Staggerford (10 page)

At that moment, as though a class bell were calling them away, the faculty vanished from the dining room, leaving Thanatopsis and Miles to help the Vandergars home.

The next day Fred was hospitalized. The next week he was dead.

Today the outline of his grave was still visible where the sod had been disturbed.

Before leaving the cemetery, Miles again studied the sky. Now a heavy cloudbank was moving over the prairie like a sheet of slate. When its forward edge put out the sun, the wind doubled its force, blowing a flock of blackbirds out of a cedar tree and causing Miles to shiver in his tweed jacket.

He left the cemetery and descended the hill to the path along the river. He had intended to return to town, but here at the bottom of the riverbank the wind was not so strong. He felt warmer. He stepped out onto a large rock in the river and looked upstream. He looked downstream. He looked at his watch. Ten to three. He followed the path downstream.

The gulch was a mile beyond the cemetery. It was a steep-walled ravine that ran perpendicular to the Badbattle and emptied into it two nameless creeks, one from the north and one from the south. When Miles reached the creek flowing in from the south he sat on a rock and studied, with his binoculars, a flock of grosbeaks in a bare tree across the river. The tree was a birch, standing at the point where the creek from the north joined the river. The grosbeaks were impervious to the gusts of wind ruffling their feathers. Grosbeaks liked being chilly. This flock of nine, perched one above the other on nine different branches and facing into the wind, had just arrived from their summer in the Arctic. They were waiting in this birch to see if it
was going to rain (a sign they had flown too far south) or snow (in which case they would settle down until spring). One of the birds turned and looked directly into Miles’s line of vision. It was a male, with bright yellow chevrons on his wings and bright yellow eyebrows.

“I knew you’d come.” The voice startled Miles and he turned suddenly about. He saw Beverly coming toward him along the creek, pushing aside the low-hanging branches of the bare aspen trees. Over her Hub uniform she was wearing an old checkered jacket, a man’s wool jacket, probably her father’s. It had buttonholes but no buttons. It had been worn so long that the checks (red and white? black and red?) had become gray and off-gray.

“What were you looking at?” she asked. She sat near him on the trunk of a fallen elm. Since their visit in the Hub, she had applied something chartreuse and oily to her eyelids. He wanted to tell her to leave her eyes alone. They were large and blue and couldn’t be improved upon. Keeping her hair from falling in front of them was the only attention they needed.

“I was looking at grosbeaks in that birch over there. They’re gone now.”

She did not look at the birch but kept her eyes on Miles. “I never notice birds,” she said.

“This is a good place for birdwatching. I’ve even seen eagles out here circling over the gulch.”

“Yeah? So what do you do when you see them?—just see them? That’s why I’ve never understood birdwatching. All it amounts to is watching birds.”

“They’re interesting.”

“The only birds I ever notice are chickens. Our place is overrun with chickens. Listen.”

Miles heard, over the wind, the distant hum of traffic on Highway 4.

“I thought maybe we could hear our chickens from here, but I guess not. They’re always clucking like crazy. Our place isn’t very far back there along the creek.” She reached into the pocket of her orange uniform and pulled
out a flip-top box of Marlboros. She put one in her mouth and offered one to Miles. He declined.

“I haven’t been smoking very long.” She lit up. “I started when I got my job at the Hub. That’s two weeks ago. I work Friday nights and Saturdays and Sundays. Everybody that comes in lights up, especially the kids, so I thought what the hell.”

Miles drew up his binoculars and watched a crow land on the opposite bank and poke his beak into the sand.

“I don’t ever come down here to the river anymore, the brush has grown up so thick between here and the house. When my sister was home we used to come down here and fish, but I really don’t care for fishing.”

“I don’t either,” said Miles, “but I like to watch water move.”

They watched the surface of the Badbattle sliding west toward Pike Park, toward the reservation, toward its confluence with the Red River of the North. Mingling with the Red, this water would then flow through Fargo and up to Winnipeg and from there it would angle northeast and divide itself into dozens of channels across Ontario and come together once more before emptying itself into Hudson Bay.

“Why?” said Beverly.

“Why what?”

“Why do you like to watch water move?”

Miles shrugged, his eyes on a ripple of water gurgling below a midstream rock.

“I can’t figure out guys like you. There must be girls you could be out with right now instead of sitting here watching water move.”

“Is that what you wanted to talk to me about, my relationship with women?”

“Why not?”

“It would be dull talk, I’m afraid.”

Beverly picked a strip of bark off the elm and set it adrift toward Hudson Bay. “I just want to talk. You know, there aren’t to many teachers a girl can talk to. I mean about things other than school.”

“How about Mrs. Workman?”

“No, I hardly know her. I never took home ec. Anyway, she’s a woman. Don’t you know a girl, if she’s got a choice, would rather talk to a man?”

“Is that so?”

“Oh, come on now. Don’t play dumb.”

A cold gust of wind shivered the water. Beverly threw her cigarette into the river and pulled her jacket together at the throat.

“Mr. Pruitt, could I really make it in college?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t mean the academic part of it. I know I could handle that. I’ve known real stupes who went to college and made it. I’m talking about the social part of it.”

“That’s the easiest part.”

“But I can’t imagine myself on a college campus.”

“Why?”

She took a deep breath. “I don’t know. I just can’t. There are reasons why I don’t fit into places other girls fit into.”

“What reasons?”

“And then there’s the whole money part of it. What do I do for money? All I get at the Hub is minimum wage, and it seems like everything we make on the farm goes to feed the chickens.”

“There’s money these days for anybody who wants to go to college—grants, loans, scholarships, work-study. Start out at the junior college in Berrington. You’ll get by cheap. In fact, you might get by free. Your father was Chippewa, wasn’t he?”

“Half.”

“Then there’s federal money for you. All you need. Tuition, books, room and board. Maybe even spending money. We’ll look into it and see.”

There was a noise behind them in the brush. “Oh God!” said Beverly, and she jumped up and darted down the path toward the cemetery. Miles stood, ready to run, as soon as he saw what he was running from. Something was snapping sticks and kicking through the fallen leaves along the
creek. He expected to see a bear. Hunters told of seeing bears in the gulch.

It was the Bonewoman. She was striding forward like a bear, heedless of the spongy wetness of the creek that covered her shoes, heedless of the saplings and vines that hung in her way.

And she was heedless of Miles. She passed him and stopped at the fallen elm and looked down the path where Beverly had run.

Miles said, “Hello, Mrs. Bingham.”

The Bonewoman made no reply except a noise of disgust like a snort, which she directed toward the river. She turned and re-entered the heavy brush, and Miles stood listening to the splash and crackling of her disappearance.

This was his first look at the woman in daylight. He was struck by her relatively youthful face. He had imagined that anyone as legendary as the Bonewoman had to be old, but this woman was not old. Her face was not lined by age. The only mark of having lived a lifetime in the gulch was a hint of desperation in her eyes. And twigs in her hair.

Miles set off down the path toward the cemetery, expecting to find Beverly waiting for him, but she had disappeared somewhere in the thick undergrowth of the riverbank. He was amazed by the acuteness of his disappointment. He lingered for a time at the bend of the river where he last saw her, then he continued along the path toward town. He heard the mournful call of geese, but light was dying in the sky and he could not see them. He hoped they were not the same confused flock he and Miss McGee had seen that morning.

Miles put on Lyle Kite’s green ranger uniform—the percale shirt stiff as canvas, the gabardine pants with hanger creases at the knees, the short jacket not coming together over Miles’s stomach—and he walked across the alley and called for Imogene.

Lillian Kite, clutching her knitting and trailing a ball of yarn, opened the door and said, “Imogene will be ready
in a minute. My, if you don’t look nice in Lyle’s uniform. But I see it’s a bit snug on you.”

“What’s Imogene wearing?” Miles asked, sucking in his belly.

“I’m not allowed to say. She wants to surprise you. Come and sit down.”

He sat on the arm of the couch, the tight pants allowing him to bend no further.

Lillian took her place in the swivel chair before the TV set and spoke over the sound of a commercial for contraceptive cat food. “It’s a shame that uniform doesn’t get more use. I really should contact some of the younger rangers and see if they might not like to buy it from me. Lyle wore it only once, and it’s in such handsome condition. I can remember the argument we had when it came to buying that uniform.” Her eyes were neither on Miles nor on the TV but on her speedy needles. “It was shortly before Lyle retired and he could have gotten along with the uniforms he had, though they were beginning to look a little threadbare, and he said, ‘Lil’—he always called me Lil—‘Lil,’ he said, ‘I’ve got half a notion to splurge and buy myself a new uniform for my last six months of work.’ I said, ‘No, we can make do with what you have,’ and it was true, we could have got along very nicely with what he had in his closet. I think he had three uniforms at the time and although two of them had patches on the seat where he carried his billfold, he could have made do very nicely. But he said, ‘Lil, what about the retirement party?’ and of course I could see his point. All the rangers from this region and their wives were going to give this retirement party for him and two other retirees at the Sheraton Ritz in St. Paul, and it was customary for the retirees to wear their uniforms to the party. So I said, ‘I guess you’re right, Lyle, I guess we’ll go and invest in another uniform.’ And we did, and it was a mistake. I mean not that we could tell ahead of time, but it turned out to be a mistake in the long run because those last six months he never wore that new uniform to work lest he have an accident with it of some kind—tear it or get ink on it, you know—and it wasn’t until
the day of the retirement party that he put it on for the first time. He put it on and we set out for St. Paul in a snowstorm and we got stranded. It was the twentieth day of March and there was a blizzard, and we had to stay overnight in St. Cloud. We got a motel room there in St. Cloud and Lyle called the Sheraton Ritz in St. Paul and told them he was stranded. Well, the director of rangers was there from the Department of the Interior, and he read his speech to Lyle over the phone. It was a handsome tribute to all the men who were retiring but especially to Lyle because he had been with the Park Service longer than the others. It was
such
a handsome tribute, although I’ve always said that it wasn’t undeserved. Lyle never took a day of sick leave in his life. I was sitting beside him on the bed in that motel room, and Lyle held the phone so I could hear the speech too. Later the director sent him the speech in the mail. I’ve got it here in my knitting bag. Would you like to read it, Miles?”

“Yes, I would.”

“I read it again last Sunday afternoon. On Sundays I get to thinking about Lyle, and that’s when I usually read it. Agatha’s read it, and some of the folks at the Senior Citizens’ Club have read it, and they all say it’s a handsome tribute to Lyle.” She took a sheaf of papers from her bag and handed them to Miles.

“It’s long,” he said.

“Yes, that’s the only fault I find with it. I wish it weren’t quite so long. The next day when we paid for our motel room, the phone bill was five dollars and a half.”

Imogene stepped into the room. She was dressed in a cap and gown. Perfect, thought Miles. What could be more fitting for Imogene, the walking encyclopedia?

“Isn’t she handsome?” said her mother.

“Yes,” said Miles. Handsome was the word for her. She was too sexless to be pretty, but the black cap and gown accentuated the bone-white pallor of her angular face and made her as handsome as young Abraham Lincoln. He would have to be careful tonight not to call her Abe.

Imogene said, “Pruitt, must you always be so early?”

“I like to be on time.” He looked at his watch. “The party starts at eight, and it’s five to.”

“Anything up to half an hour late is considered on time, Pruitt. Don’t you know anything about etiquette?”

“Very little, I’m afraid.”

“Well, anything up to half an hour late is considered on time, but anything
before
the appointed time—even a single minute—is downright gouchy.”

“Downright what?”

“Downright gouchy.”

“Downright what?” said her mother, pausing in her knitting.

“Gouchy,” said Imogene, clearly irritated.

“You mean gauche,” said Miles. “It’s pronounced
gosh
, with a long
O.”

“I mean gouchy, Pruitt. It means crude.”

“My, my, you ack-comedians,” said her mother.

“What did you call us?” said Imogene.

“Ack-comedians. It means scholars.”

“You’re pronouncing it wrong,” said Imogene. “You mean academicians.”

“Academicians? I always thought it was ack-comedians. Who’s right, Miles?”

“I love ack-comedians,” said Miles. “If it means scholars it’s perfect.”

“Pruitt, you’re impossible. Let’s get going.”