Soil (15 page)

20

Sandy deposited Jacob at the Methodist Sunday school and told him she'd be back in an hour to attend church with him. First she planned to drop by the hospital. She believed her father took strength from her company, and in turn, she needed to borrow his courage to make her long-delayed return to Christian fellowship.

As she pulled out of the circular drive, Sandy's high school friend Tina Crump approached carrying a baby. Her slab of a husband, Dennis, waddled behind with two more children in hand.

Sandy rolled down the window to say hello.

“You doing a little drop and dash?” asked Tina, affecting a cute country lilt.

“You caught me.”

“What's a matter, you too good for us?”

The accusation stung a little, even though it was meant as a joke. Sandy thought Tina's pious eyes and the high false register of her voice told the truth.

“I'm actually on my way to the hospital. My father's in a coma.”

“Oh my goodness,” said Tina, clutching her baby. She softened and reached out to stroke Sandy's arm. “Is he gonna be all right?”

“We don't know.”

A look like genuine anguish came over Tina's face. The red-faced baby in her arms looked up, its bonnet-swathed head teetering on its shoulders. “You know I'm just messing with you about skipping church, Sandy.”

“Of course. I was actually planning to come back for worship.”

“Do, Sandy. You can sit with us, and we'll all pray for your daddy. I'll get Brother Wiles to say a prayer with the congregation.”

Sandy thanked her and waved good-bye and then whipped out of the parking lot toward the hospital. She couldn't imagine going back to sit with Tina and her family and wait for the reverend to pray for the damaged Messlers and Mizes. She could see herself after the service, besieged by all manner of well-wishers with their questions and blessings and guilt-inducing blather. They weren't bad people, they just wanted her to be happy and exactly like them.

Why was it so awkward with Tina? Sandy still loved and felt indebted to her and all the other girls—Mamie, Hallie, Mary Laurel—but they'd lost everything they ever had in common. When she moved to Madrid after her dad married Miss Sue and uprooted her suddenly, so soon after her mother's passing, those girls had welcomed her right into the fold. Throughout high school the girls had all stayed active together in the youth ministry, the choir, and volunteer work. Sandy still had fond memories of supervised sleepovers with boys in the church rec center on weekends and trips to Memphis for bowling, skating, and Christian rock concerts. She'd made a pledge to Christ before the entire congregation at seventeen and believed the rest of her life was right here among them.

But during college she drifted, her priorities migrated toward new friends and different ideas, to road trips and hangovers and late-sleeping Sundays. Then came Jay, who'd been overchurched in his youth. To him it was all a country club scene. The Christians missed the point of a good history lesson and values system by dressing everything up in such ritual and hokum, he believed. He despised their blind faith. Salvation was something you had to work for, a personal struggle, not potluck dinners and musicals and fund-­raising for new church buildings.

“I can't believe you're dating an atheist,” one of her friends told her, and aside from Miss Sue's funeral, that was the last time she'd attended church. Nevertheless, she believed a child should have a spiritual foundation, and
she would risk being seen as a groveling sinner if it would help Jacob find peace.

Her father tried occasionally to entice her back to church, but she preferred talking matters of the spirit with him one-on-one. Every tragedy that befell him seemed to strengthen his faith. He believed there was a well of goodness in the universe, and our journey in life was to find it. It was hardest to find on earth but would get progressively easier, and the key was love. “It's not about who you are or how you were made, but what you do,” he told her. “Help people, be kind, and peace will come, I swear it.”

She believed he was a saint but doubted it was so simple. She was a nice enough person, and it had brought her no closer to peace. In fact, she seemed as far adrift from peace as she'd ever been in her life. And now the thought of losing him, even of seeing him cling to life in that sterile hospital room, was a prospect worse than walking into chapel and being deemed an apostate by all the faces from her former life.

Sandy made a detour to check on his house, located in a wooded neighborhood tucked away in a quiet, older part of town. She parked in the driveway and gathered the mail accumulating in the box by the front door. Inside the rooms were cold, but it smelled like home. The cat came up squalling for food and rubbing off hair on the hem of her black skirt. She fetched the bag of rust-colored chow from the pantry, poured a panful, and drew a bowl of water from the faucet. She dumped the litter box in a garbage bag with old food from the fridge and then took the trash to the curb and came back inside to tidy up.

She moved quickly from room to room, straightening and dusting as she went, becoming intimate again with her teenage home. Miss Sue had won it in a divorce settlement from her previous marriage. It was low and sprawling, surrounded by trees and fortified on all sides with patios and decks and lounge areas. Sandy had considered it very posh during her adolescence, her own bedroom set off in a separate wing where she lived until her sophomore year of college. The room still held mementos of her youth, her corkboard of photos with friends she never spoke to anymore, the shelf of devotional
books and chaste romance novels, her framed academic honors and church citations.

She walked into the spacious den, swiping a dustrag across bookshelves laden with mystery novels and science texts and framed photographs charting their cobbled-together lives. It occurred to her that everyone was gone. Here was a photo of Sandy at six, sitting beside her mother, the quiet beauty. People told them they looked so much alike, but she couldn't discern the resemblance. There was a multiframe display from her father's wedding with Miss Sue, a casual backyard affair in autumn. Sandy was among the bridesmaids, a gawky girl of thirteen. Her mother would never have dressed her in that terrible paisley. Would she have been disappointed that her husband had remarried so soon? Sandy often wondered if he'd been cheating with Miss Sue even while her mother disappeared into the dementia that preceded her fatal stroke.

There was a lovely shot of Miss Sue, herself gone almost two years now following a quick and difficult bout with lung cancer. She had the hard look of a 1930s movie star and lived by a two-drink, two-pack philosophy, always quick-witted and edgy, easy with the off-color remarks. She hadn't a clue what to do for a girl except offer kindness and honest advice when solicited. Her previous husband still lived in Madrid, and together they had a son, Loren, a bachelor who had moved east. Miss Sue would always excuse her son, saying, “He just hasn't found the right woman,” though now Sandy understood what that meant and why he rarely called or visited.

She gathered up some books and notepads on the coffee table and returned them to her father's study. There was a small book by a famous Buddhist and another on the Mississippi River flood of 1927. As professor emeritus at the university, he partook in casual reading these days. His office still contained heavy arcane medical texts, diplomas, a few token jars of strange objects in formaldehyde. He'd been a reputed surgeon at the university hospital in Jackson but resigned under foggy circumstances. After her mother's stroke, he started prescribing to himself and got reckless. Someone noticed, and the hospital invited him to leave. That's when, presumably,
he met Miss Sue. Theirs was a whirlwind romance, six months and then married, house packed up, gone to Madrid, where her father began teaching biology at the university and became one of the campus's most beloved professors.

The doorbell sounded at the front of the house. Sandy's first inclination was to hide, but she felt protective of the house and went to investigate. An older lady wearing a velvety tracksuit and sunglasses stood at the door holding a foil-covered pan. Her hair was dyed jet-black and burst in a fashionable shock. She introduced herself as Mrs. Bender. They'd recently moved in next door and had already made friends with her father. She seemed to know all about Sandy and Jacob too and expressed sympathy for her situation without alluding directly to the separation.

“I saw you taking the trash and wanted to bring something over, just some dinner for you and the little one,” she said, passing the meal to Sandy. Mrs. Bender patted her hand. “So sorry to hear about your father, we just think he's a splendid man.”

“Thank you,” Sandy replied with exaggerated kindness.

“And you are such a lovely woman.”

“Oh, thank you, Mrs. Bender. You are so sweet.”

“What are the doctors saying?”

“Well,” said Sandy, bracing herself. “They're just watching him. Not a lot they can do, apparently. Just monitoring his fever, making sure his body is well equipped to fight the infection.”

“Is it true that it's West Nile?” asked Mrs. Bender.

“Yes, they're fairly certain.”

The neighbor clasped her hand to her mouth. “My husband Bill and I, we try not to go outside too much. The mosquitoes are terrible this year. We screened in our back porch. He thinks I'm crazy, but honey, you just never know. You hear these things on the news and you wonder if they're real. Imagine that, in our own neighborhood!”

“Well, don't get too worried, Mrs. Bender. He was just down in south Louisiana visiting friends.”

“Oh my word.”

“It's quite possible he was bitten there. It could've happened anywhere. And they tell me it's actually quite rare. This is only their first case.”

“They say eating bananas will keep them away,” Mrs. Bender advised, though Sandy wasn't sure if she meant doctors or mosquitoes. “I heard that on the television, and I eat four a day now.”

The kindly neighbor didn't want to take up too much of Sandy's time. “I know this is so difficult for you, and I think you are just a brave and impressive young woman,” she said, clutching Sandy's hand. “Don't feel like you can't call on us if the load gets too great to bear.” They hugged briefly, and Sandy thanked her for everything, and then Mrs. Bender rushed back to the safety of indoors.

The stranger's kindness took Sandy by surprise, and she teared up, thankful for the unsought encouragement. She set the casserole pan on the kitchen island and removed the cover. It was a rigatoni dish, generous with cheese and Italian sausage, not even frozen. Had she thrown it together that quick or was there a batch waiting in the fridge for a random gesture of sympathy? Sandy grabbed a fork and sampled it cold. Not bad.

Sitting there at her father's dinner table—fretting over the past, something the Buddhist in her father would have discouraged—she couldn't help but recall the last time they'd all eaten together at this table. It must have been May? June? If the end of her marriage could be ascribed to a moment, then it took place right here.

In the adjacent living room, Jay had been relating to her father terrible news of the universe, new findings collected by satellites of how the entire galaxy was passing into an interstellar energy cloud, some patch of astral turbulence, and had begun to absorb dramatic amounts of energy. The earth was due for a prolonged holocaust of environmental cataclysms, all created by this excess energy and increased solar flares. The planet, Jay insisted, would be ripped slowly asunder for a thousand years.

As her husband spoke with alarm and authority, she'd noticed the growing sense of fear on Jacob's face. He was listening while pretending to watch
TV. She took Jay aside and asked him to tone it down. Of course he dismissed her and continued to rave. At dinner Jacob mentioned wanting some new video game for his birthday, which sent Jay into a tirade about electronic technology and how all of it would soon be rendered useless. He described the earth's magnetic field, which was generated from the active iron core and wrapped around the planet like a sheet. According to Jay, scientists believed the poles were shifting, tearing holes in the sheet, and allowing the sun's radiation to stream in unfiltered.

“Delightful dinner conversation,” Sandy said. “I'm shocked I haven't heard any of this on the news.”

“Sure, put it on the news and watch the world go insane. Looting, raping, pillaging. If the planet doesn't get us first, we'll do it to ourselves. Environmental extremes always lead to social breakdown.”

He went off on a long discourse about how mass extinctions occur every 60 to 65 million years, and we were due for another just any time now.

“Okay, so if fleeing underground is the only hope we have for survival, then why on earth did you insist on buying the farm?” she demanded. “Isn't it pointless to grow our own food if the sun is going to burn it all up?”

Her father was smiling now. Perhaps he had mistaken this doomsday banter for spirited, tongue-in-cheek debate. Of course he quietly rooted for his daughter, but didn't he sense Jay's mania?

Jay shook his head. “Well, all that could take years to unfold. In the immediate future we're much more likely to see corrupt governments and crashing markets, leading to poverty, hunger, and civil unrest in the cities. Let's say a rebellion forms. Someone gets hold of a dirty bomb or unleashes a genetically modified virus that decimates the population. At least we could stay and farm and protect our land. That's the best-case scenario really. I mean, what if someone sets loose a fleet of self-replicating nanorobots?”

Sandy was astonished. In that moment she saw a new disturbance in Jay's eyes. He was someone else, someone not her husband. Someone to whom she would have never made the promises she did. At that moment her instinct was not to nurture him back but to attack the stranger.