Matters of Faith (23 page)

“It's not as easy as it looks,” he said. “Besides, do you really want to touch fish guts?”

“I had a life before I became a vegetarian, Marshall,” Ada said with a grin. “Believe it or not, I've done this before.”

He remembered her ease hooking the worm, how quickly she'd picked up casting, how she managed to unhook a fish and release it without flinching. He wondered what else he didn't know about her. He thought they knew everything about each other.

But he hadn't been completely honest either, had he? This was the first she'd heard about his grandfather, the first time she'd heard about this family at all really. He hadn't told her about his grandparents, and she hadn't asked. The first time he'd told her about Ira had been on the drive down.

So she hadn't told him about being born in Canada. There was no crime in being Canadian. And she hadn't told him about what her life was like in the other states she'd lived in. Still no crime. But there was no question that he was starting to wonder about what else he didn't know.

She took the knife from him, gently moving against him until she was standing in front of the sink. He breathed her in, and then joined his grandmother on the sofa.

“Hey,” he said.

“Well hey yourself, son,” she said. “That girl of yours is a real firecracker, isn't she?”

He laughed. “Yeah, she is. She likes you.”

“Hmmm, well, she don't know me yet, really. I know I'm a tough one to get on with sometimes.”

“I don't know,” he said. “You seem all right to me.”

“What's your daddy told you about me?”

“Nothing much,” he admitted. “I got the feeling there was some kind of fight—”

“Wasn't no fight.”

“Well, I don't really know then.”

She nodded. “It's hard to hear about where we come from sometimes. Sometimes people think they have to get away from their people. Your girl there, she seems like she wants to get back to her people.”

“She does,” he said with a nod. “She comes from solid people, people of faith.”

“Mmm hmm, she mentioned that. She knows her Bible, that's for certain.”

“She's helping me to know it better.”

“You know, you want to know your Bible better, you can come to me.”

“I didn't—”

“Why don't you tell me what kind of trouble you're in, son? What are you two runnin' from?”

“We're not running.”

“I raised two boys. I know when one's in trouble. And, your Ada, she's got a spark, I can see that. But she's not in the same kind of trouble.”

“I don't know what you're saying, I don't know what you mean,” he said desperately.

“You got some kind of trouble of the conscience. That one's got trouble in her soul. You got trouble can be taken care of. Hers, I'm not so sure.”

He stared into the kitchen. He could just see a bit of Ada's hair, her shoulder, a slender leg cocked to the side as she worked over the fish.

“I'm in love with her,” he said.

She nodded. “Oh sure, I can see that much.”

“She loves me.”

“Your folks like her?”

“Yeah,” he said, his face flushing. He could feel Grandmother Tobias's steady gaze on him. He couldn't look at her.

“Calvin ever tell you about your granddaddy?”

“Just that he was a minister,” he said, relieved that she'd dropped the subject of Ada. He wouldn't leave them alone again.

“You ever seen any pictures?”

“Just the ones in your hallway. My dad looks just like him, doesn't he?”

“He does. Randy takes after my side more. Now here,” she said, opening up a heavy, blue, cloth-covered photo album across his knees, and pointing to the first photo, a black-and-white group shot taken in front of a tiny house with a single window. “These are your granddaddy's people. He's right here.” She touched a shaky finger to the brittle, yellow plastic protecting the photo, pointing to a lanky teenager with a nearly shaved head, wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt and squinting somewhere beyond the camera.

He looked strong, as though his lankiness, his casual stance was hiding long, lean muscles ready to burst into action. He looked . . . tested, proven somehow. He was clearly younger than Marshall was, but he seemed more of a man than Marshall had ever felt.

It made him ashamed of his soft life, of his freedom to choose how he spent his days. It made him ache to run a plow behind a horse, to fish for dinner because he had to, not for sport, to have dirt creased into his calloused hands. He felt spoiled by the heaviness of the cell phone in his pocket, his electronics-filled dorm room, the classes he took.

The classes he used to take.

He felt a sudden cramp in his middle, and he hunched over as his grandmother turned the page in the photo album, touching the hard faces of his ancestors, pointing out everything he wasn't.

Ada brought them both tall glasses of lemonade, and then took her own out to the backyard, where Marshall saw her stretch out in the grass, apparently unconcerned about the dogs. He couldn't tell if she was gazing up at the sky or closing her eyes, but he knew that what she was really doing was giving him time with Grandmother Tobias, and they stayed on the sofa looking through album after album for almost two hours.

She told short anecdotes about the people, occasionally telling the same one over again whenever she came upon the same face. But the one he sought out in all of the pictures was his grandfather. He watched him change from the hard teen into a hard man, with his parents and siblings, fishing, driving, preaching in front of small groups of men as hard as he.

Finally he had his own wife by his side, Grandmother Tobias, looking much like she did now, he saw in amazement. Yes, she'd gotten older, much older, but everything was recognizable, the shape of her face and eyes, the gaze direct and knowing, the body sturdy and capable as a man's. And then the children, two boys who grew tall, their eyes less hard when they were young, both of them looking uncertain and wary.

Until the pictures progressed to their early teens, the photos turning from black-and-white to color, that was when they finally changed, when they grew shuttered. Even in the photos that showed them at play, in a canoe or with long shotguns cradled in their arms, posing over gutted deer or fowl, their faces were inscrutable.

The album ended abruptly, blank pages for the last half of it, and Grandmother Tobias pulled out a final, slim one, covered in vinyl, and slid it onto his lap. To his surprise, it was filled with pictures of his own family. Mostly of him at first, baby pictures, photos of him tearing open Christmas presents, school photos. There was an occasional one of him with his father, and after staring at photos of the males of his father's family, he was struck by how alike they all looked.

He could even, for the first time, see his grandfather, his uncle, and his father in his own face, his own eyes. And like his father and uncle, his photos changed at some point. He flipped the pages back and forth, looking for the exact moment it happened, and, at last, he thought he found it. He remembered the day at school that it had been taken, remembered the shirt that drove him crazy because of the high collar, it had made him feel as if he'd had a noose around his neck, as if it were keeping the air from filling his lungs completely.

But Shelly Williams, an eighth-grader with long blonde hair and the astonishing beginnings of a chest, had once told him that his arms looked good in it, and he wanted to make sure he was immortalized wearing it.

It was
before
Ira died.

If he had ever been asked to point to a defining moment in his life, he would have pointed to Ira and the train. Would have talked about seeing him hit, how he saw Ira place the penny on the tracks, saw it tip off the edge, catching the sun and blinking bright and gold and copper for a half second as Ira darted away. And saw the thing that everyone asked about later. Saw Ira turn back, even as the train bore down, saw him
turn back
to right the penny, saw him fall over his own clumsy feet, in the brand-new, too-big Nikes he got just the day before, an early bar mitzvah present.

He didn't remember reaching for him, but he must have, because when the train hit Ira—hit him as though he were soft as a pillow, as though he had never had bones—the rush of wind from the train knocked him off his own feet. When he fell, blinded by the swirl of grit and dust kicked up by the hungry metal wheels, he ripped his shirt, a jagged tear that exposed the right side of his chest. He didn't remember how it happened. Later, all he remembered was the wink of the penny.

And he had been profoundly changed. Everyone around him looked at him differently, and in the mirror he looked different to himself.

But this photo had been taken before that day. Bewildered, he flipped the pages again, but yes, he remembered that photo very well, because of Shelly Williams, because of the irritating neckline, and because it had been that shirt, the same shirt that he'd torn the day that Ira died.

And he'd already changed.

Grandmother Tobias had been talking during Marshall's frantic page-flipping, but he'd barely heard what she said, something about his mother sending the photos, but rarely any proper letters, and how her own letters went unanswered and how her son had forsaken her. Long, rambling, righteous talk that reminded him of when she'd sat at the table and told them that she'd not have whores and fornicators in her house.

He turned the page again. Meghan had started showing up. Baby pictures, pink blankets, tiny hair bows that he remembered his mother struggling to fasten with Velcro in Meghan's fine hair. School pictures, Meghan's eyes already sad, long before she had anything remotely like Ira happen to her.

She'd never had anything like that happen to her.

But then, nothing like that had really happened to
him
, had it? After all, he was not the one hit by the train. In fact, nothing had ever really happened
to
him. And Meghan had. She'd almost died when she was little more than a baby.

He hadn't been home when the babysitter gave her the peanut butter. He'd been at school. All he'd been told was that she'd gotten sick, and then his parents were busy with her. He hadn't been jealous; in fact, he'd felt heady with independence. He spent a lot of time with Ira and his parents, sure, but he'd also taken care of himself. He'd felt grown-up.

Photos started appearing that he didn't recognize, photos without him in them, photos with his father and Meghan, rarely ones of his mother, but of course she'd been the one behind the camera. Meghan grew up within a few pages, and the last one in the book was her current school photo, her eyes wide, as if someone had surprised her just as the camera went off.

It wasn't a great picture. And he knew Meghan hated it. She was so sensitive. A splotch appeared on the plastic over her face, and he hastily wiped it away, hanging his head and turning away from his grandmother so she wouldn't see him crying. He closed the photo album as she noted that Meghan looked like her mother, but that she'd gotten her father's nose.

He nodded, agreeing with the genetics lottery, letting her talk, and stared out the window at Ada, her better knee bent up into the sun, her bandaged one hidden in the thick grass.

“You told Ada that we weren't going on the same road together,” he said, interrupting her.

She stopped talking and was silent for a moment before nodding, slowly. “That's true. That's what I believe.”

“Why?”

“Because that's what God told me.”

“God told you that?”

“That's right.”

“What else did God tell you?”

She looked at him steadily for a second, her eyes full of certainty and what felt to him like a solid judgment, heavy, pushing against him, knowing that he was questioning her.

“You're in trouble, son. I know that. Don't know exactly what it is, but I imagine I'll be finding out soon enough. That one there,” she said, nodding out the window, “she's something different from you. She's got trouble, too, but she's . . . alone with herself. She's alone, Marshall, and that means she's not with you.”

He wanted to protest. Not against Ada being alone, but at the assumption that he wasn't. The only times he hadn't felt alone were the times he'd been with Ada, the times he'd held her, the times they had prayed together.

He'd always been alone.

“What did God tell you about me, besides me being in trouble?” he asked, hating the quiver in his voice.

“Well, that's something between me and God, I guess,” she said. She patted his back and hauled herself off the sofa. Marshall winced as her joints cracked and studied her as she limped into the kitchen with their empty glasses. “She did a right good job on these fish,” she called to him, and again, he considered what he didn't know about Ada.

He opened the photo album to the last page to look at Meghan and her sad eyes, and wondered how alone she felt.

AGAIN, after Cal left I tried to resume some sort of normal relationship with Meghan. It was easier now, without the respirator, though everything else was still hooked up, the catheter, the GI tube, and the transducer. Still, things seemed different without the respirator. The nurse brought me a shower cap, an ingenious little thing that she heated in the microwave and had a no-rinse shampoo built into it. I washed Meghan's hair, trying to believe that somehow she felt and enjoyed the pressure of my fingertips against her skull, knew that it was me and felt safe.