Photographic (43 page)

You’ll receive a packet from my attorney. I’ve left Tam the house and land. I’ve written to my children. 

I didn’t mean to go on so. If I knew I had such a talent I wouldn’t have wasted so much time riding combines and applied at the Kittrie Crossroads as Handyman/Reporter.

I thank you for making my last seven years a dream within a dream. Tell Tam the truth. No euphemisms. Tell her I was like an old Indian chief who wouldn’t be locked up in prison. Rather be free. But tell her, her way is to live a long good life until Death comes for her. Tell her I love her to infinity, and that’s where she’ll find me.

Hank

Jane immediately thought of the doses of animal tranquilizer, lined up in neat rows on a locked shelf in the door of his refrigerator. Jane knew Hank. He wasn’t the kind of man to choose poison. If he did it, he’d shoot himself with one of his revolvers. He’d take a less violent way for one reason only, she knew as sure as if it were in the note, or if he had held her hand and told her: so that Tam could imagine him going to sleep, peacefully, not a lifetime to picture the violence of a weapon held to his beautiful head, disfiguring it. He would think of Tam, think of Jane, except he’d miss the forest for the trees. It was Hank they needed, for the growing-up years, the teenage years, graduation, college, falling in love. It was Hank who knew how to talk to Tam on two levels. To make her laugh, to see the whole, to take her seriously one moment and play the fool for her the next. She had her father, yes, she had him. But Hank was the grandfather she didn’t have. No one else loves with the unconditional, heedless love of a grandparent. And he wanted to take that away. Yet, in comparison, what was that to what he wanted to take from himself?

These thoughts came to her in one vivid whole, exploding images, now and the future, flashing in a brilliant multicolor hologram, spinning around her as she stood locked in the center. As she held the pages in her hand, thin blue paper, so light and translucent it might be airmail paper, she thought, he loves me, as her hand felt for the phone in her pocket. She opened it and pressed the numbers she’d never pressed. As she waited for an answering voice, she thought, when he saw no chance anymore, when he saw Ian and I were staying together, we were leaving, he made the choice. She pressed the paper to her heart and leapt forward, released from the trance the letter had laid upon her. 

She prayed for slim chances as she ran out the door, ran the path, the path that had become almost worn from her door to his, speaking into the phone as she ran, clutching the letter and knowing he wouldn’t have risked it, being found too soon.
Why me?
she thought.
Does he want me to find him?
But before she got half-way across the field she saw rotating lights and fire trucks, police, ambulance. She dropped the papers and ran as fast as she could, her lungs burning, small vessels bursting. 

Then she saw a gurney, with a black zippered bag on it, in the shape of a person.

She whipped her head away, turning in a swift circle and covered her face with her hands. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no.” She ran back toward the old corn field, stumbling and coughing. She had dropped his letter. She saw color somewhere on the field, the dull dead flat meaningless dirt, and she ran for the faint smudge of blue like a beacon. The letter was three pages. How could she ever have dropped it? For her madness, the minute of madness that told her she might never need that letter again, because she might have Hank, while now, the letter was everything to her, because she would never have Hank again, and the letter was the last gift Hank had given her. She saw the pages fluttering and dancing across the land, scatter, and she screamed as she saw a crow near one of the pages, screamed crow at the black bird, that this flying paper was hers, and no bird dare snatch what was hers. Lazily, the large creature flapped further off, away from the paper, and she had it in her hand. She screamed again, in case any other predators thought to come close, as she ran crouching to the other two papers, crumpled by their flight, but untorn. Holding them, she stood up and flattened the letter, folded it in thirds, and smoothed it like a tiny blanket. 

She put the letter in her back pocket. Holding her hands to the sky, as if to receive a child, she put her head back and shrieked. Birds flew away. The field grew still. The sky remained the same. The sky, the clouds, the sun rotated around her, a brilliant planetarium. “I hate you all!” she bawled out, collapsing forward until she was bent horizontally at the waist, in the middle of the empty field. There was no one. She reached out, reached up. “Fuck you all to hell, you bloody bastards!” She punched the sky. “Hank, you can go to hell!” she screamed. She wiped her face. “It’s what you want anyway. Now you’re happy. You fucking coward. I hate you.” She stumbled and fell backward, hard onto the dirt of the field. The field Hank had tilled for so many, many years, and his wife’s kin before him. She turned over and buried her face in the dirt. “Hank,” she said. “Hank, don’t do it. I need you. I can’t do it without you. I love you, too. I’ll do what you want. I don’t care. I don’t care what you want, I’ll do it. I’ll leave Ian. If it’s so important, you should say. We could be happy. You should tell me. It’s not fair. I love you, too.” She sat up, her hands dug in the dirt. “I threw myself at you, once, you idiot.” She threw dry clods of dirt, mud thick under her fingernails. “You had your chance, no guilt, nothing. Why didn’t you. At least you could have that. You fool. Who turns down a woman he’s in love with who throws herself at him. I wasn’t even drunk.” She lay back and looked at the sky for a long time. “Hank,” she said confidingly, “I want you to know I love you. We all love you. So I’m sorry about the stuff I said before. Why deny yourself life, Hank? Remember that song, we sang it together, ‘Sweet Old World’? And you go and do it anyway. I hope you know what you’re doing, Hank. I hope age brings wisdom.” Her voice started to fade away. “I hope you’re with Cor, and you’re happy, and you’re in each other’s arms, and she’s so happy to see you. I hope that’s how it is right now, Hank, okay? Good night, Hank. Good night, Cor. Sleep now.” She covered her eyes with her arms, folding out the sun.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

T
HIS
ENCHANTING
VIEW
, high and protected, whispery with the talk of trees, surrounded by an old ornate iron fence gracefully deteriorating, was a good home to lay your bones, she thought. Jane turned her head to look at her mother, standing next to her, who had made the effort not only to come, but attired in black. She slipped her arm around her mother’s waist and rested her head on Magda’s shoulder for a moment. Magda kissed the top of her head. 

The service was coming to an end. Hank’s children and grandchildren, the Reillys, and the large crowd of farmers and townspeople didn’t fit within the iron fence. Hank’s family were along one side of the grave, the Reillys on the other. Jane didn’t think twice about taking her place there. She had lost her best friend. A few blood relations weren’t going to depose her after seven years’ absence. The minister closed his Bible. 

A tall woman with dark brown hair in a smooth chignon, dressed in a black suit, picked up a handful of dirt from a pile near the head of the grave. The casket had already been lowered. While her husband held their baby, she held her hand out over the space, whispered something under her breath, and dropped the earth. It fell with a gentle thud. Another woman came forward; another daughter. This one, Delia, did not resemble Hank. Small and round, unexpectedly blonde, with dimpled cheeks, she had been in tears during the entire graveside service. She put both hands into the pile of dirt. She seemed to be molding it between her hands, like a potter, as she silently cried. She let little bits of dirt fall, loamy pieces dried by her hands, holding onto each bit until she had sifted through it all. 

“Bye, Papa,” she said, and turned away, falling into her sister Lane’s arms, who held her and patted her back.

Jane watched this as if from far away. Why didn’t they come before? she thought. He was here all along. Jane didn’t have to take a step forward for her tribute. She was on the brink, having given Tam to Magda. She brought her hand up from where she had held it low, bringing the small bouquet to her nose, then dropped the bunch of violets, bound together with one of Tam’s hair ribbons, into the hole in the ground. They fell on the casket. She was pleased. 

Jane turned away, her family following in her wake.

As they walked home together, sometimes the enormity of what they had just witnessed hit one person, sometimes another. They passed soggy tissues around. Magda cried the most. Only Jane was dry-eyed. They held hands, except in places where they had to walk single file. As soon as they could, they joined hands again, walking four abreast. Jane enjoyed looking at her mother in black velvet: her thick, unlined skin, her ringleted dark hair, her scent, which was muted, Jane thought, in honor of the occasion, but still there. Her mother used scents as protections, as charms. 

“What are you wearing today, Ma?” She felt a strange blankness inside. It felt delicious.

“Geranium. Just a bit. Would you like some? I have a vial.”

“Okay.”

Magda pulled a hanging, stoppered tube from around her neck and daubed Jane at her pulse points. And Tam, of course, who clung to one or the other of the three of them like cat hair on velvet, an apt comparison, Magda had discovered at breakfast, when she let Buttermilk on her lap before the service. 

Without discussion, Buttermilk had become a member of the Reilly household. None of the family thought it worthwhile to bring up the subject of Buttermilk with the Sutters. They probably didn’t even know there was a Buttermilk. So the transfer was done without fuss before the Sutters’s arrival. Buttermilk understood the situation, having expressed his feelings by spraying Hank’s couch, something he had never done before, the day after Hank’s death. He moved in and became a more intimate friend of Tam’s, dozing in her room during the day, and something more of a house cat than he had ever been before. They all appreciated him as a tie to Hank. It was almost like having a friend of Hank’s around.

The funeral, the final saying-goodbye, was more than Jane could take in. Whatever waves had carried her to depths and heights through the days since Hank’s death, inexplicably now she floated unencumbered and free. 

Ian had been silent throughout the funeral, but his presence was a comfort Jane had come to find indescribably consoling. He had held Jane through the nights and days of the aftermath. He had not tried to comfort her. When they had to tell Tam, they did it together, but Ian did most of the talking. Jane hadn’t shown him the letter, which she still held to her like a talisman, but she’d told him about most of it, particularly the parts concerning Tam.

Ian had answered Tam’s questions. He had walked with Tam to Hank’s, for her to be sure he really wasn’t there. Tam had wanted to see Hank. He had facilitated that, through Hank’s family. So at six, almost seven, Tam had seen her first body. She had decided to give Hank one of her teddy bears. Ian had helped her decide which one to give him. They had fixed on her second favorite, Candace. Hank would be buried with it. Jane couldn’t stand to talk about it with Tam much, before the funeral, and Ian had patiently borne with Tam’s endless questions, her tears, her confusion, her unanswerables. 

Jane started to follow Ian around. She didn’t care what he was doing. His presence was a solace. She thought, Ian is my number one bear. The one I couldn’t part with.

The day after the funeral, Magda, back in her colorful skirts, though she wore a black cotton peasant blouse, patted the table, for Jane to sit down with her. “Jana, there is something we must do.”

Where everything on her mother was full, voluptuous, curves and generosity, somehow Jane had emerged stripped of all that, hard and whippet-like by comparison. Not without curves, but hers were the sharp curves of a sand dune. 

“We must exorcize the ghost living in you, in your memory, and in Tam’s.”

Jane’s eyes widened. “What are you thinking of?” Magda could mean anything from a ritual sage smoke clearing to a full-scale exorcism, knowing her.

“A bonfire dance. Do you remember the Dance for the Dead?”

Jane put her head down on the table. “Oh, God.”

“Yes.” Her mother was implacable.

“I don’t know if I’m up to that.”

Magda took one of Jane’s hands. “My darling. I know what you’ve lost. By my heart, I do. Look at me.”

Jane dragged her head up.

“I have lost.” Magda put her hand over her chest. “I have lost great loves in my life. One must go one. The sooner you dance, the sooner you heal, my love.”

Jane sighed deeply. “All right.”

Her mother leaned forward, clinking. “Do you have clothes?”

“Yes. I started…dancing, I guess you could say, again in London.”

“Wonderful! I knew you would come back to it someday. Come here.”

Jane let herself be pulled into her mother’s large, loving, inescapable embrace, and she felt her heart shell crack, just a little.

CHAPTER FIFTY

T
HE
NIGHT
OF
the dance was to be on the full moon, luckily not far off on the calendar. Magda decided it was important to initiate Tamsin to the ways of her matrilineal line, as well as heal them all from the heartsickness they were experiencing, as members of the same family. Ian’s part would be to build the bonfire, to Magda’s specifications, and to drum. And, if he knew people who were of the right timbre; simpatico, who would not disturb the energy, to invite them. Drummers or musicians were especially desirable. Ian was more excited than anyone, and dogged Jane with questions about this ritual.

“How do you know how to do this? Have you done it before? Have you seen her clothes? They’re gorgeous. It’s like Angel and Berman’s up there. How did you get so good? Did she teach you? Did you ever perform together?”