Going to Bend (20 page)

Inside, the cabin was mean and dark. There was no stove and no fireplace; the only heat came from a propane heater in the corner. Against one wall was a crude bed, a chest of drawers and a lantern. At a table, bent over a two-burner propane camp stove, was the big dark man Petie had seen with her mother in the feed store four years ago. The bad man, Petie’s grandfather. He didn’t look so big now, though. Behind his beard his face was wasting, and the circles under his eyes were yellowy gray. His eyes were a deep yellow, too, almost tobacco-colored, and so were the palms of his hands. He had no gut now; his overalls hung slack around him. He nodded at Old Man, and then his eyes rested on Petie. She moved a little closer to Old Man and set her feet. After a minute her grandfather grunted and said, “Sure looks like her, don’t she.” He moved around the rough table and sat down in the cabin’s one chair.

“I came up here to tell you she’s gone,” Old Man said, standing where he was. “She passed yesterday. We brought her ashes, thought they belonged here. She wasn’t no part of Hubbard.”

The old man passed his hand over his face once and Petie saw some thing in his eyes that might have been sadness, might have been anger. He grunted. “What she die of?”

“Female cancer. They kept her going a while, but it didn’t do any good.” Old Man pulled a cigarette from a pack in his pocket and lit it by striking a match on the zipper of his pants.

“You got another of those?”

Old Man fetched up another and handed it over. Petie’s grandfather gestured impatiently for Old Man’s cigarette, and used it to light his own. The smell of the two cigarettes plus of the men themselves—Petie’s grandfather smelled sour and strong, like something spoiling, and Old Man’s clothes were stiff with wear—turned Petie’s stomach.

“What’s your name again?” her grandfather said to her.

“Petie.”

“Not much of a name for a girl. What do they call you that for?”

“I don’t know.” Petie had always been called Petie. It had never occurred to her to wonder why.

“Paula, she called her that ever since she was a baby,” Old Man said. Petie hardly ever heard him use her mother’s name. Usually he just said Her, or She. Old Man flicked his cigarette butt out the front door into the dirt yard, shook out a fresh one and lit it. Her grandfather took the pot he’d been stirring off the camp stove, set it down on the rude table in front of him and started spooning soup. He didn’t offer any to them.

“You bring anything to drink?” he demanded of Old Man.

“I might have a bottle in the truck.”

“Well, go see.”

Petie followed Old Man outside so she wouldn’t have to be alone with her grandfather. She knew there was a bottle; they’d stopped to buy one on their way through Sawyer.

“You stay out here now.” Old Man told her, dragging the bottle out the truck window. “Play.”

It was mid-November, and a light rain had started to fall. Petie only had a sweatshirt on; her jacket had gotten too small while her mother was in the hospital. “It’s cold,” she said.

“Stay in the truck, then.” Old Man hurried back into the cabin with the bottle cradled in his arm, leaving the door slightly ajar.

Petie looked with dread at the cardboard box on the seat of the truck.
The plastic bag inside, she thought, would still feel warm. She couldn’t stay in there with that. From the cabin she could hear the squeaky release of a cork. That meant they’d be drinking whiskey and it would be a long time before Old Man had had enough. Until she got sick Petie’s mother used to take her out for walks when Old Man drank whiskey. They’d walk anywhere their feet took them, down to the docks if the weather was fine, or to Howrey’s Market, or to the gift shops, where they’d watch people spend their money on little ceramic spoon rests and indoor/outdoor thermometers and plates you could hang on the wall.

Once, on a warm summer day, they’d dared to go into a gift shop they’d never entered before because her mother thought it was too fancy for people like them. Its shelves were full of teacups covered in tiny floral prints, and dozens of matching teapots fancier than anything Petie had ever seen. She wondered if anyone actually used them. They looked so fragile, just like eggshells. She and Paula had been standing near the front door watching one of the saleswomen help a customer when the saleswoman slipped and dropped a cup onto the glass display case. Paula and Petie both gasped, appalled to see a porcelain chip the size of a dime fly off. Paula’s hand tightened around Petie’s wrist, as though they could somehow be blamed, but the saleswoman simply moved the damaged cup to one side, replaced it with one that was undamaged, wrapped the entire purchase in layers of pale yellow tissue paper and cheerfully told the customer goodbye. Seeing Petie standing so still, the saleswoman winked at her and beckoned her over. Paula stayed where she was, but gave Petie a little push.

“Have you ever seen anyone so clumsy?” the woman said.

Petie stood mute.

“Which is your favorite pattern, honey?” she asked, no doubt taking in Petie’s cheap clothes, her patched sweater with the button missing. Petie pointed to a blue and white cup with little yellow rosebuds all over it. It was the same pattern as the one on the broken cup.

“Is that right?” the woman said. “You know, I think that one’s my favorite, too. It’s a very old pattern.”

Petie nodded and looked back at Paula, who was standing near the door trying not to call attention to herself. Petie turned to go.

“Wait, hon,” the woman said. Pulling up several leaves of tissue paper, she wrapped up the chipped cup with the broken piece placed inside it. “You take this home and I’ll bet you can fix it with just a little bit of glue.”

Petie could see Paula near the door, putting both hands to her mouth. The saleswoman said, “Now, don’t you worry, honey, this cup would be tossed out otherwise, and think of what a waste that would be.” She pulled up another couple of sheets of tissue paper, this time placing on them a saucer with the same pattern. “You take this, too,” she told Petie. “There’s nothing in this world as lonely as a saucer without a cup.” They were the most beautiful things Petie and Paula had ever had. Paula had put them on a special shelf where she and Petie could admire them anytime they wanted.

Now Petie crouched alone by the truck, in the lee of the rain, but she got wet anyway, and her teeth started to chatter. She could hear voices, rasping and uneven, inside the cabin; she didn’t want to go there, not even to get warm. Instead she found an oily tarp on the floor of the truck to wrap up in, and scavenged a candy bar from the glove compartment. Old Man had bought two of them from the hospital vending machines a couple of days ago, one for him and one for Petie, except that he forgot to eat his. Under the candy bar was a book of matches and Petie took that, too.

Keeping the tarp over her head, Petie looked into the cabins one by one. No one had lived in any of them for a long time; not even an old chair had been left behind in the first three. In the fourth she saw a bench, a rickety thing but at least she could sit on it, and the cabin itself was dry inside, although doorless. From there she could still see Old Man’s truck, so he wouldn’t be able to leave without her when he was finished.

The bench was wobbly but it held. Petie hunkered down beneath the tarp and unwrapped the candy bar—a Baby Ruth, her favorite. By sucking
all the chocolate off, then picking out the peanuts one at a time with her front teeth, then eating the nougat, she made it last a long time, and for a few minutes the pleasure of the candy made her forget how cold she was. She hardly ever got to eat candy bars except when Rose brought one to school in her lunch and shared it. Rose liked Hershey bars best, so this was only the third Baby Ruth Petie had ever had. As soon as it was gone Petie began to shiver. Old Man came out of the cabin, but only to pee by the side of the truck and get a fresh pack of cigarettes from his toolbox. When he went back inside he struggled a little, but got the door to the cabin all the way closed.

In a corner of Petie’s cabin there was a small pile of twigs and grass and leaves and down from seedpods. It had once been a nest, now abandoned. When she looked at it more closely Petie found mixed in a bright blue button, a bottle cap, a pop-top ring, two pennies and a piece of foil. The nest had belonged to a pack rat. Carefully Petie picked out and moved the pack rat’s treasure to safety, then found other bits of twigs and splintered lumber around the cabin’s foundations, where it was still dry. She piled them carefully on the dusty nest and struck a match.

The little pile caught and burned with the speed and abruptness of a breath suddenly drawn. As quickly as she could, Petie found other bits and pieces to feed the fire, laid them on one by one and watched them burn. In the sudden warmth her hands began to tingle, and she leaned closer to see their translucency against the fire, admiring the color, soothed by the heat. They were small, pretty hands, dainty hands, her mother’s hands. She bowed low to give a careful breath of encouragement to the fire, and a corner of the tarp she was wrapped in erupted in flames.

Petie cried out. Old Man would beat her if she ruined the tarp, especially since she had taken it from the truck without his permission. She flung it to the floor, but the oil made it burn faster. She folded the tarp quickly over itself, but the top layer instantly caught. There was nothing else to do. Petie raised her foot and brought it straight down into the flames, again and again until finally the tarp lay stinking and dead.

Unnoticed, the little fire on the floor guttered and went out.

Petie must have screamed.

The men came running from the other cabin, stumbling over ruts and tree roots. Petie’s grandfather had an old rifle; Old Man brandished the nearly empty whiskey bottle by its neck. They burst into the cabin bellowing and stinking drunk, expecting a bear or a cougar. Instead they found Petie sitting on the floor vomiting.

“Jesus Christ,” Old Man yelled, seeing her foot and leg. “What have you been doing, girl?”

“Well, get her off the floor,” her grandfather barked. “Lift her up, boy, and get her back to my place.”

“For Chrissakes,” Old Man swore. He hoisted Petie roughly and weaved out of the cabin and across the track. It had begun raining in earnest, and he slipped twice in the deepening mud.

Inside, Petie’s grandfather pointed to the narrow bed along the cabin wall. It was covered with a battered quilt, not clean. Old Man dropped Petie the final eight inches and she passed out briefly as she hit.

“Butter? Ice? Baking soda?” Old Man was saying when she came to.

“Don’t have none of that,” her grandfather grumbled.

“Then get me some ashes. Some ashes and some water.” Then Old Man ripped away what was left of Petie’s melted shoe and she passed out for real. The cardboard box was gone from the truck when Petie came to, halfway home, and her foot and lower leg had been packed in a thick poultice of ashes and water. The ashes they put on her foot that day might or might not have been her mother. She never asked Old Man, and on his own he never said.

The burn healed slow, but it healed. Her mother would have seen to that, Petie thought. It wasn’t the same as goodbye, but it was something.

A
FTER PAULA TYLER
died and Old Man was served his eviction notice, the women of Hubbard descended upon the saggy little house on Chollum Road. They came knowing there was no way they would be here at this place if there hadn’t been a death. They didn’t like Old Man, never had, not since they were all kids together. No, they came out of respect for Paula Tyler, who they knew to be a poor soul who hadn’t been given a single break in her whole life. They remembered when she first came down out of the hills, way back when they were all young and pretty and every one of them thought they’d turn out different, turn out lucky. Even then, when all of them still looked so good, you could tell that Paula wasn’t lucky. And it wasn’t just her ending up with Old Man. There had been rumors about some bad thing that had happened to her, something no one would exactly put a name to; something that made her walk in that slidey way she had, like she was trying to be invisible, like she was maybe trying to walk and keep her legs together at the same time. Some of the girls swore she had a smell about her, a sweet smell like something going bad, but most of them didn’t believe that. Most of them just thought she was a poor, sad, going-nowhere girl who deserved their pity if not exactly their friendship. So now five women tied on bandannas and unpacked their mops and brooms and cleaning supplies and clucked over the dirty front room, the foodless kitchen, preparing to
pack the place up while thanking God both privately and out loud that none of this had happened to them or their kids.

Only Eula Coolbaugh sought Petie out. “Hon, you okay?” she asked, still from a distance. Even at nine Petie was nobody’s darling. She had disconnected, shocky eyes, everything about her stuffed way down out of sight. Even her shadow was like weak tea. She was a ghost moving around the house as the women moved, crouching just out of their view. She tried again. “I’m Eula Coolbaugh. I’m so sorry about your mama, hon. I knew her real well once. We all feel bad about her passing.”

The dead had livelier eyes.

“Is there anything you’d like to know, hon, about what we’re doing?”

She didn’t move, could have been deaf except that as Eula was about to turn away the girl whispered, “Why did he burn her?”

“What?”

“Why did he have her burned?” Petie said.

Eula turned around. “Lord, Petie, what a question. I don’t know. Some people don’t like the idea of being buried. Maybe she asked your daddy to have her cremated. No matter what, she didn’t feel anything, hon. She was already in heaven.”

The child stared at her with unblinking eyes. “He made her burn in hell.”

“Oh, honey, even your daddy can’t make hell.” Eula Coolbaugh squatted in front of her. “Hell is everlasting fire that can’t be made on this earth,” she said. “Listen to me. I knew your mother—I knew her for a real long time, and she was a good woman. I know for a fact that she’s in heaven right now sitting beside God, safe and glad and peaceful.”