We Were the Mulvaneys (41 page)

Patrick thought
He knows who I am, sure.

Patrick thought
I have executed justice.

Patrick thought
What an awful way to die.

 

In that instant changing his mind, as if a key had turned in a lock, abandoning his plan though not immediately understanding that this was so. He'd sunk to his heels, squatting in the muddy soil, aware suddenly of his breath steaming, hands pressed against his ears so he wouldn't have to hear his enemy pleading for his life.
Let him die let him suffocate in filth it's what he deserves: rapist! Murderer!
Shutting his eyes tight, rocking on his heels as if mourning his own impotence, his failure for the object of his hatred wasn't the young man sinking in the bog but the high school boy of years before, smirking, conscienceless, a coward unknown to himself, unexposed and arrogant. And that object, that enemy Patrick could not reach. Rocking in anguish on his heels as once, a child of two or three, he'd seen his own father in what unimaginable extremity of emotion, what unarticulated anguish, having to put down a young filly who'd shattered both forelegs in a freak accident. This memory was so old, retrieved from so great a distance, a fossil record of Patrick's soul, Patrick was astonished—had he forgotten so much, even as he prided himself, above all the Mulvaneys, on his extraordinary powers of mind? He thought
I love my father, how can I hate him?

It came upon him in a flash: he didn't want anyone to die, not even his enemy.

He pushed through undergrowth, spiky reeds and cattails, approaching the struggling figure from higher ground. How like a giant slug, a mud-creature, feebly flailing, its head and face mired in mud. Patrick snatched up a fallen tree limb about four feet in length and held it out to Zachary—“Hey! Lundt! Take hold! I'll pull you out.” Zachary was so exhausted, or dazed, he didn't respond at once, until Patrick continued to shout at him; lifting, then, his head with an effort. His pale face, mottled with mud, seemed on the verge of dissolution, like tissue in water. His glasses were gone and his eyes, rapidly blinking, looked both enormous and blind. He lifted his right arm with great effort, straining to close his fingers around the tree limb, but he was inches short. Patrick said, disgusted, “Grab hold for Christ's sake! God damn you!” But Zachary couldn't grab hold, his fingers flailed helplessly, so Patrick had no choice but to step out into the bog, his feet immediately sinking in the soft bottom, he was wearing boots but only to his ankles and the mud came to midcalf, loathsome cold muck seeping into his boots. He muttered, “God damn you! God damn! Fucker God damn!” leaning out as far as he dared, knowing the soft shelf of land would drop away sharply, he held the limb out trembling to Zachary who again tried to reach it, too weak to lift his arm for more than a few seconds at a time. Zachary was sobbing, moaning. Patrick inched farther out. His face was contorted in rage, self-disgust. He could not believe he was doing this! He, Patrick Mulvaney! Rescuing Zachary Lundt! After all he'd vowed, his proud plan of
executing justice
.

It was then that Patrick lost his footing and fell heavily into the bog, averting his face just in time to avoid a mouthful of mud. Unspeakable hideous filth, black muck. He gagged, he spat. By sheer strength managing to lift himself, pushing out the limb to Zachary who at last managed to close his fingers around it, weakly, then with more strength, the strength of desperation, trying to pull himself to solid ground. Patrick tugged at the limb, at Zachary, the dead weight of Zachary, imagining himself sinking too into the bog, as in his nightmare, as he deserved, betraying his own pledge, Patrick cursed steadily, words he wouldn't have known he knew, rolling off his tongue as if he'd been uttering them all his life, until after what seemed like a very long time but must have been less than ten minutes he was able to haul Zachary close enough to seize his hand, his arm, his shoulder and help him to firmer ground.

“There! You bastard.”

Zachary lay senseless, choking and gagging, bringing up an acid-smelling liquid from his guts. Patrick crawled from him, got shakily to his feet. Where were his glasses? He wiped muck from his face, out of his eyes, eyelashes. He wiped muck from his hands onto grass. A loathsome smell covered him like a film. He was shivering in the cold, his teeth chattering. Furious as if a malicious trick had been played on him. “Lundt, you fucker! You don't deserve to live but—here you are.” Patrick groped about the ground for his glasses, couldn't find them, then found them, thank God they weren't broken, he lifted them quickly to his face and fitted the earpieces in place, pushing the glasses against the bridge of his nose.

Now he could see again. Now he'd be all right.

“I let you live, fucker. I could have let you die and I let you live—remember that.”

Zachary lay motionless on the ground, breathing in shuddering gasps. He squinted up at Patrick, with that look of being blind, helpless.

“D-Don't leave me here, please—”

Patrick cursed, and tossed Zachary's car keys at him. He located the rifle where he'd dropped it, and the flashlight, and climbed back into the Jeep, jammed the key in the ignition and started the motor. He was boiling over with fury, stinking of muck, and in no mood to humor Zachary Lundt any longer. Let the rapist find his own way back to Mt. Ephraim—hitch a ride in the morning out on Route 58. Let the rapist invent a story to explain what had happened to him, what had so fantastically happened to him, a college boy who'd met with high school buddies for a few beers at Cobb's Corner and next morning was discovered exhausted and dazed and covered in stinking black muck staggering along Route 58 ten miles from his car left parked in a dump off Depot Street, Mt. Ephraim—or let the rapist tell the truth, if such a coward dared tell the truth.

Quickly before pity weakened him further, Patrick backed the Jeep out of the bog, and escaped. The prospect of actually returning and helping Zachary into the Jeep and bringing him back to Depot Street to his car—no, no! He would not,
would not
. The experiment hadn't gone as he'd planned but it was over, outside him now. He was feeling good suddenly. He was feeling elated! How simple it had been after all, how easy once he'd begun. He'd known what to do and he had done it and it was done now and could not be revoked.
I could have let you die and I let you live.

He and his enemy Zachary Lundt would remember those words all their lives.

T
here came Mom's excited voice
Dad is ready to see you now, honey.

Or, no: Mom would surely say
Honey we're driving down to fetch you, just stay where you are.

Muffin would trot excitedly into the room, hearing Marianne's happy voice. She'd snatch him up and kiss him on the nose, whiskers and all. And rush in a flurry about the room she shared with Felice-Marie preparing to leave the Green Isle Co-op (though she loved it here, she'd surely miss it—miss her friends terribly) and return to High Point Farm.

Marianne was waiting for that call from Mom. She was waiting, and she wasn't impatient.

It's true she was hurt. In secret. Never admitting to Mom, or certainly to Patrick over the phone. She did cry occasionally, even after so many months (how many? better not to count)—more than was healthy. Crying is nothing but a childish indulgence, crying is mostly self-pity—Marianne knew. Mom was never patient with nuisance crying as she called it. If you have hope, and faith, and enough work to keep you busy, you won't cry. So Marianne hid her tears, and believed that no one at the Co-op knew. Weeping in the kitchen amid so much commotion as she chopped onions, dozens of onions—that was a tactic. Marianne Mulvaney was always volunteering to chop onions! Sometimes too she was observed weeping while preparing bread, kneading the tough dough so energetically it about wore her out, so crying had some logic; and her salty tears fell into the dough, moistening it, and that was said to be why Marianne Mulvaney's breads (her specialties were nine-grain, zucchini, yogurt-and-dill) were everyone's favorites.

Another shrewd tactic for disguising her tears, at least Marianne believed it was a shrewd tactic, was to work out-of-doors as much as possible in cold weather. Preferably when the wind blew! Naturally, her eyes smarted from the cold and tears spilled down her cheeks—couldn't be helped. There she was, observed through a window, furiously raking leaves or spreading mulch in beds, in a chill autumn wind; or, more famously, the sole girl in the Co-op to volunteer for the Snow Removal Brigade, eager and energetic on bright snow-glaring winter mornings shoveling the front walk and the ridiculously long curved drive with a crew of muscle-armed males. Marianne in her blue-tasseled hand-knit cap and matching blue mittens traded jokes with the boys like a sister, wisecracks and friendly insults. Her face glistened with shiny rivulets of tears even as she laughed her dimpled laugh, wiped her cheeks roughly on her mittens. Who among the Snow Removal Brigade was in love with Marianne Mulvaney, the most mysterious, elusive member of the Green Isle Coop? He, or they, watched her covertly, respectful of her shyness. What a good sport she was, even as she wept; she couldn't keep up with even the slowest of the boys but snow flew unstintingly off her shovel and they all joined to praise her—
For an eighty-nine-pounder, Marianne Mulvaney is tops.
It wasn't so funny, however, one January morning when the thermometer outside the kitchen window hovered at zero degrees, and tear-rivulets froze on Marianne's frosty-pale cheeks, and two of the boys insisted she go inside with them at once to thaw her face before frostbite set in. Marianne said scornfully, “Frostbite? That's never happened before.” And, inside the house, “Frostbite?
I
don't feel a thing.” But it was so, her tears she'd believed secret had turned to ice for all to see.

She had no choice but to allow her friends Felice-Marie, Amethyst, Val Allan to fuss over her, as Birk and Hewie looked on, administering lukewarm water to her cheeks that were porcelain-white and cold, gently dabbing with soaked cloths, not rubbing (rubbing could lacerate the skin! Hewie warned) but pressing, until after a few minutes blood flowed back throbbing into the capillaries and color returned to her cheeks and Marianne was all right, though wincing with pain. And embarrassment. It made her so angry! She knew she wasn't weak and here they were hovering over her treating her as if she were!

She said, “I'm a farmer's daughter from the Chautauqua Valley and a teeny little snow and cold weather don't scare
me
.”

Though afterward, alone, she was transfixed by a sudden terrible fear. It was The Fear. The Fear that overtook her after people, well-intentioned of course, made too much of her. Especially if they worried aloud about her, and touched her. A wise voice warned
If you accept kindness undeserved, even worse will happen to you.

How much, Marianne wondered, did Abelove know? What exactly had her mother said to him, in his office, shortly before she'd stormed out of the house, a shamefaced Judd in tow? It was believed, not very seriously of course but entertained as a possibility, that Abelove, Founder and Director of the Green Isle Co-op, knew everything there was to know about each of the members. You could only join if Abelove approved you, after an intense private conversation (not an “interview”), and though Abelove had been tactful and gentle and not at all prying with Marianne, she'd had the sense that—oh, it was silly, she didn't truly believe it—his greenish-gray eyes could so penetrate hers, he could read her mind.

Once to Marianne's extreme embarrassment she succumbed to one of her crying episodes working in the greenhouse, seeding flats of lettuce (romaine, red leaf) to be planted in early April, after the thaw. It was work she loved, but some random commingling of smells, fertilizer, crumbly earth, the heat of sunshine magnified by greenhouse glass on a filth-stiffened gardener's glove exactly like Mom's reminded her of High Point Farm, and she hiccuped, and wept, and laughed, and wiped at her eyes protesting she didn't know what on earth was wrong! must be an allergy! but the seizure didn't stop and didn't stop and her face grew smudgy and smeared from dirt where she wiped at it and at last Amethyst who was working with her slipped away to fetch Abelove who was overseeing the dumping of rich black topsoil into a bed and immediately Abelove came rushing into the greenhouse, bristling with authority and rubbing his hands with that air of someone eager to put things right and confident he's the man to do it. Marianne was so ashamed, she cried all the harder. Abelove squatted beside her, teasing, “Uh-oh. Amie was saying, you've gotten the soil all muddy with tears,” indicating the soil in the flat which was in fact dotted with moisture. “What's wrong, Marianne?” Abelove always took up more space than his actual physical being required. A few inches away, he'd seem to be touching you. The fine hairs of Marianne's bare arms lifted like filings to a magnet. Abelove irradiated a powerful masculine heat, his somewhat ragged blond goatee and shoulder-length shimmering blond hair giving off light and Marianne was dazed by his nearness, stammering, “Oh, you k-know—just nothing.” And Abelove, gazing at her with his greenish-gray teasing eyes, said in his kindest voice, as if speaking to a small child, “Hmmm. If
nothing
can cause such tears, what might
something
someday do?”

Which made Marianne weep all the more.