Читать книгу Twister - Genanne Walsh - Страница 10

On the morning of the storm Perry woke at 4:00 a.m. as if to the click of a light. He made a fist and rubbed at a sore spot on his knuckle, and then swung his feet down to the rag rug. Nina rolled over in sleep. It was a morning like any other: the cold splash of water on his face and the first heavy yellow piss of the day. Then into jeans and a t-shirt. His shoulder brushed the plaster wall on the stairwell and steps creaked underfoot. He wasn’t the first one up—that honor went to the Old Man, Perry’s father, a rattling cough downstairs in the back of the house.

In the kitchen, Perry ate rolled oats with raisins and milk, his spoon scraping the bowl for the dried fruit and his jaw aching a bit from chewing. The radio gave off a soft crackle—“Unseasonable cold front moving down from Canada…” according to Ted Waite, the announcer. There was an advertisement for a cell phone service, a news blip on the faraway war. The numbers of the dead. The number of raisins in his bowl. “Squalls possible tomorrow but it’s looking clear today, folks,” Ted Waite said, friendly as ever. “Keep on your toes, keep on truckin’…”

“Storm’s coming,” the Old Man said, shuffling into the kitchen.

“The radio says tomorrow,” Perry countered.

His father muttered something, picked up his “#1 Grandpa” coffee cup, filled it with black, and stood at the counter to prepare his usual bowl of instant oatmeal. The cane was slung over his forearm—the Old Man used it more and more these days. He was supposed to let Perry take on more decision-making power, a natural generational progression, but his father was ornery, still trying to run what he could no longer work. He’d recorded every crop they had planted and harvested since 1957. Read like the Bible, consulted like an oracle: ledgers stacked on his bedside table and pulled out whenever Perry talked about trying something new. Not everything new is radical, not everything radical is new, Nina had whispered across the pillow last night.

The Old Man sat, spooned oatmeal into his mouth, and coughed. Tiny bits of oats dotted the table between them. Without Nina’s presence, the less they said to each other the better. Perry pushed his chair away from the table and put the cereal bowl in the sink. He went to the parlor and pulled the old Webster’s dictionary from the shelf. After Rose’s last rebuff, he had pressed his copy of the unsigned lease between the pages—in the “P” section, “Predispose” to “Pregnant.” He put the folded contract into his pocket and walked back to the kitchen to pour a glass of juice for his father. Then he went to the mudroom for his boots and headed down to the barn, tongue working a shred of raisin still stuck between his molars.

A crow swooped overhead with a baby gopher dangling from its beak. The bird perched on the eave of the barn, holding the motionless body as if waiting for applause. Then it set the rodent down and the thing scurried into action, running west along the roof in a mad dash. The bird shook its feathers leisurely, spread its wings and cawed, and then launched into the air, plucking the gopher up again. There it is, Perry thought, in a nutshell.

The raisin was stubborn between Perry’s teeth, and he pressed it with his tongue as he rode out to the east fields to clear rocks. He had been paying particular attention to Rose’s adjacent acreage ever since the day three months before when Nina told him, her voice crackly: “Jim Culp drove out to see Rose and Sill followed him out there and made him tell her too. Lance is dead. My God, Perry, the boy is killed. What’s Rose going to do?”

It was natural for the Browns to acquire Rose’s land now. It would be practically negligent not to. Grow or die, was one of the Old Man’s pearls of wisdom, imparted, in the old days, with a rare grin. Perry wanted Rose’s land but the want came from his head, not his gut. That’s where he and the Old Man differed. That, Nina said, was Perry’s strength.

The corn was growing well. He passed it by, moving on to the untilled acres, and then cut the tractor engine and stepped down. There was no sign of life from Rose’s place. Perry stuck his index finger in his mouth, pulled out the raisin shred with a fingernail, and flicked it away. His mouth tasted metallic. They’d gone to Lance’s funeral: a folded flag, buttons on a uniform, a crisp salute. What was there in those things for a mind to latch onto? The whole town had turned out to pay respects, except for Rose herself. They’d tried to visit her afterward but she wouldn’t speak to them. Was busy, she said. Pruning.

The Brown land that abutted Rose’s was untilled, an old pasture that hadn’t yet been made into something new. Perry had been slowly clearing rocks and brambles from a portion of it, without machines. He’d come to look forward to the time, just an hour or two most mornings, spent rolling and lifting rocks, digging up stubborn roots, watching the rich soil revealed bit by bit. He was creating a dividing line of sorts between the acre he wanted to reclaim for pasture and the rocky piece that he’d leave be. Nina had scolded him for not wearing gloves—he’d dinged his hands more than once. He always felt best when he climbed off the tractor and worked the land directly. Now he surveyed his progress and bent to hoist a mid-size stone, clenching the muscles in his legs and back. He crab-walked with it to the edge of the pasture and settled it into line.

Perry didn’t fool himself that gaining a hold over Rose’s land would bring him peace. What it would bring was authority, a wedge in his father’s grip on things. He had a plan. Rose would lease him her place at a fair price. At the dinner table, he would hold up the contract and say, “It’s ours now. I have ideas—” and the Old Man would set down his fork, acknowledging the inevitable handover of power. Sweat soaked the back of Perry’s shirt. His segmented dividing line grew rock by rock, and as he worked, he kept Rose’s property in his peripheral vision. The air was soft. A tickle of extra humidity caressed his skin—so much for the promised cold front. If the Old Man was right about the weather, he’d be sure to remind Perry of it over dinner. And Perry would sit there and feel the tilt of their elevated house and the weight of the unclaimed land.

The folded contract felt stiff in his pocket, and his knuckle was bleeding a bit. Perry paused to rest, dragging the back of his hand down the leg of his jeans, and then without thinking too hard about it he hoisted himself to his feet. His pasture gave way to hers, and soon enough he walked through the thicket that led to her front yard.

She stood on the porch as if expecting him, holding a casserole dish in one hand. Tinfoil dangled from one corner, juices dribbled out the side and spattered to the ground. There was a smell of rot. Lance’s dog, Fergus, growled a few times then wagged his tail. Perry cleared his throat but she didn’t look up, just tossed the dish onto some sort of compost heap.

“Rose, how are you?” She didn’t acknowledge him. “Rose?” Her hair hadn’t just gone white, it had changed texture; tendrils strayed up to the sky.

“I just thought I’d…Are you okay?” Her shoulders curved inward. She grabbed a pair of pruning shears from the porch step and walked to her overgrown plants. He swung his arms out in a fake relaxed semicircle, sore knuckle landing in his opposite palm, some part of him still thinking this might go well. “Rose—” he started. “Rose, will you please just think about my offer? Me leasing from you is the best thing for both of us.”

She ran her thumb along the handle of the pruning shears and fixed her eyes behind him, on the hayloft. Your place was a refuge for me once, he thought. But maybe you never knew it. “Have you thought about what I said last month? I want to make it easier on you, Rose. It’ll help you, it’ll help me. Please.” He reached toward his pocket.

“How is your father?” she asked, eyes sliding past his. She couldn’t stand the Old Man. Rose without family, standing among the brambles with long shears, looking for all the world like someone who shouldn’t hold sharp objects. She’ll turn them on me, ran through his mind before the other: She’ll turn them on herself.

“He’s fine, Rose. He’s just slowing down…” Perry pulled out the lease. “I brought this for you just to read over…just to think about.” He paused. “With Lance—” Her eyes went sharp, her mouth twisted. She came at him, hair flying, a great rushing of air and the paper was gone. It took everything he had not to fall back. The dog was at her side, his eyes yellow, tail pointing upward. Hairs rose on the back of Perry’s neck. He looked over his shoulder and took a deep breath. “Keep it up, Rose, and the bank will take this place.”

Her face crumpled, and her fingers twisted the fabric of her skirt. He felt like a kid seeing an adult, the person supposedly in charge, collapsed. Something splashed in the well. How had it come to this? Rose batty, older than her years, and him clutching papers in a grabby fist. Both of them not their true selves. Or perhaps these were the selves they’d been working toward. Fergus scratched his ear roughly and whimpered in a kind of sensual relief.

“I’m sorry. I’m not trying to…” Perry stuttered. “I only want…” Even as he spoke he backed toward the property line. She seemed to have already forgotten him. The screen door screeched shut. “Rose,” Perry begged, too quiet for her to hear. His breath came fast as he retraced his steps. He passed the clearing project and his work seemed negligible, a new line of rocks dividing nothing from nothing. The tractor hunkered where he’d left it on the edge of a row of corn, and he climbed up. He had a couple of hours until lunch and work would calm him. Yet he sat for a while, unmoving, his mind empty of everything—want, fear, care, love. The bloody spot on his knuckle dried to form a thin protective crust.

Then he turned to the county road, hearing it before he saw it: Rose’s blue beater of a truck sputtered toward town.

Every day at noon the Old Man pinpointed Perry’s location and drove out to deliver lunch and tell him how he should be doing things, tossing the paper lunch sack up to Perry’s waiting hands. Today the bag held a ham sandwich and an apple, as it always did. Nina liked consistency. Perry started with the fruit, chewing while the Old Man surveyed the fields.

As his father held forth on how the corn was doing, Perry scanned the horizon. The apple skin was tough. “Nina home?”

The Old Man shrugged. “She let Sill beg off school again today. The kid’s taking advantage.”

“She’s grieving.” His daughter wasn’t ready to let the boy go.

The Old Man bent to inspect the roots of a corn plant. Then he straightened and raised his palm to the air. “The weather is worse. I told you there’s a storm coming. You can’t plan to be out much longer.”

“I heard you,” Perry said.

“The warnings are on the news.”

“I know.” Perry didn’t know, and how would he? The radio on his tractor was silent. But this was often the stance that he took with the Old Man—agreeing without agreement, a way to tamp down the barrage.

“Don’t waste time dithering. If you want to keep working, there’s plenty up closer to the house you can do.”

Perry moved on to the sandwich. The Old Man hadn’t seen him coming from the direction of Rose’s place. A few years ago his father had coveted Rose’s land and tried to buy it, but he’d since done an about-face. Perry looked toward home. A swatch of pink moved through the green below the house at a quick clip. As the figure reached the clearing at the bottom of the hill he could see that it was Nina, carrying a bag and wearing a blue kerchief on her head. She took the slope in long strides, rounding toward the back door and moving out of view.

The Old Man was still talking about fertilizer. Perry had barely tasted his sandwich. He considered the piece of crust in his hand, and swallowed. He could bring up his plans again—it had become a monthly ritual. When do I get to try my ideas? When will you let me take a shot? But he didn’t trust his voice. Perry watched the corn grow and tuned out whatever his father was saying. He folded the empty lunch bag and slid it into his back pocket as the Old Man stalked to his truck.

Perry worked until mid-afternoon and then cut the engine, wiping his forehead and glancing toward the house. He wasn’t ready to face them yet. If the light seemed muted, it matched his thoughts. He was near the untilled land again—not something he’d planned, but as he leapt to the ground the earth met his feet, solid and reassuring. He took a few steps and kicked a small rock to reveal the hard-packed, thirsty soil underneath. Then he crossed over to the fallow patch and found his stone, knelt, and rolled it aside. Perry stretched his body across the ground and whispered into the hole: I will hold the land any way I can.

When Perry was a boy, his father told him that to get rid of bad dreams and sadness you whisper them into a hole in the ground. This was advice about his newly-dead mother after the Old Man grew tired of being waked by Perry’s sobs. Perry had come to this spot and dug a hole, whispering his mother into it as she had become, unrecognizable as the illness progressed—sharp cheekbones and undereye bruises that moved further and further down her face—then whispered in all the things he’d loved about her too. He’d covered the hole with a sizable stone. His father had meant the advice as comfort to a grieving child, but Perry never outgrew the habit. Whenever the Old Man cussed about these rocky acres, in his head Perry saw just one stone, his stone: rough and flat and unremarkable. This piece of land he’d never clear.

A chill came over him. He pressed harder into the dirt and whispered: Forgive me. And: I should’ve done more for Lance. And: Time to shake it up or give up once and for all. If the Old Man—or Nina, or anyone else for that matter—saw him lying here they’d assume he’d gone the way of Theo, or just lost his marbles.

One final whispered vow: I won’t repeat the Old Man’s mistakes. I might make new ones, but they’ll be mine. Then he hoisted himself off his belly, rolled the stone into place, and smacked the dust off his shirt and jeans. He pushed his chest forward, loosening his shoulders, and wiped a sleeve across his mouth. It smelled dry and clean as bones. He bounced on his toes to get his blood moving again and turned toward home.

By the time he pulled up near the barn the air prickled. The house at the top of the hill looked angular and exposed—it was time to repaint again. He rounded the barn, unlatching the doors to swing them wide. No barn cats to be seen. Perry picked up a can of oil and went back out to the tractor. The Old Man must have been watching for him—he humped down the hill, moving fast.

Perry took a breath, still smelling the untilled dirt. “Nina inside?”

The Old Man affirmed that she was, his eyes rheumy. Perry thought of Lance’s dog, Fergus, sitting at Rose’s side, thumping his tail and waiting for him to make a move.

He cleared his throat. “We need to talk about my ideas…” The Old Man tightened his fist on the cane. Perry’s fingers crept up to fiddle with the button on his empty shirt pocket. He made himself drop his hand before he spoke again. “You know what I mean. I’ve proved myself. I want to try hogs.”

“Hogs! They’ll break your back.”

“They didn’t break your father’s.” Leaves rustled. Perry felt a caress of wind at his neck, egging him on.

The Old Man picked up a fistful of dirt and sniffed it. “Pigs are too much, whatever they’re worth. You’ve got to worry about vet bills, parasites, blocked birth canals. You don’t want it.”

“I want to turn Rose’s southern acres and some of our fallow piece into pastures. We need to face facts, we’ll never get enough land to beat the suits, they’ll always win at that game. But if we can focus…people will pay good money for organic—”

“Where’s Rose gonna go, if you buy her out?”

Not the question Perry expected. He shrugged. “Stella’s. She’s got that big place in town now. The farm is too much for Rose.”

“Stella!” The Old Man winced. “Rose would peel off her own skin before going there.”

“What do you care?” What did he care? The Old Man kept talking, pissing on Perry’s ideas. Perry braced instinctively for a backhand: a blow that could’ve come any time from the year Perry was old enough to stand for a beating to the year he graduated high school. His heel ground into the dirt. “I’ve earned this. I’ve put in my time.”

The Old Man let go the fistful of soil and swiped his palm against his blue pants. “You want it so bad, take over. See if I stop you.” A long powdery stain on the Old Man’s right thigh was all that was left of his handful. Perry turned to the barn. The cracked voice pulled him back again: “Put the tractor in the shed.”

“I’ll do it after supper.”

“Don’t be a fool, boy. The storm is coming.” The Old Man reached out and clamped his shoulder. “Look at the goddamn sky.”

It was purplish green overhead, almost camouflage. Wind bent the border of trees along the side of the house. Perry shook his head, making room for the lowering clouds.

“I’ll tell her to get the house ready.” His father swung round, hobbling up the Brown hill.

Perry jogged toward the tractor, toes pressing uncomfortably against hard leather. Then he stopped. “Where’s Sill?” he yelled.

The Old Man yelled back, “…find her.”

Perry angled the tractor neatly into the shed, lashed down the tools, left the doors and windows swinging wide so the wind could find an exit, and then went to check on the barn. The barn cats’ silence was nudged out by the rising wind, blowing the sky along darkly. His father hadn’t even paused to gloat. Clouds careened past the door. “Twister season,” the radioman had warned, vowels shortened and run together in that put-on drawl.

He circled the barn’s exterior, scanning for things he’d missed. Hooves galloped along the edges of the sky. An image of the hole flashed before him: his stone flipped and split, the rent in the earth matched by the gash of a funnel cloud, his secrets sucked up and scattered. He trotted up the hill and around to the back of the house, arms swinging at his sides as he ran over the emergency list in his head: blankets, batteries, first aid kit, canned food, water, flashlights, radio. Nina had taken the wash off the line and picked up any garden tools. The windows were open, yellow checked curtains blowing into his father’s bedroom.

She was in the kitchen with the Old Man, fiddling with the radio. “Tornado advisory in the following counties…” Nina looked up when Perry entered and said, “It’s bad,” just as the Old Man barked, “It’s coming near, all right,” with a strange tone in his voice, almost satisfaction.

“Where’s Sill?” His daughter’s nickname sounded hollow. He’d been negligent. It was time to tell Sill about the stone, about laying her grief to rest. She needed to know, he needed to help her.

“She probably took shelter with Rose,” Nina said, reassuring herself. “She’s been spending a lot of time over there.”

“Of course she’s at Rose’s,” the Old Man spat.

His father went down the hall and Nina stepped closer. “Rose said, No, and so did the Old Man,” Perry told her.

She flicked her braid back and took a breath. He could have leavened it, mentioned that the Old Man had left him an opening: See if I stop you. But it was easier to keep it black-and-white with Nina. There were only so many expectations he could disappoint in any given day. Two spots of color appeared on her neck and she said something snappish about giving up. She was worried, he knew, more than angry. About him, and about Sill. He poked her gently in the shoulder as the Old Man clattered back into the kitchen.

“I’m trying,” Perry said. Neither of them answered him. The kitchen lights flickered.

Perry picked up the phone to call over to Rose’s and then set it back down—a busy signal, the lines were overloaded. Sill knew how to take shelter. “Let’s go,” he said, and they all three walked out the front door. Nina held the Old Man by the elbow, and Perry veered off to do another sweep around the house. The stiff chicken wire around Nina’s vegetable garden whipped in the wind. He was standing on the bluff at the east side of the house when a tree branch smacked him across the kidneys. Hard and quick, it knocked the air out of his lungs and sent him down on one knee. He staggered to his feet and ran to the front of the house just in time to see Nina and the Old Man tumbling down the final third of the hill, the Old Man crumpling and Nina dragged along after, rolling, flashes of skin, her hand locked onto his elbow.

He reached them soon after they hit the bottom. Nina was already on her hands and knees, struggling to stand. The Old Man’s legs flailed. He’d lost his cane and Perry scrambled for it, shoving it into his father’s hand. He grabbed them each by the arm and pulled, yelping as the muscles tightened in his lower back. The wind caught his cry and threw it back on them.

“Sill!” Nina turned toward the house.

“No,” Perry yelled, “That was me.” But she trotted back up the hill, waving her arm behind her, and shooing the men toward the shelter. “You heard me.” Perry tried to make her understand.

Nina was too far off to hear. The Old Man’s sinewy arm locked around his neck. Something was wrong with his father, as if all his strength had been stored up in that wayward cane. Perry swung his arm around him and they turned to the cellar, just ten feet away. When he looked back again Nina was by the porch standing face to face with Sill. Right there, the only things he loved. He waved his free arm at them and yelled but his father crumpled a few more inches and he had to turn, he couldn’t wait. The sky was an ocean, brackish and churning.

Everything was wrong. Sill and Nina left unsheltered, the Old Man shriveled at his side. Perry’s back throbbed. He fumbled to swing the trap door open, pulling it hard against the thick wind, and the Old Man slid awkwardly down the ladder. Perry turned to look at his wife and daughter but there was too much in the air—pieces of wood, grit, rock—and he had to cast down his eyes. He’d settle the Old Man and go back up for them. The trap door tore from his hand and slammed down as he followed his father into the dark.