Sweeter Life (4 page)

“Sor-ry,” he called out as he stepped inside. “I forgot.”

His aunt and sister were in the living room. They had the look of two people who had run out of things to say years ago. Isabel clutched a handful of red licorice that she flicked into her palm like a cat-o’-nine-tails. She was trying to quit smoking again, but the ashtray beside her held three butts, with lipstick halos around the filters.

“Where’s Clarence?” he asked.

His aunt rubbed her eyes. It was past her bedtime. “Where he’s supposed to be this hour of night. We didn’t hear you come up the drive he was snoring so loud.”

“Sorry about dinner, Iz.”

“It’s all right. We’ll talk some other time. Ruby here thinks you need to get something off your chest.”

Cyrus took a deep breath and decided to plunge right in. He sat on the couch beside his aunt and patted her leg. “That’s the thing,” he said. “I figured it all out tonight.” He looked from one woman to the other. “I’m quitting school.”

Ruby had always prided herself on knowing Cyrus’s mind. Not that he’d ever been talkative. When he first came to live with them, he didn’t say a word for almost three months, his jaws clenched so tightly she could hear him grinding his teeth at night. And even now, years later, she had to coax from him the tiniest details of his school day. So it wasn’t his words that had helped her to understand, but his face. He had always seemed to her a still pool, with everything visible. This announcement, however, had caught her completely by surprise.

“That’s impossible,” she said. “Quit? It’s only three months to graduation. That makes no sense at all.”

“But it does, don’t you see? I don’t need school.”

Ruby looked to Isabel for help, and Izzy shook her licorice at him and said, “Look, weirdo, even if you were thinking of working the farm here, Gerry was saying just the other day how with the new machinery and the pricing and the futures market, you’re gonna need a college education just to grow soybeans. It’s the way of the world.”

Cyrus looked at her as though she had started speaking in tongues. “Farming? What are you talking about? Doesn’t anyone here know anything about me?”

At that point, Clarence came downstairs in his striped flannel pyjamas and housecoat, his hair tousled. Calm as a sleepwalker, he sat in his favourite armchair and said, “Maybe you need to tell us, boy. Maybe when you spit it out we’ll all know more about you.”

Cyrus had hoped to avoid a scene like this. He looked to Izzy for help. All his life she’d been his ally. She’d taught him to sing rounds when they did the dishes. She’d taught him to dance and, a few years ago out in the orchard, had told him what girls liked and didn’t like. But this was one time when she was no use to him, her expression a mix of pity and rebuke, as though he’d been caught stealing.

Taking a deep breath, he looked Clarence in the eye and said, “I was telling Ruby that, you know, I think it’s time I quit school.”

Clarence nodded. “I thought that’s what I heard you say. Only I couldn’t believe my ears. It sounded too much like craziness, and you never struck me as crazy.”

“Well, that’s the thing, I’m not crazy. The way I look at it, in terms of my life, you know, it makes perfect sense.”

“Your life. Goddammit, Cyrus, you’d be throwing away your life. Can’t you see that? Get your head out of the clouds and look around.”

Ruby gave her husband a warning look. “What your uncle is trying to say, sweetheart, is that it doesn’t make sense to us that you’d throw away all your hard work when it’s just a matter of a few more months. Then with the summer off, maybe things will seem a little clearer.”

“Everything is perfectly clear right now,” Cyrus said, his voice taking on an edge of irritation. “I know exactly what I want to do, so I might as well get started.”

Clarence closed his eyes and let his chin rest on his breastbone as though he were fast asleep again. He wondered, not for the first time, why raising kids was so much harder than farming. Thirty years he’d wrestled with the Fates—floods and droughts, good markets and bad. He’d learned that each new season brought a fresh chance. With Cyrus, though, he just couldn’t separate one year from the next, one incident from another. Every victory came tangled in a mess of defeats, every bit of bad news came trailing a long history of grief and disappointment.

“Get started on what,” he said at last, “a life as a high school dropout? Because let me tell you one thing, young man, there are times when it’s not about what you want, or your life, or any such thing. It’s about family and promises and how sometimes you do what you don’t want, for the sake of others. I have to tell you straight out here, Cyrus, I don’t think I can let you make such a foolish mistake. Ruby and I, maybe we haven’t been all you deserve, but we have fed you and clothed you, done everything we could for you. Now you can do this one little thing for us and stay put.”

“You don’t understand.”

“No,
you
don’t understand. Let me tell you a little story, all right? About your father. When he first moved out on the farm there with his folks, people in town called him a marsh rat. You understand? A dirty marsh rat. They lived in that chicken shack out there, with nothing but a pot to piss in, while he helped your grandfather try to build something.”

Cyrus rolled his eyes. “What is this, history class?”

Immediately, Clarence jumped to his feet, pointing his finger at Cyrus’s face. He had never been one to raise his voice, believing it the sign of an uneducated man. Rather, his words became hushed and precise. “You listen to me, boy. You show some respect. That father of yours, I guess he was just about the best friend I ever had, and when he and your mother died, I made myself a promise, you hear, that no one would
ever
call him or anyone in his family a marsh rat again. You understand? If he was here today, by George, he’d peel a strip off your back something fierce, talking nonsense like that. So let me just make this as plain as I can. There will be no high school dropouts in this house.”

Cyrus looked at Ruby, at Isabel, and found no support there. Then,
swallowing hard, he said, “Whatever you say, Clarence. Time to go, anyway.” And with that, Cyrus walked out the door and down the road.

Ten minutes later, Isabel passed him in her dinged Plymouth Belvedere. Freddie, she called it, the first thing she’d bought when she moved out on her own nine years ago. Gerry had offered to buy her a nicer car after they got married, but she wasn’t interested. She loved that car. She’d picked it out herself, haggled her own price and slapped down her own cash. It was a symbol of her passage into being an adult, a talisman for her independence. And though she had a better car now for her work, she still preferred the Plymouth for certain occasions.

A hundred yards down the road she pulled over to wait for Cyrus to catch up. As he approached, she rolled down the window and said, “Go home, dummy. This is no good for anyone.”

He leaned both arms on the roof of the car and looked down at her. “What do you know about anything, Iz? You’re as bad as they are. You think you know what’s good for me?”

Those were hurtful words, and she waited a moment before she said, “I’m your sister. I know more than you think. And I certainly know what this would do to Ruby and Clarence, your leaving this way. I’m pretty sure you know, too.” When he didn’t respond, she was encouraged. She put the car in gear and said, “Get in. I’ll take you back.”

Instead he reared away from her and shook his head. “Leave me alone. This is between me and me and no one else.”

“Really. How convenient. If you believe that, you’re even more of a jerk than I thought you were.”

He turned away from her then and continued walking down the road. In response she gunned the engine and sped past, peppering him with loose stone. The damage was done, though. She had planted the seeds of guilt, and he could already feel them swelling inside.

At the Bailey bridge, he hoisted himself onto one of the supports and gazed down at the sluggish flow of Spring Creek. Hank used to bring him here, in the year after Burwash but before Portland. Cyrus would have been about six or seven, Hank about seventeen and looking like a young god. The two of them would shuffle down the bank and under the bridge. Hank called
it their clubhouse. He’d take a few drinks from his secret flask, chainsmoking Black Cats all the while, and let Cyrus inspect his tattoos. Mostly they just sat out of the sun and wove their words into the complicated rhythms of the creek. “Kid,” Hank said several times a day, “life is a peach.”

Six months later Hank would be gone for good. He crossed his own dark bridge and left the rest of them behind to untangle the guilt and recrimination. That, of course, was what Isabel had been talking about—Hank, old heartaches—and the longer Cyrus sat there, the more he felt his conviction ebbing. Ruby and Clarence had been good to him, helping to turn a disaster into something more or less bearable. He hoped they knew that, hoped they understood how much he appreciated all they’d done.

Just then a car approached from the direction of the marsh. From the corner of his eye he could tell it was a big black number, a Caddy, perhaps. He wasn’t sure. Unlike other boys his age, he didn’t know about cars. He couldn’t, from a tail light or grille, tell you the make and model.

When the car stopped behind him, Cyrus didn’t bother to turn around. He heard the door open, the deep murmur of the radio like something from the womb. Then a man cleared his throat and said, “I hope you are not contemplating anything so rash as jumping. I am afraid I am not the ablest of swimmers.”

It was a soft voice, an accent Cyrus couldn’t place, though it seemed faintly regal. He turned around to find a man wearing a dark suit and V-necked sweater. He had brown hair that curled down to his shoulders, and hooded eyes that seemed to glisten in the dark. A diamond sparkled on his pinky.

ISABEL DROVE HOME
to an empty house and sat in the darkness of the living room, smoking cigarettes and thinking about Ruby and Clarence and her damned kid brother. Even at the best of times a chat with her aunt and uncle could cause her a sleepless night, stirring up painful memories of departed loved ones; and sometimes she came away from her visits with Ruby feeling ungenerous and spiteful. It was sour grapes, of course, for a perfectly decent woman who had done no wrong in her life, a childless woman who, with the purest of intentions, had swooped down in the
midst of a great tragedy and snatched Isabel and Cyrus to her bosom.

At the time, Isabel was just finishing high school and was so bitter about her parents’ deaths that she resisted Ruby’s attempts to mother her, turning a cold shoulder to the hugs and kisses, the evenings with the church choir. She said hurtful things, did hurtful things and ran off a few months later, leaving her little brother with the Mitchells to somehow pick his way through the wreckage on his own. She married Gerry then and moved out to his farm, built a new life. And although she now had reason to think the future would be a sunnier place—and most of the time felt fine, like a woman in her prime—some nights she sat in the dark and pondered the loss, the guilt, the selfishness and, yes, her resentment of Ruby, who for nearly a decade had sifted the meaning of her life from the ashes of another.

When Gerry came home about midnight, Isabel had settled into one of her moods. He knew well enough the signs of her unhappiness and knew he had caused his share of it. So, without a word, he put out her cigarette and guided her upstairs to the bedroom. Without removing her clothes, he tucked her into bed and carefully crawled in beside her.

There were any number of things he might have been tempted to do just then. He might have pulled her into his arms and crooned softly under his breath, Marty Robbins or Merle Haggard or George Jones, the way he used to when they were first dating. He might even have made love to her, mussing her hair and pawing her flesh like he meant to obliterate the person she was and refashion a newer, happier model. But the only time Gerry ever sang anymore was on the tractor, where no one could hear him. And, really, the sexual act—he was sure that even so much as a kiss would be regarded as selfish and insensitive. So he tiptoed down the single safe path left to him. He began to talk about their life together, their plans for the future.

“Reg Foster was at it again tonight,” he said, his voice lazy with drink. “Wants me to come in and work up figures for those new barns I was telling you about.”

He waited for her to respond. He wanted this to be a conversation, but sarcasm was all she had to offer. “My, my,” she said. “Imagine Reg Foster slumming it at the Wilbury Hotel.”

She could hear the scratch and rasp of whiskers as he dragged his hand across his face. When he spoke this time his voice was clearer and more businesslike. “I was at the Gaslight Room. Too many young punks these days at the Wilbury. Anyway, Reg says we’re crazy if we don’t upgrade now while the rates are low. We could double our production, he figures, and be paid off in seven years. Otherwise we’ll fall so far behind we’ll never catch up. Everybody’s doing it—Fred, Marty, Chet, all in hock up to their eyeballs. Any other time I wouldn’t give it another thought. You know how I feel about debt. But these new feeders and such are awful slick …”

She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. “I thought you said that kind of thing was too risky. I’ve heard you say it a hundred times.”

“I know what I said, but I’m thinking maybe this is different. Maybe there’s times you can play it too safe, when you have to stretch a little for the things you want.”

She closed her eyes and could see Reg leaning across his desk to pat Gerry’s hand, much as Reg had patted hers all those many years ago. She’d gone to his dark panelled office with Clarence and Ruby and listened as he explained the sorry details of her parents’ estate. Two weeks later the bank took possession of the farm.

It was ancient history, but it still hurt. She hugged her knees to her chest and said, “If there’s one thing we don’t need right now, Gerry, it’s new pig barns. That’s not going to help a single goddamn thing.”