I Want to Show You More (9780802193742) (6 page)

1.7 to Tennessee

Eva Bock made her way along the shoulder of Lula Lake Road. She was eighty-nine—tall, bent forward from the waist. Her white pants hung from her hips so the hemlines of the legs pooled onto the tops of her tennis shoes. Her narrow lips were painted orange-red, and her steel-gray hair, tied up in a bun, smelled faintly of lemon. Loose strands hung about her cheeks and trailed down her spine. She wore a pair of headphones that created a furrow across the center pile of her hair. The cord fed into a chunky cassette deck/FM radio hooked onto the waistband of her pants. She was listening to NPR.

In her pocket was a letter, addressed:
Pres. George W. Bush, Penn. Ave., Wash. D.C.
Seven envelopes she had thrown away before she felt her handwriting passed for that of an adult. The letter itself she dictated to Quentin Jenkins, one of the McCallie boys who went down the mountain for her groceries. Quentin wrote in cursive on a college-ruled sheet of paper. She preferred he type it, and considered offering to pay him an extra dollar to do so, but when she finished her dictation and Quentin read the letter back to her, she grew excited and snatched the paper from him, folding and stuffing it into an envelope. Then she realized she hadn't signed the letter, so she had to open the envelope and borrow the boy's pen. Quentin offered to mail it for her but she had made up her mind to deliver it to the post office herself. She took great pride in the fact that she, an eighty-nine-year-old woman, still had things to say to the President of the United States. It was a formal letter, protesting the war. She felt it her duty to place it, personally, into the hands of the government.

A yellow Penske truck approached, honking. Eva set her feet a little ways apart and froze, looking straight ahead. She swayed from side to side, as if holding her balance on a log. In her freckled hand she carried a furled green umbrella, the tip of which she planted into the pavement to steady herself against the truck's tailwind.

When it passed she continued on, watching her feet take turns appearing and vanishing beneath her. One of her shoelaces was untied. The Lookout Mountain residents never honked. She had been walking this route, mornings, for as long as she could remember. Most locals slowed and made half-circles around her so she wouldn't feel obliged to step off the pavement. The tourists would run her off the road if she did not stand her ground to remind them this was a residential suburb, where folks lived and worked and took morning walks.

Eva felt short of breath, a bit light-headed. She'd been unable to finish her toast that morning, so eager she'd been to set off upon her errand. Three houses before the elementary school she stopped to tie her shoe. Sitting on the stone retaining wall beside the Sutherlands' driveway, she crossed her left foot over her right knee. The angle was awkward; the laces draped against her inside arch. She rested, looking up Lula Lake Road, visualizing her route. Just past the school's pillared entrance were a small pond and wooden gazebo; beyond the gazebo she could see the spire of the Methodist church, and beyond that were the bakery, City Hall, gas station, and convenience mart. Next came the Mountain Market and Bed and Breakfast. A brief stretch of houses. And then—with difficulty, Eva pictured herself reaching it—the four-way stop where Lookout Mountain, Georgia, became Lookout Mountain, Tennessee.

It was here, at the border, that Eva usually turned around, so that by the time she came home to the Adirondack rocker on her front patio, she had covered just over a mile of ground. Today would be different. The post office was on the Tennessee side, 1.7 miles from her front door. She'd had Quentin look it up on his laptop computer. Round trip: 3.4. She had not walked this far in twenty years.

She stood and, clutching the handle of her umbrella, again began her slow, measured steps. With her free hand she brushed off the backs of her pant legs and adjusted her top. She was wearing a threadbare sweater with an orange “P” knitted into the black fabric. It had been a gift from her son Thomas, who, after one semester at Princeton, joined the Army and was killed in a village in the Batangan Penninsula when he went into the jungle to relieve himself and stepped onto a booby-trapped 105 round. One arm was found hanging by its sleeve from a branch twenty feet above the ground. At least this was the story she heard coming out of her mouth when people asked about the sweater. Sometimes she forgot and said she didn't know where the sweater came from, and when she said this, it was as true as when she told the story about the dead son. She wasn't always sure if the thing had actually happened or if it was just something she read in a book. When she told the story, she felt she had not even known the boy in the jungle; she told it without emotion, as if describing a scene from a stage play, the boy who stepped onto the booby trap just an actor who was now carrying on another life somewhere.

When she finished telling the story she would berate herself. “His own mother,” she would think.
What kind of mother stops feeling grief for her son? What kind of mother must I have been?
She could not remember. And there was no one left whom she could ask.

But no one talked to her about the sweater anymore. If anyone spoke to her at all, it was, “Miss Eva, why must you take your walk along this busy road? You know when the fog sets in we can't see you coming or going. Miss Eva, you're going to get yourself run over.” But most people in town could not imagine what it would be like to drive along Lula Lake without watching for Miss Eva. Single-handedly, between 7:30 and 8:45
A
.
M
., Eva Bock kept the speed limit in check.

The truth was she could no longer remember why she walked this road. “It's the way I know,” she said when people asked. When she'd formed the habit, Lula Lake was not paved. Where the gas station and pharmacy stood had once been a grove of peach trees. But these were details that, most of the time, she could not recall. This morning, for example, she could think back only as far as yesterday's walk, when Phyllis Driver came out of the convenience mart and offered her a cup of Barnies coffee. She turned it down. The cup was brown with a picture of a man wearing glasses drawn in yellow lines. Phyllis was wearing a watch for people with vision trouble, large black numbers on an oversized white face. It read 8:10. Eva could remember these things—the time, watch, cup, “Barnies.” She could not remember her own son.

Sometimes she did remember things, usually when the season was in a time of change, but they were memories from her childhood. When one of these memories broke over her she would laugh and clap her hands against her thighs. One
October morning, she stepped into the Mountain Market,
flushed and shaking. Lorna Ellis, the cashier, put out her cigarette. “Gambling!” Eva shouted. “At the college!” Except for smears of red in the corners, her lips were colorless and wet with saliva. The skin on her face was like a delicate system of roots. Miss Eva beckoned and Lorna followed her out onto the stoop. With her umbrella, Eva pointed to the ridge above the Methodist church, where the trees around the Westminster campus shone red and yellow. “That's where Granddaddy showed me how to play blackjack. Held me on his knee and taught me to add up cards.”

When she did remember her son, Eva Bock prayed. It was the only time she prayed, and since she rarely remembered, she prayed infrequently. She began with the Lord's Prayer but usually wound up arguing about the funeral with Hugh, her husband, dead thirty-two years now. “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven,” she would recite, imagining Thomas's soul continuing to fly upward while the rest of him fell back to earth. “And get rid of the flag,” she told Hugh. “It's sullying his coffin.” When they sent Thomas home in a bag with a zipper, Hugh oversaw the entire affair: the guns, flag-folding, honors from a country that served Thomas up in the name of— what? It was a question she'd asked so many times it was boiled down, the feeling refined out of it. Just a quiet string of words she wished God would tell her the answer to. Sometimes during these prayers, when she got to the part where she meant to argue about the funeral, a young Hugh Bock would appear before her, expressionless and shining in a white linen suit. He was handsome and when she saw him like this she would forget what it was she wanted to say. She would feel girlish and shy and want to adorn him in some way, perhaps slide a daisy into the buttonhole on his lapel.

Today she did not remember Hugh or her son. She thought only of hand-delivering the letter in her pocket. It was cold out, close to freezing, in fact, and her knuckles ached around the handle of the umbrella.
Should have put on my coat. But there's no sense in turning around.
She was passing the pond and gazebo beside the school. Children—looking impossibly tiny to her, dwarfed by oversized backpacks—were emerging from side streets and parked cars. They wore brightly colored rubber shoes and hats with tassels. Mothers and fathers looked at her but did not wave or say hello, which was the way Eva wanted it. It was the reason she'd started wearing the headphones. The muscles of her face no longer betrayed any expression, so that it was difficult for anyone to tell if she was feeling friendly, which she usually was not. More than anything else, while she walked, Eva Bock wanted to be left alone.

Two boys wearing hooded sweatshirts flicked thin branches over the pond like fly rods. Sunlight and shadow spotted the muddy water, the surface of which buoyed a thousand brightly colored leaves. A yellow dog sat on the bank beside the boys.

“Careful,” Eva said. She had not intended to say the word aloud.

They turned to look at her. One boy laughed, then leaned over and said something to the other.

“What are you listening to?” the second boy called out.

Eva kept up her wide, even steps. “Floods in Mexico,” she said. “A mountain fell into the sea and the wave washed away a village in Chiapas.”

The bell rang. The boys ran across the school's front lawn, the dog following, their shoes kicking up little moist tufts of grass.

Something in the way the boys ran off . . . Eva felt as if a stack of papers were shifting inside her head.
Remember
. But as soon as she tried there was only the road ahead of her, a line up of latecoming cars, children's faces like pale moons in backseat windows. Eva planted her feet and stood, waiting for the cars to pass. She listened to the British announcer reporting the collapse of a bridge in Dubai. She thought of her letter and reached into her pocket, afraid she might forget her errand and turn around at the four-way stop. She rubbed her fingers along the edge of the envelope, feeling the stamps. She'd had to lick four of them to make enough postage. Almost a half-dollar to mail a letter to the President.

She continued on, past City Hall with its wooden sign hanging by only one hook so the words
Lookout Mountain, Ga
. had to be read sideways. She passed the Fairy Bakery with its morning smells of cinnamon rolls and coffee. The bakery had opened in September and some mornings the line came out the door.

At the McFarland intersection, in front of the gas station, she had to stop to rest. There was a bench in the tiny center island, placed there by the Fairyland Garden Club. Violas had been planted around the bench and Eva accidentally crushed two of them beneath her shoe. She sat down, folding her hands around her knees.
Only a quarter-mile, Miss Eva. How are you going to make it all the way into Tennessee?
Little black spots dotted the outside edges of her vision. She swiped at them with her hand.

Coming toward her, crossing Lula Lake from Oberon Road, was the new family—the professor's wife and her two children. Eva had seen them before. They were late for school but the mother did not seem in a hurry. The boy had hair like a mushroom cap and carried a long stick. The girl's brown hair was pulled into pigtails and she wore a skirt with stockings. The mother watched the boy, who, when they reached the island, pointed the stick at Eva and pretended to fire. The mother said something and Eva pushed back an earphone.

“Sorry to interrupt. We've seen you out walking.” She put her hands on the tops of the children's heads. “This is Myra and Grady. I'm Jocelyn Corley.” She held out a hand. She seemed eager to be touched.

Eva took her hand and looked up. The woman had a scarf tied around her neck.
Sarkozy
, Eva heard in one ear,
like President Bush, is a teetotaler. He enjoys mountain biking. He and Bush are discussing a Franco-American holiday in honor of Lafayette.

“We've been so charmed, seeing you out here every day,” the mother said. “We even made up a limerick about it. We thought, with your permission, we could send it to the
Mountain Mirror
.”

“Let's hear it then,” Eva said. She was annoyed by this distraction from her errand and by the fact that these new folks had already formed opinions about her. Again she reached to feel for the letter in her pocket. In one ear Sarkozy was speaking.
France was there for the United States at the beginning. United States was there for France during the wars in Europe. We must remind our people of this
.

The little girl stepped behind her mother, shy; but Jocelyn and the boy recited:

“There once was a woman named Bock,

who every day went for a walk.

Rain or snow,

still she would go,

each step like the tick of a clock.”

“Carrying a dirty sock,” said the boy. “Looking for a cool rock.”

“He comes up with alternate endings,” the mother said.

“What's on your Ipod?” the girl asked. When Eva didn't answer the girl pointed to her hip.

“Oh. It's a radio.” She lifted the corner of her sweater so the girl could see the cassette player. “I've got my news program on. The war.”

The boy sat down on the bench and unzipped his backpack. “Are you for blue or gray?”