Something Rising (Light and Swift) (4 page)

This was what Cassie had been thinking of lately, all those injuries of Belle's, all the flaps of skin hanging from her knees, the head wounds bleeding furiously, the falls down stairs, the bicycle wreck in the thorn bush, her slightly chipped front tooth. How could it have been, the two of them side by side and playing the same game, that Belle was always falling? Cassie rarely got hurt. If they walked across the backyard, it was Cassie who found the dead baby bird, the caterpillars and nightcrawlers, she found treasure in tall grass because Belle was looking up. What she was looking for Cassie couldn't say, winged things probably, orioles or nuthatches or bluebirds, or those tiny yellow butterflies that arrive in swarms one day and are gone the next. Belle got hurt, she took her pain in to Laura like a gift, she cried then tried to look brave. There was a demand in her. Cassie thought but couldn't say (wasn't sure what the words would be) that this wasn't the way to go, Laura didn't like to touch or be touched, she was doing her work
at a minimum
and preferred to be alone. Belle's wounds were akin to getting too thick into events. At eleven Belle started
to withdraw from the Great Wide World, as Jimmy called it, she moved inside and became top of her class, at twelve had nearly memorized Edith Hamilton's
Mythology
, which a thoughtful librarian had given her as a gift. Every day she begged for a copy of Virgil in Translation. She had taken to the house and could almost always be found at the kitchen table, under the hanging light with the round shade, and there too was Laura, staring out the window above the sink, and Belle thought she had gotten what she wanted, but Cassie wasn't so sure.

“What's that in the yard? Do you see what I'm pointing at, Cassie? Go on over there and take a look.”

Cassie walked across the gravel driveway, periodically stepping on a sharp rock that made her say ow, ow, ow, and through the side door that led into the cool garage, where she picked up Poppy's shovel.

“Do you see the thing I'm talking about, that gray mound over there? Mom's not going to want to walk out here and see it.”

The groundhog was lying belly up. He'd been a fat little guy. Cassie studied his face: dead. Also his small, expressive hands, curled now: dead. She put the shovel under him and felt that he'd—

“What is it, Cassie, do you know?”

—been turned to liquid. There weren't bones or organs to offer any resistance. The Pig Dogs had had a time with this one. She got the shovel under his back and tried to lift it; he was very heavy, in addition to being liquid, and he rolled off the end of the shovel and landed facedown.

“I'm going in, I'm not watching this. Take it across the road and over the fence. Drop it
over the fence
, Cassie, so those dogs can't get to it and bring it right back. Do you hear me?”

Cassie got the shovel under his belly and tried to lift him. He rolled off and landed on his back, and that was about all it took for Cassie to see what she was up against. Her shoulders strained and her back began to sweat. It wasn't his weight so much as the fact of him down at the end of the long shovel, and her up at the other end. She gripped the shovel in the middle of the handle, stuck it under the groundhog's back, he was maybe easier to lift this way, but he rolled off and landed on his belly. Simply by turning him over repeatedly, she'd managed to get him a few feet across the yard, so she did that some more: turned him again and again, rolling him like a sausage in a pan. Belly up, belly down. They made it across the road and to the ditch, and putting him in the ditch was no good, Belle would know or the dogs would know. The sun was a violence against Cassie's back, sweat ran toward her eyes. She took off her T-shirt, wiped her face with it, then covered her hands and grabbed him by his paws, his front two in her left hand, his back two in her right. She turned herself sideways, spun around twice, then let him fly, across the ditch and over the fence. At the peak of his flight his back arched like a high jumper's, his chin tilted regally, his arms and legs were loose in surrender. Cassie was, at ten, a child who would have to learn to look away.

Thursday evening, after dinner and a visit with Edwin Meyer and Poppy, a game of Chinese checkers and a bowl of green sherbet, Cassie went out on the screened porch and waited, and Friday she got up very early and went outside and waited.

*    *    *

Saturday morning she woke up and listened; if he was still gone, this would be the longest in a while and would signal nothing good, but then she heard them, the voices that had awakened her. Jimmy and Laura didn't fight about Everything, as some parents did. The tear and scramble of their lives revolved around only two subjects, Money and the Prior Claim. The two could be mixed and matched and combined in novel ways. Cassie had hovered for years at the edge of the conversation and could reduce its complex elements to two sentences:

JIMMY
: She has a prior claim.

LAURA
: Prior to your
children?

Cassie had written these sentences in her notebook: for her they were no less than Virgil in Translation. She and Belle both wanted to get to the bottom of something, and even if they ultimately knew what it was—lost cultures, Barbara Thompson in a trailer park in Hopwood—they would keep at it. Young scholars. Their parents were having the conversation in the bedroom next door, which was the marital bedroom and contained many mysteries. Laura complained that she hated every stick of furniture in there, the bed they slept in, the dressers and mirrored vanity that matched it, all won by Jimmy in a card game with the Minor Criminals of the Midwest, who were not famous for their taste. The queen-size headboard was tall, flat, and covered with quilted, yellowed vinyl, attached to the frame with brass buttons, brass mostly missing. The dresser and vanity were made of blond wood, perhaps for a blond woman, which was the opposite of Laura but similar to Barbara Thompson, whose name so far had not been mentioned.

The voices weren't much more than a murmur. Cassie had to get out of bed and creep like a cat across her floor in order to hear
what she hoped were the sounds of Jimmy taking his change, his keys, and his breath mints out of his pocket and placing them carefully on his dresser, because this meant he was staying for some hours. Last summer he would sometimes drop in late at night or early in the morning, expecting the girls to be asleep, and deposit with Laura a handful of disputed Money and leave again, that went on for weeks.

Cassie heard the loose change land on the dresser top, Jimmy say he was tired, Laura make a sound that was perhaps a word or a cry, and then Cassie knew it was okay to get back in bed awhile. Wherever it was he went—and she didn't believe she'd ever know—her father got very little sleep, he loved to come home and slip into bed in the morning light. She slipped into bed and lay on her back; the sun was coming up on the other side of the house but would reach her soon enough. Her heart pounded, she could see the plaster on the ceiling very clearly, the crack that zigzagged like a fault line from one side of the room to the other. She tried to close her eyes, but they popped right back open.

Last summer Belle had crept into Cassie's room late one night and gotten in bed with her, then wrapped her arms around Cassie from behind the way she had when they were small and whispered in Cassie's ear,
Are you very very sad?
In all the great wide world Cassie couldn't imagine another soul who would ask a question like that one and not expect to get beaten up good. Cassie hadn't answered, had just lay there feeling Belle's breath on the back of her neck and trying to think of a true answer. Every day was a vaccination. She missed her grandmother, who had been old and soft, who said few words but who gave to them: she and Poppy had taken them in without a word so long ago, when they had nowhere to live. They'd opened up all the old bedrooms, Buena Vista had
gathered up her sewing things and moved them to the attic, and Cassie remembered those years with Buena Vista like a long party where the party is going on inside and no one talks about it. Cassie could still imagine her grandmother so clearly, her white hair curled tight against her head in a permanent wave, the skin on her face that had fallen and kept falling, her watery blue eyes. Buena Vista had been heavy, especially in her legs, and she walked with a kind of back-and-forth Frankenstein gait, and unable to control the distribution of her weight, she had walked hard and made everything in the house shake, especially her animal figurines. She had been just an old woman in a faded housedress, sometimes she even wore her slippers to the grocery store, but something about her had been their hearts' salvation.

Now, lying in bed, her father asleep in the next room, Cassie felt herself swaying back into sleep.
Do you smell the water?
Maybe someday she would tell Belle that she hadn't been, she wasn't sad, she was … she almost knew, and then began to dream, there was a wide field, pink and spongy, or maybe it was a desert, there was no sign of anything anywhere, only the vast pinkness all around her, and she guessed she had to cross it, so she started walking.

Laura smoked. Belle sat at the kitchen table doing homework and tearing at her cuticles, her fingernails were already so short they sometimes bled. Poppy came in through the mudroom, “Laurie, have you seen my level?” and Laura said no, she hadn't, and he left again. A few minutes later he popped back in with Roger, who made a mad dash around the kitchen table and back out the door. “Laurie, have you seen my old canvas camp stool?” No, she hadn't.
He left. Cassie wandered from the kitchen to the screened porch, drinking a soda that made her stomach burn, as she hadn't eaten anything all day and here it was almost two in the afternoon. She sat in the rocker with splinters. Finally Belle stuck her head out the door and said, He's up.

Cassie went into the kitchen and casually sat down at the table, picked up Belle's history book, and opened it to the page on Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. Upstairs the shower was running, then it turned off. Jimmy hummed as he shaved. When he came downstairs he smelled sweet, had a swing in his step. Cassie wrote on her palm with her fingernail the things she wanted to talk to him about: a door for the shack, help fixing her bicycle chain, would he toss the football with her, would he figure out how to get a better fence around the garden—the deer were tearing it up. Poppy needed new propane tanks on the Airstream, and there was something else. She tapped her fingernail on the table.

“Stop that,” Belle said. Cassie stopped.

“Hey, girls,” Jimmy said, sitting down at the head of the table.

“Hello,” Belle said, not looking up.

“Hey.” Cassie glanced at him, his hair was still wet from the shower and he had some tan across his nose. He'd put on a pressed white shirt, linen pants in a mossy green, one of his thin leather belts. He sat at the table as he always did, with his legs crossed like a woman's, his torso slightly turned. Other fathers looked to Cassie like livestock; Jimmy was how it was supposed to be, a jangly, dancing man. She remembered she wanted to tell him that last week she'd been walking down the road and a fox had bolted out of the tall grass and run right in front of her, she could almost feel him against her skin, and she'd been tempted to follow him. But they move fast.

“Get some coffee here, Laura?” Jimmy asked.

Her mother turned away from the window, dropped her cigarette in the sink where she'd been washing dishes, filled the percolator with water, slammed it against the counter.

“Whatcha working on there, Bella Belle?”

Belle blushed, tore at a cuticle. “A book report. On
Where the Lilies Bloom
.”

“Aren't you—Isn't this summer vacation?”

“I'm just,” Belle said, placing her hands over her notebook, “doing it on my own.”

“I see. Good book?”

“I liked it.”

Jimmy nodded. “Well.”

Cassie kicked the chair with her heel until it started to ache.

“How about you, Cass? Having a good summer?”

She glanced down at the palm of her hand, where she'd written her invisible list, then cleared her throat.

“Laura, how about putting a little soup in a pan for me?”

Cassie cleared her throat again—she'd start with the bike chain, she figured—and Laura turned slowly and looked Jimmy up and down, then pulled a pan from the cabinet with a hard rattle and slammed it on the stove.

“And maybe a cheese sandwich.” Jimmy looked at Cassie, grinned, shrinking up his left eye as he did so, his bit of a wink. “Man could starve to death in his own home, huh, Cass?”

Cassie thought she might be called upon to betray her mother, it was not at all out of the question for Jimmy to demand such loyalty, but she was spared the request by a block of cheese sailing from the direction of the refrigerator, not its sailing so much as its landing was the distraction. It skidded underneath Belle's papers
and came to a stop. The three at the table looked up at Laura. Some very bad things had happened this way, some of which could still be discerned on the ceiling.

“I can see I'm not wanted here,” Jimmy said, pushing himself up from the table.

“How
dare
you,” Laura said, crossing the kitchen like a storm. “How dare you come home after four days—”

“Five,” Cassie said.

“—five days and push me into giving you an excuse to leave again? What in the name of Christ sort of person are you?”

“Mom,” Belle said.

“Shut up, Belle, and you shut up, too, Cassie.”

“I don't appreciate you talking to me like this in front of my daughters,” Jimmy said, pulling himself up to his full height, an inch shorter than Laura.

“Oh, oh, that's rich, too,
your daughters
,” Laura said, getting closer to Jimmy's face with every word.

“All I came home for was my stick, anyway.” Jimmy turned and walked into the living room, stopping at the coat closet, where he took out his cue case.