One Heart (17 page)

January was the hardest month we spent there because there wasn't enough work to pour ourselves into, and Muriel was always having neighbors over. Neighbors from a mile away would ride their tractors through the snow and sit in Muriel's dining room around her table in their wool socks drinking hot rum and cider and talking about people they knew who Ivy and I didn't know. Muriel always tried to invite us into these conversations, but mostly we sat in silence, listening, Ivy listening with her pure attention span and her natural ease, me listening with a growing restlessness, an unwanted knowledge that soon I'd probably be living somewhere else, because this wasn't my home. Hearing the generations of history these people had shared told me it would not become my home.

Then, in March, after a dose of false spring, I was up late and looking out our bedroom window when I discovered a tire on the lower roof, and in the tire was what looked like a bird, a goose. The goose seemed to be sleeping. It was a moonlit creature, very beautiful, with white patches on its face, a long black neck, and a gray coat. A Canada goose. I had always been captivated by the pure noise of their departures, and their designs in the skies.

I supposed the bird was nesting, and I was right. Immediately I felt happy about this, that I had a view of a nesting bird I had always liked. The next day Muriel told me the tire had been used for years as a nest, that she had witnessed the births of hundreds of goslings. “You should see them when they have to jump out of that nest. The poor little things land flat on the ground, then start walking behind the mother toward the lake. It's a long walk for those little goslings, but most of them make it. It just stuns me, the kind of hunger for life that nature packs into such tiny bodies.”

I watched the mother on her nest every night, and sometimes during the day I'd come in from the fields where we were working on the soil, and I'd watch the big, beautiful goose covering the eggs with her own down, biting it from her own coat and adding it until she developed a painful-looking bare spot on her underside. Sometimes she'd leave the nest and come back dripping wet. I'd watch her stand over her eggs, dripping water on them, then adding more down. A few times she looked toward the window, seemed to see me. She made a honking sound that I took as a greeting, though I knew it was more likely a warning not to come closer. At night she sometimes looked toward the window so intently I believed she was trying to find me, so I finally turned on a small lamp. Ivy never woke up, and for reasons that weren't very clear to me at the time I never told her about the way I was keeping what amounted to be a kind of vigil.

But she came into the room one afternoon when I was at the window watching this goose fix more of her down over the eggs, and I looked away from the window quickly, and immediately felt resentful of Ivy's presence. I couldn't understand myself in these moments, but I knew enough not to be rude to her, knew it was my problem. So I said, “A nest of Canada geese on the roof.” She walked over and stood beside me and watched the mother goose for a moment.

“I used to love watching them fly in the autumn. I'd just lay on my back and watch and listen to their honks. They sure are some loud honkers.”

I was happy when Ivy left me there, alone, happy that the goose hadn't turned to look at her, though I was not obsessed with the goose, not strangely attached as it may sound. I just felt the need to have something of my own, something purely interesting that I could observe with my own eyes, and my own mind. Muriel told me it took about four weeks for the eggs to hatch, and I was happy to learn that, glad to hear that the drama of their birth would take some time.

When I stood at the window, I could see far out into the fields, where the snow still layered the ground. From the attic window, upstairs, you could see Superior. I knew that when the geese were born they'd have to learn to fly down to the lake. I was already thinking of how I could watch them learn to fly, how I could study them as they swam and dove for food.

For a while there wasn't much to see. I'd stand and make eye contact with the mother, and I wouldn't leave the window until she looked away. Sometimes she held my gaze, or so it seemed, for a long time, and I'd find myself staring beyond her out into the land, thinking back to New Orleans, probably as a way to avoid thinking back further, but as a man learns soon enough, memory never walks a straight line.

In New Orleans, I'd met a hard-working woman named Nicoletta Graves. She held down two part-time jobs, one as a graveyard shift security guard, and one as a waitress in the fine restaurant where I first saw her. I wasn't eating in that restaurant but delivering fish in the morning, which I did twice a week, and after I first caught sight of Nicoletta, on subsequent deliveries I lingered in that big kitchen, hoping she would come through the swinging door in her white uniform and meet my eyes. When she did, she smiled, and I took this as a cue to ask her how she was doing. Beg your pardon? she said, because I'd spoken too quietly. She stepped closer to me, looked up at my eyes. “How you doing?” I said again, holding steady. She said she was doing just fine, thank you, and smiled. It was not a smile that suggested she knew I was uncomfortable; I had never approached a woman this way before, mostly because I'd never had to. Her smile was easy, and her eyes unburdened.

A few weeks later, after several more of these easy smiles, I finally said to her, “What are you doing tonight?” and she said, “Tending to my kid and my nephew.”

I said, “Alone, or with a man?” and stepping closer because again I was too quiet, she said, “Pardon?” “You want company?” I said, and she said, “Depends on the company.” And I said, “Well, I'd like to see you again.”

Again she smiled and said, “You would, would ya.”

Later she told me she agreed to see me because I reminded her of her father. She was forty-two, and her father had been dead for nineteen years.

She was tending to the children alone, outside of the city in a house that looked small as a child's toy when I first drove up. It was pale pink, with a gray metal chair on the lopsided porch, and my first thought was that I'd be too tall to fit inside the place, and my second thought was that the place could be taken up into the sky by a strong wind.

I had taken three showers before driving out to her place to make certain I would not smell like fish, which tells you my intentions were to eventually seduce her. Two nights before as I laid down in bed it had dawned on me that I hadn't been with a woman in over two years. I can't say it was a physical hunger I felt so much as a fear that I was turning strange that sent me toward Nicoletta Graves without my usual hesitations.

Nicoletta answered the door in a dress, looking prettier than I'd expected, and said, “Come on in and have some wine, the kids are almost asleep.” I walked in and we sat at her kitchen table in the smallest kitchen I had ever seen, small enough so that as we drank red wine I felt that we were
huddled
. I studied her as she stared out the window and said nothing, and I don't know how to say why we were both comfortable in that silence, but I remember I wanted it to last, because I could hear her breathing, and it had been a long time since I had heard anyone's breathing but my own.

She had some questions, however, which didn't surprise me. First she wanted to know why I'd picked her out. I told her I couldn't explain that, but that I imagined many men had picked her out before me. She said that was true, but she wasn't used to someone like me choosing her. At the time she wouldn't go on to explain what she meant by that. She also had the predictable curiosities: where was I from, had I been married, and if I had kids.

I have always been as wedded to truth as I believe a man can be, which is a trait that never served me well, because as most everyone knows this land of ours is built on lies; men keep jobs and wives because they're willing to lie, and all of us are supposed to agree that a little lying is what you need to keep the American peace. I never accepted that, mostly because I knew I felt unable to discern a white lie from a real lie. I felt if I started lying, I might fall into a state of confusion and never return. I'd had truthful parents, parents who never even told white lies when they were drunk, or at least they managed to give me that impression, so telling the truth was an inherited habit of mine, one I couldn't imagine breaking without effort before that night in Nicoletta's house.

I said I was from Kentucky, originally, but had lived all over. I said I had been married, and that I had never had children.

This last statement came out of my mouth as if the words had their own will. The lie floated like a black balloon in the air between us, and stayed there all night, and a few times I was tempted to throw a dart that way, but I didn't.

I can only say that I felt there was no room for the real stories of my life in that kitchen. I must have felt that if I let them escape from my heart, the room would disappear, the stories would take over, and I'd feel emptied out and incapable of seeing this woman. I'd be unable to see much of anything if I let what I had lived come into the room; even stating the facts would be too much. So I sat there with Nicoletta, and I made up a life for myself, a simple life that allowed that room and woman to exist for me, and the longer they existed, the more I knew I had needed them for a long time, needed someone like her to help dismantle my isolation.

“Always wanted some kids, but it just never happened. I was only married for a few years, then went to Korea. When I came home it was clear things were bad with my wife. That's all ancient history,” I lied. Then rushed onto the truth. “Anyhow, so I've moved around a lot, worked construction, welding, worked as a fisherman like I am now, a painter, a substitute mailman. Lived in all kinds of places.”

That was fine as far as she was concerned.

“I just wanted to hear ya talk a little more than you do at the restaurant,” she said. “Just wanted to make sure you were normal.”

We had almost finished the bottle of wine when Pie Pie Graves appeared in the doorway of the kitchen in a pair of white pajamas that looked new.

“I'm hungry,” she said. She was a sturdy-looking three-year-old child. She looked at me, unsmiling but not suspicious. “Hi, Mister,” she said. “Are you the plumber?”

Her mother laughed and said the plumber was coming in the morning. Pie Pie explained that their sink was clogged for a week and that it was disgusting. I told Nicoletta I could fix it, but she said no, she had too much experience with nonprofessional men saying they could fix things, she'd wait for the plumber.

Pie Pie ate some applesauce, sitting at the table in the dim light of that kitchen. She ate, and kept her eyes on me, and when I looked over, she'd look away.

“Back to bed now,” said Nicoletta, and the child didn't argue. But a minute or so later she called out from her bed, “Hey Mister?”

“Sleep!” her mother said.

“Are you Italian?”

And then we were laughing together, her mother and I, and I called back that no, I wasn't Italian.

Nicoletta said, “The new woman in the day care is Italian, or so she says. She looks about as Italian as my pet frog.”

“I'm Italian!” Pie Pie shouted.

“Go to sleep!” Nicoletta hissed back. “The day care lady, she's got all these tiny kids doing some ancestor project. I told Pie to tell everyone she's American all the way back, and we forgot the specifics. End of story, ya know what I'm saying? I got a black grandfather, and I don't trust people with that information unless I get a real good vibe.
Real
good. We got a lot of racists in our midst, James, in case you never noticed.”

I told her I noticed. I told her I was a man who noticed a lot of things mostly because I couldn't help noticing. I told her I'd noticed way back during the Second World War, when it was all just taken for granted. I noticed how the military treated their own black soldiers like animals.

“You were in that war too?” she said. “You're older than I thought.” She smiled, like the fact that I had stepped into my fifties added to my quality of harmlessness.

I did not seduce her that night; I kissed her, and tried to feel whether or not she wanted me, but I couldn't read her clearly; I felt no resistance, but no invitation, either. Because I liked her, and her house, and her girl, I decided I would wait.

Two nights later I took Nicoletta, Pie Pie, and Jack, Nicoletta's nephew, out for catfish dinners. We sat in a circular booth by a window looking out at the crowded street. Jack was a thin boy with good manners and clear, happy eyes, like a child on an old television show. He asked me if I liked being “a laborer,” and said he was going to be a professional football player, they made a lot more money than “laborers,” did I know that? Didn't I ever think of getting another job so I could drive a nicer car? “I never minded an old car,” I told him. “But you never know, someday I might go into law, or medicine.”

“Definitely,” he said, “you definitely should. It's not too late,” he coached. “Never too late to go after your dreams.”

“Well, thank you,” I said, Nicoletta and I smiling at each other.

He was only staying with the Graves for a week, then he would go back to his mother, who had just had a new baby, Nicoletta told me. Pie Pie, hearing this, said to me, “You can sleep in Jack's bed some night when he leaves.”

Again we laughed together, her mother and I, with an ease that continued to surprise me, but in the middle of that laugh something in me lurched forward toward the child in a way that was painful, and suddenly I wanted to look at her mother and say, I had a child, a girl, she was just about this age, and she died.

But I went on eating the catfish, my face hot. I was grateful when Jack started talking in detail about some linebacker on the New Orleans Saints.