B000FCJYE6 EBOK (2 page)

They all shook their heads. Three times. Hmm, hmm, hmm. The End.

They always told this story at funeral parties. It was the best dead-person story they had, so they told it again and again. I liked it myself. The Story of Dead Aunt Rose. I liked it the same way I liked The Story of Teddy’s Last Ride—the time Uncle Ted got so schnockered he suddenly stood up from his chair and went rumbling out to his new Studebaker, waved to Aunt Agnes who stood white haired and whimpering on the porch, and peeled backward out of the drive, yelling, “Here he goes! Teddy’s going for his last ride!”

It wasn’t really his last ride. He just ran the car into a tree. But Aunt Rose went and did it. I had a certain admiration for Aunt Rose. I pictured the drawing room—having never seen a drawing room, having never even been out of Motley except once, but nevertheless I pictured it all rose colored, the walls and the fabric on the couches and chairs, and paintings of roses. A Christmas tree, obviously. And Aunt Rose in her best dress, swaying slightly from the chandelier.

I always pictured her with a little smile on her face. And tiny buttonhook boots peeping out from under the best dress.

“Well, and you know,” piped up the small-voiced, tiny Mrs. Knickerbocker. “Arnold was the one found her. Mmm-hm. Never got over it. And now just look.”

We all looked over at my father. They sighed and looked content.

My brother walked out the back door, across the yard, down to the dock.

It was dark and the men were drunk, bent over their elbows on the table, gesturing and spitting as they spoke. My father had undone his tie. When he lifted his glass, he leaned his head back and tossed the drink down his throat, then chewed the ice furiously. Someone suggested they go for a spin in someone’s new car, and then we were leaving. My mother stood up from the couch, and I watched her unfold like a letter, stiff and thin in her long skirt, her hand on the back of my head. The women watched her too, heads lifting in unison, hands folded in their laps, the fingers swollen and chapped, the wedding bands a brassy dull gold, pinching the flesh below the knuckle. I studied their hands, their feet stuffed into navy blue shoes, thick pantyhosed feet set apart to keep them square on the ground. The women watched my mother and murmured, disapproving, that she was very tall, wasn’t she? Yes, quite tall, and heavens, how thin. Nothing to hold on to, one woman said, in German, and they laughed. I wrapped my arm around my mother’s leg.

The hand on the back of my head pressed me forward. My father veered into view, complaining, saying, “Aw, Claire,” and she smiled the flat smile and said very softly, “Now we are leaving, find your jacket, Arnold, get your jacket right this minute, we are going home, say good-bye.”

I watched my father’s feet do the soft-shoe four-step they did when he drank, a little square of spit-polished shoes stepping back and forth and side to side. My mother said, “Kate, run fetch your brother.” I slid my feet slowly across the thick carpet to make patterns and went out onto the back porch. It smelled of wet leaves and heat.

“Esau,” I called. My voice echoed, skipping like a smooth stone across the still lake. I could see him down on the wooden dock, the outline of his shoulders black against the water. The moon was very white, the way it gets when the sky is clear. I ran across the yard and stood a few steps short of where the dock began. I called his name again and said, “We’re going now.” He turned and came creaking up the planks.

He reminded me of an old man.

I put my hand in his jacket pocket and he wound his fingers through mine.

“Do you see the man in the moon?” he asked me. I turned to look at the moon. Esau bent down so his head was level with mine. He pointed.

“Right there,” he said. “Do you see him? He’s sitting on the edge of that big crater. They left him there when they landed, by accident. They forgot him. Now he just sits there and thinks.”

I squinted hard and said, “I see him!” We stared at the moon awhile. “What does he eat?” I asked.

“Moonflowers.”

“Is he lonely?”

Esau said, “Oh, yes. He’s very lonely.”

“That’s sad.”

“But see where the light comes down from the moon and hits the lake?”

I nodded.

I would see anything my brother wanted me to see.

“Sometimes he slides down the moonbeam and goes swimming and talks to the fish.”

“Then why can’t he just go home?”

Esau straightened up, and we turned toward the house. “He doesn’t remember home anymore,” Esau said. “Moonflowers make you forget things like that.” We stood stalling on the porch, watching the party through the window, listening to the roar, the screen door banging in the wind.

We went in. We said good-bye and were kissed. We followed our parents out to the car. Our father was singing.

In the backseat, riding down County Road 10, I tilted my head to look out the window. I watched the man on the moon swinging his legs over the edge of the crater. I wondered if he was whistling.

“Esau,” I said. I turned to look at him. He was half asleep, with his head on the window, his cheek squished against the glass. I pulled on his sleeve.

“What?” he mumbled.

“Does the man whistle?” I asked.

“Of course he does,” Esau said, smiling. “He whistles all the time.”

I turned back to the window to watch the moonbeams. They cut through the sky, cold and white, hitting field after field of corn, the perfect rows like an army of narrow men. The fields were lit up by the high, white moon, glistening like an eyeball in the sky.

“Katie, wake up.” My brother was shaking me. I sat up in bed.

“What? Can’t you sleep?” It was dark out. He stood there in his pajamas, excited.

“Put on your shoes. We’re going out.”

“Out where?”

“I don’t know,” he said, exasperated. “Out.”

I looked at him suspiciously. “Are you sick?”

“No! I’m fine. Hurry up.” He hopped from foot to foot.

I climbed out of bed and put on my shoes. “Are we going out the window?” I asked.

“Good idea. Yes. If we go out the door, they’ll hear.” He punched a hole in the screen. I looked at it.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have done that,” I said. “Tie my shoes.”

“Doesn’t matter. We’ll fix it later.” He knotted my laces and lowered me out the window and into the flower bed, then dropped next to me with a small thud. I looked at him for direction. In the white light of the moon, his cheeks were shadowed with a hot flush.

We walked along the dry creek bed. The crickets were wild with the heat. He said nothing, but moved quickly, his feet sure on the flat rocks, his striped pajamas flapping around his thin legs. I stumbled along behind him, sometimes jogging to keep up, my hair starting to get damp.

He was talking to himself. It wasn’t the kind of talking you listen to, so I didn’t.

I heard the train that ran along the edge of town. I didn’t know how far away from the house the train was, but we were getting close to it. The high weeds scratched my legs, and my shoe had come untied. He was speeding up. “Wait!” I yelled.

He turned but didn’t stop walking. “Hurry up!” he said. “We’re almost there.”

“Where?”

He reached the bridge and stopped to wait for me. When I caught up with him, I hit him in the stomach.

“Don’t walk so fast,” I said. “I’ll get lost. And then you’ll be in trouble.”

He glanced down at me, distracted. “We should have brought provisions,” he said severely.

“How long are we staying gone?”

He shrugged. “Come on.”

And he ran. I watched as his body got smaller ahead of me, though I struggled to keep up. I fell, hit my knee on a rock, got up and kept going. The moon was straight ahead; it looked as if it dangled heavily over some nearby point, a smooth stream of moonlight sliding along the creek bed. The sound of Esau’s sneakers faded and the bobbing figure ahead of me narrowed to a point, and disappeared.

I found him at the train tracks.

He was
on
the train tracks. He leaped along them in long strides, looking like a white bird.

“Katie!” he called.

“Get down from there!” I yelled as I trudged up the hill.

“Come on!”

“No! Get down!”

“Do you know how to tell if a train’s coming?”

“How?”

“You stand… here”—he came to a stop on the iron trestle farthest from me, his arms out, balancing—“and it shakes.”

He started laughing.

If I turned around and went straight back down the creek bed, I would get home.

His body trembled where it stood. He laughed and laughed.

The train turned some unseen corner and flashed its single light on him.

My knee was bleeding where I fell on it.

He balanced there, lit by the moon and the beam of the train, his arms out like a marionette, his body dancing as if in a strong wind.

I stumbled backward as the train rushed by. Out of habit, in the roar and clatter, I counted the cars.

In the ringing silence that followed the last car of the train, I heard my brother laughing. I walked up the hill and stood next to the tracks. He was lying in a ditch.

“Esau,” I yelled.

He scrambled to his feet and ran off into the dark like a frightened deer.

Into the dark. That’s what I called it then: I said that he had gone “into a dark.” It was a confusion of what my mother told me, that he “got very dark.” Doc Parker called them “episodes,” and when Esau had them, he sometimes went into his room, and sometimes went Away, and then it was much too quiet, and my parents didn’t look at me, but fought in the night.

It was only later that I knew I was right, only when I had my own, much lesser darks and realized that it felt very much as if you had entered, by accident, a separate place; as if you had been feeling your way along a dimly lit hallway, turned a corner, and found yourself in absolute dark.

We were sitting in the living room. We were listening to the shape of silence. The shape of silence was in his bedroom, pulling on the rest of the house. Everything tipped toward him in the force of our listening to his total lack of sound. My mother fussed with the corners of a book, shifting where she sat. Her stockings shushed as she recrossed her legs. My father was in his La-Z-Boy, not leaned back but rather looking as if he might pounce out of it at any moment. He was watching the television, which murmured almost inaudibly, like voices in a hospital hall. Quietly, conspiratorially, and with respect for our silence, Walter Cronkite told us about the war in Vietnam. My father swished the drink in his glass.

I was coloring everything red.

“You know what kind of bird that is?” my father said to me.

I didn’t look up from my coloring book. “Cardinal.”

“State bird,” my father said absently.

“No it isn’t,” I muttered.

“What’s that?”

“No it isn’t,” I said louder. “It isn’t the state bird.”

“Shhh,” my mother said.

“Shh yourself,” I snapped.

“Katie,” she warned.

“What do you mean, it isn’t the state bird?”

“It’s not,” I almost yelled, scribbling hard.

“Okay, Miss Smarty-pants.” My father stopped swishing his drink. “What is the state bird, then?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Arnold,” said my mother. “Don’t encourage her.”

“Loon!” I yelled, and my red crayon snapped.

“What?”

“It’s the loon!” I threw the pieces of my crayon at my father, who looked startled. I sat quietly, looking at my cardinal. I turned the page, selected a green crayon, and carefully outlined a finch.

My father went to the bar and got another drink. He sat down again.

“Quite so,” he said, rocking his La-Z-Boy slightly back and forth. “Quite so.”

Silence settled back in around us, tucking its corners under our toes.

Summer was ending. My brother had been in his room for days. During the day, when my mother went to work at the department store downtown, smelling of the lilac hand lotion she kept in a jar by the kitchen sink, my father sat reading the paper, lowering it when I came out of my bedroom.

“Morning, kiddo.”

I climbed up onto the couch and lay my head on its arm, looking at him. He was drinking grapefruit juice and vodka from a tumbler. His hair was rumpled, and he wore the blue robe my mother had given him last Christmas because she said it was unseemly for him to go gallivanting about in his pajamas, even if he was just getting the paper out of the driveway.

“You hungry?” my father asked.

I shrugged.

“Cat got your tongue?”

I stuck it out.

I listened to the silence. Esau was still sleeping. I didn’t know how I could tell, but I could. The silence was quieter, somehow. The silence was probably laid out cold on his bed, exhausted from a night of night fears.

When I think of my father now, I remember him smiling. Which seems, in light of things, incongruous, maybe even entirely invented. I can hardly remember him. Maybe I’ve pasted a smile on his face because I want something to remember and I want to think that we sat, summer mornings, in peaceable silence and my father smiled at me and I was enough.

My father wasn’t a happy man. I suppose I knew that, though when you’re six, you don’t call someone happy, unhappy, bitter, cruel. When you’re six, those are transient feelings, as changeable as clouds, not states of being that define you.

He wasn’t a happy man. I know that because of what happened, because of what my mother told me later, because of what I have pieced together and what I have made up.

You say of a man, when he’s gone, simple things, as if to try to sum him up: He loved his children. He loved his wife.

Often, you say: He did his best. Or, with more hesitation: He did what he could.

You do not say that he hated himself.

He must have worked at one time, possibly in insurance. He no longer did by the time I was old enough to notice such things. Such things as the unmentionable fact that your father watches soap operas while his wife goes to work.