Driftless (3 page)

“To Words—nothing up there but a handful of houses. Look, my brother will be waiting for me. Our place is only a little ways from here. You can spend the night, and in the morning—”

“I wonder why they put so many stop signs here?” asked the young man, neither expecting nor waiting for an answer. “I really appreciate the ride.”

Smiling, he closed the door.

“Wait,” said the old man. “The sandwiches—there are a couple left. You paid for them.” And he handed a greasy, lumpy paper sack through the open window.

July tucked it under his arm. “Well, thanks again, and goodnight.”

He stood in the middle of the road and watched the glowing taillights move beyond his sight. The clanking and banging sounds of the trailer faded and disappeared. A grinning yellow moon dissolved all the stars around it and threw a greenish-blue glow over the countryside.

July set his pack down and took out a denim jacket, replacing it with the paper sack.

“Okay,” he said, “which way now?” He hadn’t thought further ahead than this unknown intersection.

He stood in the middle of the road wondering which way to go, waiting for some inspiration—a beckoning or sign. After receiving none, he decided a town called Words was good enough.

His boots made clumping sounds against the road’s hard surface, which continued north in a meandering manner up and down hills. Moonlit fields of standing corn, hay, and soybeans merged with evergreen and hardwood, marshland and streams. Crickets, frogs, owls, and other nocturnal creatures called out to him as he passed. Of particular notice were the unidentifiable cries—the raw sounds of nature that refused to be firmly associated with mammal, fowl, or insect.

Set off from the road, an occasional yard light burned near a barn. The houses themselves remained dark, their occupants sleeping.

It had been some time since he’d been in the Midwest, and July attempted to picture himself in the central part of the United States once again. He’d been born just southwest of Wisconsin, in Iowa, so this seemed like a homecoming of sorts, or as much of one as his habitual homelessness could imagine.

In the distance a firefly of light appeared, disappeared, and reappeared at a different location. Once it was out of the hills, it advanced more earnestly, then disappeared for a longer time, only to float up into view a mile away. The single light rounded a corner and divided into two parts, accompanied by a harsh, rushing sound. Then the headlights grew brighter, bigger, and louder, like an instinct merging into consciousness.

July stepped off the road, behind a stand of honeysuck le. He’d become accustomed to his own company again and did not wish to share it with anyone or explain where he was going when he didn’t know himself.

After he had been walking for another half-hour, the faint yellow glow of a town in the near distance cautioned him to wait for morning before going further. He began looking for a place to pass the night.

Beyond the Words Cemetery a collection of old-growth trees ran downhill away from the road. He walked between several dozen gravestones, climbed the woven wire fence, picked his way through mulberry and hazelnut bushes, and found a small hollow of land covered with long grass, sheltered by an overhanging maple. In places, the moonlight fell through the branches and spotted the ground. The thick underbrush he hoped would announce the movement of any large intruders, and the rising slope of the cemetery blocked the view from the road. A short distance further down the hill, the rhythmic burbles of a stream could be heard.

July unrolled his sleeping bag. He folded his denim jacket for use as a pillow and ate one of the sandwiches from the paper sack. Then he drank from the water bottle, took off his boots, put his socks inside them, lay down, and zipped himself inside. He loosened the money belt that contained his savings from the past five or six years. Somewhere in the distance a barred owl loosed its mocking cry,
“Who-cooks-for-you, who-cooks-for-you-aaaaallllll.” The light from an occasional star found its way through the tree above him, blinking on and off with the shuttered movement of leaves in the wind.

Closing his eyes, he tried to place the experiences of the past several days in a reasonable perspective: the drive from Wyoming, the wandering conversation with the old man, the walk down the mostly deserted road. The dark foliage above him seemed to draw nearer and a spirit of fatigue invaded his senses, disrupting his review of recent events. Blocking it out, he focused his attention and struggled for several long minutes to keep the images in his mind from sliding through the cellar door of nonsensical stories, and fell asleep.

Hours later, he woke up with sudden, blunt finality. He knew why four stop signs had been placed on a remote intersection: there had been an accident. Some time ago, people had died at the crossing and two extra stop signs had been put there. They were erected as memorials.

And so it was: the dead forever change the living. Even those unknown to the dead are required to stop.

The sky was still mostly dark, but morning stirred beneath the horizon and birds rustled about in their lofts in the trees and bushes, conversing through murmured chirping.

Climbing from the sleeping bag, he put on his socks and boots, unfolded his jacket, and siphoned his arms through the sleeves.

Why had he come here, he wondered, and walked down the hill. At the stream, he sat on the bank and stared into the dark water.

The air—warm and thick—filled with noises, and mingled with burbling water, rustling birds, and the dry ruckus of squirrels came the distant sounds of humans. Doors slammed, vehicles started, and an occasional, indecipherable, barking voice could be heard. A heavy truck moved along the road beyond the cemetery.

Why had he come here?

Not everything has a reason, he told himself. His arrival amounted to a whim of circumstance, a living accident. In the same random manner he had arrived in Chicago, Sioux Falls, Cheyenne, San Francisco, Moose Jaw, and many other places. There was no reason.

At least this is what he’d been telling himself for years, but he
could no longer quite believe it. He now suspected that somewhere between his actions and what he knew about them—in that vast chasm of burgeoning silence—grew a nameless need, pushing him from one place to the next.

Something shiny near the water’s edge caught his attention and he investigated.

A rusty flashlight, half covered in dead grass and dried mud. Most of the chrome had been chipped or worn off, the cylinder dented in several places.

He wondered to whom it belonged. Had it been intentionally discarded or simply lost? But the artifact refused to divulge any information about its owner. Yet
someone
had obviously occupied the same space that July currently inhabited, and this coincidence begged for explanation.

He absently rubbed the dirt from the glass lens with his thumb and pushed the corroded switch forward. To his astonishment, a beam of light leaped out.

It seemed impossible, or at least highly improbable, and he experienced an unexpectedly good feeling over having a valuable object in his hands. The dead had come alive. A personal connection grew up between the previous owner and himself:
I have something of yours, something worth having.

But as soon as this cheerful happenstance had been announced, the light dimmed to faint orange. It flickered as though trying to communicate, glowed feebly, and went out.

He shook the flashlight and worked the switch forward and back several more times. Nothing.

He tossed it on the bank beside him, then picked it up and tried again. Nope.

Loneliness soon visited him, and though he had learned to cherish his own private loneliness, this particular feeling had a more universal character. The previous owner of the useless flashlight somehow participated in it.
I have something of yours, and it is worthless.

July looked back at the dark water and understood that he had gone as far as he could. His life had grown too thin, and he was nearing the end of himself. He was living but didn’t feel alive. He knew
no one in the sense of understanding them from the inside—feeling the center of their life—and no one knew him.

He had come here, he knew then, as a last stand—to either become in some way connected to other people or to die. He could no longer live as a hungry ghost.

He retrieved his duffel bag, climbed the woven wire fence, crossed through the cemetery, and began walking into Words. Whatever people he found there would occupy him in one way or another for the rest of his life. For better or worse, this place would become his home.

 

All of these memories visited July as he watched the panther pacing along the fence in the fog. To show the animal that he too knew how to play the game, he stepped out of the barn and walked toward it.

The animal stopped pacing, leaped effortlessly over the fence, and disappeared.

A NATION OF FAMILIES

V
IOLET BRASSO HAD A PROBLEM THAT GREW BIGGER EACH TIME she visited it, and she visited it often. The familiar pains in her chest and back were coalescing into a single, clarified anguish: What was she going to do about Olivia? What would happen when she could no longer take care of her younger sister?

It was hard for Violet to imagine two people more different than she and Olivia. If archaeologists dug up the Words Cemetery thousands of years in the future, after all the tombstones had washed away, they would assume she and Olivia were from different subspecies. It would never occur to them that such variation issued from the same family.

Everything about Violet was large, not fat, but big. Though she was feminine to the core, her bones were twice the size of Olivia’s, her shoulders wide. Her brown eyes nestled deep beneath a sloping brow, lending her facial expressions the proclamation
plain.
Her hair, which she usually gathered into a bun, grew out straight and thin. Her hands were bigger than her father’s had been; she was tall and moved slowly. People had always thought of her as old, partly because she stooped to look shorter.

Olivia, in every way, was tiny and preternaturally cute. She looked twenty-five, if that, though she was actually thirty-eight. Her face resembled a child’s, with darting, bright blue eyes; her hands were so incessantly busy they seemed to have separate agendas. Those who met her for the first time, especially in the company of her sister, often found themselves later in the day reminiscing about collector dolls—the kind that are too expensive to actually play with. Her hair sprang out of her head in curls so thick and tumultuous that, after being cut and falling to the floor, they bounced.

Most members of the Words Friends of Jesus Church assumed
Olivia’s youthful appearance had something to do with having been cared for all her life. Born into a tightly knit, protective family, the cherished invalid had been passed from one relative to another. The stress of adulthood had never caught up to her, so she had naturally remained young in appearance.

In a moment of weakness, Violet had once told this to Olivia—why she looked so young—and regretted it immediately afterwards. Olivia’s reaction was so vehement and sustained that it seemed they would never get over it. She refused to eat and stopped talking altogether. For weeks, Violet found small pieces of colored paper, neatly folded and placed in the kitchen and bathroom drawers, under cushions, in the refrigerator, with carefully written quotations from Scripture, in ink.

“He looked round about on them with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts” Mark 3:5.

“Judge not that ye be not judged” Matt. 7:1.

The pains in Violet’s chest returned, and she was reminded that at the first opportunity she and Olivia needed to have a talk. She needed to explain that it was time to begin thinking about other arrangements. She needed to guide Olivia firmly through a realistic assessment of her own situation, to remind her that many years separated them; her older sister’s health was now failing and some changes were in order.

But the opportunity seemed never to arrive, partly, Violet suspected, because she dreaded the encounter. Talking to Olivia, about anything, usually brought out one of Violet’s shortcomings: she could rarely say what she meant, or at least what she said was often not
heard
in the right way. Things perfectly understood in her mind came out jumbled. Olivia, on the other hand, had the gift of speaking clearly and authoritatively on practically any subject, and could run right over most people with her talking. Her uncompromising spirit flowed seamlessly into language. Despite the diminutive size of her vocal organs, her voice resonated in an astonishingly deep, full, and commanding register, imparting to her words a gravity-based sense of importance, even when they weren’t important at all.

So Violet tried to avoid thinking about her problem. But now
the subject of death and its inevitability was in the air. A funeral had been scheduled for Thursday afternoon—one day away—and the basement in the Words Friends of Jesus Church was in shambles. Late summer rains and a clogged eave spout had conspired to bring three inches of water running down the foundation wall, and even after the sump pump from the Words Repair Shop had removed the muddy liquid, the church smelled of mold. Cardboard boxes filled with quilting supplies and Sunday school materials rested on dark, sagging bottoms, gaping open in places like the mouths of dead fish. To make matters worse, following the first cleanup effort someone left the back door open. Dogs came down during the night, rifled through the pantry, and left a mess that pet lovers could never adequately describe.

Yet the need for everything to look its best had never been greater. The deceased had been a long-standing member of the community, with a large family. Many people, some of them new to the church, were likely to attend. As the senior member of the Food Committee, she had made the necessary calls to coordinate main dishes, salads, and desserts, but there was still much to do.