Girl Runner

To Kevin, who helped me find my inner athlete.

And to our kids, Angus, Annabella, Flora, and Calvin, who’ve always known how to play.

THIS IS NOT
the love song of Aganetha Smart.

No, and don’t talk to me of being weary and claiming one’s well-earned rest.

All my life I’ve been going somewhere, aimed toward a fixed point on the horizon that seems never to draw nearer. In the beginning, I chased it with abandon, with confidence, and somewhat later with frustration, and then with grief, and later yet with the clarity of an escape artist. It is far too late to stop, even if I run in my mind only, out of habit.

You do what you do until you’re done. You are who you are until you’re not.

My name is Aganetha Smart, and I am 104 years old.

Do not imagine this is an advantage.

I have outlived everyone I’ve ever loved, and everyone who ever loved me. Nor have I aged well. Just look at me.

I am surrounded by strangers. By day, I am propped in a wheeled chair in a room that smells of chicken fat and diapers. By night, I am lifted into a rigid bed and tamped down with a blanket that stinks of bleach. This pattern has held for much longer than I care to estimate. I am a bit deaf—though not so deaf as they think—and not-quite blind, so I’ll admit that my descriptive capacity may be lacking. It is entirely possible that I am living in a cathedral of light and sleeping in a vast canopied bed, and cannot appreciate it. But I suspect otherwise: my sense of smell is perfectly intact.

As for speech, the words do not exit my mouth entirely at my command. It is only at great cost that I make myself clear. So much easier to loop lazily, mumbling a string of disconnected yet familiar phrases, the ones that wait poised at the front of the tongue in case of emergency, or occasion for social nicety: “Well, now, I don’t know, but why . . .”

It’s a barrier, I won’t pretend.

I’m in a state that appears simple. Pared down. Reduced. Boiled clean away.

What astonishes me is how little remains. What proof? A rattling shoe box of scorched medals and no one to claim them. My name at rest in a column in a forgotten record book. Daily blasts of words, produced on deadline, inked onto newsprint, out-of-date by dinnertime.

My achievement is to have lived long enough to see my life vanish. Who will write my obituary? This is not something I fret overly about, mind you. But there it is.

It is too late to change tactics, to go wide around trouble, to save my best burst of speed for the final stretch. There’s no starting this race over again. And still I run. I run and I run, without rest, as if even now there is time and purpose and I will gain, at last—before my spool of silence unwinds—what I’ve yet to know.

“
COMING, AGGIE?
” Fannie squeezes my fingers.

We walk the dusty lane, her hand around mine. Fannie is not like anyone else. She moves like water in a muddy creek. We stop to gather wildflowers, ripping their tough stems free, the delicate flowers expiring in our hands. Tall grasses vibrate with heat. We cut a path through the raspberry brambles and along the edge of the front field, planted with corn, the corn taller than my head, taller than Fannie’s too.

Fannie’s hair is falling out of her bun. Wisps halo her. I look up into her face, like the face of the moon, looking down into mine.

We are going to the graveyard. We are always going to the graveyard.

“Here we are,” Fannie says in a comfortable way. I climb the mossy split rails. Dark and grooved, the wood is cool and damp against my knees. Fannie enters at the gate. “Hello, everyone,” she says. “Hello, boys. Good morning, Mother.”

I leap from the fence and drop the dying wildflowers. My job is to clear away the crab apples that fall from the overhanging trees. Fannie hitches her skirt, swings it out of the way, and kneels on a grave to pick it clean of weeds. That is her job.

I throw handfuls of crab apples, making noises like guns firing, like grenades exploding, like I imagine war to sound. Our brother Robbie is at war—my half-brother, Fannie’s full.

Fannie pats the grass to call me closer. I chew open a crab apple, spit it out.

“Born too early,” Fannie begins. I know her stories by heart. “Born too early,” she repeats, waiting for me, sitting now on her bottom, arms gathering her legs into her bosom. “Their skin was thinner than crepe, blue as baby birds.”

She’s got me. I kneel and brush the grass over the twins, buried together in a tiny square coffin. I can almost see its outlines under the ground, of thin dark wood pressed on all sides by the weight of the earth.

“Were they boys or girls?” I ask. Fannie is waiting for me to ask.

“Boys, of course.”

I already know, but her answer still gives me a shiver. This is a graveyard of dead children, all boys, my half-brothers. I am relieved to have been born a girl.

The twins: the first and second babies born to our father, Robert Smart, and his first wife, who was Fannie’s mother—not mine—and whose name I know was Tilda. The twins lived for a few minutes each, not even an hour, let alone a day.

Next born came Robbie, who is alive and well and fighting in the mud fields of France. His letters home are scant on details, but for the mud. He writes that his feet are always wet, and that the boys suffer from foot rot. Some of their toes turn black.

I would like to know more about this. I am thinking about it now.

“Do their toes fall off?” I ask Fannie.

“Whose toes?”

“The boys in the war, in the mud.”

“Robbie doesn’t say.”

“Can you write to him and ask?” (I don’t yet know how to write.)

“I think we have nicer things to say in our letters, don’t we? Robbie doesn’t want to think about his toes falling off.”

“Maybe they’ve already fallen off.”

“He would tell us.”

But I wonder: would he? I look forward to inspecting his feet, surreptitiously, when he’s home again, whenever that may be. The newspaper says our boys will be home by Christmas, but Christmas is a long way off.

After Robbie was born, along came Fannie, and then Edith, a string of good luck.

Fannie is older than Edith, but Edith is no longer at home with us. Last fall, she married a man named Carson Miller, and they live across the cornfield, on the next farm over. I like to close my eyes and see Edith standing under the arbour built by our father for the wedding—I think she looks beautiful and I don’t understand why my mother grieved over the bareness of the arbour. In my mind, Edith stands alone holding fresh-cut late-blooming flowers, her newly sewn dress tight at the wrists and close at the neck, a raven blue hue.

Fannie moves to the next grave, pulling me along with her. I poke at the initials in the flat stone, scraping away flecks of moss with my fingernails.

Here is another boy. After Edith was born, the string of good luck came to an end.

“Fever,” says Fannie, her fingers plucking at minuscule weeds. “Only six months old.”

But six months isn’t
only
, and I know it.

Edith’s baby is already six months. I get to haul around his squirming protesting self as often as I please. I might go whenever I want, so long as I tell Mother—she likes to send along a basket of something: fresh salt buns, or a ball of butter, or beans and tomatoes from our garden. At home, I am the youngest and I like the novelty of being in charge of Little Robbie, named so as to tell him apart from Robbie, my brother, and Robert, my father.

I feel torn, on visiting Edith’s. There is something unfinished about the house and yard, and it feels different from home. Strange.

Edith’s vegetable garden is half the size of ours, and weedy. The flowers grow scanty in their beds, as if they’ve given up trying. The house is cramped and smells of damp and dirty laundry and soup.

Edith greets my surprise arrivals with an irritated, “Oh, Aggie,” flushed and hurrying, her hairline damp with sweat. She never sits down, and she never offers me a cookie. (Maybe she doesn’t bake any?) She hands off the baby and rushes to other business—not baking cookies—muttering to herself.

Little Robbie and I go a long time without seeing her—it is like she’s disappeared—until he is howling and I am hot and cannot soothe him and my arms ache and I feel like howling too. This is when Edith pops into the scene: “There you are!” Annoyed, as if she’s been looking and looking everywhere for us.

So I might go as often as I like, but I don’t go very often.

Fannie is shifting her weight slowly from the baby who died of fever to the next grave, the grave that grieves her most of all, the one we’ve both been moving toward: little James.

“It was haying time,” says Fannie, drawing out each word slow and plain. “Maybe he was hot and wanted cooling down. Maybe he was lost. He was only two years old—how did he find his way across the back field to the pond? Drowned before we even knew he was missing, that’s how fast it happened. That’s how fast it can.”

Neighbour boys fishing at the pond discovered James floating facedown in the water, and they pulled him out and ran screaming to the farmhouse, carrying him between them.

When they set him down in the yard, little James was not yet stiff, the life fresh out of him.

“I was seven years old,” says Fannie. “Older than you. The neighbour boys—they’re in the war now, but they were just boys then—Jerry and Jack—I can hear them hollering. They laid him on the patch of grass by the summer kitchen door. Everyone came running, my mother falling down over him, trying to lift him, telling him to breathe, please, breathe. And then I knew he must be dead. So I ran and hid in the barn, in the mow, under the straw. The shock of it. It broke my mother’s heart.”

For a moment I forget that when Fannie says “my mother,” she means the first mother, not mine, and it jolts me to think, even for a breath, even mistakenly, that my own mother’s heart might be broken by anything.

None of my mother’s babies are dead; none of the graves are hers to mourn. I believe this is because my mother gave birth only to girls, three of us: Olive, then Cora, and me, Aganetha, last of all.

I have decided that my mother is nothing like the first mother. The first mother—
Tilda
, I mouth her name—is fuzzy around the edges, shrouded in black netting from all her years of mourning. The stories about Tilda are not really about her. She is in the background, weeping for her dead babies, and then, suddenly, she’s buried too.

“Puerperal fever,” says Fannie, but that is not what I hear, and so I imagine the first mother purple from scalp to toenail when she died.

All of this happened almost at once: little James drowned, our brother George came early—“So tiny we kept him in a drawer”—and the first mother died.

I imagine Fannie hiding under the straw past dusk, refusing to come out, like a kitten in a nest. Who pulls her out? Fannie doesn’t say.

The neighbour men came to finish the haying. Father sat in silence at the table and ate whatever the neighbour women laid before him. Fannie and Edith, aged seven and six, spooned milk into the tiny new baby’s mouth—my half-brother George. Everyone watched Father eat and eat and eat, like he had a hole in his stomach through which the food was falling, and they wondered whether he would ever speak again. (He must have; he married my mother before the next spring.)

Nothing so sad has ever happened to me.

“It was James drowning that killed my mother,” says Fannie. “I don’t think it was George at all. George wasn’t to blame.”

I know what she’s going to say next, and I wait for it.

“I was supposed to be watching him, Aggie. Watching him was my job. What was I doing instead?”

We are nearly done. In another moment, I’ll go back to gathering and throwing crab apples. There is just one more thing Fannie needs to say as we kneel here beside each other.

Thin yellow hair lifts from my scalp. I can’t see my own face, looking up at my sister’s, and don’t know that it is wildly freckled, and in my silence looks long and carven. Fannie is both smiling and serious.

“I’ll never stop watching you, Aggie. I promise.”

There.

It is the clearest air. The quietest sky. The hummingest bugs. The sun shines.

“
FRIENDS HERE TO SEE YOU
, Mrs. Smart!”

The nurse has woken me. I’ve been lying in a shallow drift of sleep, not an unpleasant place to linger, and it is with irritation that I’m wrenched back into this room, surfacing into a pattern that has the sensation of being chronic.

“Wakey, wakey, Mrs. Smart!”

My mouth is dry, lips peeling off each other as I open them to say again the obvious:
I never married!

I keep telling them, but they do insist on
Missus
, as if I’ve cause to be shamed by my spinster state. Do they practice their chirping in the mirror, these nurses? This one is arranging my sweater like I am her plaything, a dried-apple-head doll she’s crafted herself and would like to show off to someone who’s come to play.

I hear myself looping, “Goodness, why now . . .”

“Mrs. Smart, we have a lovely surprise for you this morning! Friends come to see you! Isn’t that something!”

She’s got me there—I would have to agree. I would have to call that
something.
Who would come to see me? I don’t know anyone, anymore. Everyone’s dead.

I am trying to explain that I am very thirsty. I’ve got her by the wrist, but she’s stronger. She evades me and goes around behind to unlock the brake—I hear its click releasing—and she begins pushing the chair out of the corner where they’ve arranged it beside the window that is never opened and that steams opaque with moisture on chilly days. The radiator mumbles. I don’t mind the spot. I’ll know I’m a goner when they park me in front of the blithering television.

“I’m thirsty,” I croak.

No, she doesn’t hear. She bends with hushed excitement and breathes into my hair, what’s left of it, tufted like the threads of root on an old red radish.

“It’s a young man and a young woman come to visit, Mrs. Smart. They’d like to take you for a stroll. And what a lovely day for it. We’ll bundle you up with blankets and tuck you right in. I’ve forgotten their names. But here they are. Smile, Mrs. Smart. Say hello to your friends.”

I refuse to do as I’m told, on principle.

The scent of scrubbed skin rushes toward me. I feel a hand alight awkwardly on mine, as if it’s afraid of elderly bones and tendons and veins, as if its owner might break me. Hair swings loose and shiny, a flash of red, between our faces. The girl is saying a name, and it isn’t mine, though it might be hers. It means nothing to me. No bells. No symphony of recognition.

“Louder, dear, she’s nearly deaf. Aren’t you, Mrs. Smart?” Voice raised. “But we know she can hear us. Can’t you, Mrs. Smart? She’s not completely lost in there.”

“Hello, again,” the girl says, to me, and then to the nurse, “it’s been a while. She might not remember us.”

I don’t reply.

“And you know Mrs. Smart from . . . ?” The nurse’s question trails off.

I could tell her, because I’m quite sure—this girl doesn’t know me from a stranger off the street. She couldn’t possibly, young as she is. Everyone known to me is dead, buried, departed, gone, x-ed out from my life, ties severed, bridges burnt, lost, misplaced.

“It’s a long story,” I hear the girl say. She adds that she’s a distant relative, but her laugh is nervous, a kid’s laugh. The girl is lying, I decide, trying to parse a rumbling under my breastbone that might just be excitement. I’ve been sitting in this chair for years, day in, day out, as the light outside the window fades and lengthens and fades again, and the seasons trail, and the sky grows dark with snowflakes and flat with summer’s glare. Every change here is incremental. Which makes this girl’s arrival monumental.

She is speaking—not to the nurse, but to me.

“Coming?” she asks, as if in my wheeled chair I have some choice, some agency. She touches my hand again, her fingers sliding under mine, around mine, so lightly I only just register the pressure of her hold on me.

I say to her, You remind me of someone. Come closer, I’ll whisper it.

Fannie.

Fannie is still so young. She’s stayed the same and I have not. But when she visits, her face always turned away from mine, hidden behind her hair, behind a shadow, I feel the girl in me, the years dissolving. I feel the comfort of her, my big sister, offering her hand.

Coming, Aggie?

She has been dead nearly a century, but she walks effortlessly across the undulations of my mind, hair loose, hips broad, apron bleached white.

“Coming?” The girl’s touch brushes the skin on my wrist, like an offer, waiting for me.

I slip my hand into hers.