Carter Clay (19 page)

At the potluck, because his hands are full—paper plate, cup of coffee—Pastor Bitner extends his greetings to M.B. by carefully lifting his elbow and tapping it against her arm. “This is a special day, isn't it, Marybelle?”

M.B. smiles, then launches into a tale of Jersey's lack of religious education, a terrible, terrible thing. Pastor Bitner offers the girl a sympathetic smile. He doubts it is easy, living with Marybelle.

“I'm reading the Bible,” Jersey tells Pastor Bitner. “My mom always wanted us to read it together, so I'd at least know the references and all, but we never got around to it. My parents and I did read some Greek things before. I guess I sort of expected the Old Testament to be a little bit more like that—like Plato or something.”

M.B. has taken up a position behind Pastor Bitner from which she waves at the girl and gives her looks of horrified warning—please, don't start in! Pastor Bitner just smiles. “When you have the word of God,” he says, “you don't have to bother with Plato, Jersey, but, here, let me introduce you to some of our members,” and he calls, “Come over here, Lloyd. I have a young lady for you to meet!”

Lloyd is an elderly gentleman who raises his tangled eyebrows in a show of delight, and, then, with a boy's spry step, heads their way.

“And there's Mick, too,” Pastor Bitner says. “Mick, come say hello to Marybelle's daughter and bring that platter of cookies, too—”

“Granddaughter,” Jersey murmurs.

Pastor Bitner gives the girl a hard wink. “Your grandma looks so young, somebody might take her for your mom, though!”

“Oh, my.” M.B. grins. “What do you say to that, Jersey?”

Jersey says nothing, only smiles at poor pale Mick, who apparently has suffered some accident himself. Fire? Half of his face is tight and strange as a portion of shrink-wrapped veal—

“Cookie?” Mick says. Jersey says thanks and selects a ball dusted in powdered sugar. Meanwhile, a stocky blond identified
as Mrs. Trevor has arrived to offer details of the youth choir and the Christian Teens' upcoming trip to the roller rink—oh! Mrs. Trevor's lips twitch in mortification: is it terrible for a person to mention roller rinks to a paraplegic?

Jersey is touched by the woman's obvious tenderheartedness but also wants to deflect her pity, and so she pretends curiosity in another matter: to whom does Pastor Bitner now wave?

The big bald-headed cowboy that M.B. identified as the aide from Fair Oaks. Coffee cup and full paper plate in hand, the cowboy seems reluctant to join the group. His face has turned an astonishing red, like something cooking.

“Another new member of our congregation,” says Pastor Bitner. “But, Jersey, you may have met Carter—Mr. Clay—over at Fair Oaks.”

While Jersey shakes the man's great humid hand, M.B. smiles, and says, “Well, hello, again!”

“I enjoyed your sermon today, Pastor,” Mr. Clay says. There is a tremor in the man's voice, and Jersey appreciates the way Pastor Bitner works to put him at ease, asks him this and that—how's Fair Oaks, and has he tried any of that cherry salad stuff? Oh, do! Great stuff, Carter, just great!

Jersey remembers that there was something about Mr. Clay that gave her a chill the time she saw him at Fair Oaks. Perhaps he looks like someone she has seen before? Certainly the rose-colored scar that marks his forehead—that diamond-shaped pucker—reminds her uncomfortably of the tracheostomy scar at the base of her mother's throat.

“Them powder sugar ones are good, ain't they?” Mr. Clay says, then bends with his napkin to mop up a spot on the floor where he has sloshed a bit of coffee.

The man's grand and shining head is almost on a level with Jersey's own, and when he glances her way and mutters, “I'm clumsy,” she smiles at him. A shy man, she thinks, and feels sorry for him—until he leans closer to whisper, as if they are old friends, confidantes, “So, you have to use that chair all the time? I mean, do they think maybe you'll walk someday?”

The idea that a stranger would ask something so personal of another human being! Flustered, hurt, she immediately backs up her chair. She murmurs, “Excuse me, Mr. Clay. I'm going to get some dinner.”

An array of food covers several big folding tables. Parishioners cluster around the tables, carrying paper plates that sag with the weight of potato salad, casseroles, brownies. The first dish that Jersey encounters is something made of com chips and kidney beans, and this she scoops onto her own plate.

Roatley Handel
, she thinks, as she sneaks a look back at Mr. Clay—now leaning against the wall once more.

Roatley Handel is a man whom Jersey never met but whose photo hung in her mother's office. A cement contractor, Roatley Handel one day went out riding an all-terrain vehicle on his property near St. David's, Arizona, and what did he find sticking out of the rocks but several fossils of
Eohippus
? This Mr. Handel sat down and posted Earth Sciences a photograph of himself and the fossils—along with a note requesting twenty-thousand dollars for his find. Katherine Milhause telephoned Mr. Handel to let him know that the university would dearly love to receive his fossils but could not possibly come up with such a sum. “Is that right?” Mr. Handel said, and then a great noise arose at his end of the line. The noise, Mr. Handel shouted, was the sound of his rock pulverizer, and did Dr. Milhause want to reconsider just how much money she had to spend? Katherine had said no more than two panicky sentences—both containing the absolute truth about the Earth Sciences budget—when she heard the fossils hit the bowl of the rock pulverizer, and rattle and whine as the machine broke them to bits.

Afterward, Katherine hung the photo of Mr. Handel and his
Eohippus
fossils next to the photograph of Darwin that already hung on her office wall. Darwin all in black, very grave, his mouth a dark line drawn hard in the white of mustache and beard. A viewer could hardly help imagining that the man who replaced the stairway to heaven with a chute to the bacterial stew now pondered the mortality to which he had, in effect, condemned himself.

According to Katherine, hanging up a photo of Darwin with a photo of Roatley Handel was a little like hanging up a picture of Jesus with a picture of one of the thieves; and soon after, a friend who overheard her offer this analysis brought in a thumbtack and one of the garish 3-D postcards of Jesus and his bloody heart that were sold at the nearby mission.

“Now you really do have Jesus,” the friend wrote on the postcard's back, and Katherine, after giving the matter some thought, found a fourth image—a postcard of René Magritte's
La Tentative de l'Impossible
, in which a painter is shown in the process of painting into existence the arm of the otherwise complete woman who stands before him.

So began the prologue to Katherine Milhause's
Rethinking the Evolution of Birds.
The year was 1991.
Rethinking the Evolution of Birds
was well received in certain quarters, vilified in others. Katherine escaped both the good responses and the bad (and the stony gaze of Joe) by taking off for a dig in the Ischigualasto valley of west central Argentina (rare Middle Triassic remains, including
Pisanosaurus
).

In the Ischigualasto valley, Katherine worked in the field each day from dawn until sunset. In the evening, by the light of kerosene lanterns, she busied herself cleaning specimens, cataloging, writing letters to Jersey and Joe that were, in part, a spirited continuation of her argument:
Archaeopteryx
belonged to an extinct subclass of birds and was no ancestor at all to
Aves.
“Joe, the orientation of the pubis in the London specimen appears
backward
only because of errors in the postmortem rotation!”

Once, while Katherine was in Argentina, Jersey accompanied Joe on a nighttime errand to his office. The evening was damp, the air filled with the pungent odor of creosote bush. Her mother would have talked about the smell. Her mother loved the smell of the creosote, orange blossoms, verbena. Jersey grew lonely for her mother on that walk across campus. Had her mother been there, she would have been holding Jersey's hand. The old Earth Sciences building, with its globe fixtures and darkly varnished wood, increased Jersey's nostalgia, and as a way of “visiting” with Katherine—while Joe went to the main office to check his mail—Jersey went to the collections room to inspect the cast that had been made of England's
Archaeopteryx
fossil.

Of course, what was preserved in the wood and glass case no more resembled the live
Archaeopteryx
than any skeleton resembled its living self—Jersey understood that. Big eye orbits, struts raised—the cast had a demonic look, to Jersey's mind. When Joe joined her in the collections room, she pointed to “the London” and said, “It always reminds me of Las Momias.” On a trip to Mexico, the family had visited that odd museum in colonial Guanajuato, where it was possible to view case after case of disinterred corpses, mummified by the peculiar soil of the city's old burial grounds. It was at Las Momias that Jersey first saw how, when all of its engineering was laid bare, the human skull conveyed only the purest expressions: terror, agony, some species of maniacal joy.

Joe unlocked the case of “the London” with a little key from the heavy ring hooked to his belt. “Their nature led to their perfect preservation,” he said, then pointed with his pen to what he explained was the bird's lack of a well-developed keel. “That made them weak flyers, and sometimes, out over water, they drowned. Their bad luck, our good fortune. When they drowned, their lungs filled with water, and the weight made the corpses sink before they could decompose.”

Jersey nodded. “But what was Mom talking about in her letter?”

“Oh, that? That was—treason,” Joe muttered, but then he laughed and gave Jersey a hug, so she was not sure whether he was truly angry with her mother or not.

Of course, when Katherine rejected his theories, it did hurt Joe. Before, in all things, Katherine had been Joe's fan. When she took her own stand as a scientist, suddenly the scientific became personal. Worse, he feared that not just Katherine but many people believed he held onto his ideas out of stubbornness or vanity.

But he was a scientist! A scientist must be ready to make way for the new.

The verification of truth.
This, both Joe and Katherine always told Jersey, was science's greatest and most noble aim.

Today, for Katherine, science is not an issue. For Katherine, the world is a fraction of its former ingredients. It is a sheet covered in trees, grass, the blind blue eye of the Fair Oaks swimming pool, and the sky. The sheet does not pucker like a curtain in a breeze. Its edges do not lift. But behind it, the rest of the fraction tumbles and fuses and concocts a significance that lies out of reach. Is it fire? Whatever, it is something that begets a roar, and to reduce the sound, Katherine yearns for a smaller fraction; sometimes, the tiny square world of the Fair Oaks television set will do, sometimes not, and then she has to turn herself outside in. Like a glove.

Today, Katherine does not remember the bulk of
Rethinking the Evolution of Birds
, teaching, growing up in Indiana, raising Jersey, marrying Joe. To clarify: the extent of her injuries was such that she now remembers her own life the way you or I might remember a language we studied long ago and have not used for years.

Is Katherine, then, still Katherine?

If a person no longer remembers most of her own past, or even what she agreed to ten minutes before, is it possible to think of her still as “herself”? Maybe a sense of allegiance compels someone like Jersey or M.B. to answer yes, but what—if she could formulate a reply—what would Katherine's own answer be? (And what of, say, a case like that of the Russian, Shereshevski, who possessed such freakishly prodigious powers of memory that, as a child, he sometimes failed to leave his bed to go to school?
And why? Because the strength of his memory of other days of rising, eating, and attending class led him to believe he had already experienced the new day as well. Who is Shereshevski to those who see him sleeping while he sees himself living his day? Who is he to himself?)

This morning, according to the Fair Oaks aide who telephones M.B., Katherine has signed a contract stipulating that she will wash her hair.
On her own!
says the aide. Very loud. Very enthusiastic.

M.B. holds the receiver away from her ear and makes a sour face at the voice issuing from it. M.B. can scarcely abide contact with Fair Oaks—all those old women, bundles of rags with joints swollen big as the clubbed steer bones that M.B. and Dicky used to find while out playing in the hills. M.B. would like to make Jersey promise to just
shoot
M.B. if anyone ever threatened to put M.B. into such a place; but, then, how can M.B. say a word against Fair Oaks, given that it is where Jersey's own mother lives?

The telephoning aide—M.B. loathes her. A good fifty pounds overweight, and yet she waddles down the halls of Fair Oaks as if she finds her heft some sort of dreamy treasure she thought up all on her lonesome.

“First time she'll have washed it herself since the accident, right?” the aide asks.

M.B. glances across the room to Jersey, busy with a game of chess. M.B. supposes she does not have to answer every question the aide asks. She can allow certain questions to hang in the air where perhaps their general stupidity will be revealed to their owner. On the table of the dinette sits an article in
To Your Health
, which explains that the bulk of free radicals in our systems are toxic oxygen molecules, which might be thought of as making our bodies “rust.” This is what M.B. was reading when the telephone rang, and as the aide rambles on, M.B. senses quite clearly that, yes, she does need to add selenium, ginkgo biloba, and flavonoids to her day.
Rust.
She can feel it, some sort of robbery going on in her system. To distract herself, she plucks at the dinette's bouquet of silk iris. Fifty dollars on Home Shopping Network, a good price, but M.B. is distressed by the bouquet's
plastic stems. She must remember to purchase a spool of green silk ribbon. She will wrap that ribbon around the stems, top to bottom, so the plastic does not show.

“Miz Milhause? You still there?”

“Yes. I won't be coming in today.” M.B. blinks, and turns her shoulders just enough that she can see Jersey at her game of chess. “I'm not feeling up to snuff. My back. Too much lifting, I suppose.”

Did Jersey hear that? Though M.B. supposes that she
did
mean for Jersey to hear, she knows the impulse was wrong, and feels guilty while the aide commiserates.

“You poor thing! But, oh, I got back trouble, too, honey, let me tell you—”

“Is that Kitty I hear crying?”

“Mm. Lost her fuzz. You know how she likes playing with that blanky fuzz, and now she's lost her blanky fuzz somewheres.”

M.B. feels the girl's eyes upon her—fervent as a setter's, waiting—and so she says, peremptorily, “Can't you help her?”

The aide chuckles. “Honey, I ain't got time to be searching for bits of fuzz!”

To Jersey, M.B. mouths
stop staring
, then snaps into the telephone, “I guess if you've got time to jaw to me, you've got time to help a woman that pays two thousand dollars a month for care!”

This last draws a moment of silence, followed by: “Just giving you the report on your daughter, ma'am. See you around.”

After she sets the telephone back in the cradle—ignoring the stares of the girl—M.B. takes up her magazine article once more. Underlines “Taking four hundred micrograms of selenium at noon will allow ample time for digestion before the evening meal.”

“So”—the girl—“what was Mom crying about, M.B.?”

“Oh—who knows? She couldn't find her fuzz. And the big news is”—M.B. lifts her index finger, makes a little twirling motion in the air—“she's going to wash her hair today.”

“And you're not going?”

In the margin of her magazine, M.B. draws her usual doodle (profile of a girl with upturned nose, long lashes, pouty lips). “I
guess I seen enough people wash their hair in my life,” she says. “
Have
seen. I guess I washed
her
hair a couple thousand times when she was little.”

Jersey flushes at the thought of her own bath times, all the angry silence and shame and exasperation between herself and M.B. as M.B. helps her—naked—out of the wheelchair, onto the special stool that straddles the tub, and then into the shower chair, and then the whole business in reverse.

“Well, I'll go,” Jersey says.

M.B. gives the girl her boldest smile to make it quite clear that she will not be made to feel guilty. Then, “Excellent,” she says. “
Excelente, magnifico, terrifico
,” and moves across the room to sit in Lorne's leather recliner. She takes her deck of cards from her pocket, shuffles. “It's just too bad your grandfather isn't here.”

Jersey is weary of M.B.'s constant references to the wonders of this grandfather who never cared enough to come to Arizona to visit her mother or herself, and she does not mind sounding a bit snappish when she asks, “Well, what would
he
do, M.B.?”

“What?”

“What would Lorne do that we're not doing?”

M.B. gives a low laugh and blows a blast of cigarette smoke in the girl's direction. “If I knew that, kid, wouldn't I be doing it?”