The End of Always: A Novel (24 page)

“Edwin,” I said. “What are you doing here?” What
was
he doing here? He turned up whenever something went wrong, like someone with a magnet in him that was drawn to my misfortunes. You will no doubt understand why this unnerved me. I imagined he would envision himself a knight in shining armor. The next thing I knew he would tell me to come live with him in his room under the church. After that he would howl if I told him to stay away. I took a step back.

“He hurt you,” he said.

“Yes.” I felt prickly and irritable but I did not blame Edwin for this. He was as hopeless as I was when it came to the world.

I walked with him back to the shadows under the trees. I held my cup out to him and asked him if he would like some of my coffee. He shook his head.

“You come with me,” he said.

When I did not move, he said it again, only this time in a louder voice and more insistently, as if I was being particularly stupid and needed to be scolded.

I shook my head. “I cannot,” I said.

He frowned and took my hand and pulled me under the trees. “You come with me,” he ordered. He dragged me through the trees and out into the alley behind my house, where early morning sun brightened the wagon tracks. I looked over my shoulder at the bare windows to see if August could see me, if his face would rise in the slick glass. But the rooms were dark, the glass blank.

At the bottom of the alley, a cart stood hitched to a brown horse. Hattie jumped down and tied off the reins and came across the grass. My heart stopped.

“You had better hurry,” she said.

B
ertha and Edwin and Hattie took my house apart in less than an hour. Bertha was in her element. She ordered and packed and made decisions: the cups stacked inside the bowl, the skillet packed separately, the dishrags for packing. Hattie came along behind and followed orders. She wasn’t wearing her braces and when I asked her where they were, she shrugged and said she just couldn’t wear them anymore. And anyway her legs were straight and had always been straight and our father had not seemed to notice when she left the braces in her room. I thought of him and of the way Hattie must have nearly disappeared from his attention, like the phantom presence of a girl from a life he used to live.

She said he was still the same. Still went to the bar at night. Still came home in the morning. Still went to his meetings. But everything around him was different. Hattie took care of the neighbors’ children so now she was able to come and go freely. She was surprised at the delight this raised in her and I knew what she meant, for I had felt the same thing, relishing my walk to work, breathing free air, feeling free. She said that Martha snuck out to see George every chance she got, which had turned out to be more and more often. And in the morning, when he returned from work, my father sat in his chair and drank his whiskey and read the newspaper and when he was done, he went to bed. She said he never even took his clothes off anymore, but just lay down fully dressed. His suit coats were ruined, twisted and wrinkled all the time.

All of this came to me as if news from a distant war. I sat on the edge of the bed and tried to see my father as he was now, a man trying to stay the same as his household turned inside out. Then Edwin and Bertha came for the mattress and I moved to the edge of the step outside, just far enough over to be out of their way, and watched Edwin finish loading the cart. The horse stamped and Edwin laid his hand on the horse’s flank. The horse stilled. He climbed up and gathered the reins. Just before he got to the street, he turned and looked back at me and waved. I waved back. I thought I had never seen anything as peculiar as Edwin driving a cart and waving, as if he was just any boy.

Bertha came across the grass toward me but then snapped her fingers. She had forgotten something. “Be right there,” she called, and climbed the steps to her porch and came back with a sack.

“I made you some lunch,” she said.

I took the sack from her. It was heavy.

“And some dinner,” she said. She laughed. Then she took my hand and squeezed it and gave me a small purse. She told me there was enough money for fare for the interurban and a little more to help me get started. “Hattie will go with you,” she said. “She knows the way.” She sat down next to me and put her arm around me and leaned her head against mine. She smelled of lemons, of something green, a faint hint of wild mint. I wanted to sink into her and never leave. But she propped me up and told me that I must not worry. Everything had been taken care of and she would see me when it was all over. “And I can’t wait to meet your baby,” she said. She smiled and stroked my hair back from my face.

We sat in front in seats right behind the driver. An old woman with a wooden leg sat across the aisle from us and behind her a younger woman with a child in her lap. Every so often, the women leaned their heads together.

We rode past the shanties at the edge of town and then the railroad yard, where bereft men in dirty white shirts and torn canvas trousers stood over a pit of smoldering coal.
There are your workers
, I thought. My father’s heroes, passing their bottles around. Filthy and wild-looking men who stood with their legs spread wide, just as men will when they think they own the world. The oily smoke from their coal fire made a faint pall over the blue sky, and I breathed it in as we passed, the smell I had known my whole life.

After that, we rode below the limestone bluffs where I had climbed to the top of the world with August. I squinted and searched for our trail but saw nothing but dark trees and gray stone. We crossed the fields and then we passed over a flat plain, where farmland spread out and white birds rose from the green wheat. This bountiful land. The purple mountains’ majesty. All of it America and all of it apart from me, save for the way the country extracted its toll, which came in the form of all of these girls, these dead women, used and discarded, like things with no purchase save as they served to advance the fortunes of men. I never imagined I would meet a boy like August, and as I rode the train away from Waukesha toward Milwaukee, I told myself that I would carry the thought of him like a bone I had found on the forest floor, a beloved bone with a sharpened point. If I lost my nerve, I could touch that point. I could remember the way blood tasted on my tongue. I could stab myself and force myself not to forget.

I listened to the clacking of the wheels on the tracks and felt hypnotized by the clatter. Someone had opened the window next to our seats and hot air poured in. My baby sister rested her head against my shoulder. I closed my eyes. I waited for all of it to pass away.

I followed Hattie from the corner to a red wooden door where she raised her fist and knocked. Next door, a tavern with grimy windows painted black. I could hear the scratchy sounds of a phonograph and I thought of its horn in the shape of an upended bell.

We waited until a bolt turned and the lock slid back and the door opened. My uncle Carl stood in the doorway. I had not seen him since the day we stood with the earth open and my mother’s box below, when grave diggers loitered like vultures, their pickaxes dirty from someone else’s funeral. Now I wanted to fall against him and hold on to his belt just the way I did when I was a little girl and he could pull me up with one hand. I could not imagine how Bertha had found him. I could not imagine that he would want me.

He wore a pair of charcoal gray twill trousers and a clean white shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his forearms. A white band of skin appeared over his collar as if his hair had been cut just minutes before.

“Come,” he said. “It is up here,” He held the door open. I let myself pass under his arm.

We climbed the stairs. Two dusty windows faced the street. Two battered ladder-back chairs stood in the middle of the room. Someone had bolted a white sink to one of the walls. A small stove was piped to another. The air dry and the ceiling slatted wood and beams, as if this had been an attic before it became the perfect place to hide me.

He put his hand on the small of my back and propelled me to one of the chairs. “Sit down,” he said.

I turned. “Where is Hattie?”

“She will wait for Edwin,” he said. “He will bring the cart.” He dug into his pants pocket and pulled out a felt oval embroidered with orange and yellow flowers, a key tied to the oval with a piece of red twine. “This belonged to your grandmother,” he said. “She gave it to Elise. Elise gave it to me. Now it is yours.”

I turned the key in my fingers. I felt hollow as a bowl. My world had run out of me when August hit me and disappeared into a darkness that was as familiar as my own shadow. No flower in the world could fix that.

“Thank you,” I said.

Carl gestured at the bare walls. “I keep this place for myself,” he said. “I come here when I need a rest. Sometimes you just have to call it a day.” He smiled at me. “Usually I have some things here. But when I heard that you were in need, I took them out. More room for you that way.”

In my mother’s story, the girl disappeared and no one found her again. She ran into the earth and sank below the mountain as if she had become a silver stream whose passage could only be known by the thready trail she left behind in the dirt. A small stream here, a tiny rivulet there. But water could also carve stone. It could carve wood. I had heard that it had carved great canyons out west, where the earth disappeared for a mile before you came to the thin river running through rock at the bottom.

Carl sat heavily in the chair next to mine. He picked up my hand and held it. “Marie,” he said. “This is a very sad business. I am very sorry to see you this way.”

I looked at his hand holding my hand in my lap. Water came to my eyes.

“Did you not see this coming?” he asked in a very quiet voice. The way you would speak to a scared child, a nervous horse, a lunatic. Down below, the rumbling of carts and then a car horn and then a shadow fell in a crooked rhombus across the wall.

“No,” he said, after a moment. “I guess not.”

Outside, a grinding hum rose and fell away and rose again. I wondered what it might be: a machine shop, a factory, an airplane. I had never seen an airplane but I had heard that they came to fairs sometimes and for a quarter the pilot would take you up for a ride. I tried to imagine myself in the air, lifted like something that has lost all of its earthly weight. But I was no longer sure I would be able to fly without taking a hard fall.

“He is a good man,” I said softly, but I did not sound convincing, not even to myself.

“Who?”

“August.”

“Ah,” he said. “August. Such a good man that he beats his wife to a pulp.”

A train whistle from far off but hurtling toward us as if no city stood in its way.

“Martha said it was my fault,” I said. I dabbed at my eyes.

“Your sister does not see straight sometimes.”

“He loves me.”

He gave a bitter laugh. “I can see that,” he said.

I looked at the sunlight on the window glass and listened to the city, which hummed below everything around us.

The silence of unspoken things settled around us. Finally I stood and walked to the window. Down below, Edwin and Hattie unloaded my belongings, the bed frame around whose rails I had curled my fingers when August came to me, the mattress where we had spent our nights, our days, our every waking moment, except when he had raised his hand.

Hattie lifted a sack of groceries from the wagon box. I could see the apples next to the tins.

“Do these open?” I asked. I touched the window latch.

“I think so, yes,” Carl said. “Well, I guess we will have to see.”

A
t six o’clock on the seventh day, I heard the door below open and close and then the sound of the bolt as it slid back into place. Carl’s footsteps on the stairs. He knocked on my door and then came into the room and set a canvas sack on the table.

“You look better,” he said. “Do you want to get up?”

I did. I felt better and I wanted him to see that I was grateful for everything that he had done for me. That he was still doing for me, day by day. My uncle, whom I had known all my life, could make me shy. He seemed to me to be a stranger but, of course, in a way he was. I had only seen him when my mother was there. When Martha was there. When my father was there, lecturing Carl on his prospects and his stolen shoes.

Carl set potatoes to boil on the stove. When these were done, he drained them in the sink and then set a skillet laid out with slices of bacon over the flame. “You must be feeling better,” he said. “Your face looks better. And your ribs?”

“They still hurt,” I said. My ribs ached, but the pain that felt as if someone meant to fillet me into strips was dulled now. I really only felt it when I took a deep breath.

“Still?” He glanced at me.

“Not as much.”

“All right then,” he said. “This rest is doing you good.” He dumped the potatoes into a bowl and set the bowl on the table before me. “It is not much,” he said.

“It’s fine,” I said.

“This will be ready in a minute,” he said. He turned to the cookstove and flipped the bacon with a fork.

We ate in silence.

“Carl,” I said finally. “Did he come back?”

“Who?”

“August,” I said softly. I thought of the grass bending under his foot. The darkened rooms. Everything gone. Me gone. “Did he come back to our house?”

“Sure,” Carl said. “Yes.” He used the back of his fork to flatten his potatoes. “What else would he do? It is the end of his day. He does not expect anything. Of course he came back.”

I waited. I thought of the way August had howled outside of Bertha’s house, and I thought of the way his hand felt, traveling slowly and surely up the inside of my thigh, the smell of him when I burrowed my nose into his neck.

Carl put his fork down. “He was not a happy man, I can tell you that,” he said. “Your father is also not a happy man.” He picked up his fork and then set it down again. “He wants to know where you are. He wants to know what he will have to do to make you go back. He says you have made him break his word. He says you have made a liar out of him. He says you are to go back now. And I can tell you one thing for sure. He does not care at what cost. He feels that August has paid and you have run off for no good reason.”

“My father,” I said, and stopped.

“He has one way of looking at this, Marie,” Carl replied. He stabbed the air with his fork and bits of potato fell on the table. “He will never look at it differently.” I shrank away a little. I knew Carl was right about my father. He would only ever see things one way and that way was not my way. But Carl thought I disagreed with him.

“I can see that you do not believe me,” he said, his fork still in the air between us. “But you can count on this. He is a man very set in his ways. He will always think exactly as he thinks right now. Do you want to argue with him? I think not.” He stood. “I will make us some coffee. That will perk you up.”

When we were finished, I offered to do the dishes but he held his hand up. “You are resting,” he said. “That is your only job.” He went to the sink and looked at me over his shoulder. “I brought a surprise for you.” He reached into his canvas bag and pulled out a bundle wrapped in waxed paper. Inside the bundle there were two slices of cake. “My boss’s wife,” he said. “She heard what happened.”

“You told her?”

He shook his head. “Not me,” he said. “But she knew.”

I thought of all the women whispering around Waukesha, heads bent together, talking about me. I imagined that Inge and Ella and Johanna had discussed and debated the merits of my choices for days. If they thought I was bad before, they must think I was even worse now. What woman would run away from her husband? I could already hear the story that Inge would tell the new girl about me.

Carl cleared the plates and forks and wiped the table. He brought two clean plates and two clean forks and set the slices of cake in their nest of waxed paper in the middle of the table. He poured the coffee. I looked at the cake, at its soft white icing.

“Here,” he said. “Come on now. Have some cake. It will sweeten that temper of yours.”

I smiled then and sat back and let him deliver a slice of cake to my plate.

“See?” he said. “It is working already.”

I watched him eat, the crumbs that caught in his mustache, the way he licked icing off his thumb. When we were through, we sat in silence. The lamp by the bed buzzed briefly and went quiet. Outside, night fell. A faint breeze came in through the open window. I could hear the city in its relentless murmurings and whispers, the sound of the new age all around us, the machinery and the engines of progress and the clocks ticking us toward the future even as businesses and banks failed and tramps cast out from the mines and mills and lumber camps roamed the woods. I knew how I had come to this place but I had no idea what I was doing here. I only knew that there was no going back.

Carl patted his breast pocket, searching for his tobacco pouch, his expression mild and thoughtful.

“Why are you helping me?” I said abruptly, and as soon as I said the words, I knew I had been trying to find the courage to ask ever since the day I moved in.

He inclined toward me very gently and then he reached over and laid his palm on my hand. “Because we are family,” he said. “Because your mother was my sister. Because not everyone in this world is bad. Although I do not see how you could know that.”

I thought of my father, who was out there somewhere, beyond the coal smoke and the long train tracks, the rocketing cars of the interurban and the dark woods. I began to weep.

“No,” Carl said. “Now look. You are safe here. Why do you cry?”

I shook my head.

“You can tell me,” he said. But I could not. All I could do was listen to the sound of heavy wheels down in the street. The strike of a church tower’s clock, somewhere out of view.

Carl wrapped the last of the cake. A long time passed. Finally he asked me again. He spoke softly, and kept his face turned away from me. I breathed in and then out and then in again. My father’s house stood in another town and yet it was still with me. August did not know where I was and yet he was here by my side, his tender face, his crushing fist.

I put my face in my hands and sobbed. “I am sorry,” I cried. “I am sorry. I am sorry.”

“For what?” he said.

“It is all my fault,” I sobbed. I jammed the heels of my hands into my eyes. The world an explosion of color.

“Why is that?” said Carl.

I could not look at him.

“You do not think the fault belongs elsewhere?” he said.

I gulped air but all of my breath disappeared. “I am bad,” I sobbed. Then I lay my cheek on the table and cried harder.

He stood and came to me and knelt down and wrapped his arms around me. I felt wobbly and unstrung, as if I had said aloud the worst truth in the world and now found myself on ground so unknown and unsteady that it could at any moment upend and turn me out and flatten me.

“You are not bad,” he murmured. “Bad things have happened. The stories they tell about you are bad. But stories are only stories. Things are only things. None of that makes you bad.”

I cried for a long time and he held me. The smell of coal smoke coming through the window. Behind that, the smell of the lake, watery and wild. The night outside swimming with stars, if only I cared to see.

When I was finally empty, I sat up. He stood and reached into his pocket for a handkerchief and gave it to me. He told me that it would be better now and I should wipe my face.

“It is so easy for us to forget that you are still a child,” he said. I opened my mouth and he held up one hand. “I know,” he said. “I know. You are a married woman. You have been out to work. But you are still very young and I think you have found the world to be a different place than you imagined. As we all do. And this always comes as a shock to us but the shock is worst when we are young.” He tapped his fingers against the tabletop. “I thought your beginnings might have given you greater protection from this,” he said. “I thought you might already have seen enough so that things would be clear. But that is not the case. Perhaps those beginnings in fact made it possible for all of this to happen. Perhaps the things you saw made you blind.” He studied me gravely. “You are healing. You are lucky. You are alive. Your face may not show any scars.” He walked over to the window and looked out at the street. “It is a pretty night,” he said. “You can see the lake from here. There is a steamboat out on the water.”

I did not rise. I sat at the table with my sticky face in my hands.

“Do you know why I came to this country?” he said, turning back to me.

“Because my mother and father were here.” My voice broken and bare.

“Well,” he said. “Yes. Of course. That is what you would know. You know where we come from and you know what things were like there,” he said. He looked at me. “No? You do not?”

“My mother told us stories about Rügen,” I said.

“What kind of stories?”

“About bells in the ocean and a golden seagull,” I said. “Dwarves.” I broke off.

He smiled. “Elise loved those stories. She had a great feeling of being connected to a long-ago world. Some people get over the hard times in their lives by looking ahead. Your mother was not one of them. She looked behind her to a place she had never herself stood. A time of giants and magicians and talking animals and men roaming the countryside under the spell of a curse. Which could always be broken.” He came back to sit at the table.

“She was not wrong,” he said. “For a very long time, the land had been a land of haves and have-nots. There were very rich men who owned castles and then there was everyone else. They worked for the rich men in the fields and on the roads. No better than peasants. Not even as good as peasants, if you want to get right down to it. Nearly everyone lived in mud huts with thatched roofs. The water came in and the mud cracked and the floors were dirt or split wood and they cracked, too. You would have children and the children would sicken and die. Your mother lost her first child just that way. A boy. I remember him. He had a narrow face and sunken eyes and he never looked right. His ears were low on the sides of his head. And then they put him in the ground three months later. She was afraid after that, but then Martha was born and Martha was different and she lived. Just like that. One is here and one is not. Elise said there was no explanation, but in fact the explanation was that no one had enough food and the work was hard.

“Everywhere you went was the mark of the rich men. They lived to keep everyone else down. This is why socialism is so popular in our towns here. The people remember what it means to live in a world where there are those with everything and those with nothing. They ask very reasonable questions, if you ask me. Why is there not enough to go around? Why can’t we share? Why is it that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? But they do not understand that things work differently here. Here a man stands on his own two feet and whatever he has is what he has gotten for himself. So no matter what they think, socialism will never catch on in America. If you are ground down here, it is because you refuse to rise. Of course there are things that conspire against you, and some people have more advantages than others. I do not mean to exclude these things from the picture. But in the end, you do not have centuries of ownership by an aristocracy that believes you are more like a beast in the mud than a man, that believes you have no purpose other than to make the prince rich. Here you are your own man.” He patted his pockets and then stood up and went to a hook by the door, where he had hung his coat. He went through the pockets until he found a tan cowhide pouch and his pipe and his matches. He stood by the window and tamped tobacco into the bowl of the pipe and then lit the pipe and drew a few breaths. Blue smoke wavered in a spiral around his head.

“The same does not hold true for women,” he said. He turned to face me. “That is unfortunate but true. A woman can never rise. She will always serve two masters. And there is nothing she can do about that. She can join the socialist party and I see them at the meetings but she cannot vote and she cannot hold her own belongings as her own.” He pulled smoke between his teeth and then exhaled.

“My mother and father—your grandmother and grandfather—had a house just outside of Garz,” he said. “This was near the southeastern coast of the island. It was an old market town. Our father was a farmer. We were luckier than most because we had a long-term lease on the land. We grew fruit. Long lines of apple trees in the orchards. Grapes growing on wooden frames that we built ourselves. This island is in the north so this fruit had to be tough. Like us,” he said, and smiled. He pulled deeply on his pipe and exhaled. “The house was a little bit luxurious because it had two rooms and it had a lean-to in the back for cooking. My mother kept chickens. The foxes got into them but she always had chickens. Your mother slept on a pallet at one end of the main living room and I slept on a pallet on the other end. In between, all the brothers and sisters. Our parents kept the other room for themselves and they kept some animals in there from time to time, too. Rabbits. Other things they were raising to sell. Once a small pig but he did not stay small long.

“This life was very hard. The apples were hard and green and sour. The grapes failed. The animals were filthy. My mother was very superstitious and kept a place in the main room where she prayed all of the time to some old god who came before Christ and was just as useful to her as I imagine Christ is to those who believe he will make their lives better.”

He set his pipe down on the table and leaned it against his saucer. “And there were lots of children of course. This is the way, is it not? They say we have them to work the farms. They say we have them because we do not know better. They say we have them because we are no better than animals. Well. I cannot tell you about any of those things. You are free to make up your own mind. But there were lots of children. And some lived and some did not. I do remember that my father took a stick to my mother and because of that, the last baby came too early. My father walked the hill line with that burlap bundle under his arm and a spade over his shoulder. He buried the bundle in the orchard. He told me once that he would have thrown it down the well but he was afraid it would contaminate the water.