A Simple Thing (15 page)

“So do you
not
want your mother to come?”

“I can't exactly say no, can I? Jon is going to Texas to be with Ann's family. Mom hasn't seen the kids since March. I'd feel too guilty if I said no.”

Matt sighed. “Is there anything you
don't
feel guilty about?”

“I just find it hard to be around her.” Susannah started to measure out the flour and sugar for the applesauce cake she was making to bring to Pizza and Poetry Day.

“It's just four or five days, Sooz.”

“I know. But she sets my teeth on edge.”

“Come on. She's not that bad. She's had a hard life.”

“I can't help it.” Susannah cracked an egg on the edge of the bowl. “Every time she's around I look at her, and I look at our kids, and I think,
How could you?
”

How could anyone send her children out on a boat with a man who got drunk every day? Mixed with her rage at herself, at the cruel way fate had played out that day, was rage that her mother had set it all in motion with her quiet acquiescence. To this day Susannah had never confronted her mother, never said, “Why did you let him take us out on the boat?” Her mother had lost a child; it was punishment enough.

“Susannah.” Matt's voice cut through her thoughts. “Have your mom for Thanksgiving. It'll be fine.”

She tried to picture her mother—with her well-coiffed hair, her ironed blouses and creased slacks and cashmere cardigans, her matching necklaces and earrings—stepping along the muddy path in front of the white cottage, stuffing splintery logs into the woodstove, wearing the same clothes day after day. But Quinn would be thrilled to have her; Matt and Betty and Jim would be here as buffers.

“Okay,” Susannah said into the phone. “Okay. I'll invite my mother.”

“All right,” Matt said. “I've got to go.”

“But we've only been talking a few minutes. I miss you, Mattie.”

“Okay. I still have to go.”

“Is something wrong?”

“What do you mean?”

“We just don't talk much. I mean, it's been hard to reach you on the phone, and when we do talk you always seem kind of distant. What's going on?”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Matt said.

“I do miss you,” Susannah said.

“Well, maybe you should have thought of that before you moved three thousand miles away.”

His statement hung in the air between them.

Susannah stopped stirring the batter. “I thought we agreed this was what was best for the kids, for our family.”

“You
agreed, Susannah. To be honest, I can't believe you're out there with our kids, who are
my
kids, too, and I'm here alone grinding out the paychecks so you can live out your little escape fantasy.”

She was caught off guard by the anger in his voice. “We should talk about this, then. I want—”

“Forget it. It is what it is, and you're out there now, and we'll make the best of it. At least, I hope we'll make the best of it. But don't expect me to like it. I've got to go.”

“You
hope
we'll make the best of it? What's that supposed to mean?”

“Look at what happened before our wedding.”

“Matt! That was nothing like this.”

They were married the year they both turned twenty-nine. Susannah moved to Chicago to move in with Matt two months before the wedding. With all the years of knowing each other, they had never lived together before, day in and day out. Susannah was more scared than she could admit. Her father was on his third wife; her mother had retreated into a shell of civility and distance; and she herself felt a yearning for love and attention that felt almost bottomless, that threatened to devour her.

One morning, with another long, empty day ahead of her, and Matt off at school, she panicked. Matt was so steady, so sure—but who was she? She'd given up her job to move to Chicago and didn't know if she'd be able to find another one. Her parents' marriage had been rocky at best, until Janie's death had crushed it. She didn't know how to be a good wife or mother, and Matt wanted kids. What if she failed him, failed their unborn children? She left the apartment, went to the bus station, and took a bus north to Ann Arbor, where she'd gone to college. She spent a week in a little bed-and-breakfast, wandering in and out of bookstores and reading—all the survivor stories she relished about people who'd survived wars and plane crashes and famines and drug addiction and kidnappings and shipwrecks, things far more devastating than what she had endured. She left a cliché-filled note for Matt about needing some time and space, but what she really needed was the conviction that she was really and truly worthy of him. She didn't find it in Ann Arbor, but she married him anyway.

“Mattie,” she said. “That was different.”

“You ran away,” he said. “It sure feels the same.” And with a click, he hung up.

 

The next morning Hood and Baker stopped by to get the kids on the way to school. Hood was wearing a green T-shirt that read “I'm Going to Thoreau Up.”

“Lovely,” Susannah said.

Hood grinned at her and winked. “Thoreau
was
a poet.”

That afternoon the fresh applesauce cake she'd made was warm in her hands on the walk to school. Gold and red leaves from the bigleaf maples carpeted the ground, and a few late apples, pitted with holes by the woodpeckers, still hung in the top branches of the trees. The apples had been so plentiful this year that Susannah had looked up as many recipes as she could find, and made apple butter, apple ketchup, apple pie, apple crisp, and
tons
of applesauce. Her cake would not be the only apple-related treat at the party today.

Susannah slipped off her shoes and walked to the food table to lay down her cake. All the chairs were pulled into a circle for the event, and desks and tables, now laden with pizza, salads, cupcakes, and other homemade dishes, were pushed against a back wall. The six posters Susannah had made hung across the blackboard at the front of the room.

With fifteen students, their parents, and Jim, there were more people than chairs, so Susannah stood in the back next to Betty. She scanned the room. She knew everyone by now and even had most of the names straight. She saw Evelyne Waters with her parents. Quinn sat next to Declan O'Meara, the youngest of the O'Meara clan of five children. Barefoot stood in a corner, head covered in a blue bandanna, and an unlit pipe clenched between his teeth. Susannah wondered if he used it to smoke anything other than tobacco. An excited buzz spread around the room as Jim stood at the front of the room to welcome everyone.

“Thanks for being here,” he said. “This is my first Pizza and Poetry Day as a Sounder
teacher,
and I'm excited. I want to acknowledge, too, our other first-timers, the Delaney family—Katie and Quinn—who have been a wonderful addition to our classroom, and their talented mother, Susannah, who created the posters you see up here.” Jim smiled at her. He went on to thank the other parents who had helped out.

“As we all know, there's no such thing as a bad poem on Pizza and Poetry Day,” Jim said. “We laud all efforts, and we all appreciate the difficulty of writing a good poem.” He introduced Declan, who stood to applause and read his poem quickly, finishing with a bow. Jim continued around the circle. When it was Quinn's turn, Susannah was thrilled at the way he stood and spoke out, the corners of his blue eyes turned up in a smile, heartened by the laughs of the crowd at the funny bits in his poem. After Quinn came Evelyne, then Katie.

Susannah leaned forward to hear. Katie had pulled her long brown hair out of its usual ponytail, and she shook her head a little, so it covered the sides of her face.

“The title is ‘Captain Blue,' ” she said. She continued:

 

“Ah, happy, happy bud! That may provide

Forgetfulness, and ease, an end to pain.

On whose sweet wisps of smoke doth freely ride

Serenity, peace, joy, a dream long lain

Fallow, now ripe and happily brought forth

To stand grinning in that most happy land

Of warmth and pleasures yet to be enjoyed

Wherein each breath evokes long gusts of mirth

And appetite so strong that none can stand

To resist. Ah! Happy bud! How we toyed!”

 

She sat down, her face flushed.

Susannah leaned over to Betty. “Is it just me? I have no idea what that was about.”

Betty's eyes met hers. “I may be almost eighty,” she said, “but I believe your irrepressible daughter has just recited a well-researched ode to marijuana.”

Chapter 15

Betty 1961

Betty's life with Bill went on like that, year after year. Bill left in early fall to work the king crab fishing season in Alaska, and returned six or seven or ten months later. In the summer he came home and helped with the farm, and spent as much time as he could with Jimmy.

Betty never asked about other women, and Bill never volunteered any information. But she knew. She knew in the way he'd mention a movie he'd seen, or a new restaurant in Seattle. “When were you in Seattle?” she'd ask, and he'd say he had spent a few days there at the beginning or end of crab season, but wouldn't look her in the eye when he talked about it. She knew by the trinkets she'd find in his pockets or on the dresser—a silver cigarette lighter, a Hawaiian puka shell necklace. She knew even in the way he touched her, differently sometimes than the last time he'd been home.

But this was what she'd signed up for, the arrangement
she'd
proposed. Bill honored their agreement by not seeing other women when he was on Sounder; she trusted him there. He loved her, in his own way. He loved their son. He wrote Jimmy almost every week from Alaska, starting the year Jimmy turned three. When he was home in the summer, he taught Jim how to play poker, how to mooch for salmon, how to skip a stone across the smooth surface of Jake's Lake.

Of course she had dark nights of the soul, nights when she'd wander the cottage after Jimmy was asleep, filled with a longing she couldn't name. It wasn't just sexual desire, although she had plenty of that, nor was it plain old loneliness, which she also had plenty of. It was a yearning to be yearned for, and it was unquenchable.

At least it was unquenchable as long as she stayed married to Bill.

 

Jim was a handful. At eighteen months he figured out how to open the back door by putting both hands on top of the cast-iron thumb latch and pressing down hard. The first time he did it, Betty didn't realize he was missing for almost ten minutes. She saw the open door and made a frantic search along the shore by the bay until she heard the uproar from the chicken coop and found him there, crowing at the chickens.

At three, he found the handgun Bill kept in a box at the back of the closet in their bedroom and picked it up and fired it through the mattress. She heard the shot from the kitchen and screamed Jim's name and he hid under the bed. She walked into the bedroom to see the smoking gun on the floor and no sign of her little boy, and was too terrified to look around or under the bed because of what she might find. She sat on the floor and gave in to her grief, and her sobs brought him out of hiding.

At four, he nearly drowned when Claire's son Stephen, who was six, found a gull egg on the beach and threw it as far out into the water as he could, where it promptly sank. Jim rushed into the waves to save the unborn baby gull. Betty, sitting on the sand next to Claire, looked up in time to see his brown head disappear under a wave. She leaped up, sprinted into the water, and saw his bright yellow T-shirt through the swirling water—thank God, thank God, thank God, she had snatched that off the clothesline that morning and put it on him—and reached down and pulled him up, coughing and spitting and crying about the lost egg.

She feared the water more than any other island danger. It would be so easy for a wave to catch Jim as he played on the beach, for a rock to tumble as he walked the path at the edge of the bay, for his foot to slip on a slick dock. She was determined he would be a strong swimmer. The summer he turned five she decided to ask Lem Jacobsen, who had swum competitively in college, to teach her son how to swim.

Lem was thirty-one, strong-willed and eccentric, known around Sounder for his encyclopedic knowledge of herbs, his mercurial moods, and his raw strength. He kept to himself much of the time in the farmhouse he owned up on Crane's Point. When he wasn't traveling for his work, he was busy in his kitchen making up teas and poultices from the herbs in his garden, or roaming the island engaged in feats of strength training.

Betty saw him often in the field by the post office, flat on the ground with arms spread wide, doing dozens of what he called “crucifix push-ups,” or on the school playground, doing pull-ups on the steel bar along the top of the swing set, or running with a pack on his back along Sounder's dirt roads. The first time Betty saw him running, wearing only long khaki shorts and his pack (not even shoes!), she assumed he was in a hurry to get home and slowed her truck to a crawl and pulled up beside him and offered him a ride. He glared at her with those bright blue eyes and said, “Why would I ride when I have two strong legs to run?” and sprinted off ahead of her down the road.

Betty didn't know Lem well. She knew what she had heard. She'd heard he had worked hard to help build the new school a few years ago—felling trees to clear the field, digging out stumps, lifting and placing rocks for the wall that protected the field from the road. She'd heard he brewed a special tea for Marie Doucette, who was dying of cancer, and took it over to her every evening after dinner to ease her pain. She'd also heard he hadn't spoken to George Hamlin for six years because of some casual remark George had made that had so angered him he'd written him off as a fool.

“Do you think Lem Jacobsen would teach Jim to swim?” she asked Claire. They were out in the meadow by the white cottage, pinning the freshly washed laundry to the clothesline while the kids played nearby.

“The kids call him ‘Barefoot' now,” Claire said. “No one ever sees him in shoes.” She pushed her dark hair back behind her ear. Claire was small, with a heart-shaped face and glossy brown hair and brown eyes. It had been hard for Betty to get past her good looks and trust her as a friend. She had become too wary of women who might draw Bill's attention.

“Whatever you call him, he's a great swimmer. Do you think he'd have the patience to teach Jim?”

“Barefoot's not known for his patience,” Claire said. “He might do it, though. He likes kids, although I doubt he'll ever have any of his own.”

“Why not? He can't be much older than I am,” Betty said.

“He's not. But he's not the marrying kind.”

“What does that mean?” Betty said.

“I don't know. He travels all the time. He was in Iran for six months this year, and in the Ukraine last year. He's never so much as looked twice at any woman on the island, although I guess there aren't many single women.” Claire looked at Betty with a sly smile. “And God knows Barefoot's easy on the eyes. Have you seen him doing those pull-ups on the swing set?”

Betty reached up to pin the corner of a large white flat sheet to the line. The wind blew up under the sheet, lifting it and then dropping it back against her.

“Of course I've seen him. I can't say I've
noticed
him the way you have.”

“There was a rumor a few years ago that he had a wife in Tibet—he goes there for two or three months every year. But then someone else said he was divorced. My personal opinion is that he's like Heathcliff—you know, desperately in love with a woman he can't have, so he's forsworn all others.”

Betty rolled her eyes. “I don't care if he's got six wives or a dead lover or fourteen unclaimed children. I need to make sure Jim learns to swim.”

“So ask him.”

“I will.” She grinned at Claire. “Should I tell him how much you admire his physique?”

Claire had the grace to blush. “No, thank you. I
am
married, after all.”

“I know,” Betty said. “Glad you remembered.”

And she didn't tell Claire, but the next time she walked by the post office and saw Barefoot doing push-ups in the field (wearing only shorts, no shirt or shoes), she had to look away because it gave her such longing for a man to hold her.

 

The crab fishing was rich that season, and the captain asked Bill to stay on until mid-August; he agreed because the money was so good. Betty was spending her first summer alone on Sounder and wasn't happy about it. Was the extra two months' salary worth the hurt to Jim, who lived for the time when his father was home? And didn't Bill yearn for
her,
enough to say to hell with the money? She chastised herself for being a romantic fool.

Barefoot didn't hesitate when she asked him to teach Jim to swim.

“I like Jim,” he said. “I'll do it.”

The moment he agreed she was suddenly filled with doubt. Jim at five possessed little of Bill's natural grace and athletic ability. He had long legs and arms like Betty, and often stumbled over his own feet. And no matter how many times Bill showed him how to grip a baseball across the seams, step with his left foot, and push off with his right to throw, Jim couldn't do it. He stepped with the wrong foot, or he pushed off so hard he'd spin around and tumble into the dirt.

Jim was also what Betty thought of as a “thin person”—which had nothing to do with the way he was built. People on Sounder often talked about the island as a “thin place,” a place where the veil between the ordinary and the sacred was thinner than in other places, a place where you could touch God more readily if you were a believer (which Betty wasn't). She did, however, believe there were “thin people,” like Jim, for whom the boundary between feeling and experience was whisper thin, who worried and loved and despaired and rejoiced with an intensity Betty found alarming. She worried that Barefoot would have little tolerance for Jim's exaggerated sensitivity.

The day of the first lesson, Betty drove her son along the leafy roads to the central part of the island and parked by the side of the road. They walked on a dirt path for almost twenty minutes to Jake's Lake (named after one of the early Sounder pioneers), where Barefoot waited for them. She had no idea how he got there; the lake was a good two miles from his house on Crane's Point.
He probably ran barefoot through the woods with twenty pounds of rocks on his back,
Betty thought with a smile. Claire seemed to regard him as some kind of physical demigod.

Jim was excited, but nervous. He peppered her with questions about Barefoot as they walked through the woods, and his eagerness broke her heart. Her son missed his father, and sometimes her anger at Bill throbbed in her like a live thing.

She watched Barefoot size Jim up as they approached him on the rocky shore of the little lake, narrowing his eyes to focus on Jim's gait, his long limbs, his face.

“I bet you're not very good at baseball or football,” Barefoot said to Jim as they walked up to him.

Jim's face fell.
You son of a bitch,
Betty thought. She was ready to turn around and march back through the woods when Barefoot said, “That's because you were made to be a swimmer. I can see it.”

Jim gave Barefoot a wary look.

“Look at your wingspan,” Barefoot said, reaching for one of Jim's hands and stretching his arm out to the side. “The thrust in swimming comes from arm propulsion, not the kick. Bet you see your friends kicking for all they're worth when they swim and getting nowhere. You're going to outswim everyone you know in a few weeks.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” Barefoot said, his eyes on Jim's. “I don't say anything that isn't true.”

Barefoot started out by demonstrating for Jim what a real swim stroke looked like. Betty sat on a rock near the water, watching. Barefoot moved naturally in the water like a fish or a seal, rolling almost on his side with each stroke and then gliding. He was beautiful.

He spent the first day teaching Jim to roll in the water. “Forget your arms and legs for now,” Barefoot said. “Your rhythm and movement should come from your core, from here”—he tapped Jim's stomach. Jim was an eager pupil, imitating Barefoot's moves and practicing drills over and over—gliding on his side with one arm outstretched, rolling to the other side, gliding again. After an hour Barefoot said, “Good work. If you do this well all week, I'll give you something in reward at the end of the week.”

That Friday, Barefoot gave Jim a small glass bead—a “head bead,” Barefoot called it—with an intricate bearded face painted on the front and a tiny crown on top. He told Jim he had six of them, all different, and he'd give him one a week if Jim did well with his swimming.

Betty asked Barefoot about the bead, and he shrugged. “I bought a handful of them in Israel several years ago,” he said. “They're old: fourth or fifth century
b.c
., I believe.”

“My God! You can't give them to Jim. He's six years old! He might lose them, or break them.”

“I trust him. I told him these are precious. Earning one means something, and he has to work hard to earn one each week.” Barefoot's gaze was direct. “If he loses or breaks one, he won't have the chance to earn another one.”

“But once you're done teaching him to swim—”

“Once I'm done teaching him to swim the beads are his to do with as he pleases.”

Betty shook her head. “I can't accept them.”

“They're not yours to accept or refuse,” Barefoot said. “They belong to your son.”

“But—”

“You argue too much,” Barefoot said. He leaned over and picked up his blue bandanna from the beach beside her. She couldn't help but notice the thick muscles of his back and shoulders, the firm ridges of his abdomen, the smooth strength of his chest. Damn Claire for putting such ideas into her head in the first place. He folded the bandanna diagonally in half, placed it on top of his head, and tied it in the back.