Driftless (56 page)

“Never mind about the cake, Violet. Are there any more frozen sandwiches?”

DRIFTLESS

A
FTER THE CLEANUP IN THE CHURCH BASEMENT, WINNIE GAVE Maxine a ride home.

“I’m sorry about this,” said Maxine. “Russell doesn’t like crowds so he left early.”

“He wouldn’t even stay to eat.”

“Being around too many people is hard on his nervous system.”

“He doesn’t talk easily, it seems,” said Winnie.

“It’s true. We communicate well but don’t talk much. Here, let me out by the road—I need to get the mail.”

When Winnie returned to the church, it was empty inside. The evening air was floral scented, quiet and still.

She carried the few remaining folding chairs out of the sanctuary and into the basement, then picked up the discarded bulletins, gum wrappers, and other scraps of paper.

The band had not returned the piano to its proper place, and she made a mental note to find some people to move it back before Sunday morning. She also needed to distribute the flowers among the local nursing homes, keeping several of the arrangements brought in by her own people.

She closed the windows, slipped off her shoes, and settled into a middle bench, feeling her body relax. She attempted to pray, but as soon as her defenses were down she thought about July Montgomery and the look of death. What would it be like to know your coat had been caught and to understand you would perish? To die like that, alone, beaten to death by a machine, seemed terrible. Much of human life seemed ugly and brutal, and Winnie cried herself to sleep, lying on the pew.

It was well after dark when she woke up, the church as dark as the ocean floor. The smell of flowers was the first thing to greet her,
joined by the coarse texture of the pew covering pressing against her cheek and the distant sound of a dog barking. These sensations coaxed her further into wakefulness and she climbed to her feet and turned on a light. Rubbing her face to remove the prickles, she began loading her car with flowers so they would be ready to take to the nursing home in the morning.

She recognized the aluminum vase as soon as she saw it and experienced a horror that reached all the way to the bottom of her.

But it did not last long. From the same psychic depths came a new feeling, and as it rose up it broke through all the gates, obstructions, and dams in its path.

She was angry, and her anger continued to mount until it burned white-hot.

 

Jacob Helm was up late. He sat in his living room staring into a small red fire, smoking his pipe and thinking about sitting next to Winnie on the short bench in the church—the smell of her soap. The little fire died to embers and he was putting on another log when the aluminum urn broke through the double-paned window and banged across the floor, spraying glass all over the room.

“You lied to me!” screamed Winnie from outside.

Jacob ran to the door. “Winifred!”

“You lied to me,” she screamed again, standing in stocking feet in the wet, cool grass.

“I didn’t.”

“You did. How could you do that?”

“You’re crying.”

“I’m not crying, I’m mad. Can’t you even tell the difference, you idiot?”

“Winifred, come inside. You’re shaking all over.”

“I can’t trust you. I’ll never trust you. You’re a rotten liar.”

“I was trying to protect you. And I didn’t quite lie. I chose my words carefully. I love you.”

“I told you not to say that,” screamed Winnie. “I told you not to say that—you filthy liar.”

“Why?”

“Because of how it sounds when I hear it. It mocks me. You don’t know how lonely I am.”

“I love you.”

“I told you to stop!”

Jacob went to her and put his arm around her thin shoulders.

“Don’t touch me,” she said and pushed him away. “You let me go through that whole funeral believing something that wasn’t true.”

“What could I do? Violet Brasso had poured July’s ashes on the peony beds in front of the church.”

“You could have told me. At least I would have known.”

“Come inside, you’re shivering.”

“No.”

“Winifred, come inside.”

“I won’t ever.”

“Then wait right here.”

He ran inside and after much clattering and bumping returned with a stuffed armchair and a blanket. He wrapped the blanket around her and settled her into the chair, then sat in the grass in front of her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have told you, you’re right. I have no good excuse. Can you forgive me?”

“No.”

“Come on, Winifred, be human.”

“This is what being human
is.
You’ve been smoking.”

“Yes, I was smoking.”

“I didn’t know you were a smoker as well as a liar.”

“I rarely smoke. If it bothers you, I’ll give it up.”

“I loathe that smell.”

“Then I will never smoke again.”

Jacob’s front door blew shut.

“My mother died from smoking cigarettes,” said Winnie, and Jacob leaned back on his arms, watching her carefully.

“I’m sorry. Tell me about her. I want to know everything. Don’t leave anything out. What was she like?”

Winnie was quiet for a long time.

“When I was little,” she said, “I could look into her eyes and see
heaven. She was the closest thing to a saint I ever hope to know. She could reach into her soul and find something for everyone. After she died, her memory was the only thing keeping me sane.”

“She was religious then?”

“In every meaningful sense of the word, though she never attended church or read the Bible.”

“Winifred, she would have been very proud of you.”

“You say that but you don’t even know me.”

“That may be true, but how many times do I need to experience autumn or taste strawberry pie before I can say I know what autumn and strawberry pie are like? I know enough to think about you all day long. I go to sleep thinking about you and wake up thinking about you. I’d like to spend the rest of my life discovering you. There’s something unquenchable about you. When I think of you I’m filled with something I can’t describe. And being with you—nothing compares to it. Being with you makes everything else all right. Everything I learn about you, everything you say, everything about you brings me pleasure.”

“I’m not a toy, Jacob, and certainly not a strawberry pie.”

“Of course not—I should have said happiness instead of pleasure.”

“Yes, you should have.”

“Tell me more about your experience with Oneness—the one you told me about before.”

“I can’t talk about that now.”

“I need to know everything. How did you feel at the time?”

“It was the most wonderful feeling. It was more than a feeling. It came from somewhere other than nerve endings.”

“A passion,” offered Jacob. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Yes, a passion, but married to compassion! Breathing in joy and exhaling love, seeing it all around me. I lacked nothing and wanted nothing.” She tossed her head and an arm popped out of the blanket, the fingers cupped in a gesture intended to shape the incorporeal object she was trying to describe. “It was a passion at peace with itself. It could not be divided or analyzed, and it was big enough to hold everything else inside it.”

“Tell me more.”

“That’s the problem, telling more. I’m still trying to understand it myself. Until the day when Holiness is revealed to everyone and these experiences become commonplace—and I hope that they will be soon—there’s no way to form consensus about how to refer to them. Our language only works when everyone is familiar with the things the words are talking about.”

“Yes,” said Jacob, looking at Winnie as though she were the thing she tried to describe. The moonlight reflected in her eyes in a small glimmer of flickering green.

“You shouldn’t be sitting on the ground,” she said. “It’s cold. You’ll catch sick.”

“I’m fine.”

“No, it’s not good for you. Here, sit on this blanket.”

“You need the blanket. I’m fine.”

“No,” said Winnie, standing up. “You sit here. I’ve got the blanket.”

Jacob rose and sat in the chair. “Now you have no place to sit,” he said.

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Let’s go in the house,” said Jacob.

“No!” said Winnie. “We’re not going in there. Wait a minute.” She unwound the blanket, seated herself on his lap, and pulled the blanket around them both. “There,” she said.

“Tell me what you think of the stars,” said Jacob, feeling unprepared for the sensations demanding his immediate attention. The veins in his neck pounded against her upper arm in a way that might be described as universal code. Her weight on his thighs had a strangely buoyant quality, a weightless weight. And the way she smelled was like the fragrance of spring after a long, bitter winter—a homecoming, lazy and deeply nourishing smell.

“I like the way ancient people used to think of the stars,” said Winnie. “Pure spirits, that’s what the Greeks thought—eternally luminous celestial bodies.”

“Ah, the Greeks,” said Jacob, breathing deeply.

“Though they were pagans of the worst sort, we owe much to them.”

“Why?”

“They understood how full of wonder life is.”

“What do you think the Greeks thought about the moon?”

“I can still smell that awful pipe, Jacob,” said Winnie, realizing for the first time the alarming implications of her position on his lap.

She wondered how she had gotten here. That it had happened seemed irrefutable, but exactly
how
it had happened remained a mystery. She stretched out her legs and saw her feet inside her stockings. What had she been thinking? What foreign conspiracy had arranged this?

She simply had not been thinking at all—that was clearly the problem. She wondered how she could go backwards in time and end up three feet away, standing up.

The logistics of moving, however, even for such a relatively short distance, seemed fairly complicated. And perhaps he hadn’t yet noticed where she was sitting, in which case moving would just draw attention to the fact. If she could sit perfectly still, avoid fidgeting or shifting her weight, leaning or blushing, everything might be all right.

Next she noticed that if she wasn’t directly thinking about her seating arrangement in one particularly disturbing way, she was actually fairly comfortable and warm. Marshaling her thoughts along this narrow and strictly utilitarian path made everything seem fine.

She decided to ignore her present position and imagine, as clearly as she could, that someone else was sitting where she was. And in order to keep things running smoothly and not alert Jacob to the rude fact that someone had changed places with her, she decided to keep talking about tobacco, so she repeated, “I can still smell that awful pipe.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay. It isn’t so bad.”

“I love the way you smell, Winifred, like a field of dandelions and hay.”

“How awful.”

“Earlier today I could smell your soap. This is better. This is you.”

“Do you mean when we were sitting on the bench?”

“Yes.”

Winnie wondered if perhaps now might be the time to inform
Jacob that she wasn’t really herself anymore. The difficulties involved in explaining this, however, seemed insurmountable, so she gradually let herself again become the person taking up space inside her body—on a purely tentative basis.

“Does it matter to you that I’ve been married before, to someone I deeply loved?” asked Jacob.

The question had the effect of fully submerging Winnie in herself and she looked into his eyes. “You really don’t know me if you could ask that. Nothing could be farther away from me than that thought. It makes no difference at all. If anything, your loving someone before me gives me reason to believe that—”

Jacob kissed her, and after a crisis of hesitation in which she evaluated both her astonishment at the sensation and the sensation itself, Winnie wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled their faces together at the two-way intersection of mouths. Then just as quickly she drew back.

“We can’t do this,” she said.

“Why not?”

“We must keep our pleasures separate; otherwise we might confuse one kind of happiness with the other. We can’t let our bodies begin thinking for us. They’re much cleverer than we give them credit for, with many rubbery joys to beguile us. Our thoughts must always remain two steps ahead of them. I’m not sure you always remember there is something higher, something better. That’s why I worry I can’t trust you. You would settle, I’m afraid, for this, for me.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I would. I do.”

“That’s because you haven’t experienced anything else.”

“I don’t need to. I love you.”

“There you go again. You think that makes everything all right.”

“It does.”

“Not everything that seems right is. Some things should be stopped.”

“And some things can’t be stopped,” said Jacob. “Your enormous spiritual ambitions and our love are inseparable. They belong together. We belong together. Your ideals make you who you are and I want all of you.”

“There might be parts of me you don’t want, once you get to know them.”

“I doubt it.”

A nightjar sang in the trees across the road, launching its voice into the dark surrounding foliage.

“Can we go inside now?” asked Jacob.

“Yes, very well. I guess it can’t hurt anything. Here, move your hands, let me up.”

From the doorway, Winnie saw the shattered window glass and the aluminum container on the floor.

“Jacob, we have to put those ashes where they belong.”

“They’re in a good place, fertilizing peonies. Come in.”