Читать книгу An Indiana Christmas - Bryan Furuness - Страница 21

INDIANA WINTER

Susan Neville

IT’S THE DEAD OF WINTER. A LANDLOCKED state. Seven cars maneuver between frozen bean fields under gray skies. Seven men drive. Six women hold warm casseroles wrapped in towels.

Each car pushes its own small horn of light, scraping the road and frozen waves of soil until it blends with the others in the dim floodlights of one driveway.

The men and women leave their cars and go to the front door of a farmhouse. The women hug the casseroles. The men stand behind them. Their breath plumes as they wait.

Inside there is movement! Noise! Bright light! A party, hot spiced tea on the stove. Divinity! Take the casseroles in the kitchen, the hostess says, pile the coats on the bed.

The guests move into the large kitchen, into the brick-walled family room, around the wood stove, past the rack of shining guns. Some of the women stay in the kitchen and arrange dishes. The one old man stays with them. He stands at the kitchen counter with a toothed knife and homemade bread. His spotted hands make precise cuts. The rest of the men and some of the women move close to the basketball game on television.

The women talk about their children. Some of the men talk about money. A million dollars at retirement, a banker says, guaranteed. Honey, a woman yells to her husband, listen to this. Her husband has gone in the kitchen with the host to inspect a leaking pipe. The wealth we could have when we retire, she thinks. Honey, imagine, the security. There’s a roar around the flickering television. Damnit, Uwe, the host booms, coming back from the kitchen, you were wide open. If I had been that tall, he says, I’d own the damn state and throw in Kentucky.

We’re ready, the hostess calls. Come. Eat.

Glass casseroles, clouds of steam. Yams sweet in orange sauce. Almond cookies. Home-canned beans, red tomatoes, ham. Yeast breads, risen. Sugar pies. Cranberry ice in pink glasses. Paper plates stamped with holly. There is no wine. Taste. Shh. The host. Please, give us grace. The clatter of silver on glass. The flash of fire from knives, candle flames cradled in spoons. Your bread, Reverend, is delicious. Outside the house, the frost line is two feet deep. A rabbit run over by a car, its fur frozen. Inside the house, the air is as thick and warm and yellow as clotted cream. If only we lived here, the guests believe, we would never be unhappy.

She bought the skirt to wear tonight, but the waist button is already tight. She had no idea it would happen so fast. Under the table, her husband’s knee presses hers. Still their secret, the child curled like a spoon under the paper napkin. Conceived in the dead of winter, lucky child, the mother hopes. Less danger of miscarriage than those children begun in the season of dogwood and iris, red discing, herbicide and dust. Half the women here seem cloudy with never-born children. There was that spring when three of the women miscarried in April. At the end of nine months, one had said, she felt the child’s presence like a phantom limb.

Last spring it had happened to her too. The three months of growth, then the blood, then the waiting, then this new baby who would always feel like two. Later that spring there had been the fragile green of early corn, the good, kind faces of farmers in town, and no real connection between anything.

The candles carve out the slight hollows underneath her husband’s cheekbones, the cold glow of early silver in his hair. Husband, do you know how much I love you? Sometimes this world seems so temporary. The whole table laughs at something the host said. Her husband looks ecstatic. Life is wonderful, she knows he is thinking, marvelous. Husband, I’m frightened. Do you know how much I love you?

The Reverend’s hand is dry on the pink water glass. His lips are unsteady. He sees the exhilaration on the face of the young man beside him. The young man turns to him, out of politeness says, And for Christmas, Reverend, where will you be? The Reverend says he’s not sure yet and the young man looks for a second guiltily at his wife until the Reverend says he has several offers and the husband relaxes and touches his wife’s hand.

I hope, she says, this holiday won’t be difficult for you, and the Reverend says, Oh no, I’m going to try to keep busy. I read a lot, you know.

He starts to tell them about an Eskimo book he’s been reading, forgetting the vows he had made as a young man when old retired uncles would talk endlessly at family dinners about birds or former presidents, the vows that he could never bore young people like that. But the pleasure of conversation! Of hearing himself tell someone about the things he’s filled his mind with—ice houses and frozen seals and lamps of fat and hot tea. Though it seems to come out odd. For a moment he feels dizzy, like that kayak sickness when the sky and water are such a blinding blue and white that you can’t tell up from down.

The host’s face and neck are as red as sunburn. He shouts across two women. The game should have started. A father with a son on the team looks up nervously from his plate, a cookie in his hand. You think so? He’s been aware of every minute. Yes, it’s time. The host reaches for a radio on the table behind him. His wife looks at him, and he doesn’t turn it on.

The basketball player’s father thinks of the drive back through the country to town. Hundreds of gravestones along the highway leading to the fieldhouse. On Saturday nights, when the traffic gets heavy, the gravestones snap with sharp, reflected light, like rows of cameras aimed right for his son.

The fieldhouse is a sea of green sweatshirts by now. Teenagers cruise the perimeter in two concentric circles, their eyes headlights. Scoreboards flashing, steamed eyeglasses, candy wrappers, old men and babies. Everyone in town is there, and his son! The father looks up to see if anyone’s looking at him. He takes another cookie. My God, his son. Legs like a racehorse, just as fast. Only a sophomore, but already some people know. The old Reverend knows, the way he clasps the boy’s hand on the Sundays they bring him out of retirement to preach, the way he leans forward in his thin tie and white shirt, his hands on his knees, focusing always on his son as intently as he, the father, focuses. Everyone in town is unemployed or just holding on, waiting for something. And it’s his son. Never misses a free throw. Hits from halfway down the court. But still inconsistent, young. Not everyone knows what he’ll be: best point guard in the state, in the country. Records that will stand. He has a gift. Everyone is waiting for something, and it’s his son they’re waiting for.

He holds his own small hand a few inches above the table, looks at the top, then the palm. Where did he come from, his son? A game tonight, and he let his wife talk him into missing it for this party. Already he’s regretting that he’s come. This party, she said, I look forward all year. A game tonight.

The host jumps up, says, To the best cooks in the county. A toast with this piece of fudge. He picks up the radio and heads for the family room. One by one the men follow, scraping chairs, joking. The old Reverend and the young husband stay behind, helping the women clear dishes. The cold presses against the bay window by the table, comes down the chimney in the living room by the tree.

Start another fire, the hostess says.

There is the sound of basketball from the family room, the odor of wood burning in the stove and the fireplace, of smoke from the snuffed-out candles. The women’s faces are glowing from the warmth, stomachs round as bubbles.

When the old man runs out of things he can see to do and stands with his hands at his sides, the women send him into the family room and begin comparing childbirth stories. They all know each other’s stories but pretend, for the pleasure of telling them again. Labor started in the car, in the bathroom, in bed, at work, in the grocery. Tipped uterus, dilated cervix, placenta praevia, I was so scared. Four children, says one woman, they were all a breeze; I could do it every day. Twenty hours of labor, says another, I almost died. Forty-eight hours for me, says another.

The young husband helping with the dishes goes into the living room to stand by the fire.

I knew right away when I was pregnant, one woman says, my breasts so sore I couldn’t sleep on them. With Todd, another says, I was on the pill for two months and didn’t know; when I found out, I worried the whole time.

They outdo one another with horror stories, secondhand, and casually told. A child born without ears, stillborn children wrapped in magazines at the foot of a teenager’s bed. A two-pound baby born too early who fits in the palm of her mother’s hand.

Slowly they bring up their own worries. A child who doesn’t crawl. A boy who cries at night. A baby who hasn’t yet turned over—Mine didn’t turn until he was ever so old, the hostess says, and now he’s gifted. One woman’s daughter with leukemia, in remission, her lips so dry in the hospital the mother rubbed them with the strawberry lip gloss she sells door to door, a beautiful child. They’ll be well, the women reassure one another, they all will be well. Remember the way a baby’s soft hair feels on your cheek, the way you hate to give up nursing.

The woman in the wool skirt wants to tell but is afraid to bring bad luck. Some days, she thinks, it feels like a festival, and some days I’m so frightened. The hostess takes powdered cream from a shelf and pours it into a small pitcher with a silver spoon. She turns to the woman in the wool skirt who has nothing to add to the conversation. Now which grade is it you teach again? The woman in the wool skirt answers, smiles, goes into the living room to find her husband.

The husband and wife stand in the living room by the tree. How do you feel? he asks her. She smiles and looks into the tree: planets and stars brought inside against the winter. She lets her eyes lose focus and leans into her husband, galaxies of light multiplied and spinning, filling the room, her husband’s body the only stable, unchanging thing in a universe too large, the tiny child the size of her thumb. A log cracks and falls through the fireplace grate, an explosion of orange sparks. He puts his arm around her waist. I never realized it, she says, for so long, how people have had the courage to have children.

The temperature drops below zero. The wind blows dark branches of evergreens outside the windows. The women see the branches and move into the family room. The husband and wife hear the wind and move into the family room. The men are laughing at something they can’t explain.

The old Reverend sits uncomfortably in the best overstuffed chair. When he sees the couple come in from the living room, he offers it to the woman and moves to a stiff, wooden one.

Please, he thinks. Listen to me. For months my house has been darker than I remember it ever being, the outside gray seeping in and nothing I do will keep it out. The northern winters that last six months, a warm light from seal fat shining through ice and one family living by itself until the air gets close and then running miles through the black cold to another place just like it, all ice and dark, and a new house in hours, the universe shrunk to a bright warm dot. If my house could feel as warm as that, as warm as this place, please listen.

The host opens the wood-burning stove. The room seems smaller. Maybe it will snow, someone says. Not a chance, says the basketball player’s father. It only snows in March during basketball play-offs. Right now it’s the middle of the gray season, not a chance for snow.

The hostess passes pecans in the shell. The host picks up a book from the coffee table. He shows it to the woman in the wool skirt. The inscription reads “to my friend.” It was signed by the author. The cover is bright yellow with orange. We were in Vietnam together, the host says. He shot himself after the book was published. The host says this with bravado, his knees spread wide.

Pecan shells cracking dust in the air. Black windows sweating. We got lost coming here, the woman says to him, ended up by the grain elevators.

They are the host’s elevators, round white silos. In the fall farmers bring him their crops. In the spring he sells them poisons.

The woman remembers high school, another party. She didn’t know anyone there. She’d gone with a boy she wasn’t supposed to even talk to. Most of the boys she knew were college-bound and not worried. This was one of the expendable ones. There was nothing he wanted to do with his life, no job worth waiting for, probably no job at all.

She can’t remember how she got there, whose car they went in. It was a frame working-class house close to other houses just like it. They all had porches. There were no adults, or rather, no authority. Someone’s older brother was there.

There were a lot of people in the living room. She remembers orange-flowered upholstery, a windowsill covered with chips of putty and paint, the shells of bugs. She doesn’t remember faces. The older brother had short hair. He was home on some sort of leave. He laughed hard, his arm crooked around the neck of a short, long-haired girl. It was like he was choking her.

He got out a white screen and set it up against a wall. He had a case of slides. The projector was old and the slides kept sticking. It bothered him when one of the slides was in backward, though no one else could tell. She thinks she remembers him laughing as he showed them but doesn’t trust that memory. She turned away from the screen.

And what does that have to do with this room, earthy nut taste, lingering cinnamon and cranberry, hot coffee, her child. The host and that boy pulled out of the county, her future husband sitting safe in an accounting class. Just from watching the news, she says now to the host, even to me, there’s something terrifying about helicopters.

We’re living in dark times, the host says, and she nods.

Dark times, the host says, and the men agree. Smoke from pipes and one or two cigarettes. The largest all-brick factory in the world, now a quiet old fossil in the center of town. Windows are broken out and covered with paper. Acres of empty parking lots full of trash. There are For Sale signs in every neighborhood, many of them foreclosures. Last fall a stomping death out by the county high school. Of course the banks are holding on, one or two of the furniture stores. Churches are still open, the children at school dreaming about the future. The hostess passes ribbon candy.

She goes to an exercise class twice a week in the basement under the B&G Gym. The class is downtown, near the courthouse, and most of the stores around it are empty, the windows blank. The basement is unfinished: block walls, bare bulb lights, a slanting, cracked concrete floor with rusted drains, years of dust and cobwebs, exposed pipes and supporting beams holding up the gym floor. The children paly to the side, by the furnace, on a tumbling mat. It’s a dreary place to be but the new, light-filled gym behind the Baptist church, where prayer concerns precede each session and a head of Christ fills one whole wall in a paint-by-numbers style, has no provision for children and meets at an inconvenient time.

The instructor brings a small tape player with tapes of rock music and routines she drives to Indianapolis every other month to learn and they all jump and dance and breathe while overhead men drop hundred-pound weights on an old plank floor and the women imitate their clumsy instructor and watch their children play and pray for grace.

In town, the fieldhouse is packed. The crowd roars as the boys run through the tunnel and onto the floor. The radio announcers interview the mascot, a Roman soldier. An Indian from the visiting school runs around the outside of the court with a tomahawk and the home crowd boos. The soldier walks across the floor on his hands.

The Reverend stares at the radio, trying to picture that tall, confident boy. Sitting on the bench probably while the others start to practice, his head between his hands, praying most likely. Some coaches would mind, but this is a town where the prayer at last year’s graduation turned into a revival, with the seniors who thought they were saved raising their hands and shouting.

The Reverend has known that boy since he was born. They were neighbors. He and his wife would sit out on the porch and watch him play. He can remember the boy during that cute toddler stage, when he’d come over to their porch tangling his fingers together and holding his fists up to him as a gift; this is a flower, he’d say, and then untangle them and twist them back together as a star or a bird that only he could see. This is a church, the Reverend would say, showing the boy his own hands and conventional patterns, and this the steeple.

He was like their child. Sometimes he envied the boy’s parents but would never say that to his wife. They had both accepted their inability to have children and had not looked back. But it amazed him now when he thinks about it how much of their time they spent watching this boy, how much of their time they spent talking about him. His wife worried when she heard that metallic ringing of the basketball on the concrete driveway in all kinds of weather, the boy unable to let himself come in until he made a hundred shots in a row, starting over if he missed one, even in cold rain.

Last year during the closest thing Methodists ever had to a revival, on the fifth night of services when the minister had asked for the fifth time for people to come forward in rededication and everyone but two or three old women who had sat still all their lives and were tired of it stayed, as usual, politely in their seats, the boy had come forward and taken the pulpit, quietly, quietly, and with dignity, chastising the congregating for their lack of fervor.

And first his parents had come forward, his mother crying and his father large and uncomfortable kneeling at the altar, and then the teenagers and then the others around the parents’ age, the ones here tonight, and then most of the rest, only a small ring of the ever-polite left sitting on the oak benches at the perimeter.

Dark times, the host says, and the men and one or two women talk about nuclear war. Within the next decade, the host says, and some of the men agree. There’s no way it won’t happen. These are end times, a teacher says, and he begins enumerating the seven horsemen, forgetting four. The host, excited, remembers one—famine. It’s like the seven dwarves, the teacher says, any group can only usually remember part of them, and I’m sure there are more. But I think there may only be four, a woman says. How many, Reverend? she asks. There are four horsemen of the apocalypse, he says; but I can’t believe it has much to do with this.

At any rate, the host says, you have to believe it’s true, within the decade. A banker agrees. The economy is falling apart, he says, you know this year the bank didn’t hold its Christmas party. And it’s happening everywhere. That always comes before war. We can’t live with this tension anymore, sooner or later one of us, maybe even it will be us, will decide to hell with it and start the whole thing going.

It could happen by accident, one of the women says.

And probably will, says the host.

Maybe we’ll be safe out here, the hostess says.

An accountant who had just read an article in a magazine shakes his head. One of the newer missiles hits Indianapolis, Chicago, or Dayton, and we’ve all had it.

Why would anyone aim at those cities, a woman asks; they’re not New York or Washington.

The Russians will want to save the Rockettes, the banker says—and anyway, who had ever heard of Nagasaki?

Summer, gray-green jets from Wright Patterson practice maneuvers over the farmhouse while the hostess hangs out laundry. They fly so fast she would miss them if it weren’t for the sound. Her youngest boy hides under a red maple. When the planes fly back into the morning sun they turn white and fragile as tiny, brittle bones.

She excuses herself and goes into the kitchen for more coffee. When she comes back to the party she sits on the other side of the room where a few of the women are huddled around a table.

According to this article, the accountant says, you can make a quick shelter against the foundation of your house, kind of like a deep window well—that is, if you have an hour or so warning, and if you’re far enough away that all you have to worry about is fallout. Sounds like a grave, says a banker. You can survive fallout, the husband of the woman in the wool skirt says. At least for a day or two, says the host.

He’s already got twenty-eight points, the father says to the room, and the game’s only half over.

I’ve got my wife drying vegetables, the host says, and we’ve got ammunition for all those guns. You’d let all of us in, wouldn’t you, says the banker with a cane. If we had enough, the host says, looking uncomfortable. We have a lot of friends.

The school record is forty-eight, and he’s only a sophomore, says the father.

The host shifts position in his chair and looks at the banker. Of course we’d let you in, he says.

The other banker says he put an electric fence around his place last summer. He cracks a pecan into his handkerchief. The shock waves from one missile in a strategic place, says the accountant, will knock out all the electricity, all the computers, all the cars, everything.

The world’s going up in flames, says the host, there aren’t any leaders anymore that aren’t idiots. Look at our last mayoral election, the teacher says—well-meaning alcoholics and bag ladies and a couple of addicts, the biggest qualification for the job that they’re unemployed and have plenty of time to devote to it. Anyone with something to do, a business or family, wouldn’t want the job, the banker with the fence says. Not much hope in it.

It’s funny, the husband says, looking away from the radio. The day of the big train wreck in Dunreith the plaster cracked in every room in our house, the sky was red from the fire. I woke up and for a minute I was terrified, sure that the Russians had finally dropped the bomb on us. I never stopped to ask why they would choose a town of ten or twelve families and three antique stores as a target. I was sure, the fear so deep in me. At any time, depending on your mood, the most likely two targets seem to be exactly where you are or exactly where you aren’t.

If I’m really quiet, his wife thinks, maybe I can feel him move. She stretches her legs out, listens to the logs in the fire and the pleasant crackling of the radio, glad the Reverend gave her the chair in the middle of the men where she can just listen to the drone of their voices, not feeling like she needs to join in the conversation the way she would if she were with the women. She can sit there feeling secret and warm, as though she’s the only one this has ever happened to. It will be a boy. She’s sure of that already. She and her husband and the boy will come together so tightly they will never need anyone else, never be afraid of anything, never lonely. They will live forever.

One of the women brings a plate of Christmas cookies into the family room and puts it on the coffee table. The host notices the gold lights above the mantel aren’t plugged in, and he turns them on. The accountant eats a green-sugared bell, a banker a silver wreath with cinnamon hearts. Dark times, the men agree. They’re silent and then turn uncomfortably to the women. The teacher clears his throat, says, Well anyway, tell us about the new retirement accounts, and the bankers produce calculators and sheets of the paper to prove how if you start now you really could be a millionaire when you retire.

The accountant and the host go into the basement to inspect some new wiring. The ball player’s father eats a piece of vanilla fudge. The skin above his sweater is purple. A quiet repairman talks about the deck he’s building on the back of his house, the banker with a fence asks him about a leak in his hot water heater.

The room is cold, the light dimming. They all notice the Reverend, poor thing, sitting with his eyes milky, missing his wife.

The basketball player’s mother leans forward in her chair, catching the eye of her husband. My God! he shouts and jumps up from his chair. Forty-four points. What’s the record? a woman asks. I think it’s forty-eight, says the repairman. A nervous excitement bubbles up like tree lights. The accountant and the host come back up from the basement. The banker stops talking about his hot water heater. The women get up from the table and squeeze onto sofas next to their husbands. Three of four men and women sit on the floor. They all face the radio, their backs to the windows.

Who set the record?

Scott Lewis in ’68. Maybe Troy Schweikart in ’57.

It was Scott, says the Reverend, in ’67.

How could I let her talk me out of being there? thinks the father. He stands up and paces.

Thousands of people are crowded into the fieldhouse, others around radios, late on one of the darkest nights of the year. And his son, her son, takes the ball down the floor and from twenty feet outside right through the net without hitting the rim, their son, so quiet when I carried him, where did he come from? The arc of the basketball beginning at a point deep in all of their chests, this boy they know, who is part of them, the arc ending, how could it be otherwise, in the sweet center of the basket, a record set years ago by a boy two years older and, with a foul shot, on this night quietly broken.

The host takes a deep breath of pine from the roping on the mantel. The heat from the crowded room. Dark times, he repeats without thinking, everyone excited, including the host, congratulating the father, who is hugging his wife and hugging the other wives and his friends, a great party. The host slaps one of the bankers on the back. End times.

The woman in the wool skirt touches her husband’s hand. Life is wonderful, he thinks, marvelous. Are you ready? she asks. Yes, it’s late.

A crowding in the kitchen. Was that your casserole? It was delicious. Don’t forget the spoon. Smooth satin lining on coats, voices like bells. The old man with his hands in his pockets hesitates at the door.

Four older model cars and three new ones head into the black night. For a while the house lights blaze. Then the host and hostess turn off the outside lights and turn and lock the door. And the fields, the trees, the faces in the cars, fade into the winter night.