“Do not start that again.”
I looked down.
“The one thing we will not do is stand here in the street,” he said. “That is one thing I will not abide.”
He walked behind me as we climbed the dirty wooden stairs to his office. When we came to the top he pushed past me and opened the door and walked into the room. The warm wet air of the laundry rose through the floorboards. His dark Bible lay open on his desk and he saw me glance at it.
“Do not look so surprised,” he said. “Even a great man requires guidance from time to time. The rest of us must also consult those with wisdom far beyond our own. With all due apologies to your philosophical turn of mind, I find that I lack any such individual in my life. So it was John or Samuel Clemens and John won. At least, he won today.” He held the book up. “Revelation. How the world will be made new. Consider yourself lucky. I might have been reading Darwin and then where would we be?”
His words bewildered me. “I am sorry,” I said. “I do not—”
“No,” he said. “I don’t suppose you do. Your father is something of a Vandal, isn’t he? I doubt he’s seen to your education.” He waved his hand at the wooden chair before the desk. “Sit down.”
“My father,” I said.
“Sit down, Mary.”
I sat.
“Your father,” he said. “He is not well liked by the better class of people. You are aware of this?”
The Bible’s pages, dog-eared from the places where he had marked pages by turning down corners. The smell of the laundry swelled over us.
“Let me illuminate. People see your father as something of an ill-bred thug. He lacks—what is it?” He searched the air above his head as if the word might fall on him suddenly and with great weight, like an anvil. “Grace. For lack of a better description.” He walked to the window and looked out. “He is just one of the teeming masses yearning to breathe free and that is no recommendation at all, I am afraid.” He turned to face me. “Of course, you know that I am counting on these very qualities. Especially when you seem ready to go feral on us.”
My mouth pulled but I said nothing. He made me feel stupid and then I felt ashamed and then I fell even more silent than usual.
“Feral?” he said. “No? It means wild. A child of the woods. A nymph of the forest. Raised by wolves. Romulus and Remus. Does this mean anything to you?” He stared at me. “No?” He sighed. “Your mother would surely fix this but your mother has left us. This must please your father. It certainly pleases him that men like me can no longer approach her and say the things we tend to say. Do you know that he punched me in the nose one night when I said something to her on the sidewalk? He did. The next week we had a drink and he told me that everything would be fine, as long as I left her alone. If I did not—” He lifted his hand to his neck and slashed it across his throat.
I stared past him. I was not going to discuss my mother with William Oliver.
He studied me. “Did he kill her? Has that thought crossed your mind? Perhaps we should consult a spiritualist. Call her to us and ask the question.”
“Mr. Oliver—”
“William.”
“William.”
“What.” He smiled at me, a smile unmarked by joy.
I shrank a little. “Can I go to work now?”
“Do you work here?”
I flinched. “I thought—”
“So we come back to that.”
“To—”
“To the question,” he interrupted. He stroked his beard and his eyes were warm and brown and hard. “We come back to the question, Mary, as we are always going to come back to the question.” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pocketknife with a blackened bone handle. This he began tossing in the air and catching.
“Do you know what I did night before last?” he said. “I was thinking of you so I went up to see your father at the bar. I asked after his family. This is what men do, you know, because they have to work very hard to conceal the fact that at any moment they will fall on one another like a pack of wolves. And do you know what he said? He said that you were all fine. And he had that sort of Teutonic blankness about him that is unique to your tribe. You can be a cold and emotionless lot. So I believe the question is still in play.”
I stood.
“Where are you going?” he said. In three steps he stood in front of the door. “Sit down.”
I sat. He tossed the knife in the air again and again. Each time he caught it, it slapped against his palm and the hard muscles of his forearm flexed.
You always wonder what you will do if someone threatens you. You think you will be brave. You imagine that you will get away. But in the actual moment, you sit and watch the knife slap into the palm of his hand and slap his palm again and you listen to everything he says.
“I’m a patient man,” he said. “But my patience is wearing thin, Mary.” He flipped the knife as if it were a toy, a thing of no consequence, rather than what it was, which was the biggest thing in the room. I thought of the way all men carry knives; my father carried the pocketknife his father had carried, and even my brother Willie carried a knife from the age of six. My father gave it to him for Christmas one year, his only present.
“I do not have to ask your permission,” William Oliver said. “You should be grateful that I was raised correctly and could not live with myself if I did not show you this kind of courtesy. But you can see the truth of the matter. We are here right now and there is nothing to stop me but my own good manners.”
He studied me.
“I must say I am a little surprised,” he said at last. “You are a very daring girl in every way. I did not think I would have to do so much persuading.”
I took a deep breath and stood up. I would not let him do this without a fight.
“Oh,” he said. He smiled and snapped the knife shut. “I see. Our interview is over.”
“I am going to work now.” I pushed the words out as if they were punches.
“Right,” he said nastily. “You need this job. Your father. Your poor motherless sisters. That penniless boy who says he will marry you. And all the rest of it.” He gestured at the air as if he might make my whole world visible. But he made no move to stop me. I walked past him and opened the door and came down the dusty stairs and opened the wooden door that led out into the street.
Above me, he lifted the sash and leaned out over the sidewalk. “Do not fail to recollect,” he shouted. “End of day Friday. I will wait on you.”
When I got home that evening, Martha stood on the back steps like a stone angel, her face grim and her arms hard around her waist. Then the light shifted and she looked like my mother. The mark on her face had faded and I knew she had spent the day washing the floors and making the beds and trying to figure out how to keep everything as normal as possible, as if she could create a house where all of us would be safe. But she knew differently. I knew she knew differently.
She came down into the yard and put her hand on my arm. “He is waiting for you,” she said in a low voice.
I knew where I would find him. I walked as if propelled by something outside of myself, a magnetic pull as tense as a tightwire. Up the back steps. Through the warm kitchen. Down the dark hallway. Into the front room where he sat polishing his boots. When he saw me, he put the boot in his hand on the bench beside him and told me to come in and sit down. His voice mild-mannered, the tone of a man who plans to discuss something pleasant. But his look cut through me. I did as I was told.
He picked up the boot and spit on the toe and began to work on it, moving his rag in circles and stopping every so often to look at the result. Then he picked up a brush and turned to the heel.
He wore his work clothes. He wore the shirt that I had ironed the night before, and he wore the black trousers that I had washed and hung on the line on Monday and then pressed on Tuesday. He wore his blue necktie and his black coat and his mended black stockings. He sat with his legs wide apart
so the dirt he brushed from his boots would fall between his knees. His hair was wet and combed.
Even if my thoughts had not flattened and disappeared, taking my words with them, I knew how hopeless it was to struggle against him. When he got an idea in his head, it stuck like something nailed in place. Once I had been singing a song when he came in from work, just a small song, Go tell Aunt Rhodie the old gray goose is dead, and I was just little then, could not have been more than eight, and he swung at me as soon as he came through the door and then made fun of me for crying. He worked at the flour mill in those days and he wanted the house quiet when he came home.
“Where have you been?” he said.
“At work,” I said.
“I see.” A clod of dried mud fell to the floor. “All of this time at work?”
“Yes.”
“From yesterday until today? At work?”
The dirt on the floor. The sound of his rag.
“No?” he said. “Not at work?”
“I went for a walk.”
“Like a hure.” He looked at me, his eyes small and round. “You know what that is. A whore.” He said the word hure in the American way, so it was exaggerated and sounded like a word spoken by some other man. He held the boot in front of him and turned it so he could brush along the side.
I swallowed, choked the way another person might have been choked by mud in a landslide, water in a drowning.
“That is right, yes? You have become a whore?”
I shook my head.
“No? That is not what I hear. I hear you go with many men. That you have a fine business for yourself up there in the woods.”
I cried and shook my head. The air in the room thinning out and vanishing like I would never breathe again.
“And why should I believe anything you say?” he said. He put the brush down on the bench next to him and spit on the boot and held the boot between his knees and began to rub it with his rag in straight strokes. “I know you are a liar, so.” He rubbed the boot hard and then waved it through the air between his knees and looked at it. “I do not listen.”
Tears rolled down my cheeks. The sound of the brush on the boot heel again. The house silent as Martha waited as quiet as death in the kitchen.
“Do I not provide for you?” he said. “Is this not my house?”
I could not speak.
“And I am your father.” When I did not reply, he stopped rubbing the boot with his brush and looked at me. “You answer me when I talk to you, girl,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. My voice strangled.
“And these things are clear to you?”
“Yes.” I blinked and looked around.
“And what I say goes?”
“Yes,” I said. And swallowed a sob. I knew weeping would only make things worse. He would tell me to stop my crying or he would give me something to cry about. And then he would.
He put the boot on the bench and picked up its mate and studied it. “So,” he said. “Now comes the question. What do we do with a hure? Can a decent house keep her? Can she go out among the neighbors?” He ran his finger along the edge of the boot and looked at the tip, testing for dirt. “No. No. These are not things for a hure.”
I felt the word ripple through me. I was not a whore. I was nothing, just a tiny speck in the whole wide world, cast about by things I could not see and could not control, but I was not a whore. August loved me. He loved me. And Edwin was just a strange boy with strange ideas whom I had somehow come to know. I took a very deep breath. “But I—” I said.
My father stood up and slapped his rag onto the floor. “You shut up when I am talking to you,” he screamed. “You shut up now.”
“But I am not—”
And then my head jolted through black and there came a million pinpricks of jittery white light. The color in the room receded. The sound in the room disappeared in the shushing inside my skull. Everything around me vanished. I could not lift my head.
After a few minutes, the room began to brighten. I tasted metallic blood in my mouth. Now I could hear the bench creak. Now I could hear him breathing. He stopped next to me and I saw his spit-shined boots through the little space between my elbow and the floor.
“Next time, you are out on the street,” he said. “I will not have a hure in my house.” Then he kicked me and I cried out. He lifted his boot over my face and for a moment I thought he would stomp me into nothingness, into even less than I was at that moment. But he put his foot down without touching me and I lay breathless and weeping while his footsteps went down the hall. The back door slammed and he was gone.
Martha wrapped a cold towel over my cheek and tied it on top of my head but it did no good. My head pounded and my face pulsed and my mouth throbbed. She had washed my mouth but dried blood still flaked from my lips when I moved. A little trail of me left behind, pointing out that I was nothing but a whirling particle of earth. My father raved about equality and justice and freedom and the workingman, but in the end, that was all he cared about. Justice but not for us. Mercy but not for us. We were not citizens of his land. We were the land itself, something to conquer and master and turn to his hand.
I sat up and pulled the towel away. I touched the swelling along my jaw and flinched. I tried to pull my knees up to my chest but felt a sharp stab under my ribs and so let my knees drop. I lay down and wrapped my arms around my pillow and stared into the dark. I wished I had something that belonged to August so he would be with me. But I had nothing. In the flickering light of the hunting hut he had built a fire in a stone pit that stood under a makeshift flue and carefully unbuttoned my dress and pulled it over my head. He had let his palm slide down over my belly. He had lifted my chemise and pulled that over my head. I stood before him motionless while he unbuttoned his own shirt and then unbuckled his belt and let his trousers fall clinking to the floor. He held me against him before he kissed me. The light moved over the walls and the smoky fire filled the air with the smell of burning wood. The night did not fall away but grew larger somehow and deeper, as if the span of stars and the light of suns far distant and the moving of the earth we walked on were all new and we were alone among them, the first, the bearers of this unbearable secret, and joined together forever because of it. I knew that he would come back. But I did not know when and I grew worried in the waiting and then I told myself to have some faith in him and in the telling I knew that I had lost all faith. I listened to the throbbing in my head as if a terrible river of blood pounded against a different shore.
Something dark moved on the far side of the fence. The houses were still and our neighbors were not out in their gardens. No one bundled trash into the barrel behind the fence and no smoke curled to the sky. The dark shape moved again. I left my bucket at the pump. Edwin crouched at the end of the woodpile. When he saw me, he grinned and stood up. He reached over and patted my arm.
I thought of my father, not home yet but liable to come up the drive at any moment. “You cannot be here,” I said. “My sister will kill me.” My father will kill you, I thought, if he even lays eyes on you.
He squinted at me. Then he raised his hand and touched my face, very lightly, right along the jaw, where my father had struck me.
I leaned away. “Do not touch me.”
He pulled his hand back.
“You have to go,” I said. I looked around to see if we were being watched.
His arms flapped helplessly. “The armies that march come upon us in the open,” he said. “They ride dark horses and they come upon us in the fields and I was there and I saw what happened when the armies,” he said. Then he stopped. “I fought in that war,” he said miserably, and his face darkened. “I fought in that war, too.” He gazed past me to the open sky and searched the long line of horizon that ran out to the prairie and then east to the gray lake. His lips moved. Then he looked back at me. “What happened?” he said. He pointed at my jaw.
“It is nothing,” I said. “My father.”
&n
bsp; “Why?”
I swallowed. How could I explain any of this to Edwin? It was impossible. So I said nothing and Edwin waited and watched me. Finally I said, “He says I am a bad girl.” And felt the truth of this drive me into the ground.
“You come,” Edwin said.
“I cannot,” I said.
“You come,” he repeated.
“No,” I said. “And you must go. You cannot be here.”
“You cannot be here,” he said. “You come.” He worked very hard to make the words. He leaned forward and patted my arm. “You come,” he said. “You come.”
“Stop it,” I said. “I cannot go with you.”
Edwin took a step toward me.
“Maybe I can come and see you later,” I offered.
He patted my arm and patted my arm, his face sorrowful.
“If you do not go,” I said. And then I stopped. I did not want to hurt Edwin. I did not want anything bad to happen to Edwin at all.
“Please,” I said. “You will only make things worse.”
He dropped his hand back to his side. He turned and walked in his long loping stride across the neighbor’s backyard. When he reached the street he looked back at me, his haunted face still, his hand moving against his thigh. Then he was gone.
The grass was heavy with dew and the air reeked of wild onion and the forsythia bloomed in frilly yellow hedges, broken branches, the promise of flowers everywhere in the antic green shoots under the trees. Spring.
Martha stood on the back porch with her arms folded across her chest. I waved but she did not move. I crossed the grass to the pump and picked up my pail. When I carried it up the steps, she stood back and let me pass.
“I do not suppose you will tell me who that was,” she said.
12
Three nights later I carried my dustpan into the backyard and August stepped out of the shadows. He said my name and I dropped the dustpan and my knees turned to water. He smiled and reached over and took my hand. I felt his touch pitch through me, the same warmth spreading like liquid through my chest, the same bucking of my heart, the same idiotic smile like something I could not control. He was here. He had not forgotten me. He had come back.
The End of Always: A Novel Page 12
