Sourland (16 page)

All this had not happened yet. There was no way to accurately foretell it. All I knew was, I had to return to my father's bedside. I was desperate to return to my father's bedside. Before Mr. Carmichael brought the station wagon to a full stop in the parking lot, I had jumped out, I was making my way into the chill of the hospital that never changes, taking the stairs two at a time to the intensive care unit on the fourth floor, avoiding the elevator out of a morbid fear that, at this crucial time, the elevator might stall between floors, now breathless from the stairs and my heart pounding in my chest as if it might burst—

Still alive! From the doorway of the intensive care unit I can see my father in his bed swaddled in white like a comatose infant, and he is still alive.

I
s there a soul
I have to wonder. Look inside myself like leaning over the rim of an old stone well and the danger is, you might lose your balance and fall and there is no water inside to break your fall.
Hello? Hello? Anybody there
? Old stone well with a broken hand pump, I'm thinking of. That well was old when I was a kid. My grandfather's farm that's just “acreage” now north of Herkimer waiting to be sold, how many years. Nobody wants to live in the country now, we've all moved to town.

It's a fact: there's fewer people living in the country in this century than fifty years ago. New houses and a shopping mall going up south of Herkimer and along the highway halfway to Sparta. The new Church of the Risen Christ like a great shining ark rising out of the moldered earth, sailing the waves of the righteous as our pastor says. From the
outside the prow of the ark is a beacon of light, inside there is a dazzle of shining surfaces, pinewood pews in long curving rows too many to count and in the balcony more pews rising farther than you can see. At the front of the ark is a great floating gold cross illuminated in light. Each service, three thousand individuals worship here. The Church of the Risen Christ is the fastest-growing church in all the Adirondack region. Started in a store front in downtown Herkimer, now there's people coming from as far away as Utica, Rome, Watertown, Potsdam. Our tabernacle choir is on cable TV each Sunday morning. What is beautiful is the congregation singing hymns. Nobody laughs at my voice here. My voice is wavering as a girl's but gains strength from the voices close about me, I am not so self-conscious here. Shut your eyes in the Church of the Risen Christ you could be any of these.

In this pew with strangers but we are all children of God. Feeling my heart quicken because this is a secret time for me. My husband is not a churchgoer. I have not yet brought the girls, they would be restless and it makes me angry to see restless children at church.
Is there a soul
is a question I ask myself when I am alone, I am afraid of my thoughts when I am alone. One Sunday I asked Reverend Loomis and he gripped my hand in both his hands smiling he saying
Who is it who asks this question, Diane? Who is it looks through your eyes that are such beautiful eyes?
My face flushed like sunburn. My eyes filled with tears. It was after the service, so many of us anxious to speak with Reverend Loomis and waiting in the aisle for him to take our hands, ask our names and repeat our names as a blessing. So many of us and most of us are women wishing to “seek counsel” with our pastor but Reverend Rob Loomis's time is limited. His special smile for women like me, oh God I hope it isn't pity.

A wife and mother, not yet thirty-five. Yet not young. You feel it at the waist, a bulge of flesh. Turning, and in the mirror a ridge of fat at the small of the back, a crease beneath my chin, I felt so hurt!—betrayed!—until the girls, until I got pregnant, I'd been lean like a boy.
Is there a soul
because if there is and I am lacking a soul, just this body going to fat, I am not like other people but a freak. But if there is a soul and there is
one inside me waiting to emerge into the light this is a thing that scares me more.

So what
my cousin Michie Dungarve would say.
Who gives a damn, why's it a big deal.
Michie who'd been in the navy and then apprenticed to a bail bondsman/bounty hunter up in Watertown, it would be said of him he was a cold-blooded killer without a soul and Michie conceded that was probably a fact.

In the Church of the Risen Christ, three thousand of us lift our voices in a joyful noise to the Lord and to His Only Begotten Son that Jesus will drive out the devils from us and dwell in our hearts forever-more and I know this to be true.
Rock of ages
we are singing
cleft for me let me hide myself in thee
we are singing. I feel the waves buoying our ark, I feel how we are lifted like the gold cross floating in air. Reverend Loomis teaches us to laugh at sin, laugh away Satan for he is helpless in the face of Jesus. There is not a thing to regret nor even to remember once Jesus is in your heart. Like a light so bright and blinding why'd you even make an effort to see. I tell myself
Jesus understands, He was in my heart even then
.

When I was DeeDee Kinzie. That long ago.

 

This thing that happened when we were kids living out north of Herkimer. The Rapids it was called, where we lived that wasn't a town but had a post office and a volunteer fire company that shared the building. We went to school at Rapids Elementary then at Rapids Junior-Senior High. My cousin Michie Dungarve who was two years older than me but just one year ahead of me in school. These guys he hung out with in eighth grade, Steve Hauser and Dan Burney. And me. This thing that happened.

Like a sudden storm, like lightning striking. You can be standing on a porch watching the rain out of a boiling-dark sky like my mother's older sister Elsie smoking a cigarette and there's a flash of something like fire and a booming noise so loud it near-about knocked her over, lightning had struck the porch post and splinters shot into the side of
her face like buckshot. Happened that fast, my aunt would tell that story the rest of her life thanking God, He had spared her blindness, or worse.

This thing that happened.
Except I guess it had to be something we made happen. Not like a lightning storm that's an act of God out of the empty sky.

This single time I was granted an appointment with Reverend Loomis asking why you would call some terrible thing an act of God, for isn't everything that happens an act of God. And Reverend Loomis gives me this frowning smile saying an “act of God” means a great cataclysm beyond any mortal to control. And I say yes, Reverend. But why.

There is something dogged about me, I know. Seeing how our pastor smiled harder at me, that I was a challenge to his kindly nature. I was trying not to stammer saying what I meant is, if God did not wish a terrible thing to happen, why'd He let it happen?

Reverend Loomis spoke calmly and carefully as you would speak to a child. Saying we can't demand such questions of God, he grants us freedom of will to sin or not to sin. Freedom of will to take sin into our hearts or cast it from us. You don't need theology to know this, Mrs. Schmidt!

I felt the man's warmth touch my heart that has such a chill upon it like an old spell.

But needing to say, I wasn't speaking of myself but of this boy that something happened to. When we were children out in the Rapids.

My voice cracked then. For why'd I say that:
children
. We were not young children, none of us. And why say the Rapids. Reverend Loomis has family in Watertown, he would scarcely know rural Herkimer County.

Somehow I was talking fast. I was nervous, and I was anxious, and I was missing my painkillers, that keep my heart from racing and sweat from prickling in my armpits. Saying I don't understand, Reverend. See, I don't understand!

Reverend said let us pray together, Diane. Then you will understand.

Reverend smiled and touched my arm. His smile is a flash of white flame, each night following I will sink into sleep into that white flame.

 

My cousin Michie said it's good to have a little evil in you, people know not to fuck with you. Like a vaccination where they put germs in you, to make your blood stronger.

 

This swampy woods off the logging road. A thing that scares me is snakes. When we were kids, tramping through the woods back of our houses and after a heavy rainfall or the thaw in spring there'd be sheets of water in the woods, the creeks overflowing, the ditches, even the ravine and afterward a deposit of mud, silt, storm debris. Snakes in the swampy woods and some of them water moccasins. Four feet long and thick as a man's leg. I never saw one of these but knew of them. Copperheads are smaller snakes but poisonous, too. Even garter snakes and grass snakes in just our backyard, in our woodpile in the garage, I'd be terrified of. There was this story of what happened to a ten-year-old boy a cousin of Dan Burney he was tramping in the woods with his dog and the dog waded into a pond and started swimming and something in the water attacked it, the dog was howling and yipping and the boy waded in to rescue it and turned out to be water moccasins, they came swarming out of the cattails and rushes and attacked the boy, sank their fangs in his legs, pulled him down and sank their fangs in his belly, his chest, his face thrashing and swarming at their prey and he screamed for help but nobody could hear him, his heart stopped there in the swamp.

Pressed my hands over my ears. I was feeling sick just to hear this. Begging the guys to stop it, I didn't want to hear it, I didn't believe them but the guys just laughed at me.

 

The boy we hurt, his name was Arvin and he was Michie's age or older but in special ed. not in eighth grade. In special ed. that was taught by a man teacher, in a corner of the school building by the shop/voca
tional arts, students who couldn't read like the rest of us or couldn't talk right or had things wrong with them you could see, like in their eyes, in their faces, or maybe they'd be very fat or very thin and had trouble walking, or had ways of acting that were signs of their strangeness like laughing too much or twitching their shoulders or shrinking away when you saw them. On the school bus, they sat together at the front, near the driver. That way, they'd be protected.

Arvin Huehner, 14.
The name in the newspaper.

We were surprised, the way the name was spelled. You just called them
Hugh-ners
, the family.

Arvin was taller than Michie and his friends but bony-thin, with rounded shoulders and something wrong with his chest: “pigeon-breasted” it was called, he'd been excused from gym classes and swimming. His shoulder blades curved forward as if he'd been stooped over too long and couldn't straighten his back. His neck was at an angle like he was leaning away from himself. His face was pasty-pale and hairless like something skinned. His lips were rubbery and loose. His teeth were crooked and stained and his eyes were weak behind thick lenses and he had a high-pitched whiny voice you'd hear sometimes when he was scolding his younger brother and sisters who rode the bus with us, in mimicry of an adult Arvin would cry, “Bad!
Bad!”

When I saw Arvin Huehner my eyes seemed to sting. Quickly I looked away. The thought came to me
There is someone like myself
.

(Why this was, I don't know! There was nothing of DeeDee Kinzie in Arvin Huehner, or in any of the special ed. kids.)

Michie said, There's the freak.

In a freak, there is something that draws the eye. You resent it, having to look.

My cousin Michie was thirteen, when I was eleven. Michie wasn't tall but solid-built for a boy his age. He had a wedge-shaped face, a heavy jaw. You could see how he would grow into a heavy man like the older Dungarves. But his cheeks were soft and smooth-looking and had a natural flush like sunburn. His eyes were bright and shrewd. Already
in junior high, Michie Dungarve was “sexy” in the eyes of older girls. He hated school and cut classes when he could. He had a posse he called it, guys who hung out with him. When he was younger Michie used to paint stripes on his face like an Indian, red clay to give him a wild scary look. On a leather thong around his neck he wore an animal jawbone and a black turkey vulture feather. In the family Michie was known for his mule-stubbornness. Aged two, his mother said, he'd dig in his heels in the ground, even an adult man could hardly budge him.

I was DeeDee, short for Diane. I was the only girl.

Why it happened I was with them, it had to do with where we lived. Red Rock Road, that ran along Red Rock Creek from Rapids to Route 14 which was a state highway. Red Rock Road was just two miles, not a through road so you'd wind up at the old logging site where the woods look ravaged even now. It's mostly wild woods and fields and a big swampy marsh where only rushes and cattails grow and there's a terrible smelly black muck through late summer. There were six houses on this road and naturally you got to know the kids if they were your age and took the bus to school. The Dungarves lived next-door to us, my mother was all the time over visiting her sister Elsie, or Elsie was at our house, and when he'd been younger, Michie sometimes came with her. There was a path through the field to the Dungarves' house. My cousin Michie was only two years older than me but when you're a child two years is a long span of time and always I wanted Michie to like me.

Showing off for Michie, to get Michie's attention. My aunt Elsie would tease me.

At school, Michie would protect me. Not because he liked me but because I was his cousin. Fuck with DeeDee Kinzie, you'd be fucking with Michie Dungarve.

I hated girls! Mostly, girls hated me.

I wore clothes like the guys. Jeans, zip-up parkas, shirts pulled over shirts. My chest was flat as a guy's chest. My hips were lean as a guy's. Where my legs came together there was a frizz of pale brown hair, it wouldn't be for another two years or so that hairs began to grow in my
armpits and on my muscled legs sharp as tiny thorns. My face was small and oliveish-pale and my eyes deep-set like shiny black glass.

I had a mouth on me, my mother said. She stopped slapping that mouth by the time I was eleven. She'd learned.

 

Water moccasins. Slow-moving and mud-colored in the stagnant swamp water. I'd be wading in the swamp and see the snake-shapes start toward me beneath the surface of the black water, a faint ripple all you'd see, oh God I could not move my legs I could not scream for help the snakes swimming toward me surrounding me in a circle rushing at me to sink their fangs into me…

How many times I dreamt this, it makes me sick to think. At school I asked a teacher why'd God make poison snakes and she answered some bullshit answer like they do and I had to pretend to believe it, like I always did.