Mr. Splitfoot (11 page)

We don’t get more than a mile away before she stops the truck. She opens the glove box. Ruth find his registration card. Clifford Sequoya Shue. It’s out-of-date but, still, that’s his real name. She finds a bottle of water and a small box of tissues that seem the most tender thing a man could have in his glove box. What awful job did Clifford Sequoya hold down in order to purchase this sorry vehicle? How long has he been driving it? Ruth turns the truck around, and in another mile he’ll never know we almost stole it. She parks on the shoulder. She clears a couple of pieces of hard plastic—what was once Clifford’s headlight—from the road as penance for our attempted larceny. I use one of his tissues to wipe spit from the corners of my lips.

Eventually Sequoya reappears, lugging the deer over his back. The beast is taller than he is. Its hooves drag a wake of forest debris. Ruth opens the truck’s bed and lifts the hind legs from Sequoya’s back like lifting a bridal veil off a bloody bride. The deer’s chin hangs over his neck. He uses the antlers as handles. Blood spots the ground. The body trembles the bed when it lands. I see its brown eyes, its loose, lifeless tongue. Sequoya fetches the water from the glove box. He pours a drink of it over the dead deer’s tongue. “There,” he tells the deer. “You won’t remember any of that.” He turns to Ruth. “I’m out of season.” She produces our blue tarp, and he hides the animal underneath it. A bit of my stomach brew burns the back of my throat. I don’t feel so good. I hold on to the baby. Ruth squeezes me into the middle of the bench. Blood has dripped down Clifford’s authentic legwear.

“You all need a place to sleep tonight?”

“Yes.”

So Sequoya drives us back to his trailer. It’s on his grandparents’ property, a small plot with access to the canal. “Good boy,” his grandfather says. Together they string the deer up by its hind legs, binding it to a tree limb behind the house. Split open from chin to tail, the deer drips blood into a rusted pan. I’ve never been so close to a dead thing, at least not that I know of.

Sequoya invites us in. His trailer is covered with posters of metal bands, their names lifted from mythology: Karybdis. Clotho. Lethe. “These are old.” As if he’s embarrassed by the posters. He’s got a record player in his small living room, and he selects some music presumed more appealing to females.

“You ladies like a glass of water?” He sets two glasses of water on the table before us. He takes a seat. Then jumps up quickly again, thinking to wash the deer off his hands. Ruth looks down into her water. Neither of us drinks it.

“You still got a long ways to go?”

I nod my head though I don’t know.

“How come you decided to walk?”

“Well.” I pretend to think hard, as if I can’t remember. We sit there awhile listening to the music. When side A reaches its end, Sequoya doesn’t get up to flip the record. He just lets the automatic arm reset itself. Side A plays again.

Later he makes a bed on the floor of his living room. A couple sheets and a blanket. Ruth climbs in, but I decide to follow Sequoya back to his room.

“You want me to take off my clothes?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says. “I’d like that.”

I would too, someone to scrub away the traces of Lord. I take the band out of his hair and smooth it over his shoulders. I get myself undressed. Sequoya does the same, leaving his shirt for last. When he finally lifts it, his torso is covered with pockmarks, old scars like gray polka dots on his brown skin.

“What’s that about?” I ask, touching a few of them.

“I had smallpox a long time ago. Don’t worry.” He laughs. “You can’t catch it.” He reaches out to touch the curve of my belly. He stares into my navel, a lighthouse in the night. “I’ve never seen anything quite like that.”

When I kiss him, his mouth tastes like carrots or potatoes or maybe it’s just dirt. Sex with Sequoya is a bit awkward at first. I suppose it is always a bit awkward with a stranger. Sequoya’s inside me and usually that’s a warm thing, but he feels cooler inside than out, an empty box. Maybe the box used to hold ice and the ice has melted. Or maybe the box has always been empty. A box that’s forgotten how to hold things. Sequoya, I think while we’re doing it, and how I haven’t considered any names yet and how, unlike him, I have no idea what Cora even means. I don’t know if my baby’s a boy or a girl or something else entirely, a messed-up conch-shell sort of deformity that won’t live long enough to hear me speak its name.

Sequoya’s body goes rigid, but I pull myself off him quickly before he comes inside me, still thinking about that empty box, still thinking about my baby. Sequoya tries to make me come with his hand, but it doesn’t work because his neck and hair smell like the paraffin wax my mom uses for canning jelly. I can’t come when I’m thinking about my mom.

Sequoya falls asleep just fine, and I’m left alone, thinking of El, parsing through the confusion of motherhood and sex and wondering what shape she’s in right now.

When Ruth wakes me in the morning, I’m confused for only a moment. Then I remember the road, and I’m happy to leave like I have the best job ever, walking across the state of New York with my mute aunt. We slip away before the sun’s up. Sequoya’s grandfather watches us go. Inside his kitchen he’s listening to a religious broadcast. The man on the radio is reminding listeners how years ago a 7.0 earthquake struck an island nation because the island had made a pact with the devil. Sequoya’s grandfather, while surprised by this news, believes it because people will believe just about anything.

We see mountains in the distance. “‘The hills are alive,’” I sing with some idea that Ruth won’t be able to resist joining in the song. She resists.

That night I find a pay phone that still works.

“Momma.”

“Cora?”

“Hi.”

“Oh,” like a heart attack.

“You OK? What are you doing?”

“Watching a movie.”

“Do you want me to call back?”

“No! I’m just telling you what I’m doing. Where are you?”

“With Ruth.”

“Ruth? Ruth who?”

“Your sister.”

“What? How’d you find her?”

“She found me. She came to our house.”

“What? Cora, what does she want with you? Let me talk to her.”

“Mom, it’s fine.”

“Where are you? You’re OK? What’s Ruth up to? When are you coming home?”

“Eventually.”

“Eventually. Eventually.” She says it twice because she’s trying not to yell. “Cora, I need—Can I talk to her? Honey, I was so worried.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Let me talk to Ruth.”

“She’s not talking.”

“What?”

“She doesn’t talk.”

“Where are you? What’s she telling you? Don’t listen. What has she said about me?”

“She really doesn’t talk. Not a word.”

“What? Where are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m coming. Where are you?”

“I really don’t know where we are exactly. New York.”

“The city?”

“No. Farmland.”

“Where?”

“Mom, I’m OK. I’m OK on my own.”

“Where are you?” She screams it this time, and it’s going so badly that I decide it would be best to just hang up. I don’t want to hear her this upset.

Ruth sits on the curb waiting for me.

“I called El.”

She lifts her face to hear more.

“She’s pretty mad. That makes sense. Probably more scared than mad.”

Ruth nods.

“You’re not doing this to get back at her? Right?”

Ruth bites her lip. She hadn’t considered that. No, she shakes her head.

“Because you don’t have to. It wasn’t ever easy for El either.”

Ruth nods again.

We start walking and after an hour she motions, don’t I want to stop?

“Not yet.” We walk farther than we’ve ever gone in one day, following the course of the old canal, unknotting knots, untying a belly button. Every tree we see reminds me of El. There’s sacrifice, antagonism, rebellion, obsession, and adoration, but no properly complex word for what’s between a mother and a daughter, roots so twisted, a relationship so deep, people suffocated it in kitsch and comfort words to pretend it’s easy. I look to the trees. I hold my stomach tightly but I'm not strong enough to stop mothers and daughters from splitting apart.

I see forests and subdivisions. Rednecks slow as they pass, their tongues darting between their pointer and middle fingers. Packs of wild teenage girls and flat, open places where UFOs could land. “Livin’ on a Prayer” becomes “Hello Mary Lou (Goodbye Heart).” We see more men, more lawn mowers mowing lawns that don’t need it. We see a brother and sister tearing around in their grandpa’s electric wheelchair up and down their driveway as if it were a go-kart. Ahead of me, Ruth flips the cassette in her Walkman, and the song she’s listening to, whatever it might be, starts playing again from the start.

R
UTH SCREAMS LIKE A DONKEY
.
Her entire middle is on fire. Everything hurts.

“I will break you to the saddle! Lord Jesus enter in!” The Father prays over her. Nat crouches by the bed. The Father’s been praying for a day and a half to no effect. God will not ease her symptoms. The Father’s begun to curse. Ruth sweats through the night, biting Nat’s fingers when it hurts too much.

Finally the Father drives Ruth to a hospital forty minutes down the road instead of the closest one. A lower price had been negotiated for emergency room services. The Father says he was waiting for the state to call him back with instructions, as if she were a broken DVD player. He comforts her on the drive. “You’d be dead by now if the Lord thought you were ready.”

“Guess we’ll all be here a long time.”

The Father drops her off and leaves. The hospital keeps Ruth for a week. Her appendix had ruptured. She’s put in the children’s ward. The place is filled with parents taking care of their sick kids. All day Ruth hears the children call, “Mom” or “Dad.” And the reply, “Yes, dear? What do you need?”

Still. Ruth’s fingers come unclenched in the hospital. If someone wants the sheets or the poly gown she’s wearing, they can come and take them—indeed, an orderly does exactly that once a day. She’s never been so long without Nat, and it is interesting to feel the places where she expands, the places she contracts, without him.

She receives visits from candy stripers, nurses, doctors, and chaplains. A lady with art supplies shows up every other day so that Ruth doesn’t question a visit from a tall man who comes and sits beside her. He has damp blue eyes and long sideburns. For a moment he’s familiar. “Are you from CPS?”

“No.” He’s brought her a bouquet of wildflowers including the lowly, lovely dandelion among the stems.

“Thank you,” Ruth says.

“My pleasure.” He claps his hands the way a pediatrician might. “So. Where are you from?”

Ruth drinks up his attention. She tells him about Love of Christ! She tells him about Nat and the other children. She tells him about the Mother, the Father, the goats, the homemade yogurt.

“All of you are living there together?” He takes his time with her as if he doesn’t have other children to meet with in the pediatric wing.

“Yes.”

“How brotherly,” he says.

And that’s a new way of thinking about the home for Ruth. “What about you?” Ruth’s happy to have someone to talk to. “Where do you live?”

“Me?” he asks. “I own a self-storage center in Troy. I’m by myself now but hope to meet a nice woman, start a family, and settle down soon. That’s my plan.”

“Hmm,” says Ruth.

“I’ve had some trouble meeting women in the past.”

“Hmm,” she repeats again, unsure what to make of his revelations.

“Can I bring you something from the cafeteria?” he asks. “Jell-O? Ice cream?”

“Sure. I’d love that. Thank you.”

“No trouble at all.”

He returns a few minutes later with peach gelatin. “Here we are. That’ll do you good.” His pale eyes match his blue shirt. His hands look strong as a firefighter’s or someone’s dad.

“What’s your name?”

“Zeke.” The man steps up to the edge of her bed.

“Do you work at the hospital?”

“No,” he says. “The storage center. I told you.”

Ruth puts the Jell-O down on her bedside table, suddenly scared. “I’ve seen you somewhere before,” she says, but she can’t remember where.

“Yes. I get around.”

“What are you doing here?”

His cheekbones are high, leaving the area below sunk in shadow. His nose is long, comes to a definite balled point. “Visiting.”

“Who?”

“You.” He extends his hand to her. He lifts her wrist, and for a moment she thinks he’s going to kiss her palm. He reads her admission bracelet. “Ruth Sykes. Beautiful.”

“Thank you,” she whispers.

“Can I take a look at that?” he asks.

“What?” He moves his hands up to her face. Maybe he really is a doctor.

He doesn’t touch the skin but hovers over it. The man stares at her scar as if it is a glowing geode. Then he does touch her, tracing the lines of her scar with an index finger. He cups Ruth’s cheek. The curve of his palm is damp, hot as breath. “Yes.” He eyes her scar the way others might a sunset. “An entire cosmos.” He nods. “Do you feel it, child?”