Driftless (41 page)

“They’re gone now.”

“Mine too,” said Rusty. “I didn’t think it would make a difference, but it does.”

“I know what you mean, or at least I know it in my own way.”

“I’ve got a niece, my brother’s girl. She lives in Words. Didn’t know that before.”

“You mean the preacher?”

“Yup.”

“I met her last fall,” said July.

“What’s she like?”

“She’s the real thing, Rusty.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you’re going to like her. That young woman is worth about a dozen ordinary ones. So she’s your niece. That’s something. Does she know who you are?”

“Nope.”

“Want me to introduce you?”

“Nope.”

“You’re going to tell her, aren’t you?”

“I’ll do it in my own time.”

They continued watching the back of the barn.

“I remember when you came into this area,” said Rusty. “To be honest, I didn’t think you’d make it.”

“I almost didn’t.”

“You lived in that chicken coop next to the house.”

“I couldn’t afford to heat the house,” said July.

“Anyway, I didn’t think you’d make it.”

“Shhh,” whispered July, and out of the high window in the barn climbed the black cat. It lunged for the overhang, caught it, and pulled itself onto the roof. It stood there for a short while, looking in all directions, then crept down the incline several yards and leaped into the maple. In no time at all it was on the ground and bounding down the valley, stopping frequently to listen and watch.

“Let’s go,” said July, and they hurried around the barn and entered through the front doors. There was still enough light to see fairly well inside.

From his collection of tools, Rusty handed July a hammer and a handful of nails, and told him that he could pile up baled hay in the mow to reach the window, which closed from the inside.

July climbed up the ladder and Rusty waited below, holding his rifle.

When after a short time there were no sounds of hammering or stacking hay, Rusty called up, “What’s going on?”

“Be quiet,” came the voice from the mow, and soon after July climbed down.

“What’s the matter?” asked Rusty.

“This is a bigger problem than we thought,” said July. “There’s a
mostly grown cub up there. My guess is it crawled in and its mother can’t get it out. So she hauls food in for it.”

“You mean I’ve got two wild cats living up there?”

“Yes. The young one may be hurt. Looks like it favors its left front leg, a sprain maybe. Probably came in before it stiffened up. Now it doesn’t want to leave.”

“Great,” said Rusty. “That’s just damn great.”

SPRING

V
IOLET BRASSO’S ADJUSTMENT TO THE GIANT PIT BULL PROCEEDED as smoothly as could be expected. Her inveterate fondness for caregiving could not resist the charm of helplessness.

The Brasso dining room was transformed into a single-occupancy canine revitalization unit where the dog’s wounds were routinely bathed, treated, and dressed. Knowledgeable neighbors paid consolatory visits; poultices, special foods, tonics, herbs, and other remedies were administered. Medicines were sprinkled in with twice-a-day home-cooked reduced-fat meals, followed by tooth brushing. The church’s prayer chain included the white dog’s name in its intercessory activity. Olivia called in health updates to Pastor Winnie, who noted them in the weekly bulletin.

As the animal’s health improved, Violet took her for walks around the neighborhood and the benefits of dog ownership soon became apparent.

First, there was the companionship. The familiar roads, alley-ways, and trails took on new dimensions when they were traveled mutually. And as the dog’s stamina increased, their walks became longer and more frequent.

As these routines were becoming established, spring arrived in a circus of warm ghosts, each day stealing away another part of winter. In the shade of the house, the last mound of snow shrank and vanished. The frozen, lumpy ground softened discretely—first just the idea of something less hard; then a squeaky, frosty crust; then a greasy topmost skim followed by shifting layers of gelatinous instability. Then came ever-deepening mud, and the trees, bushes, and grasses sucked up the sticky goo through their greedy roots, as if they were slurping milkshakes up paper straws.

Buds blushed in scarlet as they remembered how to pucker and
open along arcades of unfurling branches, creating a new syntactical venue for Blue Skies. Flower daggers stabbed up out of the ground. Frogs, salamanders, toads, and other amphibians performed their annual resurrection, digging out of skin-breathing sleep and throating jeers at the simpler, less ceremonial life forms. Organized gangs of red-winged blackbirds appeared, overnight, congregated in empty trees, and pretended through their gleeful chattering to have always been there. Finally, the drying ground conspired with greening grass to provide the spongy-hard consistency that Violet’s feet so loved to feel through her homemade moccasins, and recurring dreams climbed up her sturdy calves as she walked.

With spring came new yet familiar smells, carried in shifting rooms of haunting surmise. And what better way to experience them than in the presence of a creature specifically designed for olfaction? The white dog’s nose never ceased its testing, exploratory work.

Violet marveled at how such an enormous animal could become frozen in her tracks, incapacitated by a stray molecule of air-borne interest, staring off into the distance, scanning for a second, confirming trace. Sometimes the short hairs on her back rose up in a row of spikes in response to a scrap of scented worry, and she would plant her front feet as though bracing for another overpowering whiff. Obviously, for Trixie, the primal scene from which all actions arose was not an unresolved parental image but rather a dark theater of pregnant odors—a fragrance of destiny—and Violet sometimes wished to escape the Human Picture Prison and, just once, inhale a plot.

Violet also took delight in walking along paths for years forbidden to her because of the fierce, barking dogs living along them. Now, those same dogs that had once terrorized her sat mutely, warily, sheepishly as they passed. The dogs with doghouses did not come out of them.

Violet also felt more confident encountering some of her neighbors—rough, taciturn men who sat on automobiles, trucks, and lawn mowers, drank beer, honed ax heads, burned trash, and preyed on female neighbors with their eyes.

“Whoa!” said Leo Burley. “Don’t bring that animal around here,
Violet. There are laws against those kinds of dogs, and it’s missing an ear.”

“It’s a free country,” replied Violet, gripping the thin leather leash while the stolid white dog looked impassively out of her massive head. “Come, Trixie.”

And indeed the country did seem much freer with her dog. She could go anywhere, anytime, without fear. And when Violet discovered that the dog liked to ride in the car, she took her on errands, Trixie’s wide face taking up most of the side window.

Olivia also grew quite fond of the animal and often insisted that Trixie sleep in her room at night, though in fact the dog preferred to be wherever Violet was. Over time, this may well have developed into an issue of some contention between the two sisters, except that something else soon demanded Olivia’s full attention.

It began on a whim.

After consulting briefly with several knowledgeable neighbors about the likely contents of the coffee tin of medicine that Trixie’s previous owner had given her, Olivia decided to take some herself. So twice a day after sprinkling the powder into the dog’s food, she slipped a heaping teaspoon into her tea along with enough sugar and cream to neutralize the awful taste.

She was not sure why. Perhaps it was just to be ingesting something her sister did not administer, ration, or even know anything about. Not that Olivia had any complaints about Violet’s supervision of her medications and foods, which was quite conscientious and competent in a slightly dictatorial and fascist way. Perhaps it was just to be performing a secret ritual. For whatever reason, it continued week after week after week, until the tin of tan powder with green flecks was mostly gone. And absolutely nothing came of it until one afternoon when Violet was out walking the dog.

Olivia had been placed on the living room sofa, a book about schizophrenia among Christians resting beside the telephone on the end table. It was a cloudy day, and the interior of the house seemed unusually gloomy. The police scanner broadcast a conversation about the mountain lion that had been seen on two recent occasions: eating a feral steer, and again in a tree on the edge of the Heartland
Federal Reserve. Apparently its territorial cry—at night—sounded like screaming, and many people were quite alarmed over hearing it.

Olivia turned off the scanner, turned on the lamp, and searched for the bent page marking the end of her last reading. Her toe hurt inside her yellow sock resting on the carpet. She moved it to relieve the ache and found her place in the text.

One paragraph later she set the book down and stared at her right foot, which, she recalled, hadn’t moved on her request for over ten years. She tried to move her toes and watched—incredulously—as the yellow fabric of the sock nudged into the air. It was an enfeebled movement, nothing like the arched, clawing yawn of a normal toe stretch wherein each of the fleshy five digits fan out in taut curlicues of wiggling neural freedom. It was only a nearly imperceptible, bony jerk beneath cloth.

But to Olivia it seemed like the Second Coming.

She tried again, and again her mind explained what she wanted to do to her nerves and her nerves carried the idea all the way down south to her foot and the appropriate muscles there listened to the notion, understood at least most of it, and performed a series of contractions. The system worked.

Olivia felt like a member of an endangered species, a seed stored for centuries in an earthen jar finally planted and sprouting.

“Violet!” she cried. “Violet!”

But Violet was nearly a mile away, walking with the dog and looking for watercress along Thistlewaite Creek.

NEW LOVE

J
ACOB HELM STARED INTO HIS WOODSTOVE. HE THOUGHT ABOUT fire and how the fundamental event—the inner working of the wasting hot disease—was completely obscured by its flamboyant symptoms. The conjuring yellow, blue, red, and orange flames danced in fairy rings on the perimeter of the logs. The brown ligneous surfaces smoked, blackened, shriveled, cracked, glowed, and collapsed into feathery dust. But just
how
the woody cylinders had been rendered to ash remained unseen. The steady progression of effects was clearly displayed, but the pounding heart of the process, the cause, thrived in secret.

In the same manner something unseen came alive in Jacob, its birth announced through an inching movement of imagination. Staring into his stove, half dreaming and wishing he could fall completely asleep, he began to remember the first assault upon his Great Sorrow, the vision of the undressed young woman on her back porch playing a musical instrument. Fleeing from this memory, he returned his attention to the fire, without success. Then out of the center of his growing discomfort, a new feeling emerged, drawing all the elements of his consciousness toward it, a single star in a dark sky. As it moved closer, it assumed a shape of surprising comfort, and after a short while he recognized Winnie. Soon, the imagined perception sharpened and he saw her perched on the edge of his mind in the straight-backed chair in his living room, her knees pinched together and her eyes narrowing expectantly as she prepared to pray. Her lips turned down in their corners as though fearful that the words they were about to release would not faithfully convey the messages entrusted to them. Her almost comic seriousness, exaggerated by freckles splashing between her eyes and her sloping cheeks moving away from her ears, all perfectly remembered.

The willful domination of her upper lip as it parted company from the plump, slightly frivolous bottom lip. Even her slender nose and tapered, vanishing eyebrows somehow embodied her longing for honesty—a sacred mission to be true to herself and loyal to an empyrean principle so cherished, so idealized, she could not imagine it as her own.

He could
see
her, even the nearly imperceptible hairs above her lip that made mockery of the idea that facial hair was masculine. He remembered the slippery glint of teeth when she smiled, the faint smell of dandelions and hay on her breath, and the pure circadian indigo of her voice rising out of her throat and into her dark eyes, where her pupils exuded a continuous overflow of bright black.

Slowly, Jacob turned from the stove, afraid the physical movement might frighten away the rare creature he had stumbled upon. But it remained with him, still and calm. Even as he rose to his feet, he could
see
her, an incorporeal spirit formed from the wedding of sorrow and firelight.

He knew it was love. That ancient vibrating string had only one harmonic, and its joyous aching filled every corner of him.

It had been years since he’d felt the stirring of this unchecked sympathy and it returned like Lazarus marching from his tomb. He paced from one side of his home to the other, glad to be moving but frantic with uncertainty.

Why had this realization come now? It had been days since her visit. It seemed unnatural, unhealthy, even perverted to experience such powerful affection in the absence of its object.

But that was the way of most things, he decided. They happened and were later realized, the visible flames from an earlier, unseen burning. Between the heart deciding and the head knowing, a fugue state. In his case, it had been so long since any message between the two camps had gotten through it had taken several days to clear a path. Now here it was.

He searched his memory for an earlier, less favorable judgment of her, and seemed to remember having entertained strong doubts about her sanity. But the evidence upon which that earlier judgment was based had for some reason been tampered with, and the same
traits that had once led him to condemn her now compelled his wild admiration.