The Talk-Funny Girl (34 page)

My mother opened the door, reluctantly it seemed. She had a belly. In the corner of my eye I saw my father set down his fishing pole. “Ma,” I said, standing at the bottom of the steps with Aunt Elaine and Sands close behind me and my mother close in front, “we broughten some things for of the baby when it’s come.”

My mother stared, a wisp of cigarette smoke circling up beside her face. I thought we wouldn’t be admitted to the house then, and I was about to say we’d brought some money, too. But at that moment my aunt said, “Emmy, aren’t you going to let us in?”

My mother pushed open the door. “Good to see ya,” she said with the hoarse-voiced sarcasm I instantly remembered. I could hear my father’s footsteps on the dirt near the shed, and with those two familiar sounds I had a moment of thinking I’d made a terrible mistake. I had forgotten what it was really like to live here.

Inside the house, with all of us crowded near the front door, Aunt Elaine turned to my mother and said, “This is Sands,” and then, a little quickly, as if forcing the words out, “my son.”

When my mother understood what she meant, she let out a laugh. She seemed happy to have the news, but it was what I thought of as a
wrong happiness, the kind that grew in the dirt of someone else’s trouble. The laugh twisted my mother’s mouth up high at the corners. Her eyes moved from Sands’s face to Aunt Elaine’s, back and forth twice, and then to the face of her husband, who had taken one step in over the threshold and was standing there with his fingers drumming on the cloth of his overalls. After a moment, she put her hands on her belly, the cigarette smoke now twirling up in front of her, and she said, “This here’s
my
son. Hah.”

I couldn’t look at my father. I said, “Ma, this here is a present to him. A little cradle so because he won’t have to—” I stopped short there. I’d been about to say, “so he won’t have to sleep in a cardboard box”—which is where I had slept as an infant, a box with a blanket on a table in my parents’ room. They’d told me that themselves, proudly. “It’s soon, but we had a want to give it now.”

“
She
wanted to,” Aunt Elaine said. “She bought it with the money she’s made. This”—she held up the unwrapped box that had baby bottles and some formula in it—“is from me. I didn’t think you would want to breast-feed.”

My mother’s one-note laugh knocked against the ceiling.

Aunt Elaine put the box down on the table. I set my large package next to it. “You don’t of have to want to open it and look now if you don’t,” I said, and felt my face go red because I was caught between the way I had once spoken in that house—without self-consciousness—and the way I was trying to speak with Sands and Aunt Elaine. When I looked up, my father was shooting his eyes into me. I could see the hairs on his beard shaking. I was a traitor, and in his way of thinking, nothing, not even a murderer, was worse than that.

I was about to mention the money when he shifted his eyes to Aunt Elaine as if Sands was not there and spat out, “You stoled her on away.”

From all those hours of working with Sands, I could feel that he didn’t like my father any more this time than he had on their first meeting. I guessed he didn’t like the smell of smoke and old cooked food
and mold either. I looked at his arms and shoulders. Next to my father’s twitching fingers, they seemed enormous and too still.

Aunt Elaine turned to face my father. “Really?” she said. “The story I have was that you tied your daughter to a tree. In the woods. At night. And left her there, hungry and in pain and eaten up by mosquitoes. I seem to remember writing you both a letter about that a little while back. Maybe you’ve forgotten, Curtis. Maybe this will remind you: Attorney Robert Baker. Does the name ring—”

“Not’n yourn business,” my father said. His eyes flicked once to Sands, an appraising glance, a naked evaluation.

“Is that so?” I noticed that Aunt Elaine had gone very quickly from being polite to looking like she was going to start yelling at them again. I had another moment of thinking I shouldn’t have come, or should have come alone.

My father bumped his chin down one time in an angry nod.

“The trouble with you, Curtis,” Aunt Elaine was saying, and I wanted to tell her to stop then. I knew, I could feel, that years of anger had built up inside my aunt and were about to spill out. She was brave as a bear, but she didn’t know certain things, seemed to have no idea of the kinds of actions her brother-in-law was capable of, seemed to think words had equal force to a chain saw or a knife or a willow whip. “The trouble with you has always been that you aren’t smart enough to separate the people who want to be kind to you from the people who want to hurt you. You think everybody wants to hurt you so you live in your little hard shell out here in the woods. When you come out of the shell it’s so you can hurt somebody first before they hurt you. We came here—your daughter, your child, came here bringing a gift for the baby in your wife’s womb. She wants to give you money, too—because you still pretend to be unable to work—though I told her several times that she’s given you enough money over the years. I bet you haven’t even taken your wife in for a checkup once in her pregnancy, am I right? You don’t know about things like that. You don’t pay attention to things like
that, do you, Curtis? The health of a woman and an unborn child. But you know how to tie your grown daughter to a tree.”

Except for his nine fluttering fingers, my father’s body had an odd quietness about it. But in another second I saw that the skin of his face was moving the way the top of a pond moves when a breeze runs across it. His eyes flicked over to Sands, and one chip of a smile went flying across his lips. It was the smile of a person who knows he is going to get hurt and in a strange way likes it. The hurt confirms something in him, some expectation about how the world works, some sense of his own ability to bear pain, if nothing else. He made the chip of a smile—I realized then that I’d told Aunt Elaine but never told Sands about being tied to the tree—and then he turned his eyes to Aunt Elaine and said two words very quietly. “Little whore.” He was starting to say something else, “Get out,” I thought it would be, when Sands, moving faster than I’d ever seen, grabbed him by the front of his T-shirt, lifted him off the ground, and pushed him back hard against the doorjamb. I heard a sound like “hunhn” when the air came out of my father’s body. His eyes were fixed unblinking on Sands’s face. I saw no fear in them at all. Sands’s other hand hung at his side but he had made the fingers into a fist.

“Cut you,” my father said, looking into Sands’s eyes.

“All right, then,” Aunt Elaine said. “Stop that now.” She put her hand on Sands’s back but he didn’t seem to feel it. For about two seconds my mother had a smoky smile drawn in pencil on her face, then it fell away. There were a few times when I’d listened to Sands talk about nonviolence, how wars were wrong, how killing was wrong. He seemed to mean what he said, but I could see that there was another part of him where those words didn’t come from. His left arm was held out almost straight, bunching the fabric of my father’s T-shirt against his throat. I could see that he was pressing forward and that if my father moved down off his tiptoes he wouldn’t be able to breathe.

“Cut your whore mother, too,” my father squeaked out, and when I heard those words, and saw Sands’s other hand swing up, I thought
that if he hit with a fist, my father’s head was going to fly right off like a bearded doll’s head, like the plastic head of the figure outside the plumbing shop. But when Sands hit it was with an open hand, and so hard the noise was like a gun going off in the room. My father went flying over sideways, caught himself on a chair for a second, and then the chair fell and he fell with it. In an instant he’d scrambled to his feet, his eyes like the eyes of an animal, blood on his mouth. My mother was watching with two hands spread on her belly, a cigarette pinched between the fingers there, a twirl of smoke rising as if from the fetus itself.

The words that came out of Sands’s mouth then were like air being forced out between his teeth, like steam from a kettle. “SaythewordagainPastor,” I thought he said, though I have never asked him about it and I might have heard it wrong. “Saythewordagain.” He was facing my father with his hands in fists now, a different man than the man I had been working with, completely different. A killer, I thought. And I thought that my father, who was also a killer-man, knew it. In my father’s eyes I saw that he expected it would be like two animals in the woods, one of them a catamount or a coyote, and the other a raccoon or a fox, with no amount of mercy there. No rules. No forgiveness. None at all. It seemed to me that my father knew about things like this from far back in his life, from his early years with Dad Paul or when he’d been upstate, or both. There was no hatred in his face, and no fear. It was almost as if he was looking at something related to him, the way one animal looks at another, not seeing it so much as feeling its existence through its own existence. There was blood running from my father’s mouth, a good amount of it, but he seemed not to notice and he was holding the chair in one hand in such a way that I knew he would swing it if Sands came at him.

“Enough,” Aunt Elaine said, in what was meant to be a strict voice. “There’s a pregnant woman here. This isn’t a bar.”

But the men weren’t listening. My mother took a drag from her Prime as calmly as if she was watching a scene on a street corner from
out a third-floor window. She said, “Yeah, we all are none of us a saint here,” in the way she had, a crazy way almost. It was almost as if she was trying to make fun of someone, Aunt Elaine probably, but the joke came out crooked. I tried to think of her walking out into the dark woods to untie me, holding in her hand a knife four sizes too big for the job of cutting rope.

Before my father and Sands could say or do anything else, I took the money out of my pants pocket and set the folded green bills, two hundred dollars, on the table near the packages. For a minute a new silence fell across the room. I said, “I want of to give you money for the baby now and I want to go.” My mother and father were looking at the money. I stepped across and put my hand on Sands’s left arm. Without speaking to him or looking into his face, I moved him gently back one step away from my father. I had my back turned to my father—I didn’t have the courage to look at him then—but I could feel his anger like smoke on my neck.

“I don’t care about any of the rest of this now,” I heard Aunt Elaine say nervously. “I don’t care about you, Emmy. Or about Curtis. If you ever were sister and brother-in-law to me, that’s finished now. But if you have trouble with the pregnancy, the smallest trouble, you come get me immediately. You get to a phone and you call. Or you drive to the church they’re building and you tell them to get me. Do you hear? That’s what I care about now, about that baby, and about this young woman here who you’ve treated worse than an animal. You and Curtis just come and get me, that’s all.” She turned to my father and for a moment I thought she would step across the room and attend to his bleeding mouth. But she looked back to my mother. “And stop drinking and smoking, for God’s sake. Just for these months. And if one little thing seems not right, you—”

“Gittin’ you all out now,” my father spluttered. I turned to look at him, saw that blood had sprayed onto the front of his shirt when he spoke. He didn’t reach up to wipe it and had not taken his hand off the chair or moved his eyes from Sands’s face.

Aunt Elaine looked at him. Everyone was looking at him. The blood ran into his beard.

“We’re going,” Aunt Elaine said. She moved so that she, too, was between Sands and my father. She looked at her stepsister one last time. My mother smiled a crazed, mean smile back at her, a bitter good-bye, and then we were going out the door, Sands beside and a little behind me, walking backward. Another second it seemed like and we were in the car. At the end of the driveway I turned and looked out the back window. The door was open but I couldn’t see anyone there.

Twenty-nine

T
hrough the heart of the summer, the only season of real heat in our part of the world—though even then the nights are usually cool—I stayed living with my aunt, rode the bus to work most days, and struggled not to think about my parents too much. Sometimes I let myself imagine that my mother and father had sold the house and land and gone off somewhere in the truck with the money, or taken a bus to Canada or Florida and were never coming back. Other times I felt they were standing on the sidewalk, watching me, waiting for me, and I had to force myself not to turn and look.

As if they knew I didn’t want them to, Sands and Aunt Elaine never talked about my parents. And Sands never again brought up the idea of my living in the rectory, which made me believe that, after seeing the kind of parents I had, he’d changed his mind about the invitation. Maybe he didn’t want a person from a family like that living with him. Maybe he didn’t want to worry about my father showing up some night to, as he used to say, “make a revenge.”

On Sundays, my aunt and I would ride up along the river on the Vermont side and have lunch in one of the towns set into the hills there—the Windsor Diner was a favorite of ours—or drive south into Massachusetts, where she knew a few nice places to walk in the woods.
Sometimes I paid for lunch on these outings, as a gift or a thank-you, because I was never allowed to pay for anything else. Twice, Sands came along, pleasant enough but very quiet, as if he had seen something in himself he was so ashamed of he’d made a vow never to speak again, or as if he was working out plans behind his eyes—for his cathedral, for his future. He touched his mother once in a while, and she touched him, but I waited for him to use a certain word and he never did.

Something was happening inside me in those weeks. Years later, when I was pregnant for the first time, I recognized the feeling. I moved differently, looked at the world differently, felt a kind of power growing through the middle of me. I thought about my parents, but I was no longer so afraid of them. I saw Aaron in town once and said hello, but, though I could tell he wanted me to, I didn’t stop to talk. The cathedral still filled my life, but I felt this new strength even when I was miles away from the work site. I remember—and this may seem like a trivial thing—going into a women’s clothing store in Watsonboro and, for the first time in my life, buying underwear that wasn’t plain white.