Sweeping Up Glass (20 page)

There’s a picture show in Buelton. “You been in any movies that come out this way?”

“I guess not, but the directors think I have promise.”

“Promise,” I say, unable to decide whether that’s a blessing or a curse. A couple of times my life held promise. I take things from the larder to start our supper. “They pay you all right?”

“I knew you’d ask that. I make a few dollars on the set. I work in the liquor store coupla nights a week. And I dance at the Starlight Ballroom, start at three o’clock, keep a nickel out of every dime the gents pay after midnight. They’re good about let-tin’ me off for auditions.”

“You working nights wouldn’t be good for the boy,” I say.

“He’ll be safe.”

“You’ve got no right to decide that, Pauline. You don’t know one thing about him!”

“I can learn. I’m his mama.”

This can’t be happening. I’ve fallen asleep waiting for the boy to come home, and I’m having a dream. But when I strike a match to light the stove, the sulfur will sting my nose and wake me. I warm the coffee while she walks around looking at things, her heels tap-tapping on the broken linoleum.

“This is his home, and it would be cruel to take him. And anyway, he’s got a cold.”

“It never snows in California,” she says. “It’s warm all winter long.”

How can it be that I’m already in one mess with Ida, and suddenly find myself in another with Pauline? Half an hour ago, Pauline was just a memory. I wish she had never come to the door. Right now I need peace. It’s not like I’m asking anyone else to take on my burdens, but a little time with no worries about money or family sure would be nice. But for now—what will I say to Will’m? How will I explain Pauline?

She sighs. “I had to leave here, Mama. I’m sorry for puttin’ him on you like that, but I had to do it, you know?”

I know. The sad part is that I do know. My stomach has sunk so low it’s making my knees weak. I hold on to the stove. Still, her going off then doesn’t mean she can waltz in here now and pick up like nothing’s happened.

I want to be cruel, to ease my own hurt. “When the boy was small, I tried to explain about you. We haven’t spoken of you since.”

“That’s fine, then. At least he doesn’t think I just up and left him.”

“But you did. And he’s a smart boy.”

“Well, I’m back now,” she says. “And that’s what counts.”

It’s not what counts, and when I get my breathing slowed, I say, “He’s not yet twelve. What do you know about eleven-year-old boys?”

“I’ll learn. I’m making a good place for us. I got a radio, and he can go outside without passing through the liquor store. There’s this yellow dog comes around, I guess he’ll like that.”

“Will’m’s not a stray dog,” I say, things getting mixed up in my head, which makes me sound like Ida. “You can’t move him from pillar to post.”

“He’ll get used to the change. Kids do that all right.”

“No, he won’t!” I’m yellin’ now, and to no good. Besides, I hear the bus stopping in front. “I want to be the one to tell him.”

“All right,” she says, smoothing her skirt and her hair like the King of England’s about to walk in. “But if you make me out to be somethin’ terrible, Mama, so help me—”

Will’m comes up the drive, stumps on the back porch, and opens the door. He looks at Pauline and at me, puts his things on the table, and leans over the box, lifting out a cub like we’re not even here. If it were another day and anyone else was sitting in our kitchen, I’d have cuffed him for his bad manners, and that
makes me wonder if he’s been expecting this. I watch him stroke the pup’s head and tickle its ears, put a bit of milk on the burner to warm. And I wonder how long he’s been waiting.

There’s no easy way to say it. “Will’m, I regret not telling you sooner, so you’d be ready. This here is Pauline.”

Will’m stands there, looking down at the cub cradled on his arm.

“Hello, William,” Pauline says. “I’m your mama.”

He never lifts his eyes, and I’m glad. I remember when Ida came home, how I’d looked into her face hoping for happiness at seeing me, longing for something that never came, and just now I could give him some tips. Most of all, boy, don’t trust what betrays you.

Pauline clears her throat. “Before you were born, I was waitin’ tables in Paramus, hoping you’d hurry up and come so’s I could try out for a part in this play. The director was a real nice lady. She took me in, helped birth you. You had that same yellow hair, those big eyes. Now look, you’ve gone and grown into a handsome man.”

Will’m is quiet, like he’s swallowed his tongue. I wonder if he’ll ever speak again.

Everything in my kitchen looks foreign and out of place. “Take your coat off, boy. I’ll make you some cocoa.”

“William,” Pauline says, standing. “You come on now and give your mama a hug.”

But he does not move.

“Well, that’s all right,” she says. “You take your time. That’s one fine-looking puppy you got there.”

“There’s two of them,” he says then. “And they’re not puppies, they’re wolves.”

“Is that right? I got me a big yellow dog. An’ there’s a soda
fountain right next door to my place. In Hollywood, California, you heard of that?”

Will’m nods.

“Sometimes on Saturdays, I go to the movies for a nickel,” she says.

He looks over at her. “Why’d you come here?”

“Well.” Pauline fusses with her dress. “I come to fetch you.”

“Gran?” Will’m says, like he’s hoping I’ll not only answer the questions, but ask them, too.

Truth is, I don’t know what to say. I think about those two women in the Bible, both laying claim to the baby, so King Solomon takes out his sword to cut him in half. At the last minute, the mama who loves him lets go of his hand, and Solomon says, “Then it’s you that shall have him.”

Only I can’t let go, and that makes me the wicked one. Ida would say that was so, and just now I can’t argue. After all, I’ve thought of murdering hunters for killing the wolves—what, then, might I do to this woman who sits in my kitchen and cuts out my heart? If I speak up now, while Will’m fetches the broth and the eyedropper—if I shout he can’t go, that he’s mine because I’ve raised him—he’ll be like a piece of old cloth we’re ripping in half. Pauline’s talking a good story with her soda fountains and picture shows. Still, if I let her walk out the door with him, I might as well take Pap’s gun and blow my head off.

Will’m tucks the cubs’ box under his arm, takes the pan of broth in the other hand, and elbows back the curtain to his alcove. Then he turns and looks at me with enough fire in his eyes to devour Kentucky. It knocks the breath clean out of me.

I
send Will’m to fetch Ida in her nightgown and a woolen shawl. A dark look is spread across her face, so I expect he has told her. He pulls out her chair for her, then digs in the drawer for a length of string. Pats her hair and ties the string around it. It hurts me to watch.

I recall my conversation with Saul on the hill, and wonder how my loving got to be so messed up. I ladle beans and salt pork into a bowl, take corn bread from the oven, and give them each a spoonful of fried potato. It’s Will’m’s favorite, but tonight he doesn’t lift his fork until I tell him to.

“Ida,” I say. “You remember Pauline. She’s all grown-up now, and pretty as a picture.” And she is, but I say it because I want to keep Ida from making some nasty remark.

“Who?” she says.

“Our Pauline. She’s come home.”

“How you doing, Grandma?” Pauline says across the table that I’ve had to pull out from the wall for the first time in years.

Ida looks at her. Then at me. She says, “Tell that woman to pass the corn bread, Olivia.”

If we were friends, Pauline and I would look at each other and shake our heads. I’d like that, another woman to share this trouble. But I can’t make it happen. I feel myself sinking lower and lower. Maybe I should ask Pauline to take me over to the home in Buelton, and have me put away.

“Will’m,” I say, “how’re the cubs doing?”

“All right,” he says.

“I saved back a bit of pork fat. You can give ’em that.”

He nods once.

I get up and go to the grocery, bring back a jar of honey, and open it. Will’m’s eyes grow round at this extravagance, but I stick a spoon in it and hand it to him. He puts honey on his corn bread and some on Ida’s. I guess he’s given himself over to Ida, and doing for her is bringing him comfort.

“I meant to tell you,” I say, “that I’m moving Pap’s grave.”

Will’m puts down his fork.

“He’s going up on the hill by Saul. It’s long overdue.”

Ida cuts her eyes toward me, and then fades away, picking at her corn bread, putting crumbs in the palm of her other hand.

Nobody says anything. I don’t know what I expected. I mean to do this quickly, and it would be nice, lowering Pap into his new spot, if we had some kind of ceremony, but nobody seems interested. I guess I’ll do what I need to, and that’ll be that. At least Junk will be there, and Love Alice, too.

I bring what’s left of the beans and set the pan on the table. “Ida? You want some more?”

But Ida looks at Pauline. And then at Will’m. “You read to me tonight, boy?” she says.

“I will. From the Letters of Paul?”

“Anything,” she says, “but Revelation. It scares the bejesus out of me, all them devils on horseback.”

“Well,” says Pauline brightly. She takes another slice of corn bread from the pan. “I been thinking that I might stay on a few days. Maybe a week.”

She’s telling me how long I have with the boy.

W
ill’m takes Ida back directly after supper, the last of the corn bread wrapped in a towel. His hovering over her irritates me, although everything bothers me just now, and God knows she needs someone. I look in on the cubs while he’s gone, and they’re sleeping but not one whit bigger, and I wonder how much longer they’ll hold on. If I can’t keep Will’m, and he leaves with Pauline, what will I do with them?

Sometime later, Pauline falls asleep on the bed beside me. Her beat-up suitcase lays open on the floor. I can’t help looking at the few things she’s brought, and wondering if she doesn’t own much, or if she’s put her money back for Will’m’s comfort. Or maybe people in California wear the same clothes over and over, and if that’s the case they must do a lot of wash.

Sometime before dawn, I wake feeling suffocated by my own daughter’s breath, and I get up and light a lantern, turning the wick low. I put my coat and mittens on, wrap a scarf around my head, and go down the back steps. I can still see the shallow snow where the wolf laid two days ago, and the track I left when I pulled it up the hill.

Because ours is a sliver of land, and unfenced, it’s easy to see how the wolves have wandered, and there’s nothing I can do
about the shooting of them past our boundaries. But slaughter on our land is something else.

The whole thing is a sloping foothill actually, because once a body reaches the crest, there’s greater hills to the north and east. On the pointy southern tip of our land is the house, what’s left of the barn and shed, a boarded-up outhouse, a goat pen, a chicken house, and Ida’s cabin. Because the ground is so rocky, there are paths and washes carved into the hillside, all of which make going up easier. In the last few days, Will’m and I have tromped down the snow as far as Cooper’s Ridge, which is the next near-level ground, although it’s thick with brushy copses and caves. Beyond that the boulders are slick-faced clear to the top, where they’re smaller until it’s like walking on finely crushed gravel, as if all the heavy pieces have rolled downhill.

Near the western edge of our land, on the Ridge, I buried Saul. Junk and his uncles dug a grave there, under a pair of weeping willows. In spring, violets the color of sunset push through, and three-pointed trilliums and dogwood, and bushes with yellow blossoms. Just now, the willows are bare, and the grave is covered with snow. But it’s shady here, and I suspect the earth is soft.

I look down at Saul’s thin upright stone with snow drifted smoothly against it, and feel the need to do something I haven’t since his last day on earth.

“They put Miz Grace Harris in the ground,” I say. I like the sound of me talking to Saul. He was so responsible, I half expect him to answer. “Made me think of how kind you were. The way you took on Pauline and me. You didn’t have to do that, Saul—you surely were a good man.”

I remember how his shoulders stooped, those last years, making him even shorter than before, and how he liked beef stewed with rice, gravy spooned over bread. He loved anything made
with apples, and boiling hot coffee at dawn. Nights, when he came last to the bed, I’d curl against his back, which was probably the only closeness I showed him.

He took everything in stride. Days, he worked in old man French’s hardware store, knowing all the sizes of nuts and washers, and he could sharpen a saw blade so a man could shave with it. Once a week he ran the still, although he seldom drank, but he kept two or three customers. I believe he did it for the perverse-ness of it, and was just waiting for a revenuer to show up.

I remember him bouncing Pauline on his knee. He loved her like his own, and I’m glad he died before she took off, so he didn’t have to watch. Like Will’m, he had a way with Ida, teasing her and twirling her around the floor. She’d bat at his hand, call him a fool, and give me the evil eye. I’d stomped around in one Ida-snit or another until Saul began to build her cabin. I wonder, now, if he was ever happy.

“I could have loved you more,” I say. “Or maybe I loved you all along, and was just too stubborn to see.”

The sun’s coming up. I lie down beside him. My knees crack, and my back gives me fits. I meant it when I said Pap should be buried here, instead of by that stinking outhouse. I’m not sure what it’ll entail, for there can’t be much of him left in the ground. If I can get Junk’s help, we’ll dig anyway and move whatever there is—wood or bone. Then, in spring, I’ll haul rocks up here and make a little graveyard for the two of them.

I never talked to Saul about the Phelpses. I wish now that I had.

After our noon meal, eaten in silence, I take the truck and without a word to Pauline, or Will’m, who’s holed up in his alcove with the cubs, I drive to Junk’s place. They’re eating their after-church dinner, and I wait on the porch with my hat in my hand
until Junk comes to the door. This is the second time in a week that I’ve dragged him away from his family because I’ve got a bee in my bonnet.