Search Party (33 page)

“There was something unprotected about Jo,” Mrs. Dominick said firmly, rousing from her semi-sleep.

“Well, what happened?” said Anne, with impatience. “You're winching the bull out of the creek. What happened to it?”

“Oh.” Susannah had to think. “They got him out. They got him up on the wagon but his heart stopped. He died.”

At the word “died,” Anne gave her a sharp look. “That must have been terribly up—upsetting,” said the thin young man beside Anne, with a burp, “to little girls.”

“No. Well . . . not as much as you might expect. It was to my father, though. Though he wouldn't let you know. He wouldn't let on.”

“I'm trying to see it. I'm trying to see you-all,” cried Garland in a different voice. He wrung his hands. “You must have thought of this particular thing because it explains something about her to you.”

“Do you think so?” Susannah said, ashamed now. “I think I just thought of it because of whatever it was you said, Anne, a minute ago, when you said that about Jo not being a farm girl. But she was, really. We did things on the farm when we were girls; we had chores, not just in the house, in the dairy when we were old enough. I was thinking of how we—”

“No!” Garland thundered, throwing his legs over the edge of the bed and slapping them. “I mean,
something
—!”

Susannah tried dizzily to think. There were so many stories. They had all been telling them, all night. Jo shoplifted in art school. Jo slapped somebody at an opening. She threw a camera into the toilet. She climbed out onto the girders of a huge building. These were things she had done. People in the room could attest to them, while the things Susannah could attest to were vague, they did not really have a shape or fit like the others'
stories, ball into socket, with what they all knew now. It did not seem to Susannah that her own memories could be made to fit, in that way.

Memory was the opposite of the movies with their important slow motion. Everything you could bring to mind took place rather jerkily and partially. You couldn't even see the entire person. You saw or felt a limb, you
scraped
at the scene to get a face.

In her pocket, Jo had her first note from a boy. That was important, though Susannah had left it out in telling the story. “Your sweet,” the note said. Jo was only nine; she seemed to be pretending more interest in the note than she felt. She had pulled it out half a dozen times, flaunting it in front of Susannah and their father, forming the two words, “Your sweet,” with her lips. Jo was under a tree with her note while they were pulling the bull out of the creek. The boy who had written it did not matter to her. She did not like him. Almost certainly her heart was not racing as they dragged and hauled at the bull, the way Susannah's was, as if it would work its way out of her chest and go flopping into the water with the bull. Animals did not matter to Jo. She was not afraid of the bull, she was not afraid
for
him. It was Susannah who was literal and ordinary, even in her sadness, who stopped liking meat when she realized about Herefords, who wished for a dog. It was Susannah who sank, again and again, into self-pity. Jo didn't pity herself or anyone else.

But something mattered to her, Susannah thought. More than to me. I wasn't the one who took pictures of the slaughterhouse. Something mattered. It made Jo angry; it altered her, like the photographs she showed me where the silver had darkened and burned the paper.

No. No one ever got mad at us. No, we were not afraid. We were careful. That was all. Careful about something. It was not anything we could have described to the women who asked, Mrs. Bayliss or Mrs. Grayson, or anyone. The things that people thought should matter to us did not. We didn't care whether we went to their parties, whether we went to the swimming pool. We didn't care about our clothes or what Stevia gave us to eat.

We didn't care what anybody thought of our mother.

We only cared what
we
thought. We only cared that it was taking so long, the waiting, going on and on. We did think she was waiting, just as we were, for everything to change, as it could, as it would, if we . . . if we—but we could not pin down what it was we would have to do. We imagined her having undergone this change while we were out of the house, and waiting for us to get home from school so that she could say . . . the thing she would say to us. “Girls . . .” The way women said that, mothers. To be followed by the explanations for what had happened up until then. How everything had been for so many years, in our house, and why it had been that way. All of it.

Though eventually we did not even think that. Or I didn't.

T
HE
bull had stumbled into the creek when the bank gave way, and broken his leg. He was not seen for days, and then they heard him. He had plowed up the creek bed trying to get out. Their father would not shoot him. He was valuable: their father gave this as his reason. The vet was there; they were going to winch the bull out. Susannah remembered the words, everybody saying them as they climbed into the pickup. Winch him out. And in fact the bull, dragged out by the heavy chain looped behind his front legs, so that they popped forward, made it onto the hay wagon and then reared up his head—as big, Susannah thought, as the tree stumps her father had been uprooting all summer with the same chain—dropped the huge head, and died. “Lungs couldn't take it,” said the vet, after they felt his neck and armpit and listened and made sure he was dead. “That or the heart. We don't know how much fighting he was doing for two days.” He was a heavy bull, Susannah remembered that. He weighed over a ton. She had gone up close to him once when he was in the squeeze chute getting a shot. He had rolled his globe eye with a fly in the corner of it downward and back to get a look at her, and blinked his long stiff lashes.

The vet was brushing the mud off his shirt and pants. He had his own truck parked sideways on the slope with a rifle in the
rack. Susannah could see he was tired and not surprised. She felt tired too, looking at the bull's black muddy legs, and sick.

Their father turned, leaned forward and pushed on a tree with both hands. “Well, I sure thought we'd do better than this,” he said. That would be the last they would hear of it. That was more than he said about most things.

But he was a man of feeling. Wasn't that what Mrs. Dominick called it? Their father was a man of feeling, and once he had wept aloud. Susannah knew this. Everybody put it in when they told the story. He wept in front of thirty men and women, when his daughter was handed up the railway embankment in triumph to him. This was fact, not legend.

Susannah had heard and sorted and judged, all her life, the stories told by people who had been in the search party, or relatives of theirs. She knew legend from fact. It was said that she had been prevented from leaving Bayliss's field, that guarded by the herd, in the same way calves are encircled and kept together, she had found the creek, drunk from it, and been shepherded away from it. It was said that the reason she was not dehydrated was that she had nursed from a Hereford mother, or eaten the wet clover, or eaten dried-up cow dung, as a child might. There was no way for anyone to know any of this.

But certain things were facts: she had been found in the middle of the herd in Bayliss's field, badly sunburned and mosquito-bitten. She had been carried back the way she must have come, across the field, the men sometimes walking backward to hail a troop of searchers farther back on the same land, who could not hear them, and down along the railroad track to the bank below her house. Several of the farmers had gotten around to combing the cinders there for signs of her. They stood up when they heard the shouts. They scrambled up the bank with her, passing her along above the brambles. Somebody went out at a run across the clover field after her father, and he came stumbling down the yard. He had on a bandana under his hat, and somebody lifted his hat and pulled the square of cloth off his head and put it in his hand for his streaming eyes.

T
HEY
were talking about a book of Jo's photographs, a book Garland was working on. People who were his employees had made mistakes putting it together. So, Susannah thought. He was not an artist, he was some sort of a . . .

There were lost proofs of something. “Of course!” chortled Anne. “When was it otherwise?” Anne had drunk a staggering amount of wine but Susannah could see she was not confused, completely confused and sick, the way Susannah herself was.

Susannah was concentrating on staying ahead of the room's steady circling. She was in a dark lobe that expanded and contracted as if the voices in the room, slow and intermittent now, were dolefully pumping it. “In my family,” she would say if things got any worse, “no one drinks. We can't, it makes us sick.”

In the morning, in a few hours, she would be back in the little car on the way to Jo's apartment. It seemed less terrible than it had, to think of doing this. It seemed to have become a problem of movement, forcing movement on a body that preferred to be still. No choice. It was just heaving oneself up through waterlogged heaviness, like getting up to feed the baby, feeling along the wall to the crib, clumsy until the assault of tenderness. Only there would be drawers of underwear, letters, negatives. Jo's things. No choice. She would reach in.

The talk pulsed slowly on. Mrs. Dominick was awake again and Susannah heard her voice join in, her matter-of-fact sentences with their wheezing interruptions. She felt the voice was settling something for her but she could not make out the sense of it. She heard it the way she would hear, in bed across the room from Jo, the faraway bawl of a cow at the back of the farm. Everybody agreed with Mrs. Dominick, by the sound of it. Whatever she was saying was bringing the night to a close. Garland put his face in his hands. Susannah struggled to sit up.

She's passing out, a voice said. She knew she was not going to pass out, she was going to be sick.

In the bathroom, Garland used both hands to hold her, one on her back and the other on the old sore collarbone. Her ribs
were doing the work, it seemed, opening so far they hurt her skin and shutting again to heave everything out. Garland might have been getting ready to cry one final time but the vomiting got everybody into action. Then they were gone. Mrs. Dominick said she would put tea bags on Susannah's eyes in the morning, for that was her remedy. Her faithful remedy, she said.

The bedroom had a stately, tilted spin, with a sound in it like tires rolling up on gravel. Susannah felt a momentary anticipation. Someone was coming. At length she identified the sound as rain on the window. It was raining hard now. From under the covers they had pulled over her, she tried to look through one eye without moving her head. She saw two bulky figures moving around the room, heard them whisper to each other. Garland put something on the bedside table. Her glasses. He looked down at her. From below, the lamp lit his face so that all the folds stood out, and his shadowy fixed eyes showed her herself going to sleep in the middle of the vigil she was to keep with him. I'm awake, she tried to say. He did not look good, standing there looking down at her.

Ah, she thought. Ah.

She was sailing slowly backward but her head cleared and she could see, as if from years of familiarity with his movements, the tiredness that had confused his purpose. He undid his belt to tuck his shirt in, buckled it, pressed his abdomen with both hands, and picked up two of the wine bottles. Then he put them down again and sat down in the chair beside her bed. There were faraway voices yelling. Or not voices . . . the rain.

She almost slept, but she gave a start, thinking she was falling. “It's all right,” he said. To let him know she heard, she uncurled her fingers on the bed, and he put his hand in them. Without opening her eyes she weighed it in hers.

Ah. Garland.

She was carried backward again. She listened to the far-off muffled yelling. She could not open her eyes but she knew someone was coming for her, someone was in search of her.