My Abandonment (11 page)

"On that cassette tape," she says, "is a recording of the stories you told me when I showed you the pictures. Those were excellent stories. Sometime you might want to listen to them."

"Thank you," I say holding the bag against me. I have no radio or machine that will play a cassette tape but I don't tell her this.

Next to the bicycle Father squints. He kicks at the kickstand then sits on the seat. When he stands and pumps the pedals he whoops. He swerves out through the grass and all the horses startle away from the fence not sure what he is.

Today a lady riding a tall chestnut horse comes along close to me. Her hair is in a straight blond braid against her black vest. My black hair is in a ponytail which does not really look like the horse's tail.

"Hi," the lady says. Sitting on her horse, she is taller than I am where I stand on the fence. The horse turns a little, its head. Its eye is brown. It shifts its metal bit in its mouth under its tongue. Its nose and nostril look very soft.

"Hello," I say.

"Do you ride?" she says.

"No," I say. "I have a bicycle that I'm learning on, though."

"What's your name?"

"Caroline," I say. "What's your horse's name?"

"Boomer."

"Boomer," I say.

"Are you someone's girl?"

"Yes," I say.

I do not stay to watch her take off the saddle and brush her horse down. Instead I go into our house to study. I read one of the schoolbooks about the American presidents who I already knew about from Father teaching me in the forest park. These days he doesn't teach me but only says to read the encyclopedias and then for school to do whatever Miss Jean Bauer said to do.

In the L encyclopedia I am reading about lions who are large carnivores and live in Africa. They reach nine feet long and four hundred pounds and prey on zebras and antelopes. Their groups are known as prides. Below that I read about lipreading which is a way for deaf people to recognize words by the way you move your mouth. It was discovered after a war where there were deafened soldiers. This is so much better than before when I had only the dictionary when the definitions were so short and turned back on each other. Here's some of my writing from back then:

A chain saw is a portable power saw linked to an endless chain. Endless means boundless, an endless universe, an endless conversation. Continuous. An endless chain. A conversation is a spoken exchange of thoughts, opinions and feelings. A feeling is a tender emotion. An emotion is a state of mental agitation or disturbance, a feeling.

Father comes in the door and hangs his straw hat on a hook and his hair is sweaty and crushed down.

"Studying," he says. "Good."

"What if," I say, "people at school have heard about me before, like in the newspaper or something?"

"Well," he says, "that's part of it. They say you're going to have an ordinary childhood, but that's not so easy." He reaches out and touches my shoulder, then the edge of my ear. He says, "It's not so easy because you're not ordinary. Regular won't fit you."

"But what if the kids make fun of me?" I say.

"You're bigger than that," he says. "You won't even hear it. You've been in a classroom before, after all."

"Yes, but I can hardly remember that," I say. "You told me to forget that."

"Are there leftovers from last night?" he says. "That rice?"

"Yes," I say. I turn toward him but I do not make any noise when I say that yes.

"What?" he says.

"I was trying to see if you can read lips," I say. "I watched the ladies riding today. They were beautiful. Do you think I'll ever ride a horse?"

"Those aren't even real people," Father says. "And half of them are sent out here just to spy on us."

"Do you think Miss Jean Bauer is pretty?" I say.

Father unlaces his boots and long strands of grass fall out. His whiskers have a gray part under his mouth that is new. He leaves his boots by the door with the right one standing and the left one tipped over.

"I really have to take a shower," he says. "Did you say if there was any rice left?"

"I thought the rotors of helicopters made such a racket," I say. "I've never heard anything."

"They can make quieter ones now," he says. "If they can make a plane that takes off straight up they can certainly make a silent helicopter, Caroline. They can see at night, too, and even the heat of your body."

"What does that look like?" I say. "Do they see the horses, too?"

"The horses' heat is a different color," he says.

I stand on the covered back porch of Mr. Walters taking the straight pins and the stiff cardboard bodies out of the school clothes that Miss Jean Bauer brought me. There are still clothes in my dresser that I have never worn but I want to wash them so they'll be soft and not have creases when I first wear them to school. I think some days that I will like it there and that it's good that I'll have the same clothes as everyone.

Mr. Walters comes out the screen door and opens the metal refrigerator he keeps there. He takes out a tall silver can of beer and snaps the top and takes a drink.

"One day I'll come out here and you'll be taller than I am," he says.

"If I keep growing," I say. "I don't think I've stopped yet."

"I doubt it," he says. "How's your garden coming?"

"Good."

"Doing some laundry?" he says. "Different than doing it at your special place in the stream, I bet."

"We used the Laundromat sometimes," I say. "These are all school clothes. I'm just getting ready."

"That'll be interesting," he says, "once you spend some more time with kids your age instead of working around with your father all the time. I wonder how much that will change you, how you act."

"I act like a girl," I say. I stab the pins into the cardboard bodies so they will not get lost.

"I'm not saying anything like that," Mr. Walters says.

I put in the detergent and the clothes and I turn and walk back outside into the sun which blinds me for a moment. I sneeze. Once in a hard rain we soaped up our clothes in the forest park and hung them up to rinse from the branches. From a ways away it looked like ten headless people flying through the trees.

In the Methodist church there is a choir wearing purple robes up at the front and the minister wears a white robe. He is not just someone's father taking a turn like in the church when I was a little girl. In that church people stood up in the crowd and said why they knew the church was true but here we just repeat words in our programs and the hymns in the hymnbook are not the ones I know. We stand to sing. We keep standing up and sitting down.

Father can carry a tune. I can hear his voice past mine and separate from all the others. Deeper. He holds the heavy red hymnal open with one hand and his other on my shoulder. When we sit down a couple girls look back at us and I wonder if they'll be at my school but I cannot tell if the people around us know who we are. I do not see Ben or Michael or their mother or anyone we know. The gold plate comes down our row and Father hands me a five-dollar bill to put inside.

Afterwards on the way out he is all smiling and shaking hands. People say I look pretty in my yellow dress. Really I only want to get outside into the sun and air, away from the crowd and candles and the dusty curtains. I don't want to sing for another week.

The best part of church is the big hill. On the way we have to ride up it and halfway to the top I get off and push. Father's bicycle wags back and forth with him standing on the pedals and at the top he shouts and waits for me. It's on the way home that the big hill is the best. Then I pedal hard and bend low. I scream and coast and the wind blows the braids out of my hair and my yellow dress around my waist I'm going so fast. Father roars behind me and he's never beaten me to the bottom.

Later we have changed out of our church clothes and I make sandwiches. Father's bracelets slide along his forearm as he writes in his small notebook. He has cut a piece of cardboard to cover the window next to where he likes to sit so no one can see him.

"Are you growing a beard?" I say. "It looks like you stopped shaving your face."

"What do you really think about that church?" he says. "Do you believe any of that?"

"It's different than the one I remember," I say, "when I was little."

"Is that what I asked you?" he says.

"No," I say. "I like the bicycle riding part."

"Good, Caroline," he says.

"Why?" I say. "Do you believe that?"

"I believe that's a good looking sandwich," he says. "Well, church. No matter how ridiculous it is sometimes some worthwhile things get said."

"So that's why we go?" I say.

"Appearances count," Father says. "When they see us riding our bikes to church, when they hear us sing and we dress up on Sunday that makes them believe certain things about us."

"Like what?" I say.

"That we're like them," he says. "That we believe the same things. That makes them happy, to see us doing what they're doing."

The horses in the moonlight bite and kick at each other with their sharp metal hooves.

When Father cuts the hay field he pulls the swather behind the tractor and it takes down the tall grass leaving a line like he's erasing the field a stripe at a time or like a haircut. It's pretty and it's sad to watch, the color green goes darker where it's cut and I watch from the branches of an aspen I climb. Every time he turns the corner he waves to me. If he hits a rock or there's some snag or tangle or jam he stops and climbs down to fix it.

Today he wears a blue and white striped engineer's cap. He changes hats almost every day so anyone watching might not know it's him. He's given me four bandanas to wear on different days on my head: red, blue, yellow, camouflage.

The engine quiets down and for a while he's sitting with his back against the tractor's tall wheel without moving or getting up to fix anything so I climb down from the aspen and hop across the stream and walk down the slope of stubble and long cut grass careful not to kick it out of its straight rows. I leap sideways at a black snake but see then that it's cut in two, in three, the edges red from the sharp blades of the swather.

Father doesn't see me coming, he's not looking for me, the sound of the tractor idling covers my footsteps. His hat is off and his face is darker down low, a necklace of white around his neck when he takes his shirt off at night. He doesn't look up until he feels my shadow.

"Are you crying?" I say.

"No," he says. "Not really. It's just my eyes, Caroline."

The tractor is not broken. He's just taking a break. Then he lets me sit on his lap even though Mr. Walters does not like me on the tractor and the engine is so loud it's impossible to talk. I steer the tractor as we cut down the tall grass. You have to look straight ahead where you're going and at the same time out of the side of your eye watch the big black wheel turning just behind you on the right since you want it rolling just on the line of what's been cut so the swather behind you doesn't miss one stalk.

The days are still long even though they're getting shorter. The sun slants across the field. The big round yellow bales are spaced all the way across from fence to fence and all the way up the slope to the stream.

"Are you counting them?" I say to Father who is standing at the window looking out. "How many are there?" I say.

"You see those shadows?" he says. "Down next to every bale? A person could easily hide in every one of those black shadows."

"Could be," I say. I don't say that we could go out and check, that I doubt it.

"Here," he says, holding out my backpack that I haven't seen in a long time. "We're going on a trip. Pack up some things."

"We're going now?" I say. "Where?"

"Once it's dark," he says.

"This is our house," I say. "Are we coming back?"

"We'll see," he says.

"How long?" I say.

"Four days, maybe? Just put whatever you can in your pack. Some clothes."

I go into my room and pull out the dresser drawers. I have so many clothes. While I'm deciding, Father comes in and watches me.

"Don't take those new school clothes," he says. "Those will draw attention. They'll recognize you. That's why they gave them to you. So they can keep track."

"Do you want to pack for me?" I say.

"No," he says. "I don't. But here, here's something I want you to keep."

It's a plastic card that fits in the Wells Fargo ATM machine, just like his card. I am not to use it unless Father says or unless something happens to him. I memorize the number I need to memorize by looking at the spots on Randy's body. One halfway down his throat, one on his hoof. I put him in my pack, and then my forest pants that I haven't worn for a long time and probably don't even fit me anymore. I put the Wells Fargo card in the front pocket of my pack with my library card that I've almost forgotten about.

Once it's dark we go out the back door, close around our house.

"It would be faster to ride," I say as we pass the bicycles where they are leaned against the wall, under the roof's overhang.

"No," Father says. "We leave those here."

We hurry without talking past the barn, along the fence. The horses follow on the other side. Father hisses but they keep coming lined up in single file under the moon like they are saying good-bye or trying to give us away by drawing attention. They do not give us away.

I look back once at our house with all our things in it. In the big house yellow lights shine in the square windows but nothing moves.

"How far are we walking?" I finally say, out on the road where we can't see the houses anymore.

"Not far," Father says. "Only to a bus stop. You remember a long time ago, that special way we rode the bus?"

"Yes," I say.

The headlights grow wider and I stand alone at the stop. I climb on and pay my fare and just then Father comes running up slapping the side of the bus like he almost missed it and like we aren't together. He sits in the back of the bus and I sit in the middle, on the right side.