Search Party (27 page)

They had the CD player turned low so as not to wake Tory. At the end of a hard day Nolan still put on Nirvana. At work he liked music on and when you were his patient he would play whatever you wanted, as loud or soft as you wanted. When she was in rehab, Mary Ann had not been able to choose. So Nolan said a select few of his people liked to do their PT to Nirvana, which did them good and did him good. Because of the groan. Any song by Nirvana had the groan, he said. The howl. “Things are far gone, but yet a song is being sung about them,” he said. “And not only that, a little bird told me Nirvana is your favorite.”

That made her jump. She saw the tree with the green bird. Things like that would happen to her then, even though she quickly knew he meant a person had told him and it was Teresa.

That was early in rehab, when she first knew him. Even then, he didn't say “
was
your favorite.” He put on certain songs and waited to see whether she liked them. Not whether she remembered them. Whether she liked them. “Sort of,” she said. “Sort of not.”

“You know something about you? You don't pretend,” he told her, his first praise.

She finished telling him everything and then they just sat there listening. After a while he said she wouldn't want to know how much beer he and his friends in PT school had put away to the tune of “Come As You Are.” But you didn't have to like a song for it to take you back. Music she had once loved, he said, might make her want to go back to a time before he and she knew each other, let alone were married. She said no, it didn't do that.

Tory was on the stairs. “
Come S.U.R.
,” he sang in his high voice.

“OK, man, come on down,” Nolan said, and he came into the
kitchen in his Nemo pajamas and stood near Nolan's chair. He put a hand on the leg Nolan was keeping time with. Finally he said, “Why did the man jump off the roof?”

“Well, my guess,” Nolan said, “would be it must have been Spiderman.” He looked at Mary Ann to see if she thought that was a lie.

Search Party

T
HE
sun comes up, low beds of cloud pull apart, the shapes on the ground turn into cows. Very quickly the sun is round and hot. One cow after another picks up a foot and puts it down, pushing up gold bubbles in the mud they have all been making where the dirt is bare of clover. Their red sides steam, they chew, they stand in a half-circle looking at Susannah.

A
T
the age of three, Susannah Floyd wandered out of her yard in a northern county of Virginia and tumbled down the embankment of the railroad track that passed a hundred yards from the house. She found she could not climb back up through the blackberry vines, and began to walk. Scratched and whimpering, she walked a mile and a half in the rail bed, and when the banks fell away and the track ran into the open she veered off across a cattle guard, under a gate and into a field of Herefords.

Hours later a search began, but no one came upon her in the bowl of three hills on the Bayliss place where she stopped. She sat down where the tractor had repeatedly dropped its back tire off a shelf of fieldstone into a groundhog hole, making a dirt hollow screened by clumps of burdock. There she remained to rock and cry and suck her scratched arms until she slept.

The next day was a Sunday, and the largest search party ever assembled in that part of the state fanned out to look for her: the
rescue squad, the Eagle Scouts, all the members of the VFW who could hike, the Lions, state troopers, police from four towns, and neighbors on foot and horseback. Several churches sent their youth groups; a hermit widow who kept dogs and shot at hunters showed up with a bloodhound. This proof that the widow listened to the radio caused opinion to shift in her favor afterward, even though the bloodhound did not find Susannah. Emotion in the search party was at such a pitch—hands being wordlessly shaken and held and eyes locked across all boundaries of age and rank, among dogs wandering with slowly wagging tails—that from a distance it could have resembled the springing up of the Peaceable Kingdom, except for the people holding up cardboard signs saying
NORTH & CASE
'
S WOODS
and
EAST TO DUMP
.

It was midsummer, when the days were long. Most of the searchers headed in the wrong direction, down the long gravel drive from the house out to the road, or straight across the two big unmowed clover fields to the woods. A few took the railroad track but went toward town or did not go far enough the other way. All day in the heat, they were assembling in the Floyds' yard to compare routes while they drank jugs of tea the neighbors kept filled, and setting out and straggling back and going again.

The sun went down around nine, leaving fiery pink trails that painted the glasses and tear-streaks of people taking leave of those intending to search through until morning, and after that, the moths came out and a dozen flashlight beams went bowing across the Floyds' clover field into the woods. The night grew unusually cool.

In the early part of the day, when they started up again, there was fog and the clover heads were loaded with wet. They sopped the pant legs, people recalled, or if you had on shorts your bare legs were washed as if you had gone into a sluice. You could write on the pale, wet film on a leaf of burdock and leave a dark green word. By ten the fog had lifted, the fields steamed. Black shade under the locust trees in the fencerows pulled the cows in and closed over them, leaving the grass blank and bright.

That morning, Susannah's mother, who had been taken to
the hospital the night before, seven weeks early, gave birth to a miniature, flaccid girl, who was passed from hand to hand into the incubator, and given the name Mary Jo, to tie her, however briefly, to the life everyone was worried the mother too might try to leave behind.

The mother of two children dying or dead might do anything, especially a woman whose nerves might be excitable. It was not clear. The stories said yes and they said no: if she seemed a little off-center, she had not grown up there and no one could say what behavior in the present crisis would be in keeping with her nature, or just what her nature had been at all up to that time. Nobody had been taken into her confidence. If you went over with a pie, this woman gave you back the pie plate at church. She did not seem to bake. But Tom Floyd's attachment, by all reports, did not require pies and cakes. Everybody knew Tom, and this spoke something in her favor, that he had married late and married her. On the other hand he had met her in a lodge in the Smoky Mountains, at a dairymen's convention. She might have been a secretary for the association; she might have been working in the lodge, even as a maid. No family was heard of; she was alone. There might have been past difficulties of some kind. It was not clear.

As the sun climbed outside her hospital window and no news came, however, she did not throw herself out of bed to wrench the window open and jump the three floors. Women who were not searching were clustered around her bed holding her to life with murmurs and touches. They did not have to be on close terms with her to fall into talk of husbands and visitors and vegetable gardens. No one spoke of children.

Some of the time they were lingering before the wide glass on the same floor to look at the unfinished newborn, motionless except for the tiny rib cage flaring and closing like a bird's mouth. They studied the eyes of the masked nurse and the doctor coming and going all morning shaking his head. They were in agreement about the baby's hands, minute and dusky, with a poise everybody was accustomed to in animals on the verge of death.

Outside in the heat the pastures and roads of a five-mile-wide strip of the upper county were swarming with people, dogs, horses and inching cars, looking for Susannah.

It was July, so dry and hot the tomatoes were banded like pumpkins. The troopers agreed that it looked bad: two nights, one of them freakishly cool, the third hot day coming, the soil conservation map showing ponds curled in every basin and little creeks, though the heat had narrowed and slowed them, still running heartlessly everywhere. The railroad tracks themselves, with culverts, cinder rail beds strewn with glass, and bridges. Copperheads sunning. Yellow jackets in the fences. Old wells. Bulls, certain dairy bulls in particular. The rescue squad brought out ropes and a grappling hook.

Later that day, the Monday after her disappearance on Saturday, Susannah was found.

I
N
later years the sisters often heard the story of how each of them escaped alive, to everyone's surprise, from the fate that had seemed to await her. For Jo the story's interest was soon worn out; she did not care for stories of birth, or fate, or what family one fell into. About herself she cared only for what came later, after the meager fingers the women were pitying in the incubator had flexed and taken hold.

Jo's friends in art school spoke in grim or offhand ways about their own families. Susannah heard them on her visit to Chicago, girls and women going on about themselves as nobody, man or woman, ever would at home. These women were not even really Jo's friends—Jo steered clear of women—but only her classmates, talking on the steps.

This was Susannah's first trip away from home, and she was examining the art students, their uncut hair, and their outfits not unlike her father's milking clothes. It was 1969, in the spring. Most of them were older than Jo, older than Susannah. Jo was drawing them; her newsprint pads were full of their bodies, looking somehow frail and old-fashioned in the nude, Susannah thought, regardless of how big and firm they were there on
the steps of the art gallery, or how confident. She sat with her baby son; she had left her two-year-old with her husband Larry's mother. She had just buttoned her blouse from nursing for the first time in public. She wondered if her milk would be affected by the marijuana smoked in Jo's apartment and the unpleasant stories everybody who came in, everybody Jo knew, was always telling.

One of the classmates on the steps had an older brother who had tried to murder his high school girlfriend. This heavy woman, steadily smiling, was relating the details to Jo, who turned her back to the wind and tied up her portfolio. A dark girl with braids, and that stamp of the un-included Susannah recognized from grade school, kept saying, “Oh my God. Oh God. Oh my God.”

“He was sick, and they just didn't realize,” the woman said. “He's been on a supervised farm for six years.”

“Farm life,” said Jo gruffly as she turned away. “Come on,” she said to Susannah.

“We were not close. I feel badly about that. If I'm smoking good stuff I'll tune into him, I'll have dreams where I go and get him,” the heavy woman persisted, looking off toward the lake. “I'll just go and take hold of his arm and pull on him to come, like I did when we were kids.”

“Does he come with you?” Susannah said, hanging back.

“It's like he's in mud or something. No. No, he doesn't.” The woman had a meek, peaceful smile. It was a hippie expression that was appearing on young women all over the country, which Susannah had not seen before this time, but remembered later. Jo didn't have it, then or ever.

“That's probably a birth dream,” said the one with braids, the one they all ignored. “Or it is if you try to pull someone out of water.” She made a face, and added in a schoolyard singsong that went with her braids, “It's not my idea.”

No one answered her, and to break the silence Susannah said, “Well, I used to have a dream, for years I had it, about pulling the bull out of the creek. Jo? Remember?” Jo snorted. “Our father
had to winch the bull out of the creek when he broke his leg. He was a big Holstein bull,” Susannah went on. She saw that none of them knew what “big” meant in this case. They had turned to look at her politely. She gave a little laugh. “Well, so I wonder what that would mean.”

“You'd have had to dream about it before it happened,” Jo said scathingly, “for it to mean anything. And I'd hate to think what it would mean. Anyway, we have to go.”

Susannah gathered her things off the steps with one hand, trying not to jostle the baby, who was not a good sleeper. The heavy woman was still smiling. “I'm interested in babies,” she said doubtfully, as the baby's eyebrows reddened in preparation for a howl. “I think I might like to draw them.”

“Babies!” said Jo from the sidewalk. “They don't even have faces.”

The baby cried shrilly as they began to walk, interspersing choked hiccups with his cries. “God, is he going to explode?” Jo said.