Search Party (28 page)

A man who had stopped directly in front of them on the sidewalk spread out his arms, blocking their way. “Hey, don't I know you from AA?” He had a red face that was too alive and interested, and too large. Shaking his big head like a calf, he fixed bloodshot eyes on Jo.

“Alan, this is my sister. She knows you don't know me from AA.”

“Come on, Jo,” the man said in a strangled voice. “Just listen.”

“Alan, just leave me alone. I've told you. Go home,” Jo said, and she pushed past him. Susannah followed her. When she looked back the man had sat down in the middle of the sidewalk.

“Babies!” Jo resumed. “How would she draw them? If she could draw in the first place. I mean they have expressions but no face. What exactly is a baby anyway? What is it?”

“I don't know, Jo,” Susannah said to pacify her. She held her son against her chest, looking surreptitiously at his flushed face, which was just smoothing out and losing its distress. The baby eyes met hers. This was not like looking at anybody else in the
world. There was a force in this face that grasped you like a fist, a force from which it seemed some people, like Jo, might have to be protected.

“No offense, Susie,” Jo said, contrite. “Your kids are beautiful, both of them. Are you worried about that guy? That's just Alan.
He's
in AA. I don't even drink. I can't, just like Dad. It makes me sick.”

“He was awfully unhappy. He's still sitting back there, Jo.”

“He's going to have to straighten it out for himself. I can't do it for him.”

Jo's early photographs were of farm machinery. Later she expanded to livestock trailers and veal feeder-cages and slaughterhouses. She photographed them empty, washed down. She photographed quarries and dams, and strip-mining dredges in West Virginia. In time, galleries showed these photographs and art museums bought them. This surprised Susannah. Machines and parts of machines were what it all added up to. Probably no one who did not work with such things would be able to identify the bars, prongs, saw-edges. Strong light with no feel of sunshine to it, metal dripping water, corners of bleached landscape out windows or behind tires: these were not the light and shade or the tools or products of any identifiable enterprise.

But this opinion—Susannah was not as backward when it came to art as Jo seemed to think—did not keep her from seeing the property in the photographs that was Jo's, and that made people want to look at them. Her angle. Jo's pictures showed this thing of hers the way you might hold up a root that had got into the plumbing and been skewered out. Or this part of it had been skewered out, and anybody looking would know worse remained. At the same time Jo did not exactly disapprove of it, whatever it was. She was guarding it, possibly, as a dog will guard something inedible it has found.

When Jo visited, she would wave the children's questions aside angrily. “These aren't magazine pictures!” she would snap, to their bewilderment. Susannah's boys were afraid of their aunt, of her harsh teasing when they made any claim on their mother's
attention, but the girl, Stephanie, intended to be an artist herself. It was she who hung over the back of the couch when Jo sorted proof sheets, and who was a slave for years to Jo's stories of ugly episodes in the lives of artists and poets and people considered the agents of beauty.

All this was exasperating to Susannah, though less so than the stories of their own past, as they were still circulated at home, were to Jo.

For Susannah, the stories had a music that was sweet no matter how many times she heard them, and she heard them with some frequency, from teachers, from nurses while she waited for her births, from people in church and women in stores. Jo asleep in her incubator, feeble and veined but actually unsubdued by the smallness of her welcome, signaling with her thin, unchanging rhythms if not a bid to live, at least not a readiness to fade from life, “just lying there, so we all thought, we'd say . . . she doesn't know she's been born.” And she, Susannah, living those days as secreted away, as potentially nonexistent, as if she too were not born. But she was sought: all the fields of the county were alive with searchers.

The stir being made, over two children who barely existed! The searchers were lifting the moldy sides of the collapsed chicken house, parting rows of corn with their arms, calling from hilltops, leaning into pole barns. They were trolling the big creek with branches, by tree roots where the current had dug out pools, and getting down on their hands and knees to see under balers. Twenty grade-school children, led by the minister's wife, could be heard singing the loud songs of Vacation Bible School, where Susannah would have been in the nursery on that Monday morning if she were not lost. Susannah heard all of this, when the story was told. She heard the panting and slobbering bloodhound, dragging the hermit widow on a path of her own that no one else took.

There were whistles blown in the woods and homemade gongs banged by some of the older women. They had been on the phone the first night conjuring up past toddlers, children
who would have sat up at the language of spoon and pie tin, and replied to it, before they would answer to the sound of their names. But there is an age of not answering, they said.

All the activity got the cattle bawling in the fields. In later life Susannah told her children that she could distinguish claims and threats and simple explanations in the voices of cattle. This was a disputed talent of hers. She had it only partly because of growing up on a dairy farm, where her father's Holsteins, though he had given each one a name, remained strangers. She thought of them as indoor cows, forever being driven into their stanchions like huge children into their cribs. Most of them would not hesitate to throw a haunch into you, or pick you up on a bony head and pitch you into Fauquier County. So her father said. He controlled them with shoves and a flat voice, but the lead cow's ball eyes took in the approach of anyone who lacked his authority. She would roll out her gray tongue and jolt her full udder with her hock. “She's not sure about you,” he would tell Susannah, setting her on a ledge. “You're near about the size of a dog.” They had no farm dog, and could not expect to have one; their mother feared dogs. “And here”—he would put Jo up—“here comes the puppy.”

Susannah believed that her knowledge—her hunches, as they came to be called—came instead from the time she had spent in Bayliss's cow-calf herd, from whatever it was that had kept her there two whole days. There was debate, that would still come up, as to what it could have been. It had been the Herefords, she knew. In her dreams, they swung their enormous heads back, like heavy bells, against the flies on their shoulders. Jo was the artist but Susannah took pride in being the one who dreamed every night and recalled it all in the morning.

Asleep, in the middle of falls from heights or insoluble multiple-choice tests or driving with no steering wheel, she had come to expect the appearance of cows, a circle of white-faced cows. She would lean forward, right out of whatever disaster it was, and look between the blunt red knees. She would be able, staring with unspeakable pleasure, to see calves through the legs,
as they watched with outstretched necks but kept their distance, and the dark pink heads of Big English Red clover plunging under the weight of bees. Some of the clover would have already gone a brownish violet in the heat that the dream somehow conducted.

The heads swung back. There was a foaming in the air, of flies starting up all at once. But someone was coming. She was so hot she would throw off the blanket and wake up. No matter that she had been dreaming of the ordinary landscape where she still lived—though she lived in town now—she would experience the stunned, triumphant feeling of having gone through the earth to China.

Sometimes she woke up with sound in her ears, the hum a cow draws up from the bags of her neck to address her calf, and the infantile m-m-m the calf makes in reply. Her husband Larry knew about this. “Cattle say much?” he sometimes said at breakfast.

T
HEIR
mother never made peace with normal life. She lost her place in it and then she forgot it. She forgot about shoe sizes and the Methodist Church and friends for her daughters, and her own friends, if she had had any before, and eventually about combing her hair or the girls' unless she was reminded, or giving baths, or going into town, or going forth at all from her place at the window where the slipcover was tanned by the sun and her cushion was squashed thin. Once in a while she reconstructed accomplishments she had had, or thought she had had, but she burned red stripes onto her hands with the skillet, or ran the sewing machine needle into her finger, and these things made her cry quietly, almost tearlessly, not at all as Susannah cried at first when she saw what her mother had done to herself.

Sometimes, too, she groaned, about nothing they could see, in a protest that did not really disturb them until they got older. Before that it was just a noise coming from the living room, one of the sounds of the daytime, like a kitchen chair being pushed back or the tractor belching, way out on the back of the farm.

In time—in high school, when they began to put thought into
her—they thought she was hardly any different from the crazy woman with the dogs, except that she would not have shot at people or gone out to rescue them.

What could be said about her? That sometimes she spoke and made perfect sense, but speech could not be touched off in her by anything that was said to her. That every night, while she was still eating with them, she stood up from the dinner table and went to bed as soon as it was suggested to her, although if they woke in the night they would hear her moving around downstairs. Or they would hear, through the floor, her voice suddenly speaking, sharp and afraid. And then the creak of the stairs and their father's voice, and water running in the kitchen as he filled the hot water bottle for her, and the stairs again as he came back up with her, in the days when she still slept upstairs.

There were no pictures of her to study later, of things she might have done in the time when she did things; certainly there were none of her on the couch with her hot water bottle, slumped in the sun flooding off the windowpane, with the radio on. Even after they got a TV she liked the radio. She didn't really listen. If they asked her a question about a program, she would give them a slow, appalled look, and sometimes she would close her eyes.

That was all later. At first she just needed help.

She needed help when the hospital finished with the baby Mary Jo and let her come home, after many weeks. Their father hired a woman to live with them, a girl, really. Stevia, the daughter of the tenants who had worked the farm down the road for twenty years and had so many children nobody knew where they had all got to. As the oldest of the six that remained at home, Stevia knew how to take care of children. She took over Susannah and the baby and most of the housework.

Stevia was a laugher, a chaser, freckled all over in a sandy pink, the possessor of movie magazines and Little Lulu comic books and a red vanity case full of cosmetics, with a mirror in the lid. She was devoted to home permanents for Susannah and three-heart barrettes for the baby's fine hair, and a succession of styles for herself derived from pin-curl diagrams in her magazines,
which she called books: “Hand me my book!” “Where's that book with Janet Leigh on it?” Susannah and Jo paged through those magazines kissing the ink lips of movie stars, ran up the back stairs and down the front and through the living room past their mother with Stevia in pursuit. They sat in kitchen chairs on newspapers having their Toni's, with shudders as the lotion crept down their necks and Stevia hissed “Stay still! Stay still!” and the smell bloomed up around their faces with its tender promise of change.

These things took years. Almost six years. For Susannah those years had an aura of put-off effort that was like being on a school bus that is still a long way from your stop.

Stevia did not read to them, though she took them to the library when their father said to, and brought back books picked out by the librarian, who was Mrs. Bayliss of the Bayliss Polled Hereford place, where Susannah had been found.

Mrs. Charlotte Bayliss had been among the legendary group seen from a mile away rising over the hill in the late afternoon bearing Susannah aloft, calling something that could not be heard. She was one of the women who took an interest in their family. She treated Stevia in a funny way, as if she were the same age as Susannah and Jo. Sometimes she walked them all down the library steps and out to the car, and peered in to see the groceries. “Tell your momma hello, now,” she always said. Stevia always gave Susannah a secret cross-eyed look as Mrs. Bayliss went back up the stairs.

From Stevia's trouble with what was printed under the pictures in her magazines Susannah knew, eventually, that she would not pass easily on to a library book. But Stevia knew how to draw people and showed Susannah, and Jo in time, how to do hair and noses, and lips, a top and a bottom, and she drew hundreds of girls, pressing so hard her dimpled fingers bent backward at the knuckle, always erasing until everything was perfect, and sweeping the eraser dust off onto the floor, where they rolled it under their bare toes.

Stevia was fat but she had a lot of slow-burning energy for coming up out of a chair and grabbing them, toppling them onto her wide, freckled knees and tickling them.

Sometimes after dinner a car horn honked for her and she went out the door and was not there to put them to bed. On those nights they left their father sleeping under the lampshade with his
Farm Journal
and tiptoed down the back hall to her room, and pulled open her dresser drawers, stopping each other when they creaked.