Bent Road (2 page)

 

E
vie shoves Daniel aside and takes his place at the window. “Mama, look at all the tumbleweeds,” she says. “Look how many. They’re all stuck together.”

“Did we hit him?” Daniel says. “Did we hit that man?”

Evie looks back at him. “There’s no man, silly,” she says, starting to roll down her window so she can stick her head out. “Those are tumbleweeds.”

“No, don’t.” Daniel slaps her hand away. “Didn’t you see him?”

This isn’t at all what Evie thought Kansas would look like. Mama said it would be flat and covered with yellow wheat. She tosses her arms over the front seat and stands on the floorboard for a better look. At the top of the hill, a fence follows the gentle curve of the road like a giant lazy tail draped across the field. The tumbleweeds, hundreds of them, thousands maybe, snagged up by the barbed wire, look like a monster’s arching spine.

“It’s not a man. It’s a monster,” she says, pointing straight ahead. “See? That’s its back and tail.” Maybe this is why Daddy never wanted to visit Kansas.

“Mama,” Daniel says. “You saw him, too, didn’t you?”

“You two sit,” Mama says. She exhales, wipes a hand over her face and down the front of her dress, not even bothering with a handkerchief. Mama never did that in Detroit. She would have told Evie it was bad manners. “I didn’t hit anything, Daniel. Just took the curve too fast. Everything is fine now. I’m sorry I frightened you, but you shouldn’t shout out like that. Not when I’m driving.”

“But I think we did hit him. The man in the road. I saw him fall.”

Evie shakes her head. “No, it’s tumbleweeds.”

Resting on the steering wheel, Mama stares out the front window. “I’m sure it was just a deer or a coyote maybe,” she says and with her elbow pushes down the lock and motions with her head for Evie to do the same. She turns and smiles. “We’ll ask your father. Whatever it was, it’s gone now.”

“Yeah, Daniel,” Evie says. “There’s no man. Just tumbleweeds.” She throws her arms over the front seat again and rests her chin there. “Look, Mama.”

Near the bottom of the hill, Daddy’s truck sits where the road turns into a long drive. It is weighted down by all of their furniture, wrapped with a tarp and tied off with Daddy’s sisal rope. The truck’s cab lights up when the driver’s side door opens. Daddy steps out, and waddling into the glow of the headlights is Grandma Reesa. Evie has never met Grandma Reesa. Neither has Daniel, because Daddy always said that come hell or high water, he’d never set foot in Kansas again. That was before the Negro boys called Elaine on the telephone.

Mama drops her head one last time and breathes in through her nose and out through her mouth. Keeping both hands on the steering wheel, she lets her head hang between her arms. She looks like she’s saying a prayer.

“Guess we made it,” Evie says.

This is the road, Bent Road, where Daddy grew up.

“Yes,” Mama says. “Looks like we’re home.”

Daniel opens his eyes and there, peeking through the bedroom door, is Mama. Smiling, she presses one finger to her lips, draws her hands together, holds them to her cheek and tilts her head as if to say, “Go back to sleep.” The door closes and Mama whispers with Elaine on the other side. She is probably telling Elaine that things will be fine. Since the day Dad sat at the head of the dinner table and announced that the family was moving to Kansas, Elaine has pouted and Mama has told her things would be fine, just fine.

Waiting until Mama’s voice fades down the hallway, Daniel sits up and shades his eyes with one hand. At the foot of the bed, a statue of the Virgin Mary, wearing a brown shawl over a simple blue gown, stands on a small end table. Her arms reach out, as if toward Daniel, but both hands are missing. The paint has chipped away from her wrists, uncovering the red clay she is molded from. The Virgin Mary is bleeding. On the table near her feet lie her missing hands.

“Hey,” Evie says from her spot next to Daniel where she had been sleeping. “We’re here, aren’t we?” She first smiles at the Virgin Mary but frowns when she notices the missing hands. “This is Grandma Reesa’s house.”

“Guess so,” Daniel says, pushing his hair from his eyes.

Evie pops to her knees and crawls to the head of the bed. “Come see,” she says, leaning so the fan propped in the window doesn’t hit her. “It’s Kansas. All the way, as far as I can see.” She starts jumping, the box springs creaking every time she lands.

“Hush already,” Daniel says, not sure why he cares except that the bleeding statue makes him think Grandma Reesa likes a quiet house.

“There’s cows, Danny,” she says. “Four of them.”

Daniel crawls across the bed until he can see out the second-story window. When he’s kneeling next to Evie, who is standing, they’re almost the same size. She lifts onto her tiptoes and smiles down on Daniel. He rolls his eyes at her but doesn’t say anything. Evie’s being small stopped seeming funny when she was six. Now, at nine years old, she is lucky to be mistaken for a kindergartner. Even though Mama says Evie will grow plenty tall in her own time, Daniel knows she is hoping that people will be smaller in Kansas, that she will be the right size.

Besides seeing four cows, Daniel gets his first glimpse of Kansas in the daylight. He cocks his head, trying to decide if the buildings outside are crooked or if Grandma Reesa’s house tilts. He wonders what Mama will have to say about Grandma’s crooked house. Before they left Detroit, Mama smiled every time Dad mentioned Kansas, but it wasn’t the smile she gave when she was really happy. When she smiled about Kansas, Mama never showed her teeth and she always nodded her head along with the smile, probably thinking the nod would do the trick if the smile didn’t.

Beyond the garage and shed, brown fields outlined by barbed-wire fences stretch to the horizon. Dad says most of the old fence posts are made from hedge tree branches and a few from limestone. He says there will be plenty of fence post driving in Daniel’s future, plenty for sure. That’ll make a man of him. Squinting out the window, Daniel counts the posts that carry the fence up and over the curve in Bent Road where the tumbleweeds were snagged up. The man he saw last night must have run through Grandma Reesa’s pasture and hopped the fence at the hill’s highest point. No sign of him now. Dad said it was probably a deer, but Daniel is sure it was a man—a large man in a big hurry. Dad promised to check the ditches to make sure the man wasn’t lying there dead. Daniel drops his eyes back to Grandma’s driveway where the four cows raise their heads and together walk toward the fence. He hears it before he sees it, a truck driving up Grandma Reesa’s gravel drive.

“Hey,” Evie says, popping off the bed, her bare feet skipping across the wooden floor. “Look at this.”

“Yeah, what is it?” Daniel says, still watching through the window.

A red truck pulls around the side of the house and parks in front of the sagging garage.

“They’re dresses,” Evie says. “Look how many.”

Across the room, Evie holds a blue dress up by its hanger, rotating it so she sees both sides. The dress flutters as the fan sweeps across the room, the tips of its hem dragging on the wooden floor. Frowning, Evie pulls at the frayed ends of a piece of blue trim left unstitched at the collar.

“Stop that,” Daniel says. “You’re getting it dirty. Those are Grandma Reesa’s.”

Evie frowns at the bleeding Virgin Mary. “No they aren’t. Grandma Reesa is too big for these dresses.”

“Well, they belong to somebody.”

“Whoever wore these was small like me,” Evie says, holding up a second dress. “Not big like Grandma Reesa.”

“Just put them back and close that door,” Daniel says as a second truck that is towing a trailer pulls into the drive. “I think Uncle Ray and Aunt Ruth are here. We’d better get downstairs.”

 

L
etting the hug fade, Celia slowly pulls away, feeling that Ruth’s slender arms might never let go. While Arthur is tall and broad enough to fill any doorway, his older sister is petite, almost breakable, and her skin is cool, as if she doesn’t have the strength to warm herself on a hot August afternoon. On the other side of the car, Ruth’s husband, Ray, shakes Arthur’s hand. Reesa stands behind them, watching, nodding.

“Damn good to see you,” Ray says, taking off his hat and slapping it against his thigh. Underneath, his dark hair is matted and sweat sparkles on his forehead. Even from several feet away, he smells of bourbon.

After shaking Arthur’s hand, Ray replaces his hat and bends down to look through the truck’s cab. His cloudy gray eye, the left one, which Celia only remembers when she sees him up close again, wanders off to the side while the eye that is clear and brown stares at Celia. He winks the bad eye.

“Well, if you damn sure aren’t still the prettiest thing I ever seen,” he says, scratching his two-day-old beard. “The good Lord’s done well by you, Arthur.”

Ray’s good eye inches down Celia’s body and settles at her waist. He had looked at her the same way on her wedding day, like her taking one man meant she would take any man.

Celia wrinkles her nose at his sour smell. “So good to see you, Ruth,” she says, reaching for the pie that Ruth holds out to her.

“It’s strawberry.” Ruth straightens the pleats on her tan calico dress. “We had a late season this year. Thought they’d never ripen.”

Celia cups the chilled pie plate. “You always did bake up the nicest desserts.”

Celia says this even though her own wedding was the last and only time she saw Ruth. Almost twenty years ago. They were barely more than kids; Ruth a new bride herself. The years have worn heavy on her, stooped her shoulders, yellowed her skin, and peppered her brown hair with gray, though she still wears it in the same tightly knit bun that she did all those years ago.

“Arthur said you had an accident on your way in,” Ruth says, still pressing her pleats. “You and the children are all right?”

Celia rubs her neck with one hand and rolls her head from side to side. “Shook us up a little. Frightened the children, but we’re fine.”

Once they finally settled into bed the night before, Arthur had said they probably saw a deer. Or maybe not. Never could tell. “But that spot at the top of Bent Road is a tricky one,” he had said. “Better take it slow next time.” Celia had rolled over, putting her back to him, and said that perhaps next time he would be inclined to slow himself down. When she woke this morning, she had a sore neck, an ache in her lower back and made Arthur promise to check the front of her car for damage. He found nothing but still couldn’t say for sure what they had seen out there.

“Good God damn,” Ray shouts to the driver of a second truck towing a trailer into the drive. “I don’t pay you to drive like a fool, boy.”

A young man steps out of the other truck. His light brown hair hangs below his collar and covers the tips of his ears. He wears a sleeveless chambray shirt, the frayed shirttail left untucked. Ruth tells Celia that his name is Jonathon Howard. He’s a local boy who has come to help Ray, though he’s not so much a boy anymore.

“You don’t pay me at all, Ray,” Jonathon says. “Quit all that fuss you’re making.” He nods at Celia and Arthur, tugs on the raw edge of his Silver Belly hat and walks toward his trailer.

At the back porch, the screened door squeals open and slams shut. Elaine walks across the drive, blotting her cheeks with a tissue. Though she is small like Celia—narrow shoulders, a slender waist, hips that flare ever so slightly beneath her skirt—she has Arthur’s brown hair and eyes.

“Elaine,” Celia says. “Come say hello to Aunt Ruth.”

Tucking the tissue into her apron and smoothing back her hair that hangs in dark waves down her back, Elaine steps around the truck’s open door and leans inside to hug Ruth. “So nice to meet you, Aunt Ruth,” she says, and standing straight, she looks down the drive toward the young man with the frayed chambray shirt. As if trying to get a better view of him, she leans away from the truck and stumbles over Celia. “Sorry,” she says.

“Quite all right.” Celia smiles and glances between Elaine and the young man.

“Celia,” Ray shouts through the truck’s open cab. Seeing Elaine, he studies her for a moment, tips his hat and stands. “Get those kids out here. Good God damn, I brought this thing for them.”

“Ray brought the children a cow,” Ruth says. “You go on and see it. I’ll check on lunch and send the children out.”

Celia steps aside to let Ruth pass. Across the drive, Reesa and Arthur follow Ray toward the trailer. Celia watches Ray, fearing that he’ll take another look at Elaine, but he doesn’t. As the three pass a small shed, which sets across the drive, Arthur stops and studies it, perhaps considering how to best fix the sagging roof or straighten the crooked walls. Reesa stops alongside him, stepping into his shadow. A thick patch of cordgrass grows around the small building and nearly swallows it up. The two of them stand silently for a moment, and then Reesa pats him on the back and, with both hands, gently pulls him away and they continue toward the trailer.

Celia knew there would be secrets between Arthur and his mother, a history that they share and that Celia has had no part in. Surely, Reesa knows what kept Arthur away all these years, and as they pass by, neither of them looking at Celia, it is clear that the past is already flaring up.