Читать книгу White Nights in Split Town City - Annie DeWitt - Страница 12

6.

Otto called the next morning to say the Shetland was dead. Father set out across the road before sunup to help dispose of the body. Otto wanted to get the carcass in the ground before word made its way around the stable. “Found that pony lining its own stall when I opened the barn to put the feed out,” he said. “Its nose still warm from breath.”

When Father got home, Mother made him strip down and clean up outside under the spigot. They’d wrapped the Shetland’s body in feedbags and buried it in Otto’s south pasture, Father said. The old ceramic tub that had once served as a water trough marked the grave.

The image of the pony in the ground did not sit well with Mother. Lately, on nights when Father was sleepless and incapable of stepping away from the world, he slipped out the slider door onto the little deck that abutted their bedroom. Mother said she often awoke to Father’s absence. In those moments, a strange stillness gripped her. The air was too light for her lungs. She could see the image of her husband’s back on the porch in the blackness. Father took a pillow with him. The mornings after these nights, his voice was hoarse and scratchy.

“You sound faded,” Mother said one morning at breakfast.

Screaming, Father said, released a chemical in his body that allowed his mind to find the emptiness in the world. Mother had mentioned Father’s habit once, in passing, to Margaret and then regretted it.

“Dumping,” Margaret said. “It’s a psychological device like blowing up a bag and then popping it. The pressure deflates.”

Mother wasn’t sure what pressures existed in the country to be deflated.

“Don’t look so alarmed, dear,” Margaret promised. “To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.”

“Where’s that from?” Mother had said.

“Wilde,” Margaret said. “‘The Ideal Husband.’”

“What else,” Mother laughed.

As the summer wore on, animals of all kinds disappeared from the fields. Livestock were kept indoors to suffer the humidity away from the threat of airborne illness. During the daylight hours, the only forms dotting the landscape were the farmers in their flatbeds, the backs of their tires shooting up mud as they barreled around the fields to gather the bales of hay. The town grew quiet as people settled into an unspoken curfew. Even Ada took to wearing a straw hat over which she draped a piece of cheesecloth to protect her face from the bugs during those lulls in the game when she settled into sleep as Wilson fingered the checkers, mulling over his next move.

Callie was the only woman I saw disrobe that summer. Mornings Callie lay out on Otto’s front lawn in her bikini before the day reached noon. The curve of her thighs and the flat of her stomach shone with oil. I passed the afternoons awaiting the sound of the occasional wood-paneled station wagon rumbling over the gravel, come to park at the base of the trail for a hike or a picnic over the butte. Even the milkman dropped our road from his circuit. If Mother wanted eggs, she had to send word via a form the postman delivered to the dairy. From a bird’s-eye view, our town might’ve resembled Ada and Wilson’s checkerboard; those people that moved did so with a worn-out deliberation.

Mother regarded the road with suspicion. She and Father sat in bed at night leafing through the local paper. To Mother, even the front page stories read like fiction. They reminded her, she said, of Birdie’s first trip to the train station. We’d made the voyage to visit Granny Olga in the city. Mother had wanted to see her daughter baptized in the old church. In the elevator on the way to the platform, Birdie had pointed to a man standing next to her. “Mommy,” she’d said. “Why is that man’s skin brown?” The elevator had been packed. There was no way the man had not overheard it. He shifted his weight, tugging on the edge of his suit jacket. “Country folk,” I’d heard him say to his companion as they exited the elevator. “Haven’t seen a shadow of the world bigger than their own two feet.”

I spied on Mother in bed nights flipping to the last page of the paper to read the police blotter, looking for some texture of life that had survived the summer’s suffocation. One evening she came across a headline about The Long Walker. She read the report aloud to Father: “Young ‘ambassador cougar.’ Seen by Nebraska Sowbelly. 23 Merriam Road. 6:30 pm. Attacked no humans or horses. Droppings consistent with Native Black Hills predator. Residents advised to keep pets indoors.”

“The Long Walker,” Mother said.

“What’s that?” Father said, flicking the edge of his page so the paper collapsed in the middle, enough for him to see over it and into his wife’s face.

“Nothing,” Mother said. She paused for a moment looking at Father’s eyes over the rims of his glasses.

“Have you heard of the Black Hills?” she said, tracing his beard with the back of her wrist as he nestled his hand between her thighs.

“Sure,” Father said, “Some 2,000 miles west of here. Highest peaks east of the Rockies.”

“That’s quite a distance,” Mother said.

“I’m more interested in these black hills,” Father said, digging his hand deeper into Mother’s lap.

The next day Mother drove Birdie and I out to the butte overlooking the highway while Father was at work. She parked on the edge of the cliff. Below the steep drop, cars sped by. The air had an industrial tinge to it, which Mother seemed to find comforting. She pushed the driver’s seat into recline so that she could rest her feet out the open window and feel the breeze whenever a truck passed. As we listened to the sound of the trucks cresting the hill before the way station, Mother took out the old Atlas that she kept crammed in the glove compartment of the car for emergency. The Black Hills, she told Birdie and me while taking Birdie on her lap in the driver’s seat, were an isolated mountain range that traversed from South Dakota to Wyoming. The trek east had taken the young ambassador nearly a year. As I looked out the window at the highway below, I pictured the body of the cougar as it emerged into the floodlights of Nebraska Sowbelly’s chicken coop. Father often surrendered after work to nature documentaries on PBS. His favorites were about large birds of prey. Beyond the scenery, I wasn’t much taken with these nostalgic glimpses of the hunt. What impressed me more were the strange feats of travel animals engaged in primarily for breeding. Birds flew south to the equator, migrating long distances called flyways, signaled by the length of the day. Salmon swum headlong upstream. Animals possessed honing devices that sounded at disparate intervals. This was something to which I sensed Mother could relate.