Читать книгу I Will Not Leave You Comfortless - Jeremy Jackson - Страница 12

In the Dark

As Grandma sat with the heating pad, she closed her eyes. Not because she was tired, but because it contained quiet comfort. It was a pause. She had been busy all afternoon with the usual town-Friday routine—groceries, hairdo, practicing organ at church—and the day had felt crowded to her, and pressed on her still. Also, there was the rest of the month to think about, the long climb toward Christmas: the shopping trip to Kansas City next week, the Neighborhood Club party here in only six days, Extension Club, Sewing Club, decorating and cleaning to do, wrapping presents, cooking, all of the cards to be written, the Cantata at the church. Finally, Christmas itself—the family here.

After a while with her eyes shut, she began to breathe more slowly. When the clock struck the half hour, she noted it but didn’t feel rushed by it. Grandpa was still outside doing the chores. She heard the furnace cycle off and opened her eyes in time to see the sun suddenly coming through the low clouds. Those dull clouds had been overhead since dawn, but now the sun was below them, and she swiveled her easy chair to face the window directly—the south window in the living room. For a moment she looked right into the sun, and she remembered another sunset just like this, from another December.

Mother called for Mildred to fetch her coat and come into the kitchen. The day was cool but not cold. When she got to the kitchen, she watched Mother put two rolls—steaming from the oven—onto a tea towel and fold them up as if they were a gift. She handed the bundle to Mildred, then scooped a wad of butter into a tin cup and gave this to her, too. In the bottom of the cup, there was already jam.

“You know where Daddy’s cutting up that tree?” Mother said.

“Yes.”

“Here it’s coming close to dark and I think it’s taking him longer than he reckoned. So take these to him to keep him going until supper. Just go through the pasture and the gate should be open. All right?”

“The big gate?”

“That’s right.”

Outside, Mildred walked back past the barn and let herself into the pasture. The cattle were clustered by the doorway, and they watched her cross their field as if she were a creature they had never seen before. In her pocket, she could feel the warmth of the bread.

She passed on across the big pasture. The grass was still green there, and she thought about how it hadn’t snowed yet this year. When she was in the middle of the pasture, she looked up at the sky, and the clouds seemed lower than they had all day. There had been no sun today, and she figured that if the clouds kept getting lower, tomorrow there would be no clouds at all, just a terrible fog.

The gate was open, like Mother had said, and she went through and followed the hedgerow all the way down to where it bent around the corner. There, lying in the grass, was the old bur oak that had been blown down last week. The ground had been wet and a wind had torn up the tree, roots and all. It had been one of the only trees on the whole farm.

“Daddy?” she called.

He wasn’t there. His tools weren’t there.

Many of the tree’s branches had been sawed off and there was sawdust scattered about, and a pyramid of cut wood was stacked to the side. She walked around the tree and looked down into the brushy draw but there was nothing to be seen and as she turned back to the tree the sun came underneath the clouds and stunned her because it was so bright. She blinked and looked away.

She found a low branch on the fallen oak that was just right for sitting, and she looked back toward the house across the fields. The sun had brushed the land in a golden tone, and as she watched, the color deepened slowly and steadily until finally it burned like the last glow of a piece of coal, and only then did she realize the sun was setting—was nearly gone, in fact—and she didn’t know how long she’d sat there.

Suddenly, there was Trixie, their dog, trotting through the last light, coming to her. Trixie, the good collie. Trixie walked up to Mildred and sniffed—she could smell the bread—and then sat down and waited.

It got dark. Mildred looked at her wet shoes but it was even hard to see them. She pushed her hair from her face. She liked the darkness and being alone here with Trixie, but she also felt too far from where she was supposed to be and she didn’t understand how it had become night so fast. She had walked clear to the other side of the farm and was closer to Bryson, in fact, than to her own house. She thought of the schoolhouse not far away, which would be empty right now, and of her teacher, Mrs. Clay, and of her slate, and of the way her coat smelled when she put it on after school: it smelled like home. But when she put the coat on in the morning at home, it smelled like school. As if it knew where it was going.

Trixie stood up and looked into the night. She heard something. Then, after a little bit, Daddy said Mildred’s name and came walking from the direction of the house. She couldn’t see his face, but she could see the outline of his head—the tilt of it—and that was enough. He carried her home, and she could hear Trixie following them, and she didn’t know how Daddy could see in the dark, but he could.

It was not the kind of memory that she had carried around for years and worn out with remembering and re-remembering so many times that it had stopped being a memory and turned into a memory of a memory. No, it was something she hadn’t thought of in years—decades, even.

Her father had been a tall man.

Trixie had given many good pups.

Now, outside the window, the sunset was doing the same thing it had done that day when she was ten. It gave the open landscape a golden glow that faded and tarnished and deepened to orange, then to a color that was fragile and plumy—that old piece of coal, lingering. The shadows rose up from the roots of the grass. There were no lights on in the living room. When it was finally dark, the heating pad slipped off her shoulder and as she reached up to catch it, the pain came back—the clenched soreness across her shoulders and neck. She heard the screen door bang on the back porch. Grandpa was coming in. She leaned forward to get up, but it hurt too much, so she leaned back into the chair. She heard Grandpa come in the back door and click on the light in the kitchen. Then he padded through the kitchen until he stood in the doorway of the living room in his sock feet.

“’S dark,” he said.

We didn’t have the same glowering sunset that evening on our farm, just the blankness of night snuffing out a cloudy day. It had been the kind of dim day that didn’t feel like day anyway, but like some outer province of night. We had an early dinner, and afterward Dad and I were excused from the dishwashing. We carried our gear to the car, then trekked across the barnyard. The calf named Kat was being weaned, and she’d been shut in a stall in the barn for a week already, bawling day and night for her mother. Now she went quiet when we came into the barn. From the shadowy corner of the stall, she watched Dad pour grain into her trough, and then she turned a circle—as if looking for an exit—and looked at the trough again. We turned out the light and left. As we reached the car, her woeful crying resumed.

We picked up my classmate Ryan Rutledge on the other side of Russellville, then continued out on Route C. I showed Ryan my new hiking boots and their tiny, zippered pockets, which, I explained, were big enough to hold two quarters each, or a fair number of movie tickets.

“Why?” Ryan asked.

“Why what?”

“Why would you put movie tickets in your boots?”

Outside Craig Linhardt’s house, we gathered with the other Cub Scouts, and soon the coon dogs were let loose, and they milled among us, all noses and feet, and then all of us—dogs and men and a whole string of boys—went into the woods, following Craig’s dad. My dad walked behind us, and in between the two dads was a total of seven Cub Scouts.

We walked through mud and passed black trunks of oaks and hickories. We each had our own flashlight, but even the most powerful of these barely penetrated the night. Craig’s dad had a different kind of light—a hissing flame that bloomed from a silver reflector strapped to his forehead. This left his hands free for a rifle.

We stopped in a clearing of clumpy grass. The dads had us all turn out our flashlights, and we stood there in the dark, silent, listening to the baying of the dogs far away.

“Can you hear,” Craig’s dad asked, “how their pitch has changed? Like they’re a little bit more excited?”

We resumed moving forward, listening to the dogs, following them, dodging low branches, trying to avoid brambles, splashing through soggy spots. We tromped onward, going around the side of this little hill, up that grassy draw, onward, onward. The night was moist but not foggy. I’d never been in these woods in the daytime, and so to traverse them at night was a strange introduction. We paused at a barbed-wire fence—a property line—and saw in the distance the light of a house.

But however fast or far we went, the dogs remained distant, which meant they had not treed a raccoon—or anything, for that matter—and were either chasing something elusive and fast, or were simply on the trail of nothing at all.

Eventually their baying became more scattered and halting, and then we could hear that they were approaching us, and suddenly they appeared among us again and quieted, and one of them laid down, right there, and panted. Which is to say, the hunt was over.

At home, Elizabeth was on the phone. She wasn’t supposed to be—not only was she grounded, but she should have been studying for tomorrow. That was the agreement she’d made with Mom. She and Mom had argued all through dinner about whether she could go to Catherine’s house on Friday. But now she’d been thinking about Wayne, how he’d given her roses on Halloween, and how he’d been dressed up as a hoodlum, with his hair slicked back, and had looked even cuter than usual. And once she started thinking about Wayne, how could she not call him?

She’d been talking to him for half an hour when Susan opened the door to their room, saw Elizabeth on the phone, then backed out and closed the door.

“Shit,” Elizabeth said. “Susan’s going to tell Mom I’m on the phone.”

Sure enough, within moments Elizabeth heard the kitchen extension pick up.

“Elizabeth, how long have you been on the line?” Mom asked.

“Five minutes.”

“It’s time to end it.”

“Okay.”

“I’m putting a one-minute timer on the microwave and when it goes off, that’s it.” Then Mom hung up.

“Good evening, Mrs. Jackson,” Wayne said, knowing she was gone.

“This is a crock,” Elizabeth said.

Exactly a minute later, Mom came on again. “Now!” she said.

“Okay!” Elizabeth said.

“I said one minute!” Mom said.

Then there was a clunk, and another clunk, a scraping sound, and a strange kind of chanting—like a two-year-old having a parade.

“What in the hell is that?” Wayne asked.

“I don’t . . . oh . . . Jesus . . . ,” Elizabeth said.

The kitchen phone had a twenty-foot cord between the receiver and the handset, and Mom was dragging the handset around the kitchen, like a dog on a leash, while chanting “Time! To! Get off the phone! Time! To! Get off the phone!”

When Elizabeth got down there, she was still doing it.

“I hung up, all right?” Elizabeth yelled.

Mom stopped. She put the phone back on the hook. The long cord contracted and coiled.

“Why’d you have to embarrass me like that?” Elizabeth asked.

“You broke our agreement,” Mom said calmly.

“So? I didn’t kill anyone.”

“Being grounded means no calls.”

“So ground me some more!”

Mom abruptly sat down on one of the kitchen chairs. Then her face changed. It turned red, it clenched. She started crying—and talking at the same time. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do!” she howled. “We had an agreement and that didn’t mean anything to you! You wouldn’t . . . I do everything! Everything! I cook everything, I clean everything, I do the laundry, I sew your clothes, and, I, and I, and you don’t even listen to me—I’m in the dark with you—and I can’t do it!” Then it was just crying. Under the bright fluorescent light of the kitchen.

Elizabeth stood there. She felt shame and heat. She set her jaw. Then she turned. She went back upstairs. She walked into the room she and Susan shared. She closed the door. She turned off the overhead light. She sat on the bed. Susan must have been hiding downstairs, because she wasn’t here.

Elizabeth knew she caused Mom and Dad pain. She knew she disobeyed and broke curfew. And she felt trapped by who she was—the person who did those things, who hurt the parents who were so good to her—but she didn’t really know how to change. She was a bad daughter.

She decided to study, to put her frustration into work. After a while, Susan came in and started getting ready for bed. They didn’t say anything to each other. Susan went into the bathroom and shut the door. Elizabeth could hear her brushing her teeth. She thought about what she could say to hurt Susan—to get back at her for snitching—but she said nothing.

After nine, Elizabeth got up and went downstairs. Mom was putting away her sewing machine. Elizabeth got a glass of water and leaned against the kitchen counter. Mom was sweeping bits of thread off the kitchen table.

“I’m sorry about yelling,” Elizabeth said. “And being on the phone.”

Mom nodded.

“I don’t mean to be so . . . mean,” Elizabeth continued.

Mom went into the study. She returned and handed Elizabeth a piece of paper. Elizabeth read it. It was Mom’s handwriting.

Ride On! Rough-shod if need be, smooth-shod if that will do, but ride on! Ride on over all obstacles, and win the race!

—Charles Dickens

“That reminds me of you,” Mom said. “You’re a strong woman. And it’s wonderful.”

Mom had never called Elizabeth a woman before.

“But strength can hurt people,” Mom added.

Elizabeth nodded.

They said goodnight, and Elizabeth went back upstairs. Susan was reading in her bed. Elizabeth washed her face, brushed her teeth, and took out her contacts. She sat down at her desk and copied the quotation into her journal. She wrote about the night. She finished, put her journal away.

“Do you want to read in bed for a little while longer?” Elizabeth said. “’Cause I do.”

“Okay,” Susan said.

“It’s sorta early, but I want to get in bed, you know? And just read.”

After the Cub Scouts’ bewildering passage through the night, the lights inside Craig’s house were startling and revealed a great deal more mud on us than we would have guessed. We’d brought extra clothes, of course, so we dumped our boots in the garage and were soon wearing clean, dry clothes.

After hot chocolate and snacks, my dad left, and Craig’s dad and stepmother made themselves scarce, and his sister hid in her room—wisely—which left the house to the seven boys.

We created a sprawling sleeping-bag bivouac in the living room, and we watched a TV show, and played some video games, and then we challenged ourselves, as a group, to stay up later than we ever had—possibly even until dawn—and therefore draw forth all the rich marrow that the night had to offer. There was a hearty mood in the air, and we played a spontaneous game of hide-and-seek in which we were split into three teams. The game didn’t work, but the confusion of it was fun, and during the fray we got interested in the basement, but a surprising late-night appearance by Craig’s dad gently ended that excursion, and before long, one of us was asleep, then two were. So the grand alliance was failing, and one by one the Cub Scouts succumbed to sleep.

Then we were three: Craig, Jason, and me. We had plenty of things to say about the weak members of our group who were already asleep. We had plenty to discuss about the girls in our class. But in the middle of the conversation, we realized that Jason was no longer with us, so it was just me and Craig—the two survivors—and we engaged in cordial games of baseball on our handheld electronic game, whose red pinprick-sized LEDs signified fast balls and curve balls, base hits and home runs, strikes and fouls. Craig had been my ally since third grade—when we both discovered girls before the other boys had—and it was satisfying to know that we were the strongest of the bunch. We proved our staying power, and checked the clock at one point to discover that it was after two a.m., which was a respectable achievement, and we knew that we could stay up at least until four if we wanted to, and probably later. And on the one hand we wanted to, but on the other hand, we argued, what was the point? We knew we could do it, and we had proven our superiority, so who really cared? But we played awhile longer, because we could and because it was enjoyable. Then we decided: let’s get some shut-eye. When this game is done. Ha. Double play. Inning’s over. My turn. Must be after three o’clock by now. Gotta be. Don’t even have to check the clock, because I know.

Grandma finally put on her glasses and looked at the clock on the dresser. 3:40. Well, I’ll swan. Didn’t that just beat all? She wondered if she’d slept at all. She had lain there, trying to put the pain away—put it elsewhere—but it hadn’t worked, and now after looking at the clock, she heard the sounds of a light rain—that drip-drip in the gutters—and she decided to just get up.

So she sat with the heating pad on her neck, and she didn’t even try to read or sleep. The doctor had put her on her fourth medicine for nervitis this week, and he’d said that if it didn’t work there was another one to try, so she fully expected to be on her fifth medicine soon. On top of that, her stomach was still bothering her, and eating bran cereal every morning was like choking on a bale of hay. Didn’t seem to improve matters either.

Grandpa had been helpful. He did all the driving now. He did the dishwashing. He couldn’t be taught to cook, though. They’d lived well on leftovers recently, but those were dwindling.

The newest thing—and she didn’t like to think about it—was that sometimes she couldn’t turn her head. That’s how much it hurt.

At about five o’clock, she went into the kitchen and laid out three Christmas cards to write. Just three. It hurt, but she did it—wrote them, addressed the envelopes—and when she was done she went back into the living room to wait for dawn.

Elizabeth actually woke up before her alarm and found that she was thinking about colleges. It was still pitch black outside, so she figured it was very early, but she checked her clock and saw it was only fifteen minutes before her alarm was set to go off. She rolled onto her back and looked at the ceiling. Susan was still asleep on the lower part of the trundle bed, a spray of dark hair across her cheek.

She ate breakfast. Mom came out of the study in her nightgown. Mom yawned.

“Did they catch a raccoon?” Elizabeth asked.

“No.”

“Poor guys. But good for the raccoons.”

As Elizabeth drove the truck to Columbia, daylight did come, but it was an even gloomier daylight than yesterday’s—rain soaked, dull. She thought about Wayne, and being grounded. She thought about basketball. The Jamestown Tournament started Monday, and she wondered whether the team would actually play like a team instead of a loose affiliation of athletes occasionally interested in a common goal. Last year they’d had better ball handling.

The SAT took three hours. When she got back to the truck, the windshield was icy, but the roads—all the way home—were just wet.

After noon, Grandpa went to Warrensburg by himself. The weather didn’t improve, but it didn’t get worse, and when he got to the Christmas tree lot, there wasn’t much of a selection. Was December 3 late for picking out a tree? He didn’t like choosing one without Grandma. And the prices were higher this year. The one he got was a bit smaller than usual. Too broad and too short.

By the time he got home—about three—it was already starting to get dark.

Or: darker.