A Simple Thing (17 page)

When Susannah told Katie she was going to spend the afternoon working for Barefoot, her face registered complete astonishment.

“Barefoot is crazy,” Katie said. “Hood and Baker told me he blew off some guy's hand with a shotgun because the guy was trying to rob him.”

“Jim has known Barefoot forever and trusts him around
his
kids.
If
that story is true, which I doubt, I'm sure there's more to it than that.”

“Yeah, well that's the kind of thing you might want to find out
first
.”

“I'll take my chances,” Susannah said.

Katie sat up in bed. “Mom, you are so overreacting to this poem. You know, marijuana is legal in, like, twenty states. Maybe you should try it sometime.”

“Very funny. Get up and get dressed.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes, seriously. We'll see how working for Barefoot goes. Also, you're going to have to stick closer to home for a while. No more wandering all over the island or disappearing with Hood.”

“What?” Angry tears sprang to Katie's eyes. “You can't do that!”

The iceberg was out there, looming. “Yes, I can,” Susannah said. “Get dressed.”

After lunch, she drove Katie up to Barefoot's in the truck, barely slowing down to drop her off. As she made her way home along the dirt roads, she noticed, as always, the piles of junk on some of the properties she passed, the rusted shells of old cars and stoves, mounds of broken pottery, rotting wooden crates—the detritus of human lives, more visible here because it couldn't be easily discarded, carted away. There was a similar pile near Betty's house, and as Susannah pulled the truck up to the end of the dirt drive, she stopped and hopped out and knocked on Betty's door.

“I have a question about the junk pile,” Susannah said, as Betty opened the door.

“Oh, Jesus,” Betty said. She put a hand on one hip. “Don't tell me you're going to try to ‘civilize' us by asking me to hide the junk behind a decorative fence or something crazy like that. Junk is part of life here.”

“I know,” Susannah said. “I wanted to know if I could
use
it, if you'd mind if I went through it and took a few things.”

Betty looked incredulous. “Would I mind if you took the junk? Honey, you can hang it from the trees for all I care. I've been throwing things on that heap since I moved here fifty-six years ago, and the folks who lived here before me had a junk pile there, too.” She looked at Susannah over the rims of her glasses. “What are you going to do with it?”

“I'm not quite sure.” Susannah rooted through the pockets of her coat for her gloves. The collages she'd made for Pizza and Poetry Day had unleashed something in her. She wanted to
create,
to focus on something other than her kids, herself, her marriage, her failures.

“I don't know. Make something.” She paused. “I miss my job. I loved doing windows. Once, I painted a bunch of old wooden picture frames gold and hung them all over the window, with a single shoe in each one. They really did look like works of art.” She stood still for a moment, remembering. Another time she had painted a landscape on a backdrop—a deep blue lake with little waves edged in gold, surrounded by mountains in bright shades of yellow and orange, their slopes covered in green and black trees. For the whole painting she used brushstrokes that resembled the stitchery in Nordic knitting, then filled the window with white sweaters and mittens that stood out like spots of light against the richly colored background.

“That sounds like a lot more fun than any work I ever had,” Betty said.

“It
was
fun,” Susannah said. “But I quit when Katie was born.” At the time, quitting had seemed like the only thing to do.

Her own mother was a vague background figure in Susannah's memories of childhood—often distracted, or in bed with a headache or backache or sinus infection, or standing in helpless silence when her father was drunk. Susannah was determined she would never be
that
mother, the mother with the fearful, lonely children. Her children would always feel loved, protected, secure. So she nursed them each for a year, made baby food from scratch, took them to toddler gymnastics classes and art classes. She volunteered in their classrooms, played endless imaginary games, told stories, sewed costumes, threw memorable birthday parties. She even gave them handmade Christmas gifts every year, along with all the other toys and games.

Even when the kids had entered elementary school and then middle school, Susannah was still involved—maybe a little
too
involved, she thought now. She volunteered to oversee the book fair, organize the International Dinner, shelve books in the school library. But with each commitment, with every meeting and event, she had found herself bored, even resentful. She was sick of baking brownies for the baseball team and xeroxing flyers for the book fair and cleaning up after the team pizza party. Her life was an endless round of obligations. She couldn't remember the last time she had done something for no other reason than that
she
felt like it—she, herself, Susannah.

She eyed the junk pile again with eagerness. “Can I look through it now?”

“Sure. Let me get my coat. I'll help you. Or at least, advise you.”

Susannah pulled on her gloves and began to sort through the pile. It was, indeed, junk—pots and pans with holes burned through the bottom, rusting bedsprings, broken dishes and teacups, a discarded rototiller, a wooden chair with only two legs.

Betty returned in her thick green coat, hands in her pockets.

“When does Matt arrive?”

Matt. Susannah had called him five times in the last twenty-four hours but hadn't reached him, nor had he called her back.

“The day before Thanksgiving.”

“What did he think about Katie's poem?” Betty sat down on one of the wooden steps in front of her house.

“I don't know. I haven't talked to him since early yesterday morning.” Susannah stopped picking through the junk and stood for a moment, leaning on a purple wooden shutter. “I think he's having a harder time than I thought he would with us being out here. But it must seem silly to you. You didn't even have cell phones or e-mail when your husband was away.”

“We wrote letters.”

Susannah remembered Matt's angry voice on the phone. “Maybe that was better.”

Betty eyed her. “We didn't really communicate much when Bill was away.”

Susannah sighed. “Matt's not much of a communicator even when we're together.”

Betty crossed both arms over her chest and hugged herself against the cold. “A lot of men aren't. I was lucky to have a man in my life who was good at understanding me, who was a good listener, and comfortable with talking about all kinds of things.”

Susannah shook her head. “You married well, then.”

Betty looked at Susannah and raised one eyebrow.

“I didn't say that man was my husband.”

Chapter 17

Betty 1962

Nineteen sixty-two was a hard year. Even now, almost fifty years later, much of it was a blur to Betty. Bill left for a nine-month work stint in September. In October, Jim, who was six, caught his foot in a hole while running in the meadow and broke his leg. The cast he wore (after the trip to the hospital, which involved a bone-jolting drive in the truck to the landing strip on Sounder, where her friend Wiley Loughran waited with his plane to fly them to Bellingham) stretched all the way from his foot to his hip bone. Once they were back home, Betty had to carry him everywhere, from the truck to the house, from room to room inside, from the bed to the couch. Jim was tall for his age and weighed almost fifty pounds. It was hard physical work.

In November, Claire and Don and the boys moved to San Francisco, and Betty missed her keenly. Claire's light heart and loyalty had eased much of her loneliness on Sounder, and her boys had been Jim's closest playmates. Then, in December, she got a telegram from Bobbie that their mother and Grammy had been in a car accident. By the time Betty found someone who would take Jim for a few days, and traveled by boat and ferry and seaplane to Seattle, Grammy was dead.

She stayed for the funeral and to help figure out what to do with Mother, who faced at least another two months of physical therapy and walking with a cane, and Mel, whose anxiety in the wake of the accident was so crippling that she couldn't leave the house. They finally agreed that Mother would move in with Bobbie for a few months, and Mel would come to Sounder with Betty until March 1.

Betty didn't sleep for the next two months, or at least it felt that way. Jim awoke at least once every night needing to go to the bathroom, and even though she'd put a bucket in his room so he could pee at night, he needed her help getting into an upright position with his clunky cast. Mel didn't sleep much and often wandered the little cottage at night, pacing in circles around the dining room table, pausing to warm her hands by the woodstove, then pacing again. Betty drove Jim to and from school every day and carried him up and down the wooden steps to the schoolhouse, then went home to take care of the goats and chickens and cook and do laundry until her hands were callused and raw. Mel helped with small things—she loved to fold laundry, and was good at peeling carrots and potatoes—but in many ways having Mel there was like having another child to care for.

Late one afternoon in February, with the shadows of the pines long across the meadow, Betty got in the truck and drove up to Barefoot's house to get some cowslip and betony for Mel, and a special tea for Jim to strengthen his bones.

She found Barefoot standing in the kitchen, contemplating five piles of dried leaves arranged in a line on the counter. He wore khakis and a white V-neck T-shirt, and no shoes. He wasn't wearing his bandanna, either, and his thick dark hair curled around the back of his neck. He picked up the first pile and rubbed the leaves between his two hands over a bowl until they were crumbled into tiny bits.

“Hello.”

Barefoot glanced up at her, then back at the bowl. “I'm making the tea for Jim.”

“What's in it?”

“Oat straw, horsetail, nettles, red clover, and comfrey. Put plenty of honey in it, and he'll drink it right down.”

“His leg is healing well. I hope he can swim a lot this summer. The doctor said swimming would be good for him.”

“It will be.” Barefoot finished crumbling the leaves. He turned to look at her, and his blue eyes traveled from her face down her body to her boots and back up again. She felt exposed by his stare, and turned her head.

“You look like you could use a tonic yourself,” Barefoot said. “How much weight have you lost?”

“I don't know. We don't have a scale.”

“Are you sleeping?”

She shook her head. “Not well. I wake up a lot. If Jim needs to go to the bathroom during the night, he needs me. And Mel doesn't sleep well, so she wanders the house sometimes. You know how the floors creak.”

Barefoot picked up a little metal scoop from the counter and began to spoon the tea leaves from the bowl into a small brown paper sack.

“When is that husband of yours coming home?”

Betty leaned against the doorframe. “April fifteenth.” She didn't want to talk about Bill. She had sent him a telegram when Jim broke his leg, and then written him a letter about Mel. He'd written her back, full of concern about Jim, but hadn't offered to come home early, or expressed any concern at all about her, about how lonely and exhausted she might be, caring for Jim and Mel at the same time.

“I wish I had a cigarette,” she said.

“You shouldn't smoke. I've never let tobacco touch my lungs.”

She looked around the kitchen. She liked Barefoot's kitchen, with the paned windows that let in the golden afternoon sun, the white porcelain sink, the simple wood counters and white cupboards, the beautiful orange and turquoise rug on the floor. She looked up at the quote painted in black above the back door, the one that led out to the greenhouse:

 

Since my house burned down / I now own a better view / of the rising moon.

—Mizuta Masahide

 

“Why do you have that quote up there?”

“I like it.”

“Why?”

He turned to face her again. “Because it reminds me that the only thing that gives an experience any weight is the way you look at it.”

She was bone tired suddenly. She even had that thought,
I am bone tired,
but felt as if she really understood it for the first time. All at once her very bones seemed like too much weight for her exhausted muscles and tendons and skin to hold, as though she might collapse like a house of cards, tumbling down into nothingness.

“Sit down,” Barefoot said. He came over and grabbed her elbow, led her to the long red velvet couch in the living room, and pushed her down onto it. “I'm going to make you tea and some food. Are your people all right for now?”

She looked up at him. “Yes. Jim's at a friend's house, and Mel is sleeping. That's why I came over. I had a minute.”

“Elizabeth,” he said, “you are killing yourself slowly with too much work and too much worry. Good God, why not drink laudanum and be done with it?”

“I don't have a choice,” she said. “What do you want me to do, tell Jim I won't carry him to the bathroom or up the steps to school? Or tell my poor crazy sister she has to go live in an asylum?” She felt all at once as if she wanted to cry, which she had not done even once over these last five long months. But she'd be damned if she'd cry in front of Barefoot.

“Tell that asshole husband of yours to come home.”

Betty stood up. “Please,” she said. “I'm too tired to argue with you.”

He came to her then and put his arms around her. She rested her head against his chest, just for moment.
I shouldn't be doing this,
she thought. But then his gentleness undid her. He pulled back from her and kissed her eyelids, then the tip of her nose, then her ear, and her throat. He kissed her collarbone, and her jaw. He didn't touch her, except with his lips. She felt her body swell and flush under his touch.

She shook her head.

He stepped back and opened his blue eyes wide and stared straight into hers. “What do you want?” he said.

“I want to go home,” she said.

He nodded slowly. “All right.”

He walked across the living room of the farmhouse and opened the front door. “Want me to drive you?”

She shook her head again. “No,” she said. She didn't move. He came back to where she stood. “I'm so tired,” she said.

And then he scooped her up in his arms, as though she were a small child and not the tall, ungainly woman she had always felt herself to be, and carried her up the narrow staircase to his bedroom and laid her down on his bed. He pulled a comforter over her that smelled faintly of cedar, and before she could protest too much, she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

When she awoke it was dark. She sat up in a panic, thinking about Mel and Jimmy, and flung the covers off. Barefoot opened the bedroom door, carrying a kerosene lantern in one hand. “Don't get up,” he said. “I drove over and asked Alice MacDonald if she could spend the night with your two. She used to be a nurse. They'll be fine.”

“I can't spend the night here.”

“I'll sleep on the couch. Wait here. I brought you dinner.”

He disappeared and returned with a tray. A beautiful gold-rimmed porcelain plate held freshly grilled salmon, and there was also homemade bread, a salad of greens and herbs, and a glass of dark purple wine. She scooted back against the headboard and he placed the tray in her lap. She couldn't remember the last time she had eaten food she hadn't grown or killed or shopped for or prepared herself. She was ravenous. Barefoot sat across from her in a plain, straight-backed wooden chair, and watched her eat. When she was done, he picked up the tray and took it downstairs, returning with a pot of warm herbal tea and a thick slice of chocolate cake. She ate that, too.

“Why are you doing this?” she said at last, as she leaned back, satiated, sipping her tea.

“I want to take care of you,” he said.

She laughed. For all of her thirty-one years she had been strong, independent, competent, and a caretaker. She'd taken care of her younger brother and sisters, she'd taken care of Bill, and now she'd cared for Jim and Mel. She hadn't worked in an office in more than a decade, but she handled everything at home, from managing their finances to repairing the pump to inoculating the goats.

“I don't need to be taken care of,” she said. “I take care of everyone else. That's what I do.”

“Well, I don't want to be taken care of,” Barefoot said. “Maybe it's your turn.”

And it was then that something in her broke, all the practicality and self-control that had allowed her to maintain her marriage to Bill and raise Jim and run the farm alone. She put down her teacup on the table next to the bed and looked at Barefoot.

“No one has taken care of me in a long time,” she said.

He shrugged.

And then, without even thinking, she slid over to the edge of the bed and leaned forward and rested her forehead against his and closed her eyes.

“Thank you,” she said.

And this time she was the one who touched him with her lips, gently at first and then more urgently, until he pushed her down on to the bed. At first his lips and hands and body felt strange—Bill was the only man she'd ever even kissed—but Barefoot's touch was so tender and his concern for her so clear and direct that she relaxed and felt her body respond as it hadn't in years. He talked to her as he moved inside her, staring directly into her eyes, telling her how beautiful she was, until his words and the rhythm of their bodies moving together exploded inside her.

So Betty, who wasn't a cheater, became one. And Barefoot, who wasn't a monogamist, became one.