The Writing on the Wall: A Novel (16 page)

What was happening lower down looked normal enough to me though naturally it scared them especially with her moans which were awfully LOUD. I didn’t think we’d need to send to town for my doctor friend but could see it through ourselves. It wasn’t even a nurse they especially needed. What they needed and needed badly was an adult.

Two adults. For standing against the wall rocking slowly back and forth on heels was Rosen or Granite or whatever he wanted to be called. A lot of men intimidate you with their size and brawn but he was one of those rarer ones who impress you by their thinness like they’re showing you they don’t need much from life and because they don’t need much from life they’re a hell of a lot tougher than you are. He had on ragged work pants a red flannel shirt taut suspenders and looked like he had stepped into that room from 1885. He stroked his blonde beard while he rocked but never smiled never came close to smiling. Granite is a good name for him since his skin is steel gray with albino veins and you know if you touched him touched him anywhere nothing would flinch.

He was the one I glanced at whenever I needed something. Towels hot water compresses rubbing alcohol swabs. I only had to nod and he knew instinctively what I wanted and went to fetch it. I liked him for that hard as he was. And for all the talk about it being “our” baby I knew from the intent way he stared that the baby was his.

Lilac’s labor lasted most of the night but there were no surprises other than how a little thing like her could howl so loud and so long. I didn’t need to do much until the baby began crowning than I started in massaging since I wanted it to be positioned just right. Maybe that helped because toward the end Lilac became much quieter. The last hour was rough even so. I’m just as glad a doctor wasn’t there because he would have gotten impatient and reached for the forceps but I waited and in the end hardly needed to do anything but tie off the cord. The Viking girl turned out to be named Kit and she did a good job cleaning the baby and wrapping him and handing him to Lilac who once her exhaustion wore off and her disbelief smiled so beautifully it made me sob.

“What’s his name?” I said slipping open the blanket enough to admire him.

“Luddy,” she said.

I didn’t get it.

“Muddy?”

“Luddy.”

“Cuddy?”

“Luddy.”

“Perfect name,” I said. I never heard of it before.

I’m making myself out to sound like an expert but that was the first birth I’d ever been at where I wasn’t the one doing the pushing and moaning. I was never frightened though and that’s because I drew strength from the eager hopeful way those young people stared. I don’t know if any of them is an artist but you could paint a pretty good picture if you’d been watching that night. The rain streaming down the windows and the kerosene lamp beaming off the pink hill of Lilac’s belly and luna moths beating their wings against the screens trying to get in and the warmth of the wood-stove on our backs and the girls twirling their necklaces like rosary beads and the boys smoking weed and Granite over there in his corner holding us all together by the fearless way he stared. I looked over once and saw twin gold dots toward the bottom of the window felt it was raccoons come to watch or porcupines or bobcats and sensed at their back the wild forest land that surrounded us lonely beyond lonely forgotten beyond forgotten hardly even part of America at all and yet right there in the center pressing it back bawling its head off this gift of new life.

It was dawn the sun was burning the dew off the windows before I felt sure enough about things to leave. Granite walked me out to the truck and before we got there he grabbed one of his men by the shoulders and pointed to the old stable they used as their barn.

I was way ahead of him.

“Nope, I don’t want any piglets,” I said. “This was for free.”

That seemed to annoy him. He didn’t like being beholden to anybody. It would be better if I liked pigs.

“Nope,” I said again. “Don’t want any lambs either or honey or berries or dope. Had some fun here, thanks go to you.”

August rode back with me on the truck and when we got to my house she didn’t want to let me go.

“Out with it,” I said. I could see those soft round eyes holding something in.

“Why does it have to be torture?”

I said what any woman would say.

“Because it always is, always has been, always will be.”

This didn’t seem to satisfy her and I know it didn’t satisfy me and probably sounds easy and smug to you. But I guess that’s what they wanted me to say why I was brought up there what my role in all this was. To tell them the miracle we witnessed wasn’t so special after all but the most natural thing in the world.

The words looked tattooed, she had pressed so hard on the skin of plaster. Every fifth or sixth sentence ended with gouges instead of periods and Vera finally understood these were places where the points of her pens must have snapped, just like the lead of pencils. What kind of woman writes so hard the pen breaks? What kind of woman would use three colors of ink and change colors, it sometimes seemed, almost every word? And how many cartons of pens must she have bought, to be so extravagant?

At first the writing extended all the way across the wall, but she must have realized she would never fit in everything she had to say, because she suddenly switched to relatively neat and ordered paragraphs similar to Beth’s. Maybe it was the strain of this that made the pens snap—she didn’t like margins, borders, indents, rules.

Reading Beth, Vera’s head had remained steady and intent, a platform for her attention to rest on, but reading Dottie, trying to follow her swoops and splashes, her head kept swaying, so the words seemed to come through the muscles of her neck. The childbirth business came that way—by the time she finished reading she was massaging her shoulders trying to press out the kinks. Having Cassie had been ridiculously easy, to the point she was even somewhat disappointed that she hadn’t had the chance to prove her determination and courage.

“Don’t you worry about that,” the maternity nurse told her. “The ones that cause no trouble now torture you plenty later.”

Torture. Maybe it was a nurse word. Dottie had used it four times and each time it was as if she had reached her hand out from the wall and slapped Vera across the face. She had probably jotted it down without a moment’s thought, hyperbole but who cared, never worrying about how someone might react, that unknown someone who forty years later would be reading what she wrote.

Badly—how else could she react? Extravagantly. Wildly. She could have cursed reading the word the first time and she could have shouted the second time and the third time she could have screamed and even that wouldn’t have been commensurate with what she felt. The word had slapped her, then fallen off the plaster right smack into her lap, with those spiky
t’
s and sordid
r
’s and the dirty vowels that served as their glue.

She went out to the kitchen and fixed herself supper to get away from it. She swept the wallpaper scraps off the floor and burned them outside to get away from it. She stood naked under the hose. But her little cleansing ceremonies didn’t work, nothing worked, and so she went the other way, deliberately thought of the word constantly, saying it over and over to herself until it was nonsense.

Torture. Torture. Torture. Torture. That old childhood trick, like deliberately spinning yourself around and around on the grass until you got dizzy. Torture. Torture. Torture. Torture. Torture.

That was better, it was beginning to blur now—she turned the sewing room lamp off and went upstairs to the bedroom. Torture. Torture. Torture. Torture. Torture. Torture. Torture. She said it so many times it became automatic, her imagination kept it up in her sleep. Torture became torch-her became tore-her became toss-her became touch-her—and touch-her had never hurt anyone. When she woke up in the morning, went downstairs, ate breakfast, picked up her tools and began stripping, determined to finish the room in one final go, the word hardly meant anything, Dottie could use it all she wanted, it was nothing but a blur of ugly syllables that hardly tortured her at all.

Two days later I discovered Beth’s writing with the very first strip I peeled off the wall in the TV room which I guess had been her parlor but we had put the TV in there when we first bought the house and it’s been there ever since up on a shelf along with all my women’s magazines and Danny’s first buck or at least its antlers.
There was a foldout couch I kept meaning to replace and a coffee table with a checkerboard built into the top where Danny always used to beat Andy and Andy never seemed to mind. Since becoming an abandoned woman I didn’t see any reason to keep it tidy so it was the room that needed working on the most.

I wasn’t as surprised by the writing as you might think. Ever since we moved here I had sensed somebody else in the house like a restless presence that couldn’t rest. Ghosts you’re thinking and you’re probably laughing. But I never thought ghosts I thought well some poor soul once lived here who had a hard time and the echo of that is still bouncing off the walls. Peeling back that first strip you know what I thought? THERE YOU ARE!!! Just like in hide and go seek. Even then I was slow on the uptake. I thought it was a recipe she had jotted down on the wall while she was papering or a calculation about how many rolls she needed or some simple sort of reminder.

If I stripped off more paper I would have discovered what it really hid but just then I heard a noise outside like a giant blender crushing ice. I felt like I’d been caught doing something secret so I reached up as high as I could and tucked the edge of that first strip back under the molding and patted it down so the writing was hidden again and only then went outside.

A big Greyhound bus was pulling over to the side of the road ANOTHER BUS so it seemed like my place had suddenly become Grand Central Station. The driver climbed down muttering to himself and right behind him of all people came Andy! “Lend a hand?” the driver asked and Andy nodded. He gave me a little wave and followed the driver around to the back of the bus and the next thing I knew the two of them were under there hammering away at a pipe that had bounced loose on one of our potholes. When they scooted back out again Andy’s uniform was covered in mustard-colored grease which made him look like a hot dog after crawling through a bun. The driver climbed inside then threw a duffel bag down to him and snapped off a salute.

“Enjoy your leave, soldier! When you get over there give ’em hell for me!”

That eased the shock since at least I knew now it was leave that had brought him home. He hadn’t said anything in his last letter but he was never one to say. He leaned over and kissed me on the forehead like he’d only been gone a few hours and followed me over to the porch. I think he would have continued right straight to the TV room but I wasn’t going to let him do that at least not right away.

“Home sweet home,” I said sort of prompting him.

He looked around and nodded. “Home sweet home.”

“So, you got a leave?”

“Yeah.”

“Regular?”

“Embarkation.”

“You’re going?”

“Nam.”

“How long is your leave?”

“Thursday.”

“And you ship out?”

“Monday.”

“I thought it might be Germany.”

“Nope.”

That’s pretty much how our conversation went the two of us circling around each other on the porch like Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston me jabbing him ducking.

“Well come on in, come on in! Take your shirt or tunic or whatever it’s called off and I’ll put it in the wash.”

You need to be careful with Andy since if you tell him something he’ll do it. Right there on the porch he started stripping off his uniform! That made me laugh. Same old Andy! But the truth is he looked different than when he left not skinny and hard like you would think after basic training but thicker and puffier especially around the middle. His hair was pushed straight back in a crew cut and his acne was just as tomato red as ever and his eyes still had that meekness that used to irritate his dad and the dimple under his lip still reminded me of Kirk Douglas but what surprised me most was that over his belt hung the beginning of a paunch. I couldn’t help sticking out my hand and patting it as sort of a question.

“Good chow,” he said. “The cooks are pals of mine and I can never say no when they offer me seconds.”

That’s all I could get out of him about army life. He went up to his room and when he came back he had on the white t-shirt and khaki work pants that had always been his favorite clothes. I asked if he was thirsty but he said not particularly and went right over to the TV room and plopped himself down on the couch. One of his favorite shows was on which turned out to be a soap opera and he told me who all the characters were and what rotten things they were doing to each other. Just by luck I had chicken cutlets in the ice box which had always been his favorite and I fixed them with red potatoes and corn on the cob and maple biscuits and brought it to him on his old Donald Duck tray and when he saw what it was I got the first real smile I’d seen yet.

I sat down on our beanbag chair so he was in between me and the TV screen and though I pretended to watch it what I mostly did was watch him. Part of what I felt was what any mom would feel if her boy was going off to war proud and apprehensive but after that it got more complicated. Vietnam sat off in this numb zone that had something to do with television and something to do with politics and since I never had time for either of those things it could have been Mars they were talking about. No one in town had ever been sent there. It would have worried me more if he had been going to Germany to face all those Russian missiles and tanks.

Loving Danny losing Danny had worn me out I’m not ashamed to admit that. Both before and after his brother’s death Andy was just THERE he wasn’t the kind of boy you worried about and so it was hard to worry about him now. He had his arm hooked over the back of the couch to keep from sliding off onto the carpet but he kept inching lower and lower anyway and it was pretty funny how limp he became how slack. I thought to myself well that’s Andy for better or worse. That’s Andy and he’s all I have left in the world and I love him more than I ever thought.