Jasmine (21 page)

They are clues, but to what? Shadowy road signs for a phantom Columbus? I should have known about his friends, his sister, his community. I should have broken through, but I was afraid to test the delicate thread of his hyphenization. Vietnamese-American: don’t question either half too hard. I’m happy that he’s visiting his sister. I am not grieving over the loss of a son. His sister kept him alive in the camp; we only gave him tools. From the fields, hidden in the tangles of her ratted hair, she brought him gifts of life, gifts of love: rats, roaches, crabs, snails. For every gesture of loyalty there doesn’t have to be a betrayal. The star on my forehead throbs: pain and hope, hope and pain.

I haven’t figured out the what and why of Du’s hoarding. Or maybe that’s the point: exclude no option; someday your life might depend on the length of twine you squirreled away in your desk drawer. But Du’s also like me, a striver and a saver, a prudent investor and money manager. I find mail-order catalogues in a language I can’t read and a book of order forms. He’s been filling out orders for Vietnamese greeting cards—die-cut, stand-up, fold-out beauties. Fish swim across five-panel oceans, birds wing
pleated lavender skies. I will keep from Bud the two books of deposit slips stuck inside wool socks we bought him for a Colorado camping trip with Scott and his family. Du was keeping his money in CDs in savings and loans places in Dalton instead of in Bud’s bank in Baden. Over two thousand dollars. I am looking at the piggy bank of a new tycoon; also at an insult that Bud would not forgive.

“Bud’s not here?” she asks, and I say, “He’s still at the bank. Inspectors’ visit.” She nods. “Of course. How soon we forget.” I make her some instant coffee.

The gun is still out, propped by the door. She’s too polite to ask me about it.

“I talked to him. He’s rambling all over the lot,” she says. She’s looking around the living room and kitchen, getting her bearings. We bought everything new after the divorce. They look familiar and dingy to me, but for Karin it’s a whole new take on Bud. Because of the wheelchair, we keep wide aisles, few tables, no bric-a-brac that he might knock over. The truth is, we’re underfurnished, in a meager house.

When she joins me in the kitchen, she sees bottles and tubes of medicine with Bud’s name on them; she knows I’ve been decent in a difficult time. No picnic, is it? she says. Gallon jugs of white vinegar for his soaks: tubes of antibiotics for decubitus ulcers, support hose and diuretics for “dependent” edemas. The keening language, so precise yet so suggestive; blood tests for “occult” presences. Even
the bacteria, when they settle in his ulcers, become “indolent.”

We’ve paid a steeper price for our heroic love than even Karin would have set. She picks up a bottle of diuretic medicine, reads the directions. “Otherwise, the fluids gather,” I start to explain.

She nods. “I know, I’ve done some reading. Is he in much pain?” she asks.

“He doesn’t complain. But there has to be a lot of pain.”

His therapist said amputees sometimes scream from the terrible pain in their absent limbs. It’s called phantom pain. Bud will suffer pain from muscle memory; the loss of function, the memory of muscles that have died.

She looks around our living room, at the old pine table and four brightly enameled chairs from an unpainted furniture store, and at the huge wooden Cardinals mascot on a wall. She strokes the scarlet bird. “Did he tell you how he got that silly thing?” she asks, her eyes wet. I nod. He went to St. Louis when they tore down the old stadium. He fought a man for the cardinal. “A man has his obsessions,” I say.

Karin paces, picking up things she recognizes, his old ledger books, an old leather-flapped briefcase he’d carried to work for thirty years. When they divorced, Bud packed up his awards, the framed “Man of the Year” citations, the sporting trophies. The cardinal and the citations are now our artwork. He says, What’s the use of hanging anything on these walls? Optimistically: we won’t be here that long.

Realistically: you can’t hang things low enough for me anyway.

“I was wrong to call you a gold digger. I don’t know if I could have nursed him.”

“We do what we must,” I say.

“If you married him for money, you didn’t do that great.”

“We have enough.”

“My lawyer thought you’d adopted that Vietnamese boy in order to raise a big issue in court. Lower the settlement, something like that. I told him it was something Bud was doing out of guilt—let him pay. You can’t imagine how hurt and small-minded I was.”

Karin is still in love with Bud. She didn’t leave Baden. She could have, but she chose to stay. The world is divided between those who stay and those who leave. “It was love. Extravagant love. He thought he could atone for something,” I say. For being American, blessed, healthy, innocent, in love. I tell her the story of John, the sister, and Du’s sudden departure, my fear of confronting Bud with it.

“If you want me to stay, I will,” she says.

As we drive to Darrel’s, I don’t mention his bizarre proposal to me; the talk is purely of farming or selling, commitment to the land or to the self. “Farm boys grow up guilty if they desert the family ground,” says Karin. “It’s that simple.” This is puritan country; we’re born with guilt or quickly learn it. Guilt twists a person, she says.

I tell her something I’m expert on: I see a way of life coming to an end. Baseball loyalties, farming, small-town innocence. Most people in Elsa County care only about the Hawkeyes—football or basketball. In the brave new world of Elsa County, Karin Ripplemeyer runs a suicide hot line. Bud Ripplemeyer has adopted a Vietnamese and is shacked up with a Punjabi girl. There’s a Vietnamese network. There are Hmong, with a church of their own, turning out quilts for Lutheran relief.

When I was a child, born in a mud hut without water or electricity, the Green Revolution had just struck Punjab. Bicycles were giving way to scooters and to cars, radios to television. I was the last to be born to that kind of submission, that expectation of ignorance. When the old astrologer swatted me under a banyan tree, we were both acting out a final phase of a social order that had gone on untouched for thousands of years.

What I’m saying is, release Darrel from the land. There are different mysteries at work. Bud thinks it’s a conflict between farming and golfing, but he’s missing the point. Darrel is a romantic, just like him. The banker who steps out of marriage to live with an Indian is the same as the Iowan who dreams of New Mexico. They’ve been touched with the same virus.

By the scratchy light of a summer sundown, we see Darrel walking the rafters of his hog house. He’s rigged strong night-lights with long extension cords, as though
he intends to work through the night. Shadow gives us both a good pawing as we make our way to the construction.

“Roof goes on tomorrow. Just getting the last studs in tonight,” he shouts down.

No evidence of drinking, of disturbance. He’s the appealing kid with the floppy hair. Only a sober man could walk those boards in the dusk, hammering as he goes. “I’d come down and offer you kind ladies a beer, but I’m behind schedule as it is. Plus, if I stop I might never start up again.”

Karin shouts up at him, “We just wondered if there’s anything we could do.”

“The two of you“—he’s smiling—”seeing’s how you know Bud so well, might work on him for about fifty thousand bucks real quick. Got a lead on a couple-three champion boar hogs down in Burlington.”

He executes a jaunty hop to the next joist and begins his hammering all over again. Echoes like rifle cracks roll across the fields.

“Come by tomorrow. Everything’s hooked up and I’m letting the hogs loose in here tonight. I reckon we can bank on it not raining.”

On the drive back, we can hear the hammering out to the highway, and nearly to our property. “What do you think?” she asks, and I have to say maybe I panicked. He looked like the Darrel of old.

* * *

Bud calls to me. “Jane, hon,” he shouts, “it’s one of my clumsy nights.”

I run out to the living room. Bud’s dropped the Financial Statement and Supporting Schedule forms he’d been working on. I collect and sort the papers before I give them back. He looks miserable. It is oppressive in the living room, bugs ping against the black squares of windows. “Honey, I’m a little cold.” I throw an afghan on Bud, over his bathrobe. It’s his circulation. Bud has changed my life. I am grateful. I am carrying his child. I want to tell him that when I was a girl in Hasnapur only playboys in Bombay movies wore bathrobes. That meant, in shorthand, they had a bathroom, they had modesty, and they had air conditioning. Bathrobes, dark glasses, whiskey, cigarettes: these were shorthand for glamour that we Hasnapuris were meant not to have. I have triumphed. But how can I explain such small odd triumphs to Bud? He’s always uneasy with tales of Hasnapur, just like Mother Ripplemeyer. It’s as though Hasnapur is an old husband or lover. Even memories are a sign of disloyalty.

Bud has accepted my explanation. The sister had just been discovered and had just arrived; she sent out a call for Du and he’s answered it. It might take a few months, but he’ll be back for school in September. He worries that we’ll never really have Du to ourselves, that he’ll always be attached in occult ways to an experience he can’t fathom, and as I take off Bud’s shoes, I admit there can be no other
way for some of us. He is so exhausted he only mumbles, “But not you, Jane, that’s what I love about you,” and he’s asleep even as I unbutton his trousers.

Bud says, “Okay, feed me the numbers under ‘Breeding Stock.’What’ve we got?”

I check the column he wants me to. “Forty sows at two hundred and fifty, which makes ten thousand bucks, and three boars at four hundred, which makes another twelve hundred, so that makes eleven thousand two hundred.”

All over Iowa I hear such eerie love calls. Twenty thousand bushels corn @ two-fifty per bushel: make that fifty thousand bucks; four thousand bushels beans @ six even per bushel, so another twenty-four thousand bucks. The Prince of Baden woos the Indian Maiden. I should be swooning by now.

Scaled back, triple-mortgaged, with stipulations to sell off some land and forgo a few improvements, Darrel’s loan gets approved. It’s well after midnight; the lights are off at Darrel’s, and Bud is exhausted. I help Bud to bed. The call to Darrel will have to wait until breakfast. This is a call for Bud, not me, to make. I worry that Bud’s call will come too late. Darrel’s already imagined himself in New Mexico selling Tandys: his will has muscled out his guilt, or his destiny. He might say take your thirty thousand and stuff it.

Crazy, Darrel wants an Indian princess and a Radio Shack franchise in Santa Fe. Crazy, he’s a recruit in some army of white Christian survivalists. Sane, he wants to
baby-sit three hundred hogs and reinvent the fertilizer/pesticide wheel. Once the old chemicals have leached from the ground, he talks of cleaning the ponds and raising catfish and giant prawns, of cultivating fancy vegetables on the organic strip, charging premium prices in “Lutz’s Corner” of the Hy-Vee.

We call, early enough, but Darrel’s not in. Bud decides to deliver the news in person, so after breakfast he rolls down the ramp to my Rabbit, we make the transfer—his arms around my neck as I lift him to the front seat, chair folded in the rear—but he raises his hand before I can start the engine.

“What’s that noise?”

There are so many competing farm noises in late July, all of them rising into a single high-pitched whine like the whistling of semi-trailers on the Interstate three miles away, that I’m about to wave it off, until I catch it, too: a skip in the whine, the generalized form of something familiar and specific, as though I had confused something still-voiced and close with something loud and remote.

I remember suddenly the screams of a baby girl thrown down a well in Hasnapur, her cries for two days being taken as prowling jackals across the nullah.

“Hogs!” says Bud.

* * *

Unfed hogs are like unfed babies. They set up the most pathetic wheezing and whining. Animal abuse of any kind is the one thing a farmers reputation just doesn’t survive. “He better have a good explanation,” Bud is saying as we make the turn by the row of maples. The chorus breaks into grunts and squeals. “I told him there’s something about a hog that resists all this automation. Cows, yes, they’re stupid. But your pig’s a plenty smart customer. He wants contact, he wants to see the farmer out there winter and summer, morning and—”

We stop at precisely the same moment. On the road lies Shadow, the halves of his body practically perpendicular. Straight ahead, a boiling sea of pink hogs: their heads, their backs, their legs jump above the open cinder-block wall.

Bud is staring straight ahead at the hogs. I find my eyes slowly rising to the roofs pinnacle. The frail man who is still slowly twisting and twisting from the rafter with an extension cord wrapped around his stiffly angled neck isn’t the Darrel, would-be lover, would-be adventurer, who, only nights ago in a cumin-scented kitchen, terrorized me with the rawness of wants. This man is an astronaut shamed by the failure of his lift-off. He keeps his bitter face turned away from the galaxies that he’d longed to explore.

In the car Bud keeps muttering, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” and pulling hard at the steering wheel as though he wants me to speed into a U-turn and get us quickly out of earshot of the crazed, carnivorous hogs.

“Tahiti,” I sob. “He wanted for us to see Tahiti.”

“Jane!” Bud’s voice rises harsh above the greedy grunting in the hog house. “Don’t fall apart on me!”

“His feet. Bud, look at his feet.”

Karin would keep her head. Karin would get the sheriff, fast. She’d phone the family. And comfort Bud. Most of all, she’d comfort Bud. It’s Bud who needs Karin’s Hot Line now.

Bud’s freckled hand closes over mine. Together we turn the key in the ignition. “Good girl,” he says. “That’s my girl.”

I hear gravel chunk against the sides of the Rabbit, but it’s not rural routes in Baden I’m racing through. I am deep inside a crater on the moon. Before me huge, lunar hogs leap and chew on Darrel’s bloodied boots.