All Things Cease to Appear (6 page)

I went there, she said so softly he almost couldn’t hear. I was going to be a nurse.

The pawnshop was on River Street, the word spelled out in gold letters on the window. Cole helped his mother with the boxes, but she wouldn’t let him go in and made him wait outside. For a while he sat on the bench under the window. A group of girls in school uniforms came up the sidewalk, noisy as ducks, followed by two nuns. Cole got back into the car and played the radio and smoked one of his mother’s butts, and a little while later she came out, clutching her purse. The man from the shop stepped out as well and lit a cigar. He had a napkin tucked into his collar, like he’d just finished lunch and had forgotten all about it, and he was big and fat. He squinted hard at Cole as they pulled away.

After that the days went into each other and they wore him down. He couldn’t count on anything like he used to, not even supper, and he was always a little relieved when she came into their room to get them up for school.

That Friday morning she even made breakfast, her back keeping a secret as she worked the frying pan. His father sat at the table in his one church suit and a bolo tie he’d carved himself in the shape of a horse head. In his hand was the bank ledger where he wrote down his numbers. Cole heard him tell her, I’ll get on my knees if that’s what it takes.

There’s your bus, boys, she said.

It was just him and Wade. Eddy had been out for two years. He’d wanted to go to music school but their father said no. Eddy filled out the application anyway, putting in twenty bucks he’d stolen from their mother’s wallet, but the old man found it and ripped the papers to pieces. Now it didn’t even matter, since they wouldn’t need him on the farm anymore. The stupid fight had been for nothing.

The bus came to a stop and they climbed up into the noise. Their mother stood watching from the doorway, her pale hand like a flag of surrender. He thought about the word
surrender
and didn’t like it. The bus rocked over the pitted road. Rain on the windows like spit. He looked out at horses, sheep. They passed the plastics factory and the park nobody ever went to and the electrical substation with the chain-link fence. The sign on the fence said
High Voltage
and had a skull and crossbones on it, which got him thinking how the world was set up and how your life could depend on other people’s mistakes.

The bus turned into Chosen, past the crummy houses on Main Street, with their
Beware of Dog
signs and Holy Virgin statues, before stopping at the light. Out his window he saw Patrice standing on the curb, clutching her notebook. Last year, at the town fair, they rode the roller coaster together. It was just how the line worked out, the two of them ushered up together and strapped in. The whole time, they held hands in the screaming dark. Seeing her now, standing there in her uniform and baggy knee socks, made his insides go sharp. As the bus turned into the parking lot she looked up for a second and met his eyes. He put his hand up on the window as if to secure some imaginary pact, but she had already looked away and was crossing the street.

The last thing he could remember about that week was on Saturday, when their father took down the kites. All winter they stayed in the barn, stretched across the old beams next to the skis and fishing poles. He could remember his father’s face as he worked the string, winding it around his elbow to the crook of his hand, a dreamy light in his eyes. They carried their kites like rifles up to the ridge, where the wind was fast. You could hear the wind rattling the thin paper, which was adorned with snakes. The kites were from Tokyo, from when their father was stationed with the air force, back before he’d had kids. He said he’d gotten to know the city pretty well and had liked it. He’d been there a whole year. One time they found some pictures in a cardboard box. There was one of his father in his uniform and a canoe-shaped hat, and another of a strange woman in her undergarments, her skin marshmallow-white, her smile pointy in the shadow-filled room.

Let her go, their father said, as the wind shook their kites—that sound they made, like a thousand birds, as they shot into the sky, free at last.

2

THEN,
when they had nothing left, he found them. It was morning, before school. People said it was an accident. She left her car running. Their room was over the garage, and fumes had drifted up through the uneven boards. There they were in the bed, pressed close like lovers or maybe children, holding hands. Lined against the wall were baskets of folded laundry, and the thought occurred to him that, even dead, she didn’t want anyone getting stuck with her chores.

An accident, people said. A mistake. But Cole knew, they all did.

They had a wake, people drifting by their coffins, afraid to get too close. After it was over Father Geary came to the house in his black Beetle. Their uncle, Rainer, brought his girlfriend, Vida, and stood around in his cheap suit, smoking. The boys carried their ashes up to the ridge. Eddy held their father’s, Wade their mother’s. The muddy field swallowed Vida’s shoes. She took them off and walked across the soft earth in her stockings. Up on top, they stood in a tight circle, the sun full and bright. They spilled out the ashes and the wind blew them away. Father Geary said a prayer, and Cole wondered if his mother was with Jesus now and hoped she was. He pictured her up there taking His hand, and that made him feel a little better. He pictured her in a white gown, standing on a cloud, the yellow rays streaming out like they did on the cover of his catechism book.

We’re all you boys have now, his uncle apologized, his hand heavy on Cole’s shoulder as they walked back down to the house.

In the afternoon, people came to pay their respects. Mrs. Lawton and her husband came with Travis. Why don’t you boys get some fresh air, the sheriff said.

Cole put on his father’s coat and it swam around him like a shadow. He pushed his hands into the pockets, curled his fingers around a bag of Drum and some papers. Cole could smell him, tobacco and gasoline and sweat. He thought maybe it was the smell of bad luck.

They crossed the wet field and walked back up to the ridge, the wind in their ears. Travis watched him roll a cigarette and they stood close so he could light it. Cole could smell the fried chicken Travis had eaten for lunch and it made him hungry. Travis dragged on the cigarette like somebody playing a kazoo and looked at Cole mournfully. I’m real sorry about your folks. He held out his hand like a grown man and Cole shook it. They stood there a while longer, looking down at the house, the brown fields, the cars parked haphazardly in the dead grass.

After everyone left, Father Geary tucked a dish towel into his trousers and made them a dinner of pork chops and peas and potatoes. When they were done, Eddy rolled cigarettes while Wade made tea and then they sat there, drinking tea and smoking. Father Geary liked to drink his out of a glass and taught Wade how to pour the boiling water over the blade of a knife so the glass wouldn’t break. Drinking tea like this seemed exotic to Cole, and it gave him the idea that there might be life beyond the farm, although he could hardly imagine it.

He had come to know the priest through observation and his mother said he was a man of the world, but Cole didn’t know what she meant by that. Maybe that he’d been places, important places, and knew things ordinary people had never heard about. His mother had been fond of Father Geary and sometimes Cole imagined she was a little in love with him, even though priests aren’t supposed to fall in love. He wondered how much she’d told Father Geary about his father and how meanly he’d treated her, the things he sometimes did to her.

They walked Father Geary to the door, where he put on his coat and wrapped a scarf around his neck. He pulled Cole close and patted him on the back, and Cole could smell his hair cream and the shrill lozenge in his mouth as he whispered, Your mother’s with God now. Cole watched him cross the front yard in his black clothes to his car and could see the heavy clouds collecting on his windshield. As he drove away, Cole wondered where this man lived and what he’d do when he got there.

—

THAT DAY,
after the pawnshop. The last time he’d been with her alone, she hurried into the car, her cheeks painted with shame. Going home, they passed some girls selling kittens and pulled over to have a look. His mother scooped an orange kitty into her hands. Cole picked a black one. How much? his mother asked.

Pop’s gonna be mad.

Oh, they’re free, the older girl said.

He thought he saw his mother smile. They put the kittens in the car and she sat there for a minute without starting it and then tears rolled down her cheeks again. The same girl came over and said, Is she all right? Like his mother couldn’t answer for herself, like she wasn’t even there.

She pulled back onto the road, and for a long time they were quiet, with just the wind blasting through the windows and the kittens mewing. He finally said, You’ll be okay, Ma, and she nodded like he was right and said, I’ll be fine, like she needed to say it out loud and confirm it in her own mind. He smiled at her even though he wasn’t happy, then turned on the radio, and it was a Woody Guthrie tune and they sang it together, heading home:
Hey, boys, I’ve come a long ways / Well, boys, I’ve come a long ways / Oh boys, I’ve come a long lonesome ways, / Along in the sun and the rain.

She was dead now and he had begun to hate her for it. He would try very hard to remember her, how pretty she looked in her church clothes or the hard face she made when she smoked, but the pictures in his mind only made him sad.

He never knew what happened to those kittens, because the next day they were gone. He searched the house and the barns and the fields, but there was no trace at all, and he thought maybe his father had dumped them someplace, and sometimes, when he thought back on that last day with her, the orange sky, or singing together so loud, he wondered if it was just something he’d dreamed up.

That whole week Cole didn’t go to school and no one came looking for him. Everything kind of stopped. His brothers roaming around, doing nothing. Dishes piled up on the counters, old cans full of butts. For half a day he watched things in the house. The curtains barely moving. Stink bugs climbing up the window frame, then falling back to the floor right before reaching the top; he’d throw his ball, trying to hit one. You could hear things, the wind. Time passed, he guessed. Time had become something else, something strange. You couldn’t see the beginning or the end of things. There was only this middle part.

Strangers bringing food, neighbors. Climbing onto the porch, their arms outstretched, holding platters of fried chicken, meatloaf, stuffed peppers. One night, Mrs. Pratt cooked them dinner. Roast beef and green beans. Her name was June, her husband called her Juniper. She had hands that crept softly, like frightened animals. For some reason they didn’t have any kids. Mr. Pratt worked for General Electric. He wore clean shoes and had clean fingernails and smelled like limes, and Eddy said he had a desk job. They ate in silence, their forks clanking, like they were waiting for something. After they left, Eddy sat in their father’s chair and rolled cigarettes and drank their father’s whiskey, and his fingertips had gone yellow and his hands were big and square. Smoke drifted lazily through the room, mixing with the flashing blue light of the TV, and Cole got scared, and thought about all the things around the farm that needed fixing and how nobody had ever bothered to repair them or even notice they were broken.

Eddy was the boss now. He took after their father, ornery and skeptical, but also had their mother’s patience. Like all of the Hales, he was tall and had blue eyes, though Eddy’s were meaner and the girls liked that. In his dark farm clothes he offered them a dare. They thought they could save him.

Wade shuffled around the house, his clothes baggy and not fastened or buttoned. That was just Wade. He wasn’t a stickler for details. He said he planned to join up with the army the minute he turned eighteen and nobody could stop him.

I made up my mind.

You got to finish school first.

Long as they don’t throw me out.

Long as you don’t cause any trouble.

You don’t have to get mad.

I’m not mad.

I made up my mind. You can’t talk me out of it.

Eddy handed Cole a toolbox. Here, he said. Make yourself useful.

The greasy metal toolbox had been their father’s. It held a bunch of rusty screwdrivers and a hammer and a whole array of nails. With satisfaction, he nailed down some loose boards. When that was done he figured out how to replace a broken windowpane in the cellar with a fresh square of glass and only cut his finger a little bit and it didn’t even hurt. He tried to screw the banister back onto the wall, but the screw was stripped and he didn’t have another one that fit just right and the wood was too soft to hold it anyway. It was beyond his expertise, he told Eddy.

After a few days he got to thinking things would be all right, that they could go on just the three of them, but then these two men in suits showed up. They stood on the porch like they were selling something. After they made their introductions, the skinny one said, You all’s got a default on your loan. I’m here to tell you that the bank’s repossessing this farm. He presented the letter like they’d won something.

Eddy said, Our mother had plans to sell it.

The man put his hand on Eddy’s shoulder. Too late for that now, son. It’ll go up for auction in a couple of weeks.

The other man gave them each a box. Put your stuff in it.

After the men left, Eddy said, Go get in her car.

The garage was dark, the car just sitting there. Eddy swung the doors open with a kind of grace, like a magician about to do a trick. Since Cole was youngest, Eddy made him sit in the back. Cole thought he could still smell exhaust and tried to hold his breath. Where we going, Eddy? Wade said. Eddy didn’t answer. He started the engine and backed out fast and drove into the field. The car dipped and lurched. One of her lipsticks rolled around on the floor. The sun was sinking down behind the ridge. It was halfway to dark, and the locust trees were ready to fight with their curled black fists. The wind slammed up against the windows. In the middle of the field Eddy fishtailed and cut the engine.