The Forms of Water (8 page)

“
Y
OU TORE DOWN THE
HOUSE?”
BRENDAN SAID, BUT HENRY
was too far away to hear him.

When Brendan had entered the abbey of Our Lady of the Valley, he had made one vow with an easy heart. Poverty, chastity, obedience—those had troubled him, they had broken saints. But stability, the extra vow of his Order, was what had called him in. To stay in one place always, under perpetual enclosure; to call one place home for the rest of his life, the way the Irish monks had adopted their landfalls as they'd climbed stiffly down from their boats—that had appealed to him.

One home, one family in the brothers who had welcomed him. One liturgical year, repeated endlessly; one niche in the wall behind the main altar where, before retiring, he and his brothers had turned toward the Blessed Virgin and sung the
Salve Regina.
When he'd first come as a postulant, he'd stayed in the guesthouse and been put to work washing dishes and waxing floors. The novice master visited once in a while, but otherwise Brendan had seen the monks only at a distance until the day when he'd finally been received. He'd gone into a room and turned over his clothes and his personal belongings; then he'd donned his new robes and passed through the door that led into the cloister and the novitiate wing. When the monks welcomed him, he'd believed he would never leave.

In his ten years there he had never gone beyond the walls. His family had visited once each year, and between their visits he'd kept silent. He'd spoken only to Father Vincent, his abbot, and to Father Norbert, the novice master; outside of chapter, he and the other brothers never talked, communicating in the archaic sign language peculiar to their Order. Despite that, he'd come to know his fellow monks more intimately than he'd ever known anyone else. Because they didn't converse, he couldn't know where they had come from nor why they'd entered the Order; he couldn't know, directly, what hurt or inspired or disappointed them. But he'd learned to read their faces and eyes and to see their moods in their movements. They'd become familiar to him; they'd become his family. He expected to die among them and rest his bones beyond the orchard.

But then the abbey had been dissolved and his vow had vanished with it. He'd been peregrinating ever since, going forth into strange lands and waiting for another home to reveal itself to him. The abbey in China might have held him if the war hadn't come, but after the internment camp, after the trial and the march and the massacre, Our Lady of Consolation had been burned to the ground. And then he'd been tainted, a displaced person, a monk without a monastery; he'd lost one abbey to water and another to fire and he'd lost his faith as well. The abbeys that had sheltered him upon his return, in Manitoba and then in Rhode Island, had been guesthouses, rest houses, never more than that. When he'd left the Order and come to stay with his parents in Coreopsis, he'd promised himself that this would be his final home.

He'd forgotten that his parents were old. His mother died, and then his father, when he first became ill, had said, “I'm leaving this place to the children, Brendan—you'll have the land in Massachusetts, and there's enough money in the bank to pay the taxes until you decide to sell it. I want the children to have this.”

He'd had to move again. He had tried not to resent the decision—he was so badly crippled by then that he couldn't take care of himself and couldn't have stayed in Coreopsis even if the farm had passed to him. He'd moved into the Home and imagined his niece and nephew at peace in the old house. But neither Henry nor Wiloma had ever lived there again. They'd boarded up the place, they told him. Sold all the movable goods. For years he'd dreamed that one of them might move back and raise a family there.

And now Henry, stumbling after his dog, had done this. Brendan rolled himself down the road, heading toward a cluster of half-built houses that stood where his parents' house might once have been. One shell rose slightly above the others, absorbing the sun and reflecting the breeze in a way that seemed familiar. The land was shattered and scarred, stripped of its trees, built up falsely in some places and falsely hollowed in others, but this place looked as if it might be as hot in the summer as the old house had been.

He wheeled himself up the driveway until he reached the garage, and then he turned and gazed past the ruins at the gentle patchwork below. There were the woods covering the back part of Thompson's place. There was the pond, there Niedemeyer's corn, there the silos and pastures of the Cummings' place, the muddy creek that dried up in the summer, the low hills that rose in the distance—the view, or very near the view, that he'd seen from the parlor where he'd slept. He had first met Henry there, when Henry was fifteen. Henry had walked into the room where Brendan lay, and Brendan's mother had said, “Henry, this is your uncle Brendan.”

She'd looked at Brendan then, clearly uncomfortable with her words. “Brendan?” she'd asked. “You're sure that's the name you want to use? Not Ambrose?”

“Brendan,” he'd said, holding a knotted hand out to his nephew. “That's what people call me.” These people, anyway: this family. Brother Ambrose was the name he'd taken when he'd entered the Order; he'd left it behind with his robes.

Henry had been thin, freckled, stringy from farm work. His hair had been cut too short around his ears, exposing a pale line where his tan broke off. The skin around his nails was gnawed and torn, his pants were too small, and his shirt, although clean, was worn. His eyes were guarded, troubled, distant, and he ignored Brendan's outstretched hand.

“You knew my father?” he said—the first words Brendan ever heard him speak.

“I'm his
brother,”
Brendan replied, startled and hurt. He frowned at his mother and she twisted her hands.

“I told them,” she said. “I told them all about you.”

Henry had ignored her. “You're too old,” he said. After a minute, Brendan had figured out what Henry meant. Frank junior had been thirty-four when he'd died five years earlier; Brendan, at forty-five, had known he looked sixty. “Brendan's the oldest,” his mother said, as if that explained everything.

Henry looked at her with a weary disappointment that told Brendan more than he wanted to know about how the children had fared since their parents' deaths. Then Henry turned his gaze on him. “If you're my father's brother,” he said, “how come I never saw you before? How come you didn't help him? How come you didn't help us?”

“I wasn't here.” Brendan had tried to sit up, but his back had been as frozen as his hips and his hands and his knees. He'd never been so debilitated, before or since, and he'd been useless, flat on his back, a mass of nodules and pain. “I was in China,” he said. “I went there before your parents even met each other. I was still there when they were killed. We couldn't get mail. I didn't know.”

Henry had treated that excuse with the contempt it deserved; he'd stared steadily out of his narrow eyes and then walked away. I didn't know, Brendan thought now: and that was true. But he also knew he might not have responded differently even if he'd heard the news. He'd renounced his family, renounced the world, left all he'd loved behind so he could lose himself in what had seemed, then, like a higher love. And if his brother lost his way, if his brother's children were orphaned and forced to live with grandparents too old and bitter to care for them properly, had that been his concern?

It had, he thought. Or it should have been. He and Henry had felt their way, after that bad beginning, toward a tentative friendship that hung on Brendan's reminiscences of his childhood with Frank junior. Henry had been starved for news of his father, grateful for the scraps that Brendan could give; later, he'd become interested in Brendan's China tales and how those fit in with what he knew of his father's war. Henry's bedroom walls, Brendan remembered, had been covered with maps of the Pacific. There were pins stuck into the islands on which Frank junior had fought.

The strained, pained boy of Brendan's memory bore almost no resemblance to the clumsy man who galloped across the mud tugging Bongo by a length of blackened rope. Henry's eyes were blank, his cheeks were flushed. Brendan couldn't imagine what went on inside him. He never talked about his mother; long ago, when he married Kitty, he'd stopped talking about his father as well.

“Sorry,” Henry said. “Bongo stole our lunch. You want to see the inside of this place? It's one of my favorites, it's almost done. You can almost see how it was supposed to look.”

A plywood ramp led from the driveway up the missing steps to the door. “Sure,” Brendan said, thinking it couldn't matter. His parents' house was gone and nothing could bring it back. Nothing could bring back the childish Henry whom Brendan had grown to love, or the young Wiloma either—they were grown now, past grown, they were middle-aged. He realized with a shock that both of them were older now than he'd been when he'd first come here. They were old, and he was ancient. His kidneys twinged and his bladder cramped.

Henry tied Bongo to a concrete block and said, “Stay. You can't come in. Your feet are too dirty.”

He spoke as if the dog understood him. “This is the kitchen,” he said, giving Brendan's chair a push that bumped him over the threshold. Behind them, Bongo barked. “We were going to have slate-blue Italian tiles on the floor, and more on the backdrop below the cupboards. Gray countertops, black appliances, recessed lighting …”

Brendan tried to imagine it, but all he could see was plywood and Spackle and tape. In the old kitchen, in the old house, his mother had kept her own mother's dishes in a glass-fronted case. “The dining room,” Henry said, wheeling Brendan on. “Aren't those windows great?” They were tall and narrow and pointed, like windows in a church; they were crisscrossed with masking tape and dotted with decals, which carved the view into kaleidoscopic shapes. The old house had had a bay window, full of dusty geraniums. Brendan's bladder cramped again as Henry bent and peeled back some brown paper and exposed the half-laid wooden floor.

“Is there a bathroom down here?” Brendan asked.

“Two,” Henry said, missing the point completely. “A full bath in the guest suite and a powder room here.” He flung open a small door and pointed out the mango-colored fixtures and the mirror framed in mock bamboo. Brendan eyed the toilet, which was low, oval, and padded on its cover and seat. It bore no resemblance to the toilets at St. Benedict's, nor to any toilet he'd ever seen.

“Does it work?” Brendan asked. Henry, who was stroking the sink, turned and looked at him blankly.

“What?” Henry said, and then his brain—where does he go? Brendan wondered. When he drifts away like that?— seemed to snap back into focus. “Oh,” he said. “You have to go? The water's not connected—you could just go outside. There's no one around.”

Brendan made a face and kicked his heels against his foot-rests. “Oh,” Henry said again. “Right. What if I found you a jar or something? Could you use that?”

Brendan nodded, humiliated; he hadn't considered the details of being away from the aides at the Home. They had routines there, for washing him and transferring him into and out of his chair, for helping him to relieve himself so that they could all pretend nothing was happening. Drapes, discreet containers, averted heads. He followed Henry through the dining room, the living room, back through the kitchen, into the hall. They found nothing.

“Shit,” Henry muttered. “You'd think there'd be a paint bucket, or something …” He threw open another door, into the wing he called the guest suite, and then he froze so suddenly that Brendan ran into the backs of his legs. “What the fuck?” Henry said. Outside Bongo barked on and on.

Brendan craned his head around Henry's hips. On the floor, in the corner, lay a nest of flattened cardboard boxes and paint-spattered tarpaulins. Three people crouched there on a sheet of blue plastic: a man, a woman, and a boy. The boy was gnawing his thumb and had pressed himself against the man's side. The woman looked at the floor; the man stared at Henry and Brendan and then slowly raised his right arm and brandished a length of two-by-four.

“Don't come any closer,” he warned.

“The hell,” Henry said. “I
built
this place—what do you think you're doing here?”

“You don't live here,” the man said sternly. “Do you.”

“No,” Henry sputtered. “But …”

Brendan reached out and grasped a fold of Henry's pants, restraining him. The family, if it was a family, seemed to have been here for some time. A few clothes were stacked in a corner, along with a handful of dishes, a jug of water, a basin, and a pack of cigarettes. A cluster of black-eyed Susans stood in a jar.

“Well, we do,” the man said. The woman reached for the jar of flowers and slid them silently behind her. The man said, “That camp where they put the other berry pickers is such a dump. And this place was abandoned, so we claimed it. You have a problem with that?”

Brendan kept hold of Henry's pants; he could feel Henry tensing himself to say or do something unforgivable. He craned his head to the side and spoke before Henry had a chance. “You pick berries?” He'd picked berries himself, at the abbey. They'd made them into jam. “Strawberries?”

“All berries,” the man said warily. He lowered his arm and looked around Henry to Brendan. “Strawberries, raspberries, blueberries. Also peaches when it comes to their time, and then apples. Then we move south for the Georgia harvest, then we hit the oranges in Florida.” He paused. “What happened to your legs?”

“Arthritis,” Brendan said. “How long have you been doing this?”

“A while,” the man said. “Suellen and me hooked up nine years ago. Then Lonny came. Can you walk at all?”