Digging Out (24 page)

“You’re right there. I couldn’t be bothered to milk it. It would have meant getting up an hour before I do now to get off to school,” he says seriously. “You might remember I like my sleep.” And then he blushes.

In fact I do remember having to push him out of bed in the morning, pulling the cozy away from him, rolling over onto the warm spot
his body left after he’d gone, his smell, lavender. My turn to look away, also remembering the heaviness in my chest at his leaving me for the day and my inability to pull myself from the bed.

“So, when will you see your mam and da?”

“I meant to go round directly after Mr. Ames’ funeral—I really did—but then I took Beryl home. I don’t know. I guess I’m having difficulty diving into all of what that means, just yet. I should probably go round now, before I completely chicken out.”

He runs his fingers through his hair again. “Your mam’s told you, of course, how ill your da is?”

“She didn’t say exactly how ill.” I want his take on things.

“Well, I saw him three days ago. You remember how close your da was to Gavin Ames? I went round just after I’d heard of Gavin’s passing, to let your da know. He was in bed. Barely looked up at me when I told him. Not at all like him. Your mam said Doc Rogers told her it was just a matter of time. That’s when she let me know she’d written to tell you. I know he’ll be glad to see you.”

“I hope so.” I wondered if Da, too, might be angry with me.

I move toward the kitchen, which is small, rows of ragged paged cookbooks on a shelf, and an iron rack hanging from the middle of the ceiling full with pots and pans. It is so like my own at home it is eerie.

“May I look around?”

“Oh, sure,” he says, still rather coldly. “It’s a bit of a mess.”

In fact it’s not. Clearly Evan hasn’t changed in that way. Housekeeping was always his way of keeping control. Two stools are pushed under a small wooden counter near a sink filled with breakfast dishes. There are three oil paintings: one each of a fish, a tomato and a bunch of grapes. On closer inspection I see that they are Parry’s. I am surprised. Parry had destroyed most of his work when he finally refused the scholarship. Over the kitchen sink a window opens to a view up the whole valley toward the Brecon Beacons. Cooking a meal here with this view in sight would be lovely.

On the refrigerator are a lot of photographs. I am surprised to see a very old one of Evan and me on a picnic a while before I left. I am so young, pregnant actually, but not noticeably. I can remember the day, how dizzy and nauseous I felt. I wore a purple-and-white dress I still have in a trunk somewhere in my garage in Santa Monica. Evan
is in jeans, his hair longer than now, a day or two of a beard started. He has his arm around my neck, his hand reaching almost to my breast. I remember we’d asked an old gent just happening past to snap the photo, and afterward, we had kissed long enough to make us both decide it was time to get home. I feel my shoulders soften.

There are others of Dafydd. One when he was very little, perhaps about three. One of me holding Dafydd’s hand, the two of us standing in front of the Eiffel Tower. I have a copy at home. And another of Dafydd when he was about twelve, standing in front of our house in Santa Monica, both hands in his pockets. It was the day he’d gotten his driver’s license.

“I guess you got the photos from Gram?”

“I did.”

The pain I have caused him crosses his face and I can see that the lines are there because of that pain.

There is a photo of Parry in his mining clothes. I must have been near him when the photograph was taken because he is giving me our private salute. One of Gram much older than I remember her, with her arm around Beryl. It is not surprising that there is nothing of Evan’s family. I wonder if he is still not speaking to them, or still hasn’t forgiven his father for his newborn sister’s death. Such a horrible story that I plied from Evan that middle of the night. Oh, that we could all forgive and straighten out our pasts as Evan has so neatly organized his kitchen.

A long, quiet moment stretches between us. He is still so handsome in his tall, lean, muscular body.

“After you’d gone away, I’ll admit I was so done in I was almost nonfunctional. Gram told me your letters were full of lines written by the poets you were reading. One night when I was down the pub, more than a bit in my cups, I sat next to a man who taught poetry at the university. Over the weeks and months we got to be friendly and I told him about you, mentioned some of the poets you were reading. Next time we met up, he had a book for me by Robert Creely. He lent me another and then another, till it became a regular thing between us.”

He leads me out of the kitchen, down two stairs into what he still calls the cowshed. The floors are puzzled together with irregular pieces of flagstone and covered with two large Kilim rugs. The stone
fireplace at the far end of the room is surrounded by books, and books fill every other surface in the room and are piled high on the floor and in the corners. I run my hand along their spines, noting they are mostly history, architectural and photo books. I see novels and two or three rows of poetry—among them,
Ariel
by Sylvia Plath.

“It was what we had between us, Gram and me. I told her stories about Parry’s last days, and she gave me news of you. It was a trade for us during a difficult time. Perhaps we were both a little obsessed with the two of you,” he admitted. “Our grief took us over. Looking back, I guess I’m grateful in a way. Poetry opened up a new world for me. I actually teach it to the children now.”

Then, changing the subject once again, he asks about Dafydd. He wants to know how he did in school, what his interests are, whether he is athletic, does he body surf, what is he doing now that he’s out of school. The questions come quickly with a certain abandon that he hasn’t shown up till now, as if they are unconnected to anything else he might feel and have just been waiting to tumble out.

And finally he asks, “What does he know about me?”

“I’ve not told him nearly enough.”

He waits for me to go on.

“When he was small, I deposited the money you sent into a savings account. When a goodly sum had gathered, I invested it for him. By the time he was ready for college, it paid for a good portion of his education.”

“Glad I could be helpful. Did you tell him where the money came from?”

“Of course I told him. He’s enormously grateful.”

He waits for me to say something else. “Was that it? No such thing as a thank-you note in the States?”

It’s true, I never insisted Dafydd write to Evan—a thank-you note or otherwise. I didn’t discourage contact, but I didn’t encourage it either. And after a while, as the years passed and the checks kept coming, I’d often let months go by before I mentioned to Dafydd that I’d received another one. It was easier for me. I take a deep breath in and close my eyes for a moment, realizing how much finagling I did, so as not to have to face my past. Then I look up guiltily at Evan.

“He wanted to come with me on this trip. He wants to meet you.”

“Hmmm.” Evan stares, blinks and then looks away. “Well, that’s something, I guess.” He shrugs. “You’ll have to excuse me, Alys. Part of me can get right back into the hurt and anger. It is so huge. I can actually feel it starting in my solar plexus. It’s wretched.” He tilts his head. “I’ve had to really battle not to despise you for what you did.”

I am cornered. His anger is brutal. It makes me ashamed.

“And I have. Battled, I mean,” Evan continues. “And mostly I’m okay.”

“I wish I could have done things differently, Evan. But I couldn’t.” I am defensive, my tone flat. It’s the wrong thing to say in the wrong way. I know it. He clenches his jaw and starts to turn away. But what exactly is the right thing to say at a time like this?

“Every time you came up, everything else came up with you. I would feel like I was smothering all over again. I mean really, the cold, wet sludge appeared and seemed like it was everywhere. I had to shove you down. I had to go. If there had been another way, I would have stayed. It was not just some fly-by-night whim that made me leave, Evan. I dragged myself away from you. I was so scared. I didn’t have a choice. When I got to the States, I just blocked you out.”

“Sounds like it was pretty easy for you. Blocking me out.”

“Are you not listening, Evan? I don’t expect you to forgive me, but at least you have to hear me. It was the single hardest thing I have ever done in my life, leaving you. You must believe me. Now, at least maybe I can be of some help in getting you and Dafydd together. If you’ll let me.”

He stares at me, and another audible sigh escapes. “Well, there we have it.” He turns away. “A plan will have to be made!” He glances at his watch. “Oh my, look at the time. I’ve got choir practice in half an hour.”

I don’t know what else I can say. Another moment passes before he turns back to me and straightens up tall.

“Alys. I’m sorry. I really am. The thing is,” he starts, looking down at my feet. “I don’t want to drag it all out again, for either of us. But not to talk about it would be false, don’t you think?” I actually nod. “I’ll try to go slowly, okay? I don’t want to dump all my anger on you at once. You’d be running off again.”

There’s nothing else to say at the moment. It is utterly clear the
pain I have caused him is not something for which I can lightly apologize.

“Would you like to come to choir practice?” he asks quietly. “It goes about two hours. You could stay as long as you like, because it can get tedious. We go over the same song again and again. Don’t feel the least bit shy about leaving. You could have a look around the old neighborhood. We could meet afterward and go to the Black Cock for supper?”

The Black Cock Inn is the pub down the road from Evan’s house. It was “our place,” the one we’d gone to after our visits to the meadow. We’d sit close and eat chicken curry without the watchful eyes of the village, since the pub was ideally out of the way. Evan had actually kissed me for the first time at the bottom of the pub’s drive.

If it weren’t for his residual anger still hanging all around him like some fog cloud, I might imagine he’s asking me out on a date. But I think this is nothing more than Evan trying hard to be courteous. And it is fine with me, a relief. I feel so battered by his anger. So I am tenuous about his dinner invitation. The guilt, sadness and shame he has elicited from me now lies on top of my own anger and disappointment toward him. I don’t answer him about dinner.

We walk down the hill, a wide-open space between us. “Beryl says you owe her tea.”

He smiles, a real smile, unforced, immediate. “You know she comes to my class occasionally and helps out. She works with the slower ones, helping with their sums and their reading. She’s terrific with them. They’re very fond of her.”

I’d love to tell him how she tried to make me think he was still living with someone, tried to make me jealous. But I don’t. There is little doubt in my mind Evan would not get any pleasure out of Beryl’s shenanigans, and frankly, at the moment, neither do I.

Once we reach the rugby club, Evan points to a chair in the back of the large room with windows overlooking the road. The room has a bar with stools in the front. Liquor bottles sit on a shelf against a mirror. As the choir members pile in, taking off their cardigans and caps, some of them nod to me, or look and quickly turn away. I am the only woman in the place.

After several moments, Evan raps his knuckles on the podium. “Okay, men.” In unison, they all stand. “Don’t forget about your
breathing, and to bring the sound up through your diaphragms. Sing it out. We’ve got a visitor here all the way from the States to impress.”

As they begin their scales, my spirits seem to fly on the back of each note. Their voices rise in song, and so, somehow, does the small amount of hope that still lives in me. Every once in a while one of the men turns around and stares, perhaps trying to place me.

“Let’s do ‘We’ll Keep a Welcome.’ “

Far away a voice is calling,
Bells of memory chime’

I recognize the song immediately, one of Da’s favorites, and Parry’s. I bow my head, silently singing every word along with them:

Come home again, come home again,
They call through the oceans of time’

It is all I can do not to break into song myself, for this is the song of my childhood; in it I hear Da, Parry, Mam, Gram, Hallie, all our neighbors and friends, the theme of why I’ve come back. I dab my eyes and my running nose again, hoping this choice of song is his way of trying to show some forgiveness. But then I could be reading in what I would like him to feel.

After a while, as Evan suggested, I sneak out for some air, feeling the cool beginning of evening on my skin and relief to be out in the open again. Funny how neither distance nor death seems to change the way the heart remembers.

The sun has dropped, leaving the sky dramatically streaked with yellows and reds. When we were young, it seemed like summer’s early-evening light lasted forever. It didn’t get dark until past ten. We’d all be out in the road, dozens of us chatting each other up, playing SPUD and hide-and-go-seek, our parents calling us in only when the dark curtain of night was fully drawn. Now, probably out of some long-buried habit, I catch myself walking up the road, toward home, quickly passing Peter’s house and Hallie’s so I won’t change my mind. Then I am standing in front of my own, the whitewash looking dingy and the doorframe smaller than I remember. The front
stoop barely a foot wide. How had Hallie and I played our expansive game of dolls on it? How had we built our castle out of the huge cardboard box that our new Frigidaire came in? I can’t believe it is the same stoop where Gram brought us hundreds and hundreds of toasted cheese sandwiches. The wood door looks as if it hasn’t been painted in many years. But the brass knocker is shined bright.

I stand in front of the door, waiting for the courage to knock, wondering if Da will be in bed, Mam catering to him as always but still not really talking to him Will I remember them? Not what they look like, but the real them, their smell, the feel of them, the way they were—the way we all were—before our lives were taken from us.