was the only place to sit. But when I sat down next to him, Edwin stood up. He made a pile of blankets on the floor. He lay down on his side and propped himself on one elbow. His thin face looked strange and theatrical in the flickering candlelight. He watched me.
“Where do you come from?” I said.
He gestured at the walls. “Out there.”
“Waukesha?”
He shrugged, as if to say, Waukesha or elsewhere, it did not matter.
I lay down on my side and pillowed my head on my arm. The cot gave a little beneath me. We lay facing each other with the floor between us. I could hear the trees groaning and cracking outside. Spring always came like this in Waukesha, a great uncoiling of roots and leaves and buds, a crackling and sinking of ice on the river, the calling of birds and dogs, the humming of early rising insects in the newly warm air; a noisy symphony without a conductor.
He smiled at me and suddenly it all ran out of me like blood from a cut. I told him about my mother. Then I told him about my father. I told him that my sister was in love with a boy my father would not let her marry. I told him that Hattie wore braces but she did not need them and my father made her wear them just to torture her. I told him that my mother had been murdered and that my father was the one who had killed her. I told him that because of this my father would never tell us what had happened to her and the truth of the whole thing lay somewhere beyond words and all we were left with was my sister’s way of saying it. The day Mother had her terrible accident. Then I told him about August and the day we met and the way we went skating over a field as if we could transform solid earth into anything we wanted. I rolled up my sleeves and showed him the burns on my arms. I told him about William Oliver and the thing he wanted from me and what he would do if I did not say yes. And then I told him that I had not seen August for almost two weeks and I was afraid that he was not the boy he had seemed to be, that he had used me and left me, like I was one of those stupid girls we were always hearing about. And I was not one of them. I was sure I was not. And then I started to cry.
Edwin reached over and gingerly patted my arm. Then he put his hand under his cheek. He gave me a look so tender I knew it could not be a mistake. I sat up.
Edwin sat up, too. Finally he said, “I can take care of you.”
I rubbed my eyes.
“We can live here.”
I looked around.
“At my house.”
“Oh,” I said
. “No. Edwin. No.”
“I can take care of you,” he offered softly. Then he lay down again, his head on his arm in a pile of blankets on the cold floor, his thin frame nearly too long for the room. The candle flame wobbled and the light pitched around us on the walls. He looked up at me with his shiny eyes. He said my name. I hesitated but then I lay down. Edwin leaned forward and blew out the light.
In the morning, the birds began to call in the trees, single calls at first, low like the whistles of schoolchildren and then like the crying of young animals. When I stepped outside, I found Edwin sitting on a bench as if he were waiting for a train. He smiled when he saw me.
The sun was not yet up but the woods had begun to take shape in the fading darkness. When we got to the road in front of the church, he put his hand on my arm. He stared hard at my face, as if he could organize his thoughts and find a way to come to me across a deep and wordless river. I waited. His hand rested on my arm. Finally he said, “You go.”
“Edwin.”
But he had already dropped his hand to his thigh and was striding away through the colorless tombstones.
I felt queer and light, as if I had unpacked a bag and left the contents strewn on the open ground and did not care what became of them. No one I knew would have let me go on and on like that, without interruption, attending to the things I said as if they mattered. I do not think I had ever said so much at one time.
I waited in the yard until Martha saw me. She opened the door and held it open the way you hold the door to let a dog inside. She took a plate from the food warmer and set in on the table. She told me to eat. Then she touched the side of her face. I saw the red mark that had begun to fade, as if the blow had come sometime before.
“I am sorry,” I said. I wanted to reach for her but I did not.
“Yes,” she said. “Well.” She touched her face again.
“It should have been me,” I said.
She stared at me. “Yes,” she said bitterly. “It should have been you.” She dabbed at her eyes. I felt my heart sink.
I looked at the cold toasted bread on my plate. I picked up the knife and stabbed the butter and then set the knife down. I felt the kind of anger that comes from shame, a thing that belonged to me alone.
Behind me, Martha picked up a plate that stood draining next to the sink. She dried it and put it on the shelf. Then she wiped her hands and hung the towel on the edge of the sink. She told me I could do my own dishes.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I have things to do,” she said. Her voice like a blade.
I could not blame her. She was right to hate me. But I wanted to find a way to make things right. I wanted to go back in time and be the one who stood before my father. But I did not have a way to do that. For a minute I thought about going into my father’s room and waking him up to tell him to hit me instead, but I knew that when he hit me, the mark of his blow would still be on Martha’s cheek.
And then I realized that I had thought of the room where he slept as his room, not as my mother’s room. As if he had taken her last acre and thrown his fence around it at last.
She reached over and straightened the dish towel. “I hope it was worth it,” she said.
There was nothing in the world that would have been worth my father hitting her instead of me. Not even August.
“I was not with August,” I said.
She closed her eyes. Opened them. Looked at me. “Where were you?”
I thought of the candle’s little flame and the light on the basement walls. The leaves in the corners. Edwin’s face. The stillness I felt when I put my head down on my elbow and watched him blow out the light. And the sleep that came like a deep river flowing.
“I did not mean for anything bad to happen,” I said. “I made a mistake.”
“Where were you?” she said again.
“I went for a walk,” I said. “I met a boy. He took me to a room under a church. I fell asleep. When I woke up it was morning. So I came home.” I felt the night slipping away from me.
She covered her face with her hands. Then she began to weep.
“No,” I said, startled. “No. It was not like that. This boy is not like that.” There was nothing about Edwin that I would have compared to the average boy. He had odd ways. He was gentle and peaceful. He listened to me when I talked. “He is different,” I said. “I think he has been following me around.” I stopped.
She dropped her hands to her sides. “Do you know what you sound like?” she said. Her voice filled with disbelief, as if she could not imagine that I could be so stupid. “They are all like that.”
I picked up my table knife and examined myself in the blade. Then I put the knife down. I could see that Martha was trying to regain her composure, but it kept moving out of reach, like a boat drifting away.
I could never tell Martha about Edwin. She had no compassion for those who were different. We had once seen a baby in town with a head so misshapen his skull looked like a bag of balls. And behind him, with her hand on the pram, came a woman dragging her dress, her hair uncombed and her face wild. When we saw them, Martha had crossed the street.
I did not agree with her. Edwin seemed as human as anyone I knew. The boy with hair like a bear coat had looked at me with the most lonesome expression that I had ever seen. He was human. They were all human, even the boy chained to the wall with the flippers for fists.
She would never understand. She would only believe that I had done wrong.
“Two nights in the woods,” she said, as if she could read my mind. “Two different boys.”
“I fell asleep,” I said again. I spun the knife on the table and watched the metal gleam and dull and gleam again as it turned through the light from the stove.
“You have to stop,” she said. She unfolded a pocket handkerchief and blew her nose and wiped her upper lip and balled the handkerchief in her hand. Her eyes were red rimmed and sore looking. “Please.”
I slowly turned the knife next to my plate. “I do not see why you concern yourself,” I said. My words hung in the air. Even I could hear my tone.
She took two steps across the kitchen and slapped me as hard as she could. The blow rang through my head. My ear on fire. Tears started in my eyes. I touched my cheek.
“You make it my business when he hits me,” she shrieked.
“Stop trying to protect me,” I said. “That is what gets you in trouble.”
“Oh God,” she screamed, and hit me again. And then again. Each of her blows was like a familiar thing traveling back to me. I did not resist. I just fell under her hand and forgot about Edwin. I thought of August in the dark, moving above me, his love and his strong grip, the way he turned my fingers in his hands until I thought he would wrench my bones into a new shape and I could in that pain give up the shape I had always known.
11
When I left, Martha was down on her knees with her skirt hiked up so she could scrub the kitchen baseboards with an old toothbrush. I stepped down into our bare yard and came along the side of the house. Lavender light lay behind the clouds on the horizon. When I reached the street, I felt my breath come easier. The terrible aching in my throat began to subside.
My hair was still damp but I had brushed it and pinned it and washed my face and hands and no leaves trailed behind me. I wore a wrinkled dress pulled from the mending basket, too tight at the waist and its hem coming undone, but it was clean. At the corner, I saw Mrs. Muehls, her fingers pinching the brim of her hat as if she walked in a wind. She carried her shopping net with its bunch of carrots and its cut of meat wrapped in white butcher paper. She looked at me and then stiffly turned her face away.
In the empty lots, boys rolled hoops and pitched pebbles in the dirt. In the distance, the bank turret flashed in the early sun. The interurban clattered past and men and women looked out at me. None was August Bethke. The brown boards of the livery stable rose and the liveryman stood in the street and unbuckled a team from a
n old phaeton with curtained windows. He dropped the clinking harness and led the two horses on heavy hooves onto the dull wooden floor of the barn, where the horses drank from a trough. The laundry’s delivery cart came up the alley and the driver slapped his reins on the horse’s rump. In the window above, William Oliver stared down at the street.
He got to me before I could get inside. We stood in the shadow of the laundry, where a cool black trapezoid cut into daylight.
“Mary,” he said. He ran his fingers through his hair. He wore shirtsleeves and charcoal gray wool trousers, his white shirt without a collar and open at the throat, as if he had been up all night trying to sleep in his clothes.
“Good morning,” I said quietly.
“I suppose you imagine we will now have some sort of barbaric scene,” he said. “Is that it?”
“I do not know.”
“You do not know.”
“No,” I said.
“Do you know nothing about me?” he said. When I did not reply, he sighed. “I do not know why I assume anything,” he said. “You are the one with all the ideas. The philosopher. I am merely your humble servant.”
I shook my head and looked away. I put my hand on the wall. I imagined I could feel the heat from the laundry, which seemed to me more pleasant and welcoming than it ever had before.
To say I was weary was to leave most of my fatigue unspoken. I could see how everything had been my fault, but I could also see that in all of it, the things I had done had seemed right, first one thing and then another until added together they made a sum that no longer made sense. I longed for August but August did not come. I longed for my mother but she was dead.
The deliveryman led the horse into the yard behind the laundry. William Oliver glanced down the alley and then turned back to me.
“The question remains the same,” he said. “This should not surprise you.”
I bit my lip and put my hands in my pockets. “Mr. Oliver,” I said.
The End of Always: A Novel Page 11
