Beautiful Kate (26 page)

Later, after starting the fire and getting some hot tomato soup into Jason I peeked outside again, half expecting to find a Saint Bernard standing there in the snow with a keg of brandy around its neck. But all I saw was the same gorgeously terrifying scene as before, except that the drifts were standing even higher as the wind continued to blow. I had no doubt that elsewhere the snow was probably only a few feet deep—just enough, that is, to immobilize the entire area. But here the house and garage and barn formed a perfect L-shaped snow break, catching almost everything a northerly or easterly wind cared to blow against it. Now, I realize that this sounds like a stupid arrangement, but in point of fact most of the winter storms here come out of the west, putting the driveway and the entrances to the buildings in the lee of the wind. And then too, in all the winters I have spent here, I can’t remember a single storm as devastating as this one.

So here I sit at the kitchen table, hunkered over my single remaining tablet, one eye on the fire and my ears cocked for any sound from Jason upstairs. The temperature outside is still in the teens and inside I doubt if we are even thirty degrees warmer. (The thermostat, in the closed-off foyer, is not even registering, fifty-five being its lowest calibration.) The phone remains dead and there is no electricity, and every time I go upstairs I listen to my father’s breathing as if I were on a police bomb squad, putting my ear to the ticking of a device that might well blow me to hell. I accept it that he is a sick man and could easily die soon even in a hospital; I accept his truism that we all die finally; but nowhere in me can I find acceptance of the possibility that his life will end like this, lying in a strange bed in a freezing house with no one to look after him but
me
, the prodigal, the bugout. But then, whether or not I accept something really isn’t all that crucial, is it? One of life’s little lessons.

By now I am beginning to feel the loss of Toni like an amputation. In a way, I know it is fortunate that she is not here, because the storm and the failed electricity would surely have thrown her into such a rage of resentment (“It’s fucking
Siberia
in here!”) that I doubt if I could have handled her, short of manhandling. But oh God, I do miss the girl, all of her, her person as much as her body. I sit here with the pen almost frozen into my hand and the smell of her suddenly is in my nostrils as much as in my mind, and my arms tense for want of her. I feel hollow and incomplete. I put my hand upon my fly, as though to console my cock or maybe just to trick it. But it is not to be fooled, and stays soft, stays dead.

Upstairs Jason coughs feebly. Outside the wind sings over the snow. And right here, now, at this cold and messy kitchen table, I find there is really nothing else to do except push on, making these strange little scratchings on lined paper, for what purpose I don’t quite remember anymore.

By August, all the hay was in and I had begun tearing down the old fences and building new ones, which like haymaking was not an easy job for one man. But Stinking Joe had developed a bad case of hypertension and on doctor’s orders was able to do only part-time light work. So I labored alone, pulling the rotted old oak fence posts and replacing them with steel ones that I could drive into the ground instead of “sinking” them, as with the old. Then I would unroll the new wire, anchor it to the corner posts, stretch it tight, and finish by fastening it to the steel posts all along the line. Now and then Mother would come out and watch me, usually with the kids in tow. And once she even helped out for a time, taking a pliers and fastening the four-point line to the steel posts. But Junior promptly got tangled in some of the rusty old wire and cut himself and she had to take him to the doctor for a tetanus shot. Jason too made it out to the fields on occasion, normally after supper, when it was cool. Looking properly solemn, he would check on my progress, making sure he was getting full value for the twenty dollars “allowance” he paid me each week.

For the most part, though, I was alone. Evenings, if Kate was gone, I would go for a swim in the pond and later sit out on the front porch for a while with Jason and Mother, watching Junior and Sarah torment each other in the front yard. Then, downstairs in my room, too distracted to read, I would turn to my trusty yellow legal pads. Having found a whole package of them in Jason’s desk in the library (just as I did this last fall) I had begun to use them as a kind of cutrate psychotherapy, doodling out my worries, spilling my guts, making chilling lists of my crimes and their inevitable consequences. I tried again and again to draw a reasonable portrait of Kate, only to give it up finally in favor of words. I described her. I listed her features. I estimated her measurements. Like an eight-year-old, I scrawled over and over the terrible restroom-wall charges:
Greg loves Kate…Kate fucks…Greg and Kate must die
. And finally, hopeless, out of control:
I love you…I love you…I love you
.

Needless to say, each night I destroyed what I had written, burning the pages in an ashtray on the windowsill. Purged then, I would try to sleep. And usually I did—like a drugged man. But some nights I slept hardly at all, especially when Kate was out with her devoted Arthur Fielding. The thought that she could be lying in his arms and kissing him or letting him feel her breasts or going even farther—it all made me feel physically ill with jealousy. I longed to go to his family’s hardware store and pull him out from behind the counter and beat him half to death, and in his absence I often took my rage out on the bed, punching it so hard it had grown lumpy in spots.

But most of the time, whether I was lying awake or working in the fields, it was Kate I thought about, and only Kate. I thought about her as I imagine a bull thinks of grass, almost every second of every goddamn day. I saw her in the night light on the pond bank, her eyes a glaze of tears and her mouth pulled back in anguish, crying
Oh love me! Please love me!
And I saw her in the hayfield shade, lying in her jeans and sweaty workshirt, her hair careless in the grass. And I thought—yes, I will admit it now—I thought over and over again:
Why not?
Why couldn’t we do it? If it was what we both wanted, why couldn’t we be lovers? Why couldn’t we run away together and make a life of sorts? Who would have to know that we were brother and sister? Whose business would it be? And as for the family—Jason and Mother had chosen their mates, hadn’t they? And wouldn’t Cliff eventually do the same? So why then should Kate and I have to forgo a kindred freedom of choice? Why should the two of us be the only ones not allowed to have the lover we wanted?

I knew the answers to these questions, of course. And that was probably the reason I lay awake so often in my locked basement room: because I knew the answers and none of them made any difference. None lessened the jealousy I felt; none enabled me to think of Kate again as only my sister, my twin; none offered me salvation from this bizarre hell of my own devising. So it seemed that I had no choice except to go on as I was, working like a solitary slave by day and spending my nights in either stuporous sleep or endless hours of lacerating introspection. More than once it crossed my mind that one day soon I would have to pack my bags and hit the road again, only this time for good. But I couldn’t bring myself to make the move yet—why, I didn’t know, not at the time, though I suspect now that I was hanging on in the perverse hope that some miraculous something would step in and shatter my resolve and extinguish my sense of guilt, so I could go to the pond with Kate night after night, all the rest of our lives, if we so chose. I was, in short, becoming as mad as she was. Mad with love, in my case anyway.

On the occasion of one of Kate’s dates, I innocently happened to be sitting with Jason and Mother on the front porch, luxuriating with a succession of Pall Malls after a late supper, when the hated Arthur Fielding arrived in his father’s new Chrysler Newport. I immediately got up to go inside, having no desire to exchange pleasantries with the wimp. But before I reached the door, Kate came running out, signaling for Arthur to stay where he was, that she would join him there. Mother and Jason protested, saying that they wanted to meet the young man. But Kate skipped on down the stairs, turning at the bottom and walking backwards for a few steps.

“No, you don’t,” she told them. “He’s really such a jerk. But he does get me out of the house, doesn’t he?”

Smiling happily, she went on out to Fielding and his car, her long legs giving a touch of splendor to her Penney’s dress and high-heel shoes. A perfect footman, Arthur scurried around the car and opened the door for her. Meanwhile Jason and Mother were having an embarrassed laugh about their daughter.

“What a girl,” Jason said.

“What an
actress,”
Mother amended.

Which left one other still to be heard from. “What a phony,” I muttered, and went on inside, looking for something to punch or kick.

On another day, as I was stretching wire at the far north end of the farm, Kate came riding up on her pony, much like the plantation owner’s daughter out for a canter in the fresh air. Only this time I forsook my awed slave routine in favor of sarcasm.

“Still haven’t mastered sidesaddle, eh?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Or at least get some jodhpurs and riding boots.”

Still mounted, she confided to her pony. “The sweaty one is trying to tell us something.”

“Only that there’s a right way and a wrong way to dress—if you’re Princess Grace. Jeans just don’t cut it.”

“You’re right,” she said. “I ought to have a pair of jodhpurs.”

“Maybe Cliff could buy them for you. Or Arthur.”

“Why not? And yes, riding boots too. With real hard toes, for kicking people.”

“That’s the ticket.”

“Especially the hired help. Sweaty fence-makers and the like.”

“We’ve got it coming, all right.”

She leaned forward on the pony, so she could peer down the row of new fence posts, which, as I expected, failed to please her.

“There’s a squiggle about a hundred yards down. A couple of posts out of line.”

“No problem,” I said. “You just bring Arthur over and have him pull them out of the ground with his bare hands. Then I’ll reset them.”

She smiled at that. “You don’t like him very much, do you?”

“Not that much, no.”

“Well, I don’t see why not. I think he’s just what I need—now that my twin won’t have me.”

The remark left me shaking my head. “Jesus, how can you joke about it? Sometimes I think you’re from outer space somewhere.”

“Well, crying didn’t do me much good, did it?”

I turned back to the fence, saying that I had work to do. But she would not leave.

“Cliff gets off tonight,” she said.

“Good for him.”

“Be a perfect night for a swim. Just the three of us, like old times. You want to come?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You needn’t be frightened,” she assured me. “Cliff will be there. He’ll protect you.”

“I said, I don’t know.”

“I’ll be a perfect lady.”

“For Christ’s sake, Kate!” I turned on her in a rage, throwing my fence pliers down at the ground so hard that her pony jumped in fright.

She coolly reined him in and calmed him, patting his neck and talking to him. Finally she turned back to me.

“Don’t bother to come. You won’t be missed.”

She rode off then and for a time I just stood there watching her move out of sight. When I turned back to my work I found that I had no stomach for it, nor did I care to sit down in the shade and loaf. So I set out walking, back through the trees onto Regan land. And then I began to run, slowly at first, just jogging along. But my body seemed to have a will of its own and before long I was running over the rough weedy ground as fast as I could go, arms pumping as if I were in a sprint. And I kept on that way, hurtling through the tall grass and bushes and under trees whose branches lashed my face and over hills and down along Thorn Creek until my lungs were sobbing and my heart thumped in my ears and all I could do finally was stumble out into the shallow water and pitch forward into it, stale August creek water almost as warm as the air. But it was water still, that finest of balms, and I lay in it, I rolled in it, I wept in it.

And I think now, sitting here at this freezing kitchen table, how deeply, how acutely, one suffers at eighteen. There in those rocky shallows I lay as broken and bleeding as I thought a man could ever be. But I was wrong. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I had not yet begun to hurt.

That evening I stayed at the house with Jason while everyone else went swimming down at the pond. This is not to say that I was
with
Jason, however, for he had retreated after supper to the cool of his library, probably to pore over a new book on Egyptology that he had acquired. So I had the house pretty much to myself, and I used most of it too, roaming around like Little Boy Lost, wondering what kind of mischief Kate had up her sleeve, inviting me to join her and Cliff at the pond. With Mother and the kids there too, I had been tempted to go along. But solitude was becoming a habit, like the Pall Malls, and I indulged them both that evening, sitting on the front porch and watching the cars go by as I listened to the occasional shrieks of laughter coming from the pond—Junior’s, for the most part. Then I heard the back screendoor slam and a second later Sarah came out onto the porch, out of breath and dripping water all over the floor.