Читать книгу Wild Card Quilt - Janisse Ray - Страница 10

Restoration

The day after we arrived was the first day of school. I enrolled Silas in third grade and set to work, packing Grandmama’s dusty and cobwebbed past into boxes marked “linens” or “kitchen.” During the last hot, dry, sun-searing days of August, I emptied her things from cabinets and cupboards and replaced them with ours. The water to the house was off because of busted lines, so I hauled water from an outside spigot to clean. Within a couple of days, Daddy came and helped me fix the water line, so we had running water.

For a week I washed shelves, walls, and ceilings. I relined the kitchen cabinets with fresh newspaper, and laundered curtains and linens. I vacuumed the dead wasps. Before a week was out, I set up the computer and dared, with a house in chaos, to write in the mornings.

The first weeks were hard. I was alternately full of fear and full of peace. Afternoons, when I heard the school bus struggle to a stop to let off Silas, I turned off the computer, unplugging it and shutting the window behind it against a chance of sudden thunderstorms. Daddy would show up with Mama to work in the ninety-five-degree heat while Silas positioned his plastic action toys on battlegrounds of weedy flower beds. Uncle Percy would emerge from his trailer to join the activity—the proposing of solutions, the fetching of tools, the repair—even if he mostly watched. Mama took care of Silas and helped with the renovation if her arthritis pain would allow it.

We replaced a corroded section of copper pipe that ran to the gas space heaters—“we” being Daddy and me. What we discovered on the way to fixing the gas leak was a spray-bottle-size leak in a hot water line, then another leak in the gas line, then we (mostly Daddy, thank goodness) wrenched a fitting apart while screwing in the new section of line. The lines were under the house in the dirt, with the black widow spiders and the rattlesnakes. We had to cut off the water and the gas and drive seven miles to town for new fittings.

“Can you do without water tonight?” Daddy asked.

“Is there a choice?”

“Not really. It’s too dark to fix this now.”

“I did without it the first two days. I can again.”

“We’ll get on it first thing in the morning.”

“I need to write in the morning. Can you come in the afternoon? I’ll do without water.”

“Better go draw up some jugs, then.”

“Why don’t you and Silas come eat with us tonight?” Mama asked. “You can take baths at our house, too.”

“Thank you, Mama. We’ll get by here. I can make sandwiches, and sponge off.”

After five days of cooking on a camping stove, I fixed the real stove by cleaning out its orifices. Daddy and I got the hot water heater working again. Mama and I swept and mopped. We fixed busted water pipes and cleared blocked drains. We repainted and rescreened the front porch, where Grandmama’s two rockers sat alongside our canoe paddles and walking sticks. We tidied flower beds and planted hens-and-chickens—Mama had given me cuttings of the succulent—in concrete pots on either side of the front steps.

After nine years of neglect, a hundred tasks jostled for our attention: repair the oven, paint the kitchen, rake pine straw around the blueberries, prune the fruit trees, saw up the fallen tree, clear away the smokehouse it fell on. Uncle Percy and I set about rebuilding the kitchen screen door, which was rotted and rusted. The jamb needed replacing, and the inner door was deteriorating as well. “If the termites weren’t holding hands,” I heard someone say, “the house would fall down.” The railing along the kitchen stoop needed paint. We worked at the tasks, pegging away, a little every day toward a new home. Slowly we made the house ours.

Despite how my heart was wrenched, faced as I was with the hardest reminders of childhood (being where the memories happened was making them raw again), I’d never been more content than at the farm, as if I’d lived my whole life to come back. Those August days the air was thickly green, waterlogged, and charged with heat. It smelled of fallen pine needles clumped in the grass, and decaying water oak limbs, and also of deeply wet earth. Tough fists of sand pears dropped from the trees and rotted on the ground until my father came in his dilapidated pickup and gathered washtubs full for the wild hogs penned in his junkyard. Scuppernongs, which I had reminisced so often about, ripened on the vines, carrying fall’s pungency, a scent different from the sweetness of the tangled pasture, where Uncle Bill boarded cows. The days were longer than days had been in years. They were long and eerily quiet.

How can I say “quiet” when frogs were honking and cicadas yea-saying and the fan whirring continuously on low and fat drops of rain smacking catalpa leaves? Quiet, with the distant grumble of thunder and determination of cars on the highway? The magnolia shading the bedroom window clattered its noisy castanets, discarding them on the ground. Yet a vast silence lay upon the land; wide as gauze, it enveloped me and drifted away with me. The long, quiescent days were vessels for an odd freedom, like wearing overalls instead of a Sunday suit. One can move inside silence, like air moves inside overalls.

I loved the farm.

I’d promised Silas a puppy for our new life, and we searched for one among those abandoned at dumpsters, or along roadsides.

“What about him?” I would ask. The dog would be too mangy or too big. Near Lane’s Bridge we spotted a short-haired, brown-and-white pup with little legs and perky ears, ranging through wrappers.

“OK,” Silas said eagerly. I pulled over, bumping to a halt. The dog spotted us and took off like a rocket, legs streaking. Because it seemed to be running sideways we burst out laughing.

“Let’s follow it,” I said, but the dog cut across a field and disappeared into woods.

We procured a free puppy from a neighbor who already had four or five unspayed dogs. Silas picked the runt of the latest litter not because he was small or sported a white tip on his black tail but because that dog, of them all, came up and licked his hand. He named him Enoch, after a carouser in The Education of Little Tree, a book we’d been reading aloud.

You should have seen my son’s joy as they tore around the yard, racing between the aged pines, coming upon the feel of swiftness, that elation you get only from running hard. As Silas sprinted from pine to pine, he wanted me to count how many seconds it took. My boy and his long-tongued pup seemed to have run straight off the canvas of a Rockwell painting.

Silas figured out a way to race Enoch, with me as judge, but it was hard to tell who’d won.

“Mom,” Silas called, maybe for the second or third time, “you’re absentminded again, aren’t you?” He’s patient.

I admitted that I had been distracted and hadn’t heard whatever he’d said. The work needing to be done, especially that beyond the farm, the needs of community and region, had besieged my head. On every side, I saw a landscape resembling ruin.

“Who won that time?” Silas said.

“You did.”

Thus days passed at the farm, and the form of a life became evident.

I’d been home about a month the afternoon I met my cousin Sue. Daddy and I were unclogging the septic tank drain. The commode had stopped flushing—one more malfunction in the declining house. I’d had to use the woods the past week; Silas, refusing the woods, waited until he got to school. The drain needed fixing badly.

We had the concrete tank lid levered up with Uncle Percy’s heavy-duty Handyman jack, and then we propped it with cement blocks, hoping it wouldn’t fall and kill us. I reached down into that smelly richness and tore loose the massive root systems of grass that clung there, then I uncoiled a long metal snake up the six-inch PVC pipe that ran underneath the house. Within ten feet I hit something that felt like rock. Whatever it was had blocked the toilet drain.

Ten feet back from the septic tank, under the eaves of the house, a lantana had grown for thirty years. Friend of sulphur butterflies, it bloomed miniature bouquets of orange, yellow, and pink, which I’d loved to pick when I was a child. I was digging beside the lantana, worrying that its roots were clogging the drain, when a dated white truck turned into the yard.

“Hey,” Mama called to a woman getting out. “You don’t have to unholster for us.”

The woman was wearing blue jeans and cowboy boots. She had long red hair and tattoos stenciled up and down her arms, intricate designs that started at her wrists and disappeared into her T-shirt.

“Time to take it off,” she said, unstrapping a pistol from her belt. “I’ve been squirrel hunting with Daddy down in Shug’s pecan trees.”

I had found, as I suspected, that the lantana’s roots were woven around the pipe and entering it at a loose joint, and I was attacking the roots with fury. Only a few hours of daylight were left. Between shovel blows, I watched the woman approach, Mama and Daddy smiling wide.

“You know your cousin Sue?” Daddy asked.

“Not officially.” I stopped slicing at dirt and roots for a few minutes, long enough to apologize for the circumstances. My overalls, a gift from Uncle Percy (his old ones), were muddy and dirty; my hair went every which way. An embarrassing stench filled the air, relieved only somewhat by the odor of fallen and dried pecan leaves crushed against the ground.

“I’d shake your hand if I could,” I said.

“Don’t worry about a thing.”

“We’re kin somehow, I know,” I said.

Sue smiled. “Your grandmother was my daddy’s aunt,” she said, slowly. Sue’s daddy being Grandmama’s nephew made us second cousins.

“Close enough for me,” I said, leaning on the mattock.

“Keep working,” Sue said. “I’ve been wanting to stop and say hello. I saw you all out in the yard.”

“Glad you stopped.” In between chopping and digging and pulling, I listened. Daddy was asking after Uncle Mike and what they would do with the squirrels. The lantana was too deeply rooted for a shovel, the pipe embedded in its tan roots. Excusing myself, I went for an axe. With a few blows, I twisted the pipe out of the root-grip and it broke open under the house, spilling raw sewage across the dry dirt. A Cracker house is built two or three feet off the ground for ventilation, so I climbed under and started shoveling fast, dumping the sludge into a five-gallon bucket. It was sure stinking under there, and I was embarrassed. It was an awkward time to have company, since I couldn’t very well quit. At least fixing the pipe was easy now—simply fit it back together. But Lord, the stench.

I’d heard Sue raised rabbits, that she knew how to fish and how to tan hides. I’d heard she liked to get out in the woods, that she liked heart-pine houses and worn knives and good stories. She knew things I wanted to learn. I finished under the house and crawled out, filthy, hair chaotic, and not exactly smelling like a rose.

“You gotta come to the syrup-boiling,” she said. “The day after Thanksgiving. It’s at Tommy Davis’s place.”

“Where’s that?”

“Not far. On the other side of the church.”

“I hope you mean it. I might show up.”

“You’d be welcome.”