The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs Page 12

  In the kitchen as they made ready the girls clowned around, fixing plastic go-cups of Diet Pepsi and making jokes. Their banter was so good-natured that even Hattie, who often found their humor, especially ClairBell’s, too raucous, had to laugh. The only potential blot came when, just as she picked up the dishcloth to make a final swipe at the countertop, the telephone rang.

  All three women lunged. Doro feared it was Billy wanting to be picked up from the bus stop and she would have to tell him no in order to protect their mother’s day, but then her mother would be upset with her and wasn’t this always the way? ClairBell suspected it was Billy wanting to be picked up from the bus stop and their mother would once again abandon her to cater to her boy-child’s whim and wasn’t that always the way? Hattie worried it was Billy wanting to be picked up from the bus stop and that she would have to suffer ClairBell’s wrath at changing their plans, which of course she would for she couldn’t deny her son and anyway why should she have to?

  ClairBell reached the phone first, and when Doro and Hattie heard her say, “No, thanks, not today, and please take us off your list,” they relaxed. “Darn telemarketers,” ClairBell said, hanging up.

  Though they should have known better than to take ClairBell’s words at face value, they did, and they gave no more thought to the incident. But the caller was indeed Billy, who wanted to be fetched home from the bus stop. Dismissed so rudely by ClairBell, he smoked a Maverick or two about the insult, and then he popped a Xanax, a Percodan, and a pale-blue something and started walking the five miles between the bus stop and his parents’ house, intending to tell off Miss Crosspatch. He was known for zingers, was Billy, whether sedated or soaring, and for eloquence. His vocabulary rivaled his father’s, and he determined to fix his sister’s snippy little spite-wagon once and for all. But by the time he reached home late in the afternoon he’d forgotten his resolve. He was so exhausted and hungry that he could do little but forage for food—a meatloaf sandwich, a few bites of baked potato, a forkful of Jell-O, and too many cookies—and collapse in a recliner in front of his father’s television set. But ClairBell’s lie at least saved Hattie from fretting about what woe would betide when Billy came face-to-face with his father without her as buffer. And with Big Bill there to boot. There was no love lost between the two Williams, for too often Big Bill had fielded drunken late night phone calls from Billy’s associates.

  They were off, Doro driving the powder-blue Skylark, Hattie at shotgun, and in the backseat ClairBell and her train case. As they pulled out of the driveway they met Big Bill in his red Dodge Ram. He lifted two fingers from the wheel to greet them, flicked the switch on his Fire Squad cherry top, and whoop-whooped his siren as they passed.

  To keep up their spirits as they drove through town, Hattie asked, “Isn’t this nice, just the three of us?” She smoothed her slacks over her knees.

  ClairBell rarely let an idle comment pass. Especially if the comment was of the Pollyanna variety she was compelled to prick it with pins. “Mother, can you believe that not one of your boys tried to horn in on our girl day? Will wonders never cease?” She palmed a pile of red hots into her mouth and gave them a satisfying crunch.

  Even to her own ears the laugh Doro intended to sound breezy sounded false, but she was determined to keep ClairBell’s invidious remarks from ruining the trip. “They wouldn’t enjoy themselves,” she said, signaling a turn at the two-lane that led west out of town. “We’d drive too slowly and we wouldn’t stop at their salvage yards and stock auctions.” She pulled the Skylark onto the road and accelerated.

  Hattie smiled. “Oh, I think Billy would enjoy himself. He’d have us listening to opera and…”

  Suddenly the air in the car changed. The aroma of cinnamon and high fructose corn syrup pervaded as ClairBell heaved a dramatic sigh. From the backseat could be heard a sharp flip-flip-flipping of a train case’s catch.

  Calculating that a put-down of their brother might be balm for ClairBell’s injured feelings and proud of herself for walking the tightrope between her mother and her sister, Doro continued, “… and singing along in his horrible foghorn voice!”

  Hattie tightened her lips, but she understood that Billy must be slandered as a sacrifice to the mood gods of ClairBell, who snorted and then rallied to sing in a lunatic Bugs Bunny voice, with reddened tongue and teeth, “Welcome to my shop, lemme cut your mop, lemme shave your top. Daint-i-leeee…” Doro joined her in burlesquing snatches of arias and soon the danger had passed.

  As they made their way along the next stretch of highway the women fell quiet, settling into their trip. The road ahead, shimmering with mirages, disappeared under the tires as though into a great thresher, and then spilling out behind them. For a time Hattie remained alert for landmarks, for changes in the prairie as they moved from county to county, the dirt growing redder, the trees growing sparser, buttes and mesas rising from the plains, but soon the rhythm of the tires lulled her, and she was unhitched from the present to range from past to future and back, adrift in time. Her thoughts went first, as they always did, to Billy, to her worries about his health, his finances, his difficult dealings with Abel, but like a jarred turntable before the needle hits a groove, her thoughts jerked and skipped and instead caught on her first boy, on the highway miles she’d once driven across the state to Springfield, Missouri, where Nick lay dying in an emergency room.

  This was during the awful decade when the world fell apart, the early 1970s. Abel had kept a city practice then, in addition to his duties in Amicus. He was drinking too much for her liking and he kept company with insurance men and divorce lawyers whose ethics she mistrusted. Some of them were philanderers. And in the middle of the upheaval of the so-called sexual revolution he had brought home a book called Ideal Marriage by a Dutchman named T. H. van de Velde who had odd ideas about marital relations. Some of these ideas were mild enough, and though she didn’t much care for them, at least they didn’t offend decency. But others, oh! She had thrown the terrible book in the trash.

  Everything in those years was about sex or drugs or civil unrest. The old order was shattered. The war in Vietnam had split the country. The children changed almost before her eyes. Her once-studious Doro had dropped out of college and hitchhiked to Denver to work in a hotel. Nick grew out his hair and beard and spent long days at Riverside Park, doing things that made him smell like skunk and scalp and unwashed clothes. Jesse quit college after two weeks to bunk up with his high school girlfriend. ClairBell had scraped through high school by the skin of her teeth. Gideon went off to KU but seemed to drink his room-and-board allowance in beer-can-sized installments. Only Billy, twelve and still a child, had not abandoned her. Her baby was too big to ride standing up in the front seat beside her as he had as a toddler, his arm protectively around her neck, but he still rode on the bench seat next to her, and he had no problem that couldn’t be solved by a stop at the Dairy Queen or a new Uncle Scrooge McDuck comic book.

  Nick had been the decade’s casualty. Hoping to prove himself, he concealed his condition and enlisted. Despite the blue lips and clubbed fingers that should have signaled heart defect to the military doctors, he had passed the Navy physical. Six months later, when his limitations became clear, he was medically discharged, but at boot camp he’d picked up a drug habit—uppers, downers, heroin—that would eventually kill him. Hattie and Abel had him in and out of Menninger’s. After a second stint at the clinic, Nick had gotten clean enough that despite a sore wisdom tooth he was able to go with a cousin on a cross-country motorcycle trip. On the way back from New York the tooth flared and Nick’s wrecked system allowed the infection to shoot to his brain.

  Abel had talked to the emergency room doctor and seemed to think Nick was stable, that there would be time to fly over to Missouri in a client’s Cessna the next morning, but Hattie knew the boy wouldn’t last the night. She knew. There was a price for a world out of balance and this was it. Vietnam hadn’t taken him, but drugs would. She pleaded with Abel to dr
ive over immediately but he wanted to wait, and so she made the six-hour trip alone. Of that drive she remembered little. She hadn’t listened to the radio. She hadn’t cried. She had barely prayed, she was so stunned, so angry. She’d made it in time to see Nick still breathing, to see the smoothing of his brow when she took his hand and spoke to him, to feel his fingers, though weakly, squeeze hers in return.

  Even after all this time, though she’d never spoken of the old anger and she mostly thought it behind her, it could sometimes overtake her. Now, as the highway passed under the Skylark’s tires, came the stark question she’d tried to outrun since she’d put Toodles to sleep: Was it possible that she’d done that to punish Abel?

  The car had come to a stop and her daughters were getting out. They’d reached the crossroads town of Sawyer, to which railroad siding Hattie’s father and his father before him had driven herds of cattle. They planned to eat lunch in a cafe Hattie remembered where the strawberry pie and fried chicken were good. She got out of the car and gathered her wits to look around, feeling dizzy and unreal in the white gravel lot and the wide blue sky.

  A rust-streaked grain elevator loomed whitely, beside it an open but deserted gas station no bigger than a shack. Doro remarked that they hadn’t passed another car for the last half hour. The only evidence of life festered by the roadside, a dead Great Plains skink at least a foot long, fat as an armadillo and buzzing with flies. All around them spread the red dirt prairie, the wind riffling the big and little bluestem, the blue grama grass. The town, or what was left of it, looked makeshift, impermanent, a ghost town, and the place that figured so beautifully in Hattie’s memory felt mean and shabby.

  To tide them over, Doro bought some PayDay candy bars from a machine, and as she handed them out, Hattie said, “I don’t know what I was thinking. Let’s just go home. The drive was trip enough.”

  Her daughters shared the patronizing look she hated for its pained patience. She well knew her reputation as a second-guesser, a ditherer, an eleventh-hour mind-changer. ClairBell crossed her arms. “You got us all the way out here to the backside of bum-fuzzle Egypt and we’re not leaving until we find the old place.”

  Doro consulted the map and they took off south toward the Oklahoma line, toward Medicine Lodge. The farmhouse was long gone—burned to the ground during the Dust Bowl years—but they hoped to find the land. The road rose and fell as the hills grew higher and more rugged and the valleys and washouts lower. Doro thought to say something about how the landscape made her think of Blood Meridian, but there was no one who would know what she meant. Miles they drove, turning down one road after another, white clouds swirling at the window glass as the car’s passage stirred gravel dust made of dolomite and gypsum, until suddenly there was Elm Creek Road and Hattie shouted, “This is it!”

  Doro yanked the car into a sharp right turn, and Hattie felt her pulse in her throat. Things looked familiar, the lay of land, the feel of sky, in the distance the bluff that rose beyond the ground where the house had stood, the bluff where once she’d been stalked by a mountain lion. Though it would ruin her new permanent she rolled down the window and stuck her head out like a dog’s. Grasshoppers spanged against the windshield and she ducked to avoid them but she wouldn’t put her head back inside. The road twisted through a gully past a campground where their Baptist church had held the revival where she’d first gone forward. From the gully the road led to the upland pasture where she’d once wandered, lonely as a cloud. A covey of quail flushed and a cock pheasant whirred up from the roadside. “Stop,” she cried.

  Doro pulled over and they got out. Now that they weren’t moving with the car the world seemed to slow down. The sky grew wider. A fragrant breeze soughed across the grass, and the ground as far as eye could see blazed with wildflowers. Mallow, dogbane, sensitive briar, coneflower, fringed salt cedar like bursts of feathery pink gauze, light as spun sugar—on and on they rolled to the horizon, where yet more blooming hills billowed like waves. Wild rose, thistle, larkspur, rue. Bluets and lupine, wild violet, deep purple locoweed and buckeye, tumble mustard, sumac and indigo, gingerbread root. Here on the empty prairie in May was the heaven of flowers, blooming for no one at all. “This,” Hattie said to the wind, “is just the way I remember it.”

  She and her daughters walked the pasture, marveling at the flowers. The world over, their poor dowdy state earned ridicule from those who had not learned where—or how—to look, for the vastness of the land and the haste with which most people crossed it served as a veil. Prairie natives, Hattie and her daughters knew they had to stop, turn off the car, walk out a ways, and wait until the wind found them. They knew that if still they failed to feel the beating of the great slow heart of earth beneath their feet, the fault was theirs.

  As they wandered they called out names of flowers and the others would come to inspect, to confirm or dispute. Doro deferred to ClairBell, accepting her names—goats beard for salsify, blister buttercup for crowfoot. This concession struck Hattie as out of the ordinary, for Doro was a shameless know-it-all, but she thought no more about it except to see that some kind of change seemed to have come over her daughters, that somehow they were easier in themselves. The three of them walked to the crest of a hill and stood, the warm wind buffeting them, quietly looking out over what had been the floor of a vast inland sea. At first Hattie thought a grasshopper had landed on her back, but as an arm slipped gently around her waist she realized the touch was ClairBell’s. It occurred to Hattie that the whole long day she had forgotten to judge her younger daughter, to compare her with her sister, and she wanted, suddenly, to cry.

  On the way home they stopped in Kingman for lunch. The girls kept asking her if she was all right—she seemed so subdued—but Hattie merely smiled, spooning her tomato soup. “Never better.” On the last stretch of highway, Doro and ClairBell chatted in the front seat, but Hattie, who had chosen the backseat in order to commune with her thoughts, tuned them out and soon slept. At some point, though Hattie didn’t hear, ClairBell whispered to Doro the truth about Billy’s phone call, and though Hattie didn’t see, Doro reached over to pat ClairBell’s hand, mouthing the words, “You did the right thing.”

  At home they found the dead cottonwood reduced to a neat wall of cordwood. Big Bill’s truck was gone. In the kitchen a tableau of rebuke had been arranged to make it look like starving men, perhaps on the brink of diabetic coma, had staggered through the kitchen and, finding little to sustain them, trudged on toward death. The loaf pan teetered precariously on a stove burner so the congealed grease formed an orange pool, two butter knives had been stuck in the meatloaf like crossed sabers, and a gash in the meatloaf’s center looked as if it had been excavated with a trowel. A potato had been savaged, a loaf of bread defiled, the Jell-O forked into. The cookie jar was empty.

  ClairBell and Doro rolled their eyes at the evidence of their father’s handiwork. “Neglected Husband Attacks Kitchen!” ClairBell said.

  Doro laughed. “Meatloaf Slain!”

  Arm in arm the sisters headed for the guest room.

  Hattie was glad it was so easy for them to cut up. All that work wasted, just to buy a day for herself. She set to cleaning the kitchen. Usually domestic tasks calmed her, but on this day she became more and more angry. After a day of beauty, of the rare and somehow unsettling gesture of affection from her usually difficult younger daughter, to come home to this! From Abel’s back bedroom den the television blared, the volume set at the threshold of pain. She had a good mind to march down the hall and for the first time in their long marriage give him what-for. For old wounds and new affronts. For every time he’d criticized her driving or her cooking or her reasoning. For the way he sometimes said her name as if speaking to a child. For the way he wouldn’t pray over meals. For his moods. Because he’d called a dog his sweetheart. For the way their children tied themselves in knots trying to please him. For not believing the best of Billy, who needed his love and who wanted to love him. For the loneliest drive on the
darkest day of her life. For time and loss and history and sorrow, mixed. She could hear him saying patronizingly, when confronted with her accusations, “You have to learn to pick your battles, Hattie,” but she would not. She would fight them all, and all at once.

  As she put away the ruin of the lunch she’d prepared, as well as—mysteriously—a crumpled bag from Walt’s Cheap Hamburgers, a nasty little joint Abel favored, and two Styrofoam coffee cups, she weighed the words she would say. She needed a speech his rhetorical wiles couldn’t turn against her, and at length she had composed a statement. “Abel,” she would say, “from now on our marriage will be a two-way street.” Then she would turn and walk away before he mustered an argument.

  Down the hall toward his den she went, second-guessing herself even as she neared his door, wondering if their union had always been a two-way street and maybe she’d just been trying all these years to drive in the wrong lane. She stopped at the open door and looked into the room. There, in his sheepskin-lined chair, he reclined, asleep and snoring, weary from his exertions with his brother and the chainsaw. The television’s light glared onto his smudged glasses. Beside him in the matching recliner, under the afghan she’d knitted, also asleep and snoring, his mouth open and a runnel of saliva glistening on his chin, lay Billy.

  Her breath caught and the sand went out of her. How had Billy found his way home? Had Abel gone to fetch him? Had there been a scene, a set-to? All she knew was that the two dozed in front of the same Discovery Channel show, peaceably inhabiting the same room while on the screen the ground around a volcano began to crack and roll.

  As she regarded them, ominous music swelled, the image on the television changed, and the flickering light went red. With a rumbling bass crescendo the volcano erupted, and Hattie surprised herself by letting out a puff of air, a sort of laugh, at so crude and yet so fitting a signal for the shift of ground she felt. On the screen, lava oozed, and in its fiery glow she saw that she’d set her husband as a stone, her life’s impediment, her obstacle, when maybe it was the other way around. She’d always thought she was the glue that held her cracked, imperfect family together, but—she couldn’t think of a word for the opposite of glue—maybe she was the obstacle between them, all of them, not just Abel and Billy but all of them, orchestrating, always orchestrating, trying to pose them like dolls in order to make a picture of a family that they weren’t and never would be.