Beside the house he could see Todd and Amber standing with Gerard. They had expressions on their faces that made Jack's heart rate go up. Had something happened?
It was unbearably hot, so close to the middle of the day. The air was even dryer than the day before, and with the smoke and the heat you could believe the sparks would leap from nothing, out of mid-air.
Amber's face was streaked with tears and mud. Gerard was speaking.
"...her pride and joy, and the way you two are acting, like you're better than a goat-farmer, or smarter than her or something. Makes me want to spit." He backed up a step, shook his head with his lips tight. "She's known in four counties for her cheese."
"Grandma started the business," Amber said.
"Your grandma started milking goats, that's right. But your mother turned it into an art. She's made a world here, a whole beautiful world."
"What's going on?" Jack asked.
"These two are getting on my last nerve with their moaning about loading goats and the way they mock their mother. City kids, can't leave her alone."
"We're not city kids! This is our home, too," Amber said. Jack could see that she was so angry she was crying.
"You don't know what it's like to live with Mom," Todd said quietly, then turned to look at Jack. "We weren't mocking her, Dad."
"I said something..."
"Amber said something about being glad she wasn't working with her. You know how she gets when she's stressed out. That's all. Gerard took offense, lit right into us."
"You kids don't know what you have. Leave your mother alone. You have no idea what this fire is like for her. She was born here."
"She never seemed to like it all that much before," said Todd. "Telling Dad all the time that she wanted to go back to San Diego."
"Is that really the way you think the world is?" Gerard asked. He looked disgusted. "That everyone knows exactly how they feel or exactly what they mean all the time? That we don't say things we regret, do things we feel bad about? I'm not saying Molly's perfect, Jack. But they need to leave her be. And recognize something about what she's done here, because it's some kind of amazing. You all have her hemmed up in some box you've constructed for her. I don't know that any of you know what you have!"
Jack had tried to interject and been cut short a few times. Now he was silent. This was unexpected. Gerard was the last person he had expected to crack and start yelling at people. Now Gerard swung off and strode away.
"Have to fix it with the goats, make sure they're all settled," he called. "We're mostly done, though. Jack, I'll be ready to get out of here straight away."
Jack looked at Amber and Todd.
"We weren't complaining all that much," Amber said after a long pause. "That was hard work you gave us, we were hot and tired. I kept falling down because the goats were tripping me. One kicked me."
"They couldn't trust us," Todd said. "We were trying to do them a favor. They were spending all their energy on fighting us."
"We always get the hard jobs."
Jack shook his head. "You didn't have to come up here," he said. "This is ridiculous, right now. Come on, kids, take a minute, get yourselves together. Drink some water, for Pete's sake." He walked away, his hands shaking.
Only one day in his life had ever been worse than this.
EIGHTEEN
The aging room was cool and the floor smooth under Molly's feet. She'd taken her shoes off at the door to avoid swirling the dust around the large wheels of cheese. The wheels were shelved like books in spaces between slats of wood, placed according to age. She walked down the long row, running her hand over the wheels. It was like running her hand over the years. These round slabs were a record that she'd been here. The years of depression and confusion in her mind had stolen time from her, so that she almost couldn't account for those years, but this was something she'd managed to collect, to gather, since then. This place was a sort of monastery. She folded peace to herself when she was with the goats, in the cookhouse, and in this cool space in the aging room.
She began pulling wheels out of the slots, grasping them with both hands. They were heavy. Each one had a date written on it. She began with the oldest ones, stacking them three high with sheets of wax paper between them. She put them in boxes and began hauling them out to Martha.
It took a long time, and she'd been sweating to begin with. Outside, heaving the wheels to the truck, she saw that the smoke had taken on a darker cast. She wondered if the cheese would taste wood-smoked. They could sell them as cheese from the O'Leary Ranch fire, raise the price. The buckeye tree blew and whispered at her. Looking at it hurt, it was as though she could already feel it burning.
Rain met her at the truck on her sixth trip. She was holding a large box as well.
"What's that?" Molly asked.
"Documents."
"Where are the albums?"
"Back in the living room." Rain shrugged. "I'm about to get them."
Molly walked toward the house. She had a photo in mind that she really needed to reassure herself about.
"Where are you going, Mom?" called Rain. "What about the cheese?"
"Almost done. I'll finish in a sec!"
Again, the slight relief of coolness. Molly looked around, overwhelmed by all the things she loved about this room. The large spider-like crack on the wall above the bookcase. All those books. The lumpy sofas with the crocheted afghans over the backs. There were so many things they hadn't had time to move. She sank onto her knees on the carpet in the living room and opened a photo album. No, not this one. She stacked a few on each other and found the one she was looking for. Here, it should be here.
It wasn't. There was a small pouch in the very beginning of the album that usually held the photo, safe and separate from the rest, but it was open and the photo was gone. Molly flipped through the rest of the pages in the album and looked for it. What? What was this?
Rain slouched into the room, chewing on a thumbnail.
"The jewelry, documents, and computer stuff are all done," she said. "All that's left are those boxes."
"Can you help me find this photo?" Molly asked. She tossed magazines out of the rack they always sat in, pressed her face to the floor and looked under the coffee table, the sofas.
"What photo?"
"It's of me and my dad, from when I was a little girl. You must have seen it before. It's the last picture of us together while he was still healthy."
"Um, I don't remember." Rain picked some antique glasses off the bureau and looked underneath them.
"Don't look there! Why would it be there?"
"Don't yell at me!"
"I'm not yelling at you, I'm speaking loudly!"
"Hey, I didn't lose this picture."
"I didn't lose it either, it was right here... God, help me..." Molly suddenly thought of Catherine, going through the albums.
"Oh," she said, thinking fast. Maybe she could run to the guest cabin and see if Catherine had it. But she was dizzy with hunger. This, this was not something she had bargained on losing. She crossed her arms over her ribcage as she looked around the room, feeling for something she hadn't thought of, coming up with nothing but the image of Catherine in the chair, white head bent over the photos, flicking her braid over her shoulder in that way she had.
NINETEEN
Catherine stepped back and looked at the painting. It was finished. She'd had tears streaming down her cheeks for the last hour, but it was done and she felt more peaceful that she could ever remember feeling. She was breathing hard; the smoke was starting to get to her. She sat weakly in one of the kitchen chairs and looked at her painting.
"Old lady, you're old," she muttered.
Something had left her while she painted this. A patch she had constructed for herself had been lifted off. In the past she had carefully laid it over threadbare parts of her life, but it was gone now. The painting was for Molly; it was for giving her what belonged to her, for not withholding anymore. Catherine ha
d wept it out of herself; this tight-fisted control that had taken her over, wanting her to make such a clear line between Molly and her father, to separate them, to keep them in their own compartments so they would not bleed into one another. Maybe she had good intentions—she wanted Molly to be well, not to suffer from the sickness that Bill had. But her intentions were not always good.
The painting was just a mess of oils, really, but with color and shapes that still made her cry, looking at them. The bowl of grassy land, the Eve tree in the background. Molly and her father on the picnic blanket, belonging to one another.
Catherine had lost him and she hadn't wanted anyone else to have him.
In his good times, he had always been more light-hearted than her. Always wanted to spend time with her, outside on the grass. But she always carried with her the memory of his last bad spell, the knowledge that another would come soon, so she could never quite relax. And sitting had never come naturally to her. She didn't know what to do with her hands. She was a woman who leapt up as soon as the plates were clear of food, to stack and wash them, not one of those women who could sit chatting well into the night while the food crusted on the edges of the plates and the long hours spun out beneath them.
What a long way to work it had been for Bill! He drove for an hour to get there, in the heat, rain and snow, and yet if he ever had some time at home, he wanted all of them to traipse around outside together. He was always showing her things that she only noticed as a matter of duty, like the shade of green that covered the hills (she saw it as good pasture for the cattle) or the brilliant red outline of the clouds in the morning (rain). It was as if she sat on the outside, watching him with heavy eyes as he fooled with his new camera or tripped up the hill to the picnic spot, lay on his back in the grass, watching the sky, calling her to come and join him. She brooded. This earth that she loved needed her to tend it, she didn't have time to lay back and get moony over it. She didn't completely understand then, that his illness was something he couldn't turn on and off. Of course it nettled her. He forced her to be the mannish boss of the ranch, beaky, in charge. Coaxing him out of his bed to go to his office job in town, and then watching bitterly as he bounced back.
The painting was of his forty-seventh birthday. It was the last one before he got sick. If she had known that then! He and Molly hunted wild strawberries while Catherine fried chicken and baked bread. Even that, even that; the two of them listing off into the woods like vagabonds while she pounded and sizzled in the hot kitchen. Resentment burned in her, she was ashamed of it now, but it burned in her then.
They marched with their blanket to where the hills were sprightly with late wildflowers. The rains had trickled to a stop later than usual and there were sweet peas nodding all around them.
"I think heaven will be filled with wildflowers," Bill had said, lying on his stomach and looking at her. They had finished eating and Catherine was trying to stay still and sit with him as she knew he wanted her to. She felt intoxicated by the scent of the short pennyroyal plants they had crushed when they laid the blanket down. Wilder and stronger than mint, it spread a long cool space across her skull, between her eyes. The boys were caterwauling in the trees. They had disappeared as soon as the food was down their gullets. She leaned back on the blanket, arms ropy with muscle, her hair in the two long braids that she sometimes wore.
"Wildflowers?" she repeated.
"Yes, and you will wear a crown of them," he said, and for that instant she softened. His eyes were deep— she knew he wanted to unbraid her hair and slide his hands through it. She felt heat rise to her face.
And then there was Molly, clambering into the center of everything, small and messy with black hair like crow feathers and strawberry stains on her face and hands. She sucked their warmth into her like a kid goat.
"And me?" Molly asked. "What about me?"
"You?" Bill said. "You will have the biggest crown of all."
Catherine got up quickly, feeling bereft. She looked at the Eve Tree and her heart clenched. She longed for her mother harder than she had in years.
She must have snapped the picture then, because that was the moment it captured, Molly with Bill, him laughing into her face. But all she remembered was getting up to clear the dishes and pack them into the basket to bring back to the house.
Oh, if she knew then what she knew now. She had so many regrets. Life was so unforgiving, permanency and futility all bundled into one. But she knew now that you just can't pull a child's ancestry from her. You can't take her father out of her. In trying, she had done so much more harm than good.
There was a knock at the door. She heard Todd's voice.
"Grandma!"
She stood and slowly walked to the door. When she opened it he stood there in his tight jeans and t-shirt, that black hair standing on end, his dark eyes the very same eyes Catherine had seen in her mirror for all these years, the same ones that were in Molly's face.
"We need to go," he said. "Dad said now. Are you ready?"
"Yes, I'm ready. I've been waiting for someone to help me with my suitcase."
"Oh, I'll get it."
He followed her through the kitchen to the bedroom, and as they passed the painting she heard him gasp.
"Careful," she said. "It's wet."
"This is what you've been doing down here," he whispered. "Grandma... it's amazing."
It came suddenly to Catherine, how it must have appeared. All these hours that she'd been spending working on something that had become as urgent as the evacuation to her. She'd been hidden away, absent. Who knew what the family had made of it? Maybe they thought she had been sleeping.
She showed him the hard-shell suitcase on her bed and he picked it up easily and went to leave. She followed, grasping the painting by the frame that was exposed on the back, taking care to hold it away from her. It wasn't all that large, she figured she would hold it on her lap while they drove. And if she got paint on her clothes, so be it.
And that was how Molly found her, gingerly holding one arm out by her side with a wet painting clutched in her hand.
Catherine's daughter burst into the living room with wild eyes. She stopped beside Todd, her head just reaching the top of his shoulder.
"Mama, I'm looking for my photograph and I can't find it anywhere!" she started, then trailed off when she saw the thing that Catherine was holding, adjusting herself so she could really look at it. Catherine turned it slowly to face Molly and set it on the floor in front of her. Molly's mouth was wide open, her face astonished.
"What— how did... what is that?" she asked, reaching out and gripping Todd's arm.
This wasn't happening at all the way Catherine had hoped. She felt close to tears. In the middle of evacuating, the painting wet and Molly was so upset... Catherine's lip kept threatening to wobble. She pressed her mouth firmly together with her free hand and looked at the small stove in the corner. Things never happened the way you imagined them, she told herself.
"She painted it," Todd told his mother. Catherine took her hand away from her mouth.
"It's for you," she said. "It's a gift. I meant to give it to you after all this was over... not now. That was never my intention. It wasn't my intention to worry you about the photo either, I—"
"But I didn't even know you could paint like that! And when did you do it?"
"Oh, here and there."
"Mama, I—"
"I should have given it to you a long time ago," Catherine said," or something like it. More memories of him, more talking about him." She saw Molly's eyes fill suddenly with tears. Her own face was wet, she found, when she raised her hand up to wipe her cheeks. Todd stood quietly beside his mother. Molly looked away from Catherine and gazed at the painting. Catherine fumbled one-handed in her purse and handed Molly the photo, slightly rumpled now.
"Here," she said. Molly took it carefully and looked at it for a long moment.
Todd broke the silence finally. "We have to go."
M
olly sat down heavily, instead, on the sofa.
"I can't believe you did this. It's... it's the most incredible thing." The last words were whispered, Catherine could barely pick them out. "It's just like the photo. No, not just like the photo. I don't know. I don't know what to say, Mama."
Catherine lifted her hands helplessly, not sure what to do.
Molly stood up and walked to her, careful not to touch the painting. She lifted her face and kissed Catherine on the cheek. "Thank you," she said. They looked at each other for a long minute. Maybe this was the moment Catherine was looking for, after all.
"We have to go, Mom," Todd said. "I have Martha, we're supposed to meet everyone at Athena's."
"You two go. I'll catch a ride with someone else."
"I don't think Dad would like that—"
"In fact, that's Gerard! Hold on!" Molly shouted through the open door. Catherine fought the urge to press a hand to her ear. She felt trembly and weak. If she let go of her knees she knew she might just keel over. Molly jumped up and sped out the door to where Gerard's truck had come to a halt. She turned quickly before she jumped in.
"Just go, Todd! Tell your dad I'll be there soon!"
Todd looked at Catherine. His eyes were abnormally shiny, like they were filled with tears.
"She left the painting," he said.
"We'll bring it for her," Catherine replied, getting her voice back and squeezing his hand.
He blinked and gently held her elbow as they left the cabin and walked up the driveway to the truck. After Todd helped her in, Catherine arranged herself on the scalding vinyl bench and waited. Todd started the truck and they rolled forward, past the grouse hill and the buckeye trees and the hill where Catherine had put her daffodils in the spring, every year. She watched the trees pass by the window and put her hand out to feel the wind filling and emptying her palm.
There were many things you could say for catastrophe, she thought. People became tender toward one another. It would in fact be better if they could all recognize their fallen state as one long disaster; extending the same compassion toward one another every day. There was softness among the family, interlaced in fear and stress. Softness because the ranch was burning. She even felt it toward herself, she felt softness for the way she had failed her land and her family.
The Eve Tree: A Novel Page 21
