Half Wild (17 page)

“I want to mow the fields,” I say the next day. My mother raises her eyebrows. When I was twelve I swore off shoveling stalls and stacking wood and weeding the garden; I told my mother I wanted to be a poet or a punk rocker, a Patti Smith of the world, and she bowed her head and said, “Fine.”

Now she glances at the fifty-year-old rust-colored Farmall parked in the barn, then back at me. “You don't have to do that.”

“I want to.”

She looks out at the fields: two years of overgrowth tangled through them, blackberries and sumac invading the edges. “There's not really any point,” she says.

“I want to.”

She squints toward the tractor. “Okay. Climb on.”

My mother stands below me and shouts instructions: how to lower and raise the cutter bar, how to work the clutch.

“You're crazy!” I shout at her, the tractor rattling and choking below me. “Doing all this by yourself.”

“No choice, baby-girl. No choice,” she yells back. I ram the gearshift into first, let up on the clutch, and the machine lurches into the field. I lower the bar; grass and sticks and leaves spurt out behind me. The engine buzzes in my ears, the steering wheel vibrates and makes the skin of my hands and arms itch, but I get into a rhythm. Back and forth, lower, raise, turn, lower, raise, turn, lower. At the edge of the field I glance into the woods and think of my mother fixing the fence that day, of what the feeling along her spine must have been. I think of some large and wild creature there, lurking, but all I see are squirrels, darting up and down the bark of trees. I finish the half-acre field. My legs ache and my arms and shoulders burn. Freckles have appeared everywhere.

“Well done!” my mother calls out, handing me a glass of ice water. I drink it fast, then stand on the porch and look out at what I've done; I'm disappointed to see the three other fields I haven't yet touched, but I'm proud, too, of that neat field saved for another year from the scrub that wants it.
The women where I'm from,
I think,
are crazy, yes, but also capable.

A blue GMC pulls into the driveway. I walk out to meet him in the driveway.

“Jesse.”

“Hi.” He smiles, looks out at my mother's house and barn, rubs his face with the back of his hand. I have an urge to reach out and touch the scar, which looks both old and tender. “Wanted to see if I could help out with anything. Offer a hand.”

“That's kind.”

“Thought it might be about time.” He takes off his hat, his thinning brown hair falling into his eyes. “Your mother doing all right?” I wonder what gossip is circulating now, and whether it's done in the name of sympathy or righteous satisfaction. My mother never made much of an effort to love her neighbors; why would they love her back?

“I guess. I think she's okay.”

“Saw you up on the tractor.” He looks at me; another smile flashes across his lips. I think of the boy on the back of the school bus and how this man is nothing like him.

“Yes. First time ever.”

“Looked kind of natural.”

I blush. “Thank you.”

He looks at the barn and then at the gray clapboards of the house. He puts his hand on the door handle of his truck and pops it open. “Well. If you need anything, just say the word. No need to be puritan about asking for help.”

“Thank you,” I say again. And then, “Jesse.”

“Yeah?”

“You want to go for a walk?”

He meets my eyes. “Sure.”

We walk to the top of the field and back through the woods to the Stark cemetery. I tell him I've forgotten all the small details of this place, so he tells me the names of ferns we pass: maidenhair, ostrich, cinnamon, royal. I show him the names on the stones at the cemetery, and he smiles. “Not lighthearted folks, were they?”

“No.”

He asks why I don't come home more often, and I tell him I envy the way he belongs to this place and it belongs to him.

He laughs. “That's one way of looking at it.”

I tell him coming home involves opening my body to layers and ripples of memory and the confusion of belonging and not belonging and the dichotomy of both loving and hating my lonely and crazy mother.

He looks down at his hands, tugs on a piece of grass and uproots it. He looks at me like I am some skittering leaf, blowing this way and that in the wind. “You think you're the only one that feels confusion or pain?”

I think of rivers and lakes and deep-water wells and feel my heart freeze. “I'm so sorry,” I say.

He looks down at his fingers. “It's okay.”

We sit in silence for a while and then get up and walk the long way home around the edges of my mother's
fields. Seeds fly everywhere: dandelion, milkweed, goldenrod. Sunlight touches everything. Back at the house Jesse climbs into his truck and smiles through the open window. “Thank you,” he says, and I nod, and stand there watching the back end of his pickup leave, my body tender to the point of breaking.

My mother sits on the glider after dinner and asks me for a jar of wine; I bring us each one and join her. Her eyes settle on the far horizon; waves of late-summer heat rise up and out of the field. She is eating little and her body thins daily; gray hairs fill the bath drain, drape across her pillow. I've called my office again. I may lose my job. Do I mind? The sugar maples are turning along the roadsides. Three times I've asked her about fixing the roof, and each time she's shrugged. “Before the fall,” she says. “Before the fall.”

I go inside, put Neil Young's
Rust Never Sleeps
on the record player and turn it up loud. When I step back onto the porch she is dancing in her chair—twirling her arms around her head, swishing her hair to the beat of Ralph Molina's drums. I down my wine and start dancing too; I swivel my hips and pout my lips and toss my head back and forth.

“Rock and
roll,
” my mother says. She stands up, shimmies over to me, and reaches her arms out. “Dance with me, baby-girl?” she asks, so I put my arms around her bird-thin waist and we do, to “Pocahontas” and then
“Sail Away.” Her breasts are small against my chest and unloved; I don't want her to lose them. When the music ends she tips her head back and laughs. “Coots!” she hollers. “Couple of crazy coots!”

I laugh too. The wine has gone straight to my heart. “Rooty-toot to the moon!” I call out, still holding my mother's body against mine. “Rooty-toot-toot to the frickin' moon.”

At midnight Kristy and I meet in the field between our houses. We lie in the grass and lean back on our elbows; the dew-wet grass soaks into the butt of our jeans and the elbows of our sweaters. She tells me her mother hardly leaves the house anymore. She tells me she wants to get pregnant before it's too late, with Dylan.

“Really, babies?” I ask.

“Yes. Babies. Wouldn't I make a good mother? We're twenty-eight.”

I look down at my grass- and dirt-stained hands. “Yes,” I say to Kristy. “You would.”

A stick snaps in the woods to our left, and I look into the dark rim of trees. A ripple of fear crosses my skin. “Don't you want kids?” Kristy asks.

“No,” I say. A breeze, scented of river, shoots across the field, and I burrow deeper into my sweater. I can hear Kristy breathing. “You'll be a wonderful mom,” I say, at last, my voice lost in my throat. “The best.”

“I hope so,” she says. “I hope.”

I'm ten, maybe. I have a baby goat I've called my own—Penny—and three bantam hens who follow me everywhere I go. I put Penny in old cotton dresses I find in the attic; I put Penny in the cradle I find in the barn and rock her to sleep, singing. She sucks the bottle I give her. She looks into my eyes with devotion and love. She sucks my finger until it is tender and sore.

I walk down to the Maise farm. It's noon and I don't know why I'm walking that way; my feet lead me there. Jesse lives in a self-built house up the road, but he's at the farm all day; he greets me at the doorway of the barn and smiles. “Done here,” he says, nodding toward the milk room. “Go somewhere?”

He drives the truck along the edge of a field to a place where the land slopes down to the creek, then rises up into a quilt of blue hills. It's hot in the truck. A drop of sweat runs down my side. “I have something to tell you,” he says, cheeks reddening.

“Oh yeah?” I look out the window at the well-kept hillside, its lines straight, its fields clear with purpose. I imagine the story of a girl drowning, of where he was, or was not, at the time.

He wipes his upper lip on his sleeve, looks down at his hands. “Clem and I used to watch you and Kristy swimming down there.” He nods toward the Silver Creek,
where Kristy and I used to skinny-dip all summer, sure no one could see us. “Thought we'd died and gone to heaven.”

I laugh, thinking of my gawky adolescent legs and tender, swelling breasts.

His cheeks explode in apple-colored splotches.

“I guess none of us grow up on an island,” I say. Neither of us moves. Another drop of sweat glides down my spine.

Jesse takes his hat off, rubs his forehead, puts the hat back on. I reach across the truck seat and touch his hand. His palm is dry, callused, not sweaty like mine.

“Hey, Jesse.” I look into his right eye, the one that looks like it is here, with me, not lost on other things.

“Yeah?”

“You ever seen a catamount around here?”

He smiles. “No. But I've heard them.”

“So they're here.”

“I've seen tracks. I've heard them.”

I smile. I can't help it. “That will make Joan very happy. I'm going to tell her you're a believer.”

“I've heard them, for sure,” he says.

“Good,” I say, and he smiles and starts the truck and drives me home.

I call Matthew that night from the top of the field, the only place my cell phone gets reception. He asks when I'm coming home, and I tell him I don't know; I tell him my mother still needs me. He asks again if he can come
here, and I tell him no. He is silent. I think of his intelligent bookshelves, of how he prefers to make love in daylight, of how I always close my eyes.

I wake to a scream. It's a terrible sound, the music of nightmares. I run downstairs to the screen porch, but my mother's bed is empty, the covers tossed aside. I go to the door and am about to call out when I see her standing at the edge of the field, a lean silhouette bracing itself against the sky. I go closer; she is smiling, her eyes bright. “Cat,” she whispers. “Bobcat. Or maybe my friend the catamount. The most horrible sound in the world, the sound of a woman being raped, or dying.”

We stand there listening but the woods are silent. My heart is erratic, my cheeks hot with adrenaline.

“Why that scream?” I ask.

“Just their mating song,” my mother says. “It sounds like they're dying, when in fact they're in love.” She smiles then and we stand there in the dark for a while longer, waiting, the scent of cut hay coming from the field, the end of my mother's cigarette aglow, but the woods are quiet. A minute passes before I realize she is shaking.

“Joan. You're cold.”

“No, not cold.”

I put my arm around her. Her limbs are erratic, uncontainable.

“It's out there,” she says, grinning. “Hannah baby, it's out there.”

“I know, Joan. I know. I believe you.”

“It's here. I can't believe it's fucking here.”

“I know,” I say. “I know.” I put my arms around her. She is all bone and skin. The withered body of a girl. “I believe you,” I say. “I believe.”

I crawl into bed with her; I don't want to sleep alone. I reach for her hand under the sheets and hold it: thin, birdlike, a pocket of dry warmth.

“Hannah,” she whispers.

“Yes.”

“I'm happy here.”

“Yes.”

“Totally fucking happy here.”

“I know.”

“Grace and beauty.”

“I know.”

She sits up and lights a cigarette; the tip dances in the dark, streaking the way the lights of sparklers do. “Hannah,” she says.

“Yes.”

“I'm dying.”

“No you're not.”

“Yes. It's everywhere.”

“No.” I put my head in her lap and start to silently cry.

“Yes,” she says, “but it's okay.” She strokes my hair back from my face. “It's okay, baby-girl. Grace and beauty and life and love. It's okay.”

“No,” I say, sobs raking through my chest now, her thighs like the wooden carcass of a boat, taking me out to some farther water.

“It's okay,” she whispers, my snot and tears all over the warm skin of her legs. “It's okay, baby. Okay.”

My mother turns fifty-four the last week of August and wants a party. I invite Kristy and her mom, Annie, and Jesse: there is no one else. My mother opens up her closet and pulls out an old dress I haven't seen in twenty years—blue and green calico—and slips it over my shoulders. She slips a cream-colored one, dotted with holes, on herself, and hangs large turquoise-and-silver pendants from her ears. Her fingers brush my hair back away from my face. “Dashing,” she says. “So lovable.”

I shake my head and smile. We go out onto the porch, light candles, and wait.

At nine Kristy pulls up and leaps out of her truck. Her mom climbs out after her. This is rare: Annie leaving the house. Depression and medication and addiction, Kristy tells me, are fucking blue streaks through her family.

But Kristy's all light. “Hippies!” she calls out. “Am I dreaming?” She pulls out a bag of liquor and ice. “Juleps?”

I get a pitcher and jars from the kitchen and grab a handful of mint from where it grows wild at the edge of the porch.

Kristy pours; I pound. My mother takes a sip, coos with delight. “Ah! Taste of heaven.”

“Thank you,” Annie says, taking hers and seating herself in a rocker. She says it like she means it, but also like she is five feet under, the cool flame of her heart near drowning.