Given (18 page)

On Tuesday morning I drove to Mystic to do laundry and pick up more cereal and a bag of sugar at Natural Lee's. I was leaving the market when I saw Grace Moon and Al coming out of the liquor store.

Al carried a six-pack under each arm. When I stopped to say hello to Grace and ask how she was doing, Al answered for her. “She's doing good, got me on a new health kick,” he said, nudging her in the belly with the six-pack's sharp edge. Grace blushed and wrapped her arms around her body, as if by doing so she could hold herself, and her baby, together.

I started to ask Grace about her brother, but at the mention of Hooker's name Al's eyes flared as if I had struck a fistful of matches behind them. I said I had to run, I was on my way to the airport, which was true, and that I'd catch up with them later, which was a lie. If I never laid eyes on Al again it would be too soon.

I got to the airport early — Vernal's flight wasn't due in until 10:15. I waited in the arrivals area that smelled of freshly baked bread. Two island entrepreneurs had opened a coffee and baked goods stand called All Your Kneads in a quiet corner of the anything-but-busy terminal. When the plane still hadn't arrived by eleven forty-five, I ate a bowl of Happy As a Clam Chowder and two pieces of bread still baking-hot from the oven, then ordered an organic shade-grown-bean latte. I took a sip and thought, for a moment, something was wrong with it. It didn't taste like tea.

Vernal was uncharacteristically quiet when he got off his flight at twelve-thirty. The rain-slick road gleamed a royal grey-blue and, as we drove, Vernal, for once, didn't point things out to me — the small white dog in a red raincoat poking along the ditch, a matted teddy bear impaled on a stick — before I'd had a chance to notice them myself. I asked him if anything was wrong, if something was bothering him. “It's nothing,” he said. “It's everything. It's killing me.”

I knew what this meant. If Vernal wanted a drink, he would find any reason to have one. In the past I had always known, without even being anywhere in his vicinity, when he was about to fall off the wagon. Vernal said I was the only person he knew who could smell the thought of vodka over the telephone.

Back at the farm Vernal fixed himself a small lunch of aspirin and ice cream. The Walled Off had finally sold, he said, to a wealthy Asian couple who had arrived to close the deal in a black limousine that took up most of the driveway. If he'd seemed upset when he got off the plane, he said, it was because he'd forgotten my mother's ashes.

My mother had requested that she be scattered in the garden where she could go on being useful, fertilizing the flowers for others to enjoy. Since the house had been sold, Vernal didn't think the garden a suitable depository and had set the urn on the kitchen counter, in a container, but at the last minute they had slipped his mind and he'd left in a taxi without them. He had called his house-sitter and asked him to put the urn in the freezer until he could get back to the mainland to empty out the house.

“I don't think Mother needs freezing,” I said, feeling protective, suddenly. “Ashes don't come with a Best Before date.”

“I'm sorry,” Vernal said. “I'm doing the best I can. I'm sorry.”

I heard the soft rattle of the dustpan and the thump of the wooden broom handle against the wall above my head. When Vernal lay down to take a nap on the couch, I went upstairs and found Rainy sweeping my room, which was unusual because she most often swept in the middle of the night. She and Frenchy had stayed up all day, awake and waiting, expectantly, for news from the outside world. They wanted to know everything I had seen and heard in town.

I told them I'd stopped to buy groceries and that I'd run into Grace and Al outside the liquor store. It was Rainy's indignant opinion that Al had no right leading Grace, in her condition, into temptation.

Rainy claimed she always knew the difference between bad and wrong. At least she had a pretty clear idea about what was
wrong
. Wrong was what had happened to her when she was a kid.

Rainy's father had been a man who believed in beating the gentle Christ into his unruly children. Her brothers got the full force of his anger but when he beat Rainy he kept a Bible under his arm so as not to administer the lashes too heavily.
Ain't no makeup thick enough to cover yo father's fist kisses, either,
Rainy was fond of saying.

Because she wet the bed every night, Rainy had been forced to eat soap and recite the alphabet endlessly — the reason, Frenchy figured, she never learned to read or write. Her father, convinced that she was too lazy to get up and walk as far as the outhouse, sewed up her
chocha.
Rainy peed through the stitches in her sleep, and that made him so mad he beat her with the toaster cord and made her stand in his bedroom doorway, until dawn, in a half-packed suitcase. Some nights she said it felt as if her heart had got away on her, quit her body for good.

Frenchy figured the reason Rainy kept doing it in her sleep was because peeing wouldn't have hurt so much when she was unconscious. (I felt guilty over how I had treated Aged Orange when I remembered this. To think I had accused him of incontinence!)

Every night at the Facility, Rainy wet the bed. Every morning she changed her sheets, and every night before going to sleep she kneeled at the foot of her cot and prayed for God to help her make it through at least one night dry.
Help me to grow up,
she prayed.
Help this foolishass pissin baby.

Muh Nigga, Dat Be in Heaven,

Chillin Be Thy Name, Yo.

You be sayin' it; I be doin' it

In dis hood and in Yo's . . .

Cut me some slack

So's I be doin' it to dem dat diss me

And keep dem muhfo's away

Cuz you always be da Man.

Vernal stood by the stove, tiny white feathers floating all around him. “He can't say he wasn't warned,” he said, when he looked up and saw me staring at the albino peacock he'd just finished plucking. I watched as he dropped the bird into the stockpot on the stove, then gathered the elegant tail feathers into a bouquet and arranged them in a vase. My mother believed having peacock feathers in the house was bad luck, that they brought troublesome spirits inside, but Vernal had never been superstitious.

He leaned over the pot to sniff the broth, and added more salt. Behind the vase I saw the shot glass and the bottle of whiskey. He must have seen the worry on my face.

His lips had that soaked overnight look. I asked him if he didn't think about the future, about what was going to happen to him if he continued to drink.

Vernal said he didn't expect to live forever. “That's as far ahead as I'm looking.” Whiskey didn't make you drunk, he said, just brought you to a higher level of lucidity.

He said he was sorry. He had been concerned about me, which was part of it — having to leave me alone at the farm. He was afraid something might happen to me. He picked up the shot glass and held it in his hands as if it contained the rest of his life, then emptied it in the sink.

I looked away as the room filled with things left stubbornly unsaid. I couldn't bring myself to say he was mistaken, that Vernal was ringed by doubts far bigger than my plight. The landscape of living together never changed. It rolled on and on until it became indistinguishable from the horizon.

I heard a car pull up in front of the mounting block. Vernal said he was going to attend an evening AA meeting at the Brew, and had asked a friend to stop by to give him a ride. He pushed the pot to the back of the stove where it would simmer until the fire went out.

I followed him to the front door, where I stood watching him try to manoeuvre his shoes onto his feet.

“Don't wait up,” he said, adding, “I'll see you in the
mañana
,” as he had always done, in the old days. He reached down to kiss my cheek, but stopped at a comfortable distance without having to risk making contact before his lips touched my face.

I sat for a long time at the kitchen table, staring somewhere beyond the white peacock simmering on the edge of the stove.

The next morning Vernal was not where I expected him to be, passed out on the green leather couch. I ate a bowlful of cereal, then left the house. The Christian vegetable man had posted his thought du jour: “Jesus Didn't Know My Alcoholic Father”.

I parked in front of the church, and stepped inside in time to catch Vernal ordering a last double single malt from a man who looked like a cross between Friar Tuck and Popeye.

Vernal looked tiredly guilty. “I'm sorry,” he said, “this isn't going to become a habit. I've been having a nice little relapse, that's all.”

Vernal told me he hadn't made it home because he had arrived at the Brew halfway through Holy Hour, when the drinks were two for one, and then his ride had left halfway through the AA meeting that followed. Vernal introduced me to “his saviour,” Father Tunney, who had given him a bed for the night. When Father Tunney blushed, even his neck turned red.

“What's your poison, Missus?” he said. He made “poison” sound like “pie-zin,” and when I didn't answer right away he went back to staring mournfully out the window where the rain fell like a curtain between the church and the town.

The wall behind the counter was plastered with placards about the haplessness of the drinking life: “Religions change; beer and wine remain”; “A Hangover is the Wrath of Grapes.”

Vernal handed me the Holy Brew Wet List. “Here's a good one to wake up with,” he said, pointing to a drink called God's Blessing. I said I'd always thought Irish Coffee was a contradiction in terms. Why bother to get drunk and sober up at the same time? I took a seat on a bar stool and said I'd like a cup of tea.

Father Tunney agreed with me. “She's got a fair point.” He pronounced “point” “pint,” and said I'd given him a new purpose in life, to find where the teapot was hiding.