by S. M. Hulse
* * *
A week until the eviction. I’m beginning to realize part of me still hadn’t thought it was real. Hadn’t thought it was final. Some part of me thought it would turn out to be a misunderstanding. The state would change its mind, realize the road was better placed elsewhere, or not needed at all. The lawyer would call and say he’d found a way to stall the seizure of the property, that there were more options. Samuel would find a solution, as he always did.
He must have accepted the truth before I had. The bombing was no attempt at a solution. Even if it had gone the way I suspect he intended—no injuries, no cameras, a week out of town and back to the house with no one the wiser—it wouldn’t have changed the outcome. We would still have lost the house, the land. What he did wasn’t an attempt to change anything, save anything. It was an outburst, anger, revenge. Thought of that way, it seems a strangely futile gesture, a particularly violent tantrum. An admission of helplessness I never expected to see from my brother.
I thought we would leave together. Hard now not to feel I’m being cast out for my brother’s sin, sent away from my Eden for what someone else has done. I know it’s not truth. I know Samuel’s actions were at least in part a response to having our home stolen, and in no way its cause. But he is somewhere else, and I am here, and I am alone.
I call the Elk Fork apartment complexes with accessible units, put my name on the waiting lists. Neither will have a unit available by the time I have to be off the property, but the second complex expects a vacancy the following month, and I can afford a cheap motel that long if I have to. It feels like surrender.
I set up my painting outside. I ought to finish the house. Only a few more days, a few more opportunities. Still I leave the mud cakes untouched, the brushes dry. The painted house’s final window remains blank.
I keep thinking of Emily. I find myself tracing the outline of her face on my palm with my empty brush, those curves and lines I memorized when I went back to her hospital room with Asa. It would be a quick painting. I would use my painting knives, my thick acrylics. Exchange the large paper with the painting of the house for a small, square canvas. Outline the broadest shapes of the portrait with a soft pencil. Head and shoulders only, a pose not quite like the one in her school photo. I’d squeeze my paints onto my palette, a rainbow of hues, choosing those that would suit the longest, warmest of summer evenings, to suggest a life lived under the most brilliant sunlight.
Then I would trade the pencil for my knives. I’d work quickly, the paints blending into one another at some points, butting sharply up against one another elsewhere. I’d soften some places with the pad of my thumb, wipe it clean on my jeans. The colors would build swiftly into the shape of a face, a girl’s face, Emily’s face. Eyes the color of May grass, gold rings around the pupils; youthfully rounded features highlighted by pink cheeks; auburn hair streaked with sunny oranges and yellows.
Painting that way is familiar and comforting, and I will never do it again. Not for a portrait of Emily, and not for any other reason. So tempting to paint only the brightest vision of things. To hide damage and decay beneath thick layers of vivid pigment, to depict life as it might be in a dream. It’s the closest I can come to magic, to healing, and it isn’t nearly enough.
* * *
I don’t understand why I can’t leave. I don’t mean right now; I mean at all. Why can’t I leave Prospect? This place has never offered us much, Jo, certainly not since the mines closed, but even now I’m guarding it, circling it as I write, protecting it from the inky weight of my words.
If I were another kind of man I might’ve seen the government’s theft of the house as an opportunity. An escape. I tried to escape when I was younger, and I think I might have done it then. (Don’t think I’m blaming you. Blame Archer. Blame the impotent piece of paper telling him he couldn’t come into our lives anymore.)
You’ve always loved our home in a different way than me. You love it for what it is, and I envy you that. I love it because it’s all I have left. Because those forty acres to my name are all I still have of Mom and Dad and the Fabers who came before them. Because our home is the one dream that didn’t evaporate that night.
Do you think things would have been different somewhere else? I know they would have if we’d left after Dad died—Mom could’ve found better work, and maybe better men, too—but would it have been different if you and I left after she died? What if we’d really gone to South Dakota? Or to Denver, or Seattle? Say we’d woken up to cornfields rather than mountains, to asphalt instead of gravel, salt water instead of sandstone.
I did ask you once. Do you remember? You were twelve. I asked where you would live if you could live anywhere. I even said it twice: anywhere. You thought about it for just long enough, Jo. If you’d answered immediately, I could have told myself, She didn’t think; if you’d waited too long to answer I could have said, She isn’t sure. But you thought about it just long enough, and then you said, Here. Only here.
(I’m still not blaming you, Jo. Do you really think I would have gone?)
Maybe I should have made you choose anyway. Maybe I should’ve handed you a map like this one, but with all the states on it. Maybe I should’ve told you to pick somewhere, anywhere.
Maybe it was already too late.
* * *
I spot Devin’s car coming up the drive late Saturday morning. I open the door as he climbs the stairs to the porch, don’t even have to ask before he shakes his head and says, “No news.” Inside, I watch him take in the neatly stacked boxes, the unadorned walls and bare bookcases. He turns a chair so it faces away from the kitchen table, sits without waiting for an invitation. I wearily position myself a few feet from him. These visits have become almost routine far more quickly than I would have guessed possible, and while knowing Devin considers me untrustworthy at best and hostile at worst simplifies things, I still feel deeply uneasy with this role. I wonder how much longer I’ll have to play it. How much longer these visits will continue, if there is a point at which Samuel will have stayed gone so long they’ll turn their attention to other things.
You could stop the visits now if you tell him about the mountains. There’s still part of me that wants to. I can’t hold this question in my mind forever. I can’t keep pretending Samuel hasn’t hidden before. But what Asa said to me at the hospital has led me to understand that while I might not be my brother, and might not be responsible for what he has done, he is still my brother. Mine and mine alone. I can’t simply hand that truth, or the burdens that come with it, to someone else.
Devin doesn’t immediately speak. I’m impatient with his tactics and manipulations. I’ve said everything I mean to say to him before today, and now I just want him gone. I wait, but he still doesn’t speak. I wait some more, and then I nod to his pristine boots. “You still need to scuff those up.”
He glances down, flexes an ankle to get a better look at the leather. “I give the shoeshine guy a good tip every Monday to make sure they don’t look scuffed.”
“Makes you look like you belong on a dude ranch.”
“This might shock you,” Devin says, “since I get the distinct impression you think I’m from somewhere terribly pedestrian like Pennsylvania or New Jersey, but I was born in Helena.”
It does surprise me, but I try not to let it show.
He leans toward me. “There are ways to be a Montanan without being a mountain man.”
We’ve crossed into dangerous territory. Devin has somehow led us to this point, though I’m the one who started the conversation, and I can’t quite see how he’s done it. “Don’t know any mountain men,” I say carefully.
There’s a long silence, but I vow not to speak again until Devin does.
“You look ready to go,” he says finally, nodding toward the boxes.
“Don’t see I’ve got much of a choice.”
“Where will you be moving?”
“I don’t know.” He raises an eyebrow, and I tighten my jaw. “
I’m on a waiting list for an apartment in Elk Fork, but it’s not going to be ready in time. I don’t know where I’ll go until it is.”
Devin looks at me for a few more seconds, then nods minutely. “Let me know when you figure it out.”
Silence again. For all his tendency toward speechmaking and ranting, Samuel has always been comfortable with silence, willing to wait others out, to let his words stand without further explanation or adornment. That kind of silence makes me uncomfortable, but I try to emulate him now. To remember that there aren’t always words, and what words there are might better be left unspoken.
The silence won’t have much power over Devin; I’m sure he was taught its usefulness if he didn’t recognize it instinctively. He lets it stretch between us, but in the end he’s the one to break it. “I did come to ask you about something,” he admits. “I’ve been stalling because it will probably hurt you to hear it. And whatever you think of me, Jo, I don’t want to hurt you.” I bite back a scoff. Has he already forgotten his threat during his last visit? “I don’t think you’re a bad person,” he continues. “I think you’re stunned by what Samuel did, but you’re also deeply loyal to him, and that’s left you unsure what to do in this situation.” He’s got the profile spot-on again.
“Ask.”
“The night your mother died—”
“Was a long time ago.” I wish I hadn’t interrupted. Might as well put my hands over my ears and start humming.
“The report says Sheriff Hawkins responded to the emergency call.”
“This has nothing to do with anything,” I insist. “This has nothing to do with the bombing.”
“Sheriff Hawkins responded to the emergency call,” he repeats. Waits until I reluctantly nod. “It says he killed Benjamin Archer.”
“In the hallway.” I point, and Devin turns, as though he might see Archer’s ghost there. I don’t look; even now a small, childlike piece of my soul is afraid there might be a ghost to see.
“Hawkins’s gun jammed.” Another nod. “He used a baseball bat.”
“Samuel played in high school,” I say. Hear my own voice getting quieter with each word. “His bat was by the door.”
“There were other guns in the house,” Devin says, his head cocked just slightly. “A couple rifles, a shotgun.”
“There was no time to open the safe.” I close my eyes. I don’t want to remember this now. “Everything was so fast. It probably seems slower written in a report, but it was very fast. There was no time. He was coming down the hallway.”
“Archer was.”
“He had a gun. He heard me.”
“You were in the bedroom closet.”
“I didn’t see it.” I open my eyes. “I didn’t see anything.” Firmer. Louder.
“You must have heard.”
“I was in shock.”
“Your mother had already been … had already died?”
I reach down beside my chair, throw back the corner of the rug. The stain. Faded but not gone. Could be anything: a pet stain, water damage. Just a dark blotch that might be any of a dozen things other than the blood it is. “Samuel sanded it down,” I tell Devin. “Too much, actually. There’s a little dip in the floor if you run your hand over it. He should’ve ripped out the boards, replaced them. That’s what he had to do in the hallway. But he never got around to it. Couldn’t bring himself to do it, I guess. Hawkins bought us the rug.”
Devin stares at the spot a couple seconds too long, and I take a dark satisfaction in having surprised him. He seems to anticipate all my answers before I give them, and finding something that isn’t in that damned report, isn’t already part of Devin’s theories and conjectures, is almost a relief. He recovers quickly, though, straightens, looks back at me.
I flip the rug down.
“Archer was hit more than once,” he says, and his voice is steady as ever. “The investigation … let’s just say it wasn’t conducted the way I would have conducted it. But based on what was done, on the blood spatter and the coroner’s report, he wasn’t only hit more than once, he was hit more than a dozen times.”
He waits, and I finally say, “That’s not a question.”
“Where was Samuel when Archer was in the hallway?”
“I was in the closet.”
“Where was he, Jo?”
“I was in the closet,” I repeat.
“Where—”
“You tell me.” I force down memories of that night, the dark, the sounds. Look Devin in the eye. “You’re the one who read the report.”
* * *
I heard eleven shots. One, solitary. My mother, I understood, because her voice was suddenly gone. Her murderer’s name the last thing she said. Then a second shot. Aimed at my brother, I learned later, but it found me through the wall. And despite the pain, despite my scream, I heard the third—Samuel’s voice gone, and I thought he was dead, too, because I heard him fall—and then the rest all at once. Nine bullets in my mother altogether. And then the footsteps coming down the hall.
I still hear the sound of the shots sometimes. A wrenching Morse code, a staccato pattern I hear inside my skull, sometimes over and over, sometimes just once, when I’ve stopped expecting it. As a child I thought people were haunted by ghosts, but I understand now that the senses can haunt. Louder there in the darkness of the closet, louder now when I close my eyes at night.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four five six seven eight nine ten eleven.
* * *
I push a slice of carrot around the frozen dinner tray in front of me. Some of the gravy from the turkey has spilled into the carrot compartment, and I use the carrot as a crude brush, swirling the gravy across the black plastic.
“Not good?” Hawkins asks, watching me.
I quickly lift the fork to my mouth. “It’s fine.”
We spent the afternoon moving nearly everything from the house to the storage unit I rented in Split Creek. (I tried and failed not to think of Samuel’s unit, Samuel’s bomb.) The house is almost empty now. My bed is still there, and my easel and a few brushes, the unfinished mud painting. A few toiletries in the bathroom, some paper plates and plastic forks in the kitchen, the handful of unimportant odds and ends I’ve abandoned upstairs for the bulldozers.
Another cop show is wrapping up on Hawkins’s television. The kidnapped woman is rescued. The criminal arrested. The cops share a reflective beer. Hawkins switches the set off. “I’m not running for reelection this year.”
I turn to him, but he’s staring at the black screen.
“I’ve had enough of it. Enough. I get called to Hank Branson’s place at least once a week and I take him in to sober up, but I know I’m gonna be right back out there again next week. I toss Ren Wallace in jail for hitting Macy and then she comes to pick him up. And at least that’s doing something. It’s some kind of action, even if it don’t mean nothing in the long run. I spend most of my time sitting on my ass in my truck waiting for speeding tourists, but when they build that damn road I ain’t even gonna be able to do that. I’m tired of not mattering, Jo. I’m tired of not being able to do any good.”
“You do good,” I protest. The words come out hollow, like a line read by a middling actor.
“God knows I’ve tried,” Hawkins says. Tips his soda can up, finds it empty. He crumples it in his fist. “I did a great job helping your brother, didn’t I?”
“Hawkins…” I start, but he waves me off.
“Maybe I just don’t want to be the sheriff of a dying town anymore.”
“Where will you go?” I wonder if he wants me to try to talk him out of it. Not really his style. He’s probably been stewing about it for a while, has only said it aloud now that he’s finally decided.
“Somewhere I don’t know nobody.” He looks at me, shrugs. “And somewhere it don’t snow.”
I offer a small smile, because he wants me to. I should have stronger feelings about Hawkins’s decision, probably.
Next to Samuel, he’s been the most consistent figure in my life these last few years. With Samuel … gone … losing Hawkins will be tough. But things have shattered so wholly, so spectacularly, that this registers as minor, an aftershock. And I think he might be making the right decision. I can’t forget those pills, even if Hawkins wishes I would.
“I thought about asking if you wanted to go with me,” he says. “We could find a nice town somewhere, set you up in an apartment. A fresh start, you know? We could both use that. But you won’t leave Prospect.” He leaves a pause long enough for me to fill, if I wanted to. “I’ll be selling the house.” It takes a moment to register what he’s saying, what it means, and then I experience a little spark of excitement. Feels foreign, like something almost forgotten. “I got nowhere to put the mule, and I’m sorry about that, but there’s the ramp.”
“How much you asking for it?”
“Not that I think you ought to stay, understand. I mean it when I say this place is dying, Jo, and that road’s only gonna kill it faster.”
“Hawkins.”
He names a price that’s half what the place is worth.
* * *
I didn’t count the footsteps. Too much pain, too much fear. I heard them, though, and the breaths, heavy, winded. I didn’t hear anything from the living room, no groans or cries, and no second set of footsteps. So the first swing, when it came, was a surprise. A crack as sudden as any hit in a ballpark, but not so sharp, not so clean. A brittle sound, shattering. It changed over the next few seconds, became duller and wetter, though no quieter.
I didn’t count swings, either. More than a dozen, Devin told me. I suppose that’s right, but I didn’t count. I only knew it was enough.
* * *
