Читать книгу I Will Not Leave You Comfortless - Jeremy Jackson - Страница 8

See Farther

I stood in the kitchen doorway, blinking. I was at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, and Grandma was at the little kitchen table, writing. She didn’t see me. Finally I entered and said good morning. She said good morning and got up and pulled out a chair for me, and I saw there was already a cereal bowl there, plus a spoon and the sugar bowl. At home, I wasn’t allowed to have sugar on my cereal, only honey.

“You must have been one sleepyhead to sleep so long,” Grandma said. She set the milk in front of me. She poured my cereal. She didn’t pour quite as much as I wanted.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“It’ll be ten thirty here in a bit.” She poured the milk.

Ten thirty. I’d never slept that late in the history of me. At home, Mom would wake me up by singing a song called “Everybody Up.” It was a song of her own invention.

Maybe it was the way Grandma had put me to sleep that was to blame. The routine was the same as ever. She read an animal story from a farm magazine and tickled my hair. But those stories were for little kids. A dependable raccoon and a troublesome duck. A lesson learned. Then she tucked me in so comprehensively that breathing was an exercise in tightness.

I hadn’t thought that being ten years old would be like this.

I put more sugar on the cereal. “Why didn’t Mom and Dad wake me up to say goodbye?” I asked.

“Oh, they wanted to get off early. They needed to pick up that beef before it got too hot outside.”

Grandma was writing as she talked. She was writing in a little black notebook. A diary? Her hair was almost a perfect globe.

I thought about the beef. We had picked up a whole butchered cow last summer, too—one of Grandpa’s cows—from the meat locker in Windsor. Mom had layered blankets and the sleeping bag in the back of the station wagon, then they stacked all the white paper packets of frozen meat in there and covered them with more blankets. It was a two-hour drive home, and every once in a while, Susan and I had put our hands back under the blankets to feel the cold.

When my cereal was gone, I pursued the layer of sugar at the bottom of the bowl. The wooden screen door banged on the back porch, and then the kitchen door opened and there stood Grandpa in his overalls—tall, sweating, holding his cowboy hat at his hip.

“Well . . . ,” he said, looking at me. Then he breathed out through his nose.

I wished I hadn’t slept so late.

“Well, looka who’s up,” he said.

“Me,” I said. I rubbed my eye. It itched.

“Up and about,” he said.

In the short time between breakfast and lunch—or dinner, as Grandma and Grandpa called it—I walked around the outside of the farmhouse. I investigated all three porches, each of which slanted or tilted in its own unique way. I knelt and looked under the side porch, and there, back in the darkness, I saw the curled, panting tongues of Ringo and Pal—the dogs. The front porch was loud because the air conditioner was set in the window blowing hot air onto the bushes. I walked out into the front yard and the sound of the air conditioner got quieter. There was one tree in the whole yard. I could see the garden across the driveway. Grandma was right: it was hot today. The grass was cut short, and it was largely dead, a casualty of the sun. There were two tractor-tire flower beds on the lawn, painted white. There was also the old swing set, which was smaller than I remembered. If you clutched one of its poles, it left white powder on your palm.

I sat on the back stoop, and Ringo and Pal emerged from their subporch den and lay in the strip of shade against the shed. They were filthy, and they looked at me not with Teddy’s what-are-we-going-to- do-now? look, but with a sort of what-are-you-going-to-do-now? look.

There, through the gate, was the barn. Leaning.

It was too hot.

I went inside and Grandma gave me a popsicle and I went back outside and ate it on the back steps. This was where we always ate her homemade popsicles, and today it went particularly well because the heat was melting the popsicle quickly, which was how I liked it. I liked the popsicle to get soft so I could suck the juices out of it. But when the popsicle was gone I realized that what I’d just eaten was simply frozen orange juice. Not that I hadn’t known it before, but today it sort of popped out at me. Frozen orange juice.

I went back inside. Grandma was making a cake. I stood near her.

“This is the first time I’ve visited you and Grandpa by myself, I think,” I said.

“I think that’s right,” she said.

She talked a little about Elizabeth’s birthday party on Friday—which was the occasion for the cake—then we started speculating how Susan and Elizabeth were enjoying their basketball camp in Warrensburg. She thought they were probably having a fine time of fellowship and sport. I added that Elizabeth would likely be the best player there.

When the cake went into the oven, Grandma asked me if maybe I wanted to paint and I said sure and she brought out the old box of watercolors that I remembered since forever and she put a margarine tub of water out for me and I wet the brush and then swirled it around on the orange lozenge of watercolor, raising a froth, and then Grandma reappeared with a brown paper bag and some scissors and I remembered that that’s what one painted on here: cut-up brown paper bags.

On a brown bag, orange watercolor looked brown. Red looked brown, blue looked brown, green looked brown, and yellow—yellow just disappeared.

At sunset, I went with Grandma to water the flowers in the front yard. She gave me my own watering can with a spout shaped like a flower. As we watered I observed that the flowers looked thirsty and she said she was sure of it. We returned the watering cans to the back porch and then went to look at the garden. After that we carried two lawn chairs to the front yard and sat and waited for the stars to come out. We were facing the eastern sky and there was a gauze of gray at the horizon, and above that ran a long belt of reddish orange. Grandma asked me what color I would call it and I said extra peach. Ringo and Pal came and sat behind us. The sky got darker but there still weren’t any stars and when a pickup passed we waved, and Ringo and Pal chased it. They trotted back toward us but didn’t quite make it. They flopped down on the lawn between us and the road.

I sat cross-legged.

Across the road, a cornfield mounted its way toward the horizon. That was the direction Dad used to walk to school. A bit to the right, in the distance, the radio tower blinked.

Whenever my family and Uncle Kent’s family were here in the summer, everyone would sit out on the front lawn of an evening and our cousin Brad would organize me and my sisters and his sister into a tumbling act. My best move was a somersault, but I could also leap variously. The girls could do cartwheels and Brad could do handstands, in addition to being the ringmaster. It had been a few summers—four?—since we had put on a good show out here.

We heard someone walking on the dry grass and we looked back and here came Grandpa carrying a lawn chair.

The stars did come. Grandma saw the first one.

The second day was hotter, and the third day the hottest yet. The thermometer on the side of the green shed said ninety-eight degrees when Grandma and I left for town. We cruised into Windsor. Sunlight reflected off cars. It sure was a flat town. We stopped at the drive-up window at the bank but I was too shy to ask for a sucker and Grandma didn’t ask and the teller didn’t give me one. Maybe she didn’t see that there was a kid in the car with Grandma.

We drove out the other side of town and I looked across the fields and the cattle were clustered under the few trees. I personally thought my suggestion that maybe my cousin-once-removed Craig might be lonely and might like to play with me this afternoon was a good idea. I had spent ample time with Grandma and Grandpa. Watching Grandma cook. Driving with Grandpa in the truck to buy feed. Stalking the cats. All of us going to the Wal-Mart and the Dairy Queen in Clinton. Supper in the church basement. I didn’t have my bike with me or any other entertainment, really, and after lunch Grandma and Grandpa always both fell asleep sitting straight up in the living room and I would simply have to wait for them to wake up. We had visited the bookmobile yesterday. It stopped not far away in a place that was called a town and had a sign so you knew it was a town but really there was nothing there but two houses. I had picked out two armfuls of books but Grandma had not been sure if that was an appropriate number of books and so she asked me to put some back. The consequence being I ran out of books the same day. In Jeff City, the librarians knew we took home a whole big box full of books.

“I think the cows are hot,” I said to Grandma. We were on a straight road.

“They can stand in a pond to cool off,” she said. “If they have a pond.”

“That’s true,” I answered. Our cows at home did that.

The car was slowing down, and Grandma made a turn onto another road. The car accelerated sluggishly.

“It seems flatter over here than at your and Grandpa’s farm,” I said.

“It’s flat as a flitter.”

“Is this the prairie?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t think people call it a prairie. That’s more like Kansas.”

I nodded.

“The farm I grew up on was just over there,” Grandma said, nodding west, “and my brother—your uncle Emmett—used to call it ‘Ruffin Valley’ because it was so flat. He’s a joker, just like you.”

“What’s Ruffin?” I asked.

“My family’s name is Ruffin. I was a Ruffin until I married Grandpa.”

“Oh.” I thought. “Ruffin Valley. That is funny.” I looked west.

“Sometime I’ll show the old farm to you. You can’t see it from here. It’s where I was a girl.”

I’d never put any thought into the idea that there was a place in this world where my grandmother had once been a girl.

“Is the house you grew up in still there?” I asked.

“You know, they bulldozed it. I guess so they could plant more corn. It was in a sad state, anyway. Would have made my mother weep to see how sad it was.”

“When you were a girl, had cars been invented?” I asked. I thought it was a thoughtful question. It showed my understanding of history.

“I’m not that old,” she said quickly. “There were cars,” she said. “I’m not that old.”

I felt bad. It was rare to see Grandma ruffled. She thought I had called her old. But wasn’t she?

The real reason I’d asked to go over to Craig’s house was that I was bored, and Craig lived in a brand-new ranch house on a big farm, and there was a pinball machine in the basement, not to mention other toys, including militaristic ones I wasn’t allowed to have. But when I got to Craig’s house, I felt bad about this play date and I watched Grandma drive away out the long driveway and then I watched her turn onto the blacktop and move farther and farther away while Craig, who I now remembered was too young and frenzied to engage in satisfying play, was talking nonstop and most of it was meaningless. Grandma’s car faded into the haze.

“Hey, do you want to swim in the cows’ watering tank?” Craig asked.

That night, Craig’s mother, Linda, drove me and Craig into Sedalia, where we met Grandma, Grandpa, Mom, and Dad to see the State Fair Parade and a horse show. We got back to Grandma and Grandpa’s house at eleven p.m. The next day was a whole day at the fair with Mom and Dad. As Dad said as we walked through the admission gate: “Let’s hope it’s not just a fair fair.” It wasn’t. Baby pigs sprinted around a little racetrack to reach a plate of Oreo cookies. Giant catfish and largemouth bass hung suspended in huge aquariums, just teasing us by their presence. A free pencil here. A free key fob there. Chickens in cages. Puffy chickens, fancy chickens. Big new tractors with tires as tall as Dad. We met Grandma for lunch at Wendy’s. I got a glow-in-the-dark ball with my Kids’ Meal, but I was scared of it because I’d heard that glow-in-the-dark things caused cancer. Grandma didn’t eat much because she said her stomach had been upset in recent weeks. Back at the fair: a snow cone. A dollar to spend at the arcade. At the end of the day, my ankles were filthy with the dust of the midway. All of us went back to Grandma and Grandpa’s again for the night.

Then, Friday, we picked up Elizabeth and Susan from basketball camp and went back to Grandma and Grandpa’s for Elizabeth’s seventeenth birthday dinner. Ham, rolls, scalloped potatoes, cauliflower with cheese sauce, green beans, iced tea, peach-whip salad, cake, and ice cream.

It was different with my family there. We sat out on the front lawn while it grew dark, and Susan and Elizabeth slumped in their chairs. I pulled on Susan’s tan arm, but she wouldn’t run with me. So I did some sprinting with the dogs. I rolled on the lawn. Far away, there was a line of clouds catching the last red of the sunset on their crowns.

I had spent the first part of the week trying to think of things to do, but anything worth doing involved having at least one sister around. That’s the way it was at Grandma and Grandpa’s. There was no substitute for a sister. On Tuesday, Grandma had bought me a set of string-connected walkie-talkies from the five-and-dime, and she even tried them out with me. But what were you supposed to say to Grandma over a string-connected walkie-talkie?

“Grandma,” I had whispered conspiratorially from the top of the stairs, “I think it’s time to take the cookies out of the oven.”

This was doubly stupid because (a) it was stupid, and (b) the cookies had been baked hours ago. Plus, the walkie-talkies hadn’t worked.

And now that my sisters were here, they were stubbornly lethargic. They didn’t want to do anything. Yes, so I ran with the dogs by myself. I rolled by myself. I did somersaults by myself. I went and stood in the middle of the gravel road and looked one way, then the other, and then I looked back at my family assembled there in a line of lawn chairs. It was getting dark, and I couldn’t tell if anyone was looking at me.

But in the morning I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to feel the hot sun on the back of my neck and watch Grandpa driving the tractor across the field and listen to Grandma practice the organ in the cool, empty church and have her wash my hair in the kitchen sink.

You could see farther there. The sun was always out.