Miller's Valley (8 page)

I didn't want to take sides, but the older I got the more Ruth seemed childish to me. Sometimes someone who had known her when she was a girl would say that that was because she was a youngest child, but I was a youngest child, too, and I didn't sit around waiting for someone to make me cinnamon toast and put it on the end table with a cup of tea.

But I still brought her food, only from the diner instead of my mother's kitchen. We were allowed to take things that wouldn't look pretty on a plate, lopsided cakes, the end piece of a pork roast. Sometimes I made her something, a cheese omelet (“Not runny inside, Mary Margaret,” she would call from the living room) or a BLT.

“Ruth has always been a soft sort of girl,” said my father one day when we were riding in his truck. “I remember when I first met your mother, Ruth was maybe ten years old and was always saving baby birds. She'd put them in a little shoe box with some cotton, feed them bits of things.”

“Did she save them?” I asked.

“She sure tried hard enough.”

“But did it work? Did the birds live?”

My father thought for a moment. When my father was thinking it was like an aerobic exercise, like he was putting his whole body to the test. “I'm thinking not,” he finally said.

I
t was a hard time, the fall just before I turned sixteen. August 2 had come and gone, and Donald had never arrived. He sent me a postcard saying he couldn't get off work, but his grandfather had already told me he wouldn't be coming. “It's that mother of his,” he'd said. “Don't get me started.” He looked so sad. I knew how he felt. Our house was built for five, and now it was down to three. My brothers' old shirts hung in their closets like the ghosts of people who'd once slept in their beds. I missed Tommy. I missed Donald. I even missed Eddie sometimes, and Donald's grandmother. Sometimes I thought about her lavender smell and her warm pies. I think maybe more than anything I missed the Mimi I used to be. Getting older wasn't working out so well for me. My brother's words had made me think a lot about what I wanted, where I wanted to end up, and the truth was I had no idea in the world. I figured it should be clear, like that big strip of yellow tape they held across the end of the course for the sack race at the volunteer fire department picnic: this, here, this is how you win.

I did well in school. I'd always done well but now I moved to the head of the class because I didn't have much to do except homework and helping Callie out. There were things we studied that I couldn't see the point of, like poetry and ancient history, and there were things that made perfect sense to me, like algebra and biology. First term of sophomore year I got highest honors. The list was in the paper: three of us, the other two boys. “Don't let it go to your head, Mary Margaret,” said Ruth, who got the paper a day late, my father taking it out to her when my mother was done with it. But my mother made me sit down at the kitchen table after it had been cleared and wiped, and she put her finger on my name like she was marking a point on a map.

“This is your road to something better than this,” she said. It was the only time I'd heard her say one single thing that made it seem as though her life wasn't just what she wanted it to be, except that one night after a Jansson wedding at the firehouse and a couple of whiskey sours when she had talked about how all through high school she had gone out with an older boy named George who had gone away to the state university. “That one had a high opinion of himself,” my father had said. The next day I asked Ruth if she remembered a boy named George that my mother had dated. “Of course,” Ruth said. “That was a time.” And she wouldn't say more, which for Ruth was saying a lot.

My mother's finger tapped my name in the paper. She had made my father buy extra copies. “You're a smart girl,” she added. “Don't waste it.”

That's who I was by then: the smart girl. But it was hard. When you look back on your life there are always times that you remember as the hard times, even if they're the hard times a girl has, not the hard times of a woman, with grief and loss and real hardship. “I might come to visit this summer,” Donald had written on his last postcard (a picture of the Hollywood Bowl) but I wasn't going to count on it again. I figured it was what Ruth called wishful thinking.

LaRhonda and I had never been a perfect fit as friends, which my mother and Aunt Ruth and even Cissy Langer had told me more than once, but sometimes, I've found there are people you get to be friends with accidentally and then stay friends with because you've always been friends. But I only saw LaRhonda now when she didn't have anything better to do. After she'd come back from the ranch she seemed a lot older than I did, and for the hour or two that we'd been at her kitchen table, eating fried chicken from the diner that her mother warmed up in the oven, I figured that it was because she'd learned a lot from the other girls there. Once Mrs. Venti went to work, leaving us with a banana cream pie and a pitcher of iced tea, I'd found out what was really going on.

“I've accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior,” LaRhonda had said solemnly, clutching at the neck of her blouse and finally pulling a gold cross on a chain from underneath.

I'd seen a lot of that growing up, from Mrs. Bascomb, who spoke in tongues at a church that held its services under a tent in a used car lot, to Donald's grandfather, who had once told him that he'd been traveling a dark dark road before the Lord lifted him up. For LaRhonda finding Jesus took a different form. She became friends with a group of girls in our high school class who had all found Jesus, too, and who all spent a lot of time on the phone each night planning the outfits they would be wearing next day. They also managed to incorporate gossip and meanness into their religious tradition, like this: “I'm praying on Cheryl because I hear she drank six beers after the football game and puked in the bushes outside Cathy Barry's house.”

There's a particular kind of way I've noticed people, women mostly, act with one another when they're pretending to be nice but they really don't like each other. That's how those girls were with me. They were town girls, and it was like they could smell the farm on me, or maybe they made me smell it on myself. For a while I hung around the edges of all this, but there was a girl who kept saying she was praying on Callie because of Clifton, and I thought Callie needed a second pair of hands and a job that paid more than minimum wage a lot more than prayers, and at one point I said so, and although LaRhonda said she had told the group I was expecting a visit from Aunt Flo—which I wasn't—they were concerned about the state of my soul.

Even Tommy wasn't Tommy anymore. When he finally came home on a visit it was like he was someone else again, jacked-up and hard. He'd let his hair grow down the back of his neck and refused to shave, and he and my father had a fight about it. “I'm waiting for a gook bullet through my skull and you're worried about hair?” he'd said. He had a tough little barking laugh he laughed now, a mean second cousin to a real laugh, a poor substitute for the way he used to throw his head back and let loose. His first dinner home he said, “There was one night when the guys and I were crawling through some mud—” And my father cut him off and said, “Son, I don't think your mother and sister want to hear that.” Then we all sat silent until my mother put butterscotch pudding, Tommy's favorite, on the table, but he pushed back his chair and said, “I'm going over to see Jackie.” In the middle of the night he came in and started crashing around his room, banging his knee on the playpen. “Goddamn,” I heard, and then a thump, and silence.

When it was time for him to leave again my mother hugged him hard in the kitchen while Tommy sobbed on her shoulder like some tormented version of his old self. For weeks afterward I could hear that sound, the hoarseness like his guts were coming up, the gasps like his heart was going to explode. I'd been waiting for Tommy to tell me what to do with myself, but as his tears turned the shoulder of my mother's plaid shirt black I knew that he was more lost than I was. He pulled himself together and tried to pretend like nothing had happened, but it was one of those moments you can't ever take back, that you remember forever.

I was crying, too, and Tommy said, “Hey now,” like there was no reason for it. He kissed Clifton on the forehead and said, “Stay cool, little man,” but he hadn't really seemed to know what to do with his son when he was home, and Clifton didn't recognize him and kept pointing to the picture in the bedroom and saying “Da.”

After Tommy left, my father must have realized that I was having a tough time, or maybe he was having one, too, because he started to take me along on some of his fix-it trips when I wasn't working or at school. He said he liked the company, but I think it was more for my sake than his. He wasn't much of a conversationalist, my father; when people would stop by to have something fixed he would mostly listen. But he liked telling me stories. He would talk about being in the service, not about fighting but about being on KP and meeting men from Brooklyn and Tulsa and other places he'd scarcely known existed. “There were two Jewish boys,” he once said, as though you couldn't get more exotic and unexpected than that. He talked about how his father decided dairy was too much work and switched to beef cows, and how his mother's father had trained as a taxidermist and how my mother's grandmother had been a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse up the slope of the mountain.

My father told me a story about a great-uncle of his who was a dowser, who could stand in a yard and sniff long and hard, the way Clifton sniffed my uniform dress, and then tell you where to sink a well. Sometimes I thought Winston Bally could do that, too, sniff out, not the water, but where the water was causing trouble. As far as I knew he hadn't ever come back to our place, hadn't talked to my father since I was an eleven-year-old kid selling corn out front. But sometimes I'd see him driving on the back roads of the valley, in his navy blue government sedan, and sometimes I'd hear that he had been around, telling people that plans for the reservoir were moving ahead slowly but surely. There were two farmers at the other end of the valley who had already agreed to sell their places if the government plan went through, and a husband and wife who had taken over his mother's place and had plans to finish the basement until they found out that no builder could keep the water out. They put a For Sale sign at the end of their driveway, but it was hard to sell a house in Miller's Valley, and they were talking about discussing some kind of deal with the state.

Mr. Bally showed up at my aunt Ruth's door one day when it was in the nineties for the second straight week and she was sitting in front of a fan watching
Days of Our Lives.
Nothing irritated her more than having someone interrupt a soap opera, and nothing unsettled her more than hearing a knock at the door, which had to mean a stranger because all the rest of us just walked in.

“Can I speak to you for a moment, ma'am?” Winston Bally apparently said, and Ruth replied, “Not on your life,” although when she told me that, it sounded like the kind of thing you wish you had said at the time but dreamt up afterward.

The screening on Ruth's front door was thick and a little dusty. Looking through it was sort of like looking at something through a sheet of heavy rain, so Ruth said all she knew was that Mr. Bally suddenly backed up off her steps. That was because my father had grabbed him by one shoulder and pulled him down to the scrubby patch of dirt and struggling lawn in front of the little house behind our bigger one.

“I've been as polite as I know how to be,” he said—“hollered,” said Ruth later—“but I'm not going to tell you again to stay away from this property. And if you ever bother this lady again I will be doing more than telling you.”

“You'd better be careful, assaulting a government agent,” Mr. Bally had said, straightening the front of his white shirt.

“You are trespassing, mister, and you're upsetting this lady and I won't have this lady upset.”

“The law says I am allowed to visit citizens at their homes for this purpose.”

“I don't care what the law says, I want you off,” my father told him.

The story made the rounds in town in the next week. I heard people tell it at the diner, but it got bigger and better in the telling, the way things do. One man said my father had punched Winston Bally, and another said Winston Bally had threatened to have my father arrested. When Winston Bally came in and ordered the lunch special on Saturday, a bowl of Scotch broth and an egg salad sandwich, the place got real quiet for a minute. It so happened that he was at my station at the counter. He left me a two-dollar tip but I didn't know whether he was a good tipper because he wasn't from around here, or whether it had something to do with the fight with my father.

“You can't stop progress,” one of the other men at the counter said after he was gone. It was the first time I'd heard that sentence in the conversation about the water, but it sure wouldn't be the last, or the last time I heard the sound of my mother's voice through the vent at night as I fell into a deep and exhausted sleep: Face facts, Buddy. Just face facts.