A Simple Thing (23 page)

“Gotta get rid of these,” he mumbled, and Susannah sat up to see what he was talking about. She watched him pick up an empty beer can, and the four other empty beer cans, and put them in a plastic bag. He opened the cooler and pulled out the rest of the beer and put that in the bag, too. He opened the glove compartment and pulled out his flask and dropped that in. He held the bag with one hand, feeling its weight, considering. Then he reached for the heavy croquet ball that Janie had carried onto the boat that morning and put that inside, too, and tied the bag shut. He leaned far over the side of the boat and dropped the bag into the water and watched it sink down and down.

“The Coast Guard won't understand that I just had a beer or two,” he said. “You kids are not to say anything about the beer. It could get us all in a lot of trouble.”

Susannah stared at her father, disbelieving. He was worried about
the beer
?

“Go get her!” Susannah shouted. “You're bigger; you can dive down and find her. What is wrong with you? Go get her!”

Jon began to cry louder now, wails of terror and heartbreak that pierced the air, the soft murmur of the waves, that ripped open the clear blueness of the sky itself. Susannah didn't so much hear his screams as see them—bright streaks of grief shooting up and out and falling all around her, like the ashes from fireworks. But she didn't feel any sadness herself, not yet.
Because Janie was not dead.

But their father didn't move.

“Go get her!” Susannah shouted again. “You have to go get her!”

Her father looked at her with vacant eyes and shook his head. “She's gone,” he said.

Then he sat down and sobbed, his cries mingling with Jon's and then, finally, her own—all of it ashes, falling and falling and falling around them, grief without end.

Chapter 23

Betty 1968

The strangest thing about the accident was that Betty could not for the life of her remember what they'd been fighting about. She remembered the date: January 9. It was Jim's half birthday (twelve and a half), and she'd baked him half a cake the day before, and they were going to celebrate the half holiday and Bill's return.

She remembered standing on the dock and watching the mail boat come in. She remembered her first glimpse of Bill as he ducked to step out the door of the cabin onto the deck, his hair blowing back, his trousers whipping around his legs. She remembered her surprise at the silvery strands in his thick dark hair, even though it had been only six months since she had seen him last. Her treacherous heart still lurched at the sight of him, even though she and Barefoot had been lovers for three years now. Bill was her first love, the father of her only child, and because of their long shared history—as messy and complicated as it was—he knew her in ways no one else ever would.

His grin and green eyes were the same. He enveloped her in a hug and gave her butt a playful squeeze through her jeans.

“I missed you,” he said.

“So much that you're here ten days later than you expected.” Betty's voice was dry. She was still angry that he'd promised to be home for New Year's Eve and then called to say he'd been delayed.
Delayed, my ass,
she thought.

“Come on, Betty, I did miss you. Look at you.”

He pushed her an arm's length away, his hand still resting on her shoulder, and let his green eyes travel from her boots to the outline of her hips and up to her throat, her lips, her eyes. He looked into her eyes and held her gaze. “I mean it. Look at you. Thirty-six and you've still got it.”

“What I've got is a hungry almost teenager at home and a pen full of bawling goats that need to be milked,” Betty said.

He threw his duffel bag in the back of the pickup and slid in behind the wheel. It had been an unusually dry January, and they jolted over the hard roads, the windows rolled down in spite of the cold so Bill could smell the Sounder air. Dry leaves rustled in the gullies along the side of the road as they drove by. It was a fine, clear day. Betty spotted small clusters of white snowdrops amid the brown at the edge of the forest. Bill kept one hand on the wheel and one hand clamped on her thigh.

They talked about Jim; she remembered that. She remembered telling Bill about the parachute incident in August. Jim had become fascinated with parachutes and experimented with making homemade parachutes out of old sails and plastic garbage bags and canvas tarps. For a while he'd had fun attaching his parachutes to apples or gourds and throwing them off the roof of the cottage. Then he'd gotten the brilliant idea of making a giant parachute for an old cedar log that had been lying up on top of Crane's Point for years. The parachute he constructed, with the help of two buddies, was huge. But Jim had forgotten about how much time in the air was required to build up enough drag to allow a heavy object to actually
float
from a parachute. When he and his friends attached their homemade parachute to the log with nylon cord and then rolled the log off the cliff, it dropped like a bomb right behind Bill Chevalier's boat as he was coming in from fishing.

“If they'd dropped that log two seconds earlier they'd have killed him,” Betty told Bill.

She remembered how Bill laughed, his head thrown back, one hand on the wheel and the other still on her leg.

But then what? She had no idea. They started to argue about something just as they turned into the long gravel driveway of the farm. Maybe it was because he had come home a week late; maybe it was because he'd been gone so long. It might have been about missing Christmas, or the chores, or his next trip. She wondered later if she'd picked the fight because of her own guilt about Barefoot. Whatever the reason, when they got to the first gate, he put the car in park and hopped out to open the gate, leaving the engine running.

Betty slid over into the driver's seat.
You son of a bitch,
she remembered thinking.
You can damn well walk the rest of the way
. She meant to nose the truck through once he opened the gate, then speed on to the next gate, so she could pop out and open it and drive through before he could catch up to her on foot. But when she pushed the clutch in and shifted gears, the truck lurched, and then shot forward. She felt the thump and heard it at the same time. One second Bill was there, his back to her as he pushed the gate to the side, and then he was gone. The thump sounded like a ripe pumpkin hitting the ground.

She released the clutch and slammed her foot down on the brake and swung the wheel hard to the right, away from Bill, or where Bill had been. The truck rattled across the frozen furrows of the field, coming to a stop in a ditch at the edge of the woods. She struggled to push open the door, which wasn't easy because the truck was at an angle and the door was uphill.

“Bill!” She cranked the window down, climbed through it, and clambered out into the ditch. She scrambled on her hands and knees up the side of the ditch until she found her footing and stood. She saw Bill lying motionless next to the gate, his body sprawled at an odd angle, with one arm twisted behind his back. She ran to him.

His eyes were closed, but his mouth was open. She noticed a stream of bright red blood coming from his ear. She put her hands on his shoulders to shake him, to wake him up, but then realized she shouldn't move him in case he'd hurt his neck or back. And it was at that moment, with her hands gripping his shoulders through the thick wool of his coat, that she noticed the odd stillness.

His shoulders were still beneath her hands. His mouth was open, but his chest was still. She slid her hand up the side of his neck to the spot just behind the angle of his jaw—a spot she'd kissed often during lovemaking, when she'd trace a path of kisses from his ear, down along the line of his jaw, until she found his lips—but that spot, the spot where his pulse was supposed to be, was still, too.

She gripped his shoulders more tightly. “
Bill!
”

She shook him then, yelling his name over and over, willing his chest to rise and fall, his eyelids to flutter. He remained still, his head hanging back. Yet she kept shaking him and shaking him until her son, who had heard her cries, came running over the frozen fields and found her there, with his father's lifeless body in her arms.

 

It was January and the ground was hard, but one of their neighbors had a backhoe and they were able to dig out a grave for him in the small Sounder cemetery. Bill hadn't set foot inside a church since his boyhood in Massachusetts, but Jim wanted to make a wooden cross to mark the grave, and it didn't matter to Betty. If it made Jim feel better to have his father buried under a symbol of God, so be it.

Ted Ross, who was great with cars and could fix anything with an engine, checked out the truck after the accident and found a mechanical malfunction that had caused the truck to slip out of gear. “It wasn't your fault, Betty,” he said, holding out the guilty part for her inspection. “It could have happened to anyone.”

“It didn't, though,” she said. “It happened to me.”

The medical examiner told her that Bill's death was bad luck. He'd been standing in such a way that when the truck hit him he'd been thrown forward and his head had slammed against the ground. The impact had fractured his skull.

Jim never blamed her for the accident with even a look. He grieved his father more than she had imagined, given how little time Bill had actually spent at home, but she understood he was grieving the loss of all the possibilities he'd hoped for as much as anything else. He tried to take care of her, in his twelve-year-old-boy way. He made clumsy grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner and put them in front of her, even though food had lost all appeal. He spent less time with his friends and more time at home, watching her. Bobbie begged her to come live with her in Seattle, but Betty refused. Sounder was the only home Jim had ever known. She had to stay here, where Bill had last been, where Bill was now.

With his death, much of the bitterness over his infidelities faded, as did the hurt over the months and years spent alone. She was left with the remnants of her love, her longing, and an all-consuming guilt.

While Bill was alive, she had felt little guilt about her affair with Barefoot. Barefoot loved her and nurtured her in a way Bill never had. She trusted Barefoot completely. She understood enough about herself to realize that without Barefoot her marriage would have collapsed under the weight of her anger and loneliness—something that would have crushed her son, who knew nothing of his father's infidelities. But now—now her relationship with Barefoot seemed ugly, opportunistic. She had, in some of her worst moments with Bill, wished Bill dead. And now he
was
dead, and she was responsible.

She was haunted by the
ifs:
if she hadn't been so mad and decided to drive on past the gate without him, if she'd waited for him to open the gate all the way and then pulled through slowly, or if she'd hopped out to get the gate herself . . .

Bill's presence had often hovered through her days and nights even when he was away. Now it was bigger than ever in this final absence. She couldn't sleep, because his body filled the bed; couldn't eat, because his face was always across the table from hers; couldn't sit on the porch, because she was waiting for the sound of his footsteps on the gravel drive. She told Barefoot, who had come to her as soon as he heard about the accident, that she couldn't see him for a while, not even as a friend. She needed time to think.

Barefoot tried. He came to her house and stood on the porch and talked to her through the door. He left herbs and tea and wine and food. He wrote to her, and she left the letters on the floor by the front door to gather dust. She did not deserve to be loved so.

When spring came, she threw herself into the physical labor of the farm. It was a relief to work to the point of exhaustion, to sleep for a few hours. She had to wait until the end of May to plant the corn and beans and squash, but she spent February and March digging out the blackberry bushes that were growing up next to the field, and cleaning out the barn, and repairing the chicken coop.

One day in April she was turning over the dirt in the garden and preparing the beds for the potatoes when Barefoot walked up the driveway. He stopped and watched her for a while. She could feel his eyes on her as she pushed the spade into the ground, lifted shovelfuls of dirt, turned the spade over to drop the newly turned earth back onto the ground. Finally she stopped and turned to look at him.

“Hello,” she said.

Barefoot didn't bother to return the greeting. “Look at you,” he said. “You're emaciated—stand there with your arms straight out and no one would know you weren't a scarecrow.” He reached over and took one of her hands in his own and turned it over, studying the back of her hand and then the palm. Her knuckles were swollen and cracked, her palms covered in calluses, her fingernails chipped and broken. He dropped her hand and looked at her.

“Got a hair shirt on under that flannel?” he said. “Or do you just flog yourself before bed?”

“None of your business,” she said.

He stepped closer and leaned in toward her until she could feel the rough stubble of his unshaven face against her cheek. It stirred something in her, a memory.

“Listen to me,” he said into her ear. His voice was low, deliberate. “You keep at this, you keep letting all that guilt wrap itself around your soul like ivy, and soon your son will have lost both parents. Is that what you want?”

He pulled back and stared at her now, his blue eyes locked on hers in what Jim called Barefoot's “gunfighter stare.”

“I take care of Jim,” she said. “That hasn't changed.”

“I'm sure you do,” Barefoot said. “You want him to grow up confident and proud and believing he's worthy?”

She was too tired to talk. “Of course,” Betty said.

“Can't give your kids what you don't have,” Barefoot said.

She looked at him. She tried to remember what it felt like to care about something, anything.

“It doesn't matter if you work yourself to death or keep breathing. You're as good as dead now if you keep on like this.” He paused, and leaned in toward her again. “If you've decided you're a worthless piece of shit because your truck slipped a gear and the fates were misaligned at that moment, go hang yourself and get it over with. But if not, if you can see it for what it was, a tragic accident with no one at fault, then treat yourself with the kindness you would show to anyone else in the same circumstances.
You
choose.”

She turned her head so she didn't have to look at those eyes anymore.

He reached over and took the hoe from her hand. “Go home,” he said. “I left some tea on the counter. Steep it for ten minutes. It'll help you sleep.”

He put his hand on her cheek. “I love you and I will not give you up,” he said. “You don't have to love me back or make love with me or do a damn thing other than stop torturing yourself. That's enough for me.”