All the Truth That's in Me (14 page)

Last night’s grandiose plans are a handful of snow down the back of my neck. In this storm I could barely even reach the cabin, much less survive there. Even if this snow were gone in two days, I’m not prepared to venture off alone yet. What would I eat? What would I burn?

And how can I leave Darrel?

But, oh, to endure a winter cooped inside with Mother’s scorn.
And you.
I will leave, but not until spring.

VI.

Darrel’s face is plastered to the window. He takes a child’s delight in the snow. He must wipe the pane each time it frosts over with his breath.

From indoors, where the fire crackles, it is a gorgeous snowfall, coating every branch and limb, painting over autumn’s drab with purity. I remember past snows that charmed me just as Darrel is charmed today.

Has he yet considered how the snow will hamper him? Or how he’ll even move at all?
“Take me out in it, Judy,” he says. “I haven’t been outdoors in weeks. I want to taste the snowflakes.”
Mother doesn’t suppose this even deserves an answer.
Time, then, for Darrel’s first outing.
She mashes her hands into her hips when she finds me, moments later, fishing through the trunk for his hat and scarf.
“And what do you think you’re doing?”
I hand Darrel his trousers and help him slide them on under his nightshirt. I pull a sock over his stump, then wrap the leg of his trousers up over it and tie a string loosely around it. He pulls on his jacket and bundles his hands and head.
“You’re not going out,” Mother fumes. “You’ll catch your death.”
“I lost a foot, not a lung,” Darrel says. “It’s time for me to see the world again.”
“I forbid it.”
Darrel reaches out to me and I help him to stand.
His good leg is weak and wobbly. He clings tightly to my shoulder and I hold on tight to his waist. Together we hopstep, hop-step over the threshold and out into the snow.
“Slip and fall, why don’t you, and break your other leg.” Mother slams the door behind us.
“Winter always did cheer her up,” says Darrel.
He breathes deeply, filling himself with winter air. It smells clean and moist and sweet. His eyes are not accustomed to so much light after lying so long in the dark house, and he squints. Snowflakes melt into his orange lashes.
I look out across the way toward the stream, which snarls like long black lips across the white face of the earth. Beyond, out of sight, is your house. I see a column of smoke rise through the white sky, loose and unfurling like a girl’s long hair without her cap.
What are you about today?
Why do I care?
I don’t.
This will be a new amputation. You’ve been a part of my flesh, underneath all my skin. Your removal will bleed and leave me lame for a time.

VII.

I nudge Darrel and we hop forward. Snow squeaks under our feet. Once his leg seems to falter under his weight, and I pull him against me. He’s skin and bones now, and only a bit taller than me, so it’s not difficult to support him.

“Bet Mather and Hoss’ll be sledding at Drummond’s Hill,” Darrel says.
I nod. Undoubtedly they and a dozen other schoolboys will be there today after morning chores are done. “Class’d be cancelled, anyhow.”
His teeth chatter slightly. I’m not cold yet; the poor goose hasn’t enough meat on him to be out here in such weather.
I try to steer him back, but he refuses to budge. If I try to force him I’ll knock him headlong into a drift.
He looks at my face as if he’s just now noticed my nose.
“I want to go back to school, Judy,” he says. “It’s my only chance.”
I study his blue-gray eyes. I understand.
“Will you help me get there?”
My thoughts swirl and scatter like snowflakes on an errant wind. Will I help him make something of his life? Who will help me? Why does everyone presume that I, as damaged merchandise, forfeit any claim to happiness? That I expect nothing, have no ambitions or longings of my own? When was it agreed that my lot would be to gladly serve as a prop and a crutch for others who are whole?
And what rules of economy dictate that a boy without a foot is more whole than a girl without a tongue?
If I presume that Darrel has even given two seconds’ thought to me and my desires, I’m the fool the town supposes I am.
“Whaddya say, Judy?” He grins his dimples at me.
Darrel still thinks about his own future, as he should. And he’s right. Mother will do all she can to prevent him going, and without schooling, what can a cripple do?
Not much, as I know well.
But if I promise to help him, it locks me here, where you will always be nearby to rub salt in my open wounds.
I’m trapped for this winter. Come spring, we’ll both be more able to move. Darrel can walk to school with a crutch, and I can walk away to my new home.
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
Could I, by some miracle, find books to take with me to the colonel’s cabin? And could I, before winter is over, learn enough to read them?
I won’t be Darrel’s crutch. I make a decision. If I must stay, my delay will purchase me something useful. I clear my throat.
“You  .  .  .”
I say. His eyes widen.
“You  .  .  . go. I go. I rea—”
I am struggling with the word.
“Reab,”
it comes out.
“Judy!”
His face is all astonishment. It has been many, many years since Darrel heard my voice.
“I wan tho reab
.
”
I try again.
“Readth
.
”
I pull the stump of my tongue forward.
“Wlearn to readth. You heowp me . . . wlearn . . . to . . . readth.”
Each word demands my total concentration.
Darrel blinks like he’s seen a heavenly messenger. “You want me to help you learn to read.” He’s immensely proud of himself. My brother, the genius. “I’ve seen you working on it already. But, Judy!” He grins. “Listen to you talk!”
I glare at him. He retreats a bit. “It’s a start, anyway. . . . Mother doesn’t like you to speak, does she?”
I shake my head, then shrug. Mother’s days of making my rules are numbered.
He chews on his lower lip. “She won’t like me going to school. Nor me teaching you to read.”
I shrug.
“You wan tho go, you heowp me readth.”
He nods.
I scribble an imaginary pen through the air.
“An wriye
.
”
“And write.”
Yes.
“Can’t you write?”
I shake my head.
He nods slowly. “Too long ago to remember much.” His eyes are alight. “Here’s how we’ll do it. You bring me to school, and you stay and listen. You be a student with the other girls. And at home, at night, I’ll help you. Agreed?”
Stay at school all day? Away from Mother, away from your house?
“Yesh.”
To seal the bargain, I toss him over into a snowdrift.
He lands flailing and sputtering and is nearly half buried. His laughter rings out and bounces off the gray bones of forest trees.

VIII.

The snow lets up later in the afternoon. The sun appears in the white sky, and the house, so well insulated by drifts, grows warm and cozy until nightfall. I sit sewing by the fire and remember last night, before the snow. It might have been another world, another century, when I ran across dry leaves to you at midnight, in only a nightgown and coat.

I remember the changing mood in your eyes, and ponder what it meant.
I stab a needle through the dry, tough skin on my knuckle by mistake, and inspect the empty tunnel of white flesh that’s left behind when I yank the needle out.

IX.

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.

X.

The next morning, I go outside, swathed in scarves and shawls and armed with my bucket. It’s an effort to push the door open. At last I do, yet I remain rooted to the threshold.

“What’s the matter?” Mother calls to me, hurrying over to shut the door behind me.
I point to the ground around our house. It is covered in footprints, in front, in back, at every window. Where the snow piles deep, the prints are troughs, as if someone waded through.
“Lord have mercy,” Mother says, then pulls me in and shuts the door.

XI.

“Could be that Whiting boy,” Mother says, peering out through a gap in the shuttered window. I make sure my face betrays no emotion. I know from the pigeon-toed prints that it isn’t you. But the boots were large, whoever wore them.

“Or someone from the village, stopping by to inquire after us in the evening,” Darrel adds.
“Some tramp or other, who’s gone on his way by now?” Mother looks to me as if I might have the answer. She thinks it’s my lover. I return her gaze.
I hope it’s the village boys, in the mood for mischief and nothing more. Though mischief itself can be quite enough where overgrown boys are concerned.
After some time of peering out each window, Mother grows impatient enough with the threat of danger to thrust me out into it. Person must be milked, after all. I stamp my way through the snow, which has a hard crust over it, leaving my footprints crude and unintelligible. Not so for the other footprints, though. They must have been made earlier, when the new snow was still soft and powdery.

XII.

I finish my chores and bring in all the wood I can wrench from the frozen pile. As I work, I repeat the word:
Maria. Maria.
It’s all in the lips. The
R
is a bit awkward, but with practice, I can say it just like anyone else would. A listener would never know I wasn’t whole. After breakfast, I bundle up once more and strap on Darrel’s snowshoes.“And where do you think you’re going?” Mother demands.

“Maria,” I say, savoring the way the word sails forth almost as much as watching Mother’s cheek twitch.
What can she say to that? There’s nothing cursed or devilish about how I say
Maria
.
I step out into the blinding sunlight on the snow.
Walking over the drifts in my snowshoes presents a new aspect of the world, one from three feet higher than usual. It makes me feel giddy, as though I might fall off my perch, even though my perch is everywhere.
From this high up, your house looks humbled and insignificant, engulfed by snow. By habit I glance at the windows for a sign of your whereabouts, until I remember not to.
There’s nothing for it but to enjoy my tramp through the snow toward the village. The snowshoes slap onto the crust of snow like hands on a drum. Every bird that swoops from branch to branch adds cheery color and movement to the cold, white stillness.
In town the sight is less pristine, where dozens of men battle with sleds and shovels to claw through the snow then haul it away. I reach Maria’s house and find her wrestling with a shovel outside her door. She’s not skilled at using it, and she knows it.
“Sorry about this,” she says, looking down at her boots. “Leon’s not well enough to do it, and I’ve got to get it done before the snow ices over any more.”
“Me,” I say, reaching out my hands for the shovel.
She thrusts the blade deep into a drift. “What, ‘me’?”
It feels like Mother forcing me to say
please
when I was very young. I’m annoyed with her.
“Me,” I repeat, gesturing as if shoveling snow. If she’s going to be coy about receiving help, next time I won’t be so quick to offer.
“‘
Let
me
,
’” she prompts. “You sound like an imbecile. Use language worthy of your mind. Use what you have. Stretch it forward.”
My tongue would need to touch the backs of my teeth for the
L
and the
T
sounds in “let.” I know it won’t stretch forward that far. I’m angry enough to prove it to her. I thrust the stump of my tongue forward.
“Uueh me,” I say, sparing her none of my irritation.
“Excellent!” She beams at me. “I think there was a bit of
T
in there. Try it again. Cut the sound off abruptly. Land’s sakes, we hardly say half our
T
s as it is.”
I am grotesque when I try to engage my tongue, like a drunken idiot. I glance around, but there are no witnesses except the icicles on Maria’s roof. I shove my tongue toward my teeth until its sinews ache, and loosen my lips trying to form the sounds.
“Ueh me. Ueh me. Ueht me. Wleht me.”
Maria shrieks and points at my mouth. “There, you see! Practice. Practice is all you need. You’ll never win an elocution prize, but you can make yourself understood, if you practice. Here, here’s the shovel. You’ve earned it.” She tosses the handle toward me with a wink and disappears into her house.
I don’t know whether to laugh at Maria or throw down her shovel and trudge back home. Let me. Let me. “Llleht me.” It’s near enough to an
L
that it couldn’t be confused for anything else. I practice the words once more. The
L
improves each time, though it’s never as good as hers. The
T
is a bit heavy, a bit moist, as though it has a small
th
at its end, but it serves as a passable
T
.
Maria returns with a second shovel, and I forgive her. “Leht me,” I announce.
We fall to shoveling. Snow flies in our faces like flour on baking day.
“See what other
L
words you can say,” Maria says.
I consider. I have to concentrate so hard on my tongue stump’s movements each time, I fear I may slaver on myself. “Lllap.” That was overdone. I wipe my lip and try again. “Low. Laugh.” This earns a smile. “Lamb. Lu . . .” I feel my face grow warm despite the sting of cold grains of snow.
Maria gives me a sly wink. “That’s all right. You can say his name aloud. It won’t bother me any.”
With an effort I control my face. That was a narrow miss. “Lu-cash,” I say, then shrug, as if you were any other word to me.
“Leonh.”
Maria smiles.

XIII.

The sky turns pink, and I bid Maria “goo-bye,” at which she applauds. As it happened, we never went indoors, but we cleared her a path to the street, her woodpile, and her shed. I am shy as I kiss her cold, red cheek. She kisses mine. How long has it been since I kissed anyone?

I’m eager to get back. My feet and hands are damp. Passing down the main street, I see Alderman Brown in the doorway of his home, talking with Abijah Pratt, who stands on his porch. Alderman Brown shakes his head yet listens intently to Abijah. When they hear me approach, they turn to look. Neither says anything, but Alderman Brown inclines his head toward me. I hurry to get past them as quickly as I can.