The Fall of Alice K. (21 page)

Alice regretted that she wasn't wearing her ankle-high work shoes
instead of her old tennies, but she wasn't going to stand by and watch. She flung a leg over the fence and spun into the pen. As she landed, the cool moisture of the manure moved up her ankles. The sensation shot new energy into her legs, and she gave a full roundhouse kick to the chewer's grimy jowl. “Go! Go!” she yelled. She spun around again, manure flying through the air, and smacked the bottom of her tennie against the chewer's ribs. “Go!” she yelled, and kicked it hard. And kicked it again! The chewer skidded and scrambled on the slimy grates and stumbled away in the direction of the other hogs.

Alice looked down at her reward. She had saved the pig's life, but he was still a very pathetic animal. He was a runt and weighed no more than seventy pounds. Why hadn't her father removed this helpless animal from this pen? He had gone out into the fields and harvested the damaged corn, even though its silage was practically useless. This was a breathing, living thing and deserved to survive like everything and everyone else. She was determined to get this pig over the fence, safely away from the chewers, but she didn't have any gloves. She wasn't afraid of getting pig manure on her hands, but she wasn't sure she could get a grip on the slimy legs. She looked toward the house and thought she might be able to run to the porch and grab a pair of gloves, but she was not about to leave now and give the cannibals a second chance. The sickly pig's flank was bleeding, a red stain working through the grime. If the cannibals smelled blood, they'd finish the job before she got back.

Thinking about doing something like what she was about to do was always worse than actually doing it. She stooped down and slid her hands through the manure and under the bony rib cage. When she lifted, the animal squirmed and kicked. She wasn't going to turn back. She went down in the manure and felt the knobby grate on her knees. She pulled the kicking pig toward her stomach. She stood up, holding him like a squirming child in her arms. She leaned over the fence and placed him on the ground outside the pen. The pig stopped his kicking and squirming. He didn't try to get up. He lay motionless but safe, then stared up at her with eyes that were all too human, but if there was gratitude in his eyes, she couldn't detect it.

The chewer was watching. It acted as if it could care less about what
Alice had done. If it could talk, it would have said, “Don't you have anything better to do?”

A particle of manure had lodged in Alice's left nostril. She couldn't even smell it—only detect its cool presence. A gentle northwest breeze brushed Alice's cheek, and it was if she were suddenly nowhere and everywhere at once, and the moment—if it was a moment because time stood still—was a moment of peaceful neutrality when nothing mattered but everything was beautiful or, at least, not harmful. She could have been anywhere, suspended and free of time and space, free of pride or shame, free of fear or ambition. She could, in her suspended state, see herself covered with hogyard filth, but she could not smell the stench, and the dung-colored slime that covered everything that met her eye was not ugly. She was totally part of it all, one with it, and felt no urge to judge or reject any of it. Dreamily, her eyes moved to the chewer that had slashed the flank of the sick pig she had saved. The chewer looked neither content nor aggressive but stood in its dung-covered being in a state of peaceful indifference. We really are all in this together, she thought as she stood in her stunned state of acceptance.

A burning sensation stung her left nostril. She put the back of her hand to her right nostril and blew the lodged particle of hog manure from her left. With her shoulder she wiped hog manure from her right eyebrow. Her sweatshirt and jeans were so filthy that she didn't bother with them. She bent down and washed her hands in the hog water trough.

She walked to the hydrant and attached the hose to wash off the pig. She sprayed at the grime until the pig's white bristles and pink flesh came back into view. She sprayed that white pig until it was spotless. She looked at what she had done and felt clean. This is what it meant to care for something or someone other than herself.

The Taurus with her parents and Aldah drove onto the yard. Aldah hopped out of the backseat. Again she gave no indication of being sick. Aldah and her mother disappeared into the house, but her father saw Alice and walked across the yard.

He looked at her, then at the pig. “I don't think that one was worth it,” he said.

Alice stared at him. “What
is
worth it?” she said.

Alice walked away.

“You'd better get cleaned up,” her father said.

“After I feed the cattle,” said Alice and glowered at him the way he could glower at her.

Alice did go to feed the cattle, and she walked out among them where they were feeding in their long rows. She squeezed between the steers, rubbing her body against their hairy ribs. She imagined a car wash where the large rotating brushes washed the grime from the sides of a vehicle. The steers' hairy ribs were her brushes and she rolled her body past them. If she rubbed hard enough the hog manure smell would be removed, and, at worst, be replaced by the mild smell of dusty steer hair. She scooped up handfuls of useless silage, sniffed it, and rubbed it against herself.

When she got to the house, she showered until her father shouted, “That had better be cold water you're using!”

How were you going to bathe your chinchillas? she thought.

When she came into the kitchen for supper, she saw everyone's nostrils respond when they looked at her.

“You didn't get it all off,” said her mother and couldn't repress an expression of satisfaction.

“It'll wear off,” she said and sat down.

Whatever odor she was emitting turned everyone's stomachs. The overcooked hotdish her mother had in the oven turned her stomach—so Alice guessed they were even.

“I got new glasses,” said Aldah.

So she had, thicker ones that made her eyes look larger. Constipation one day and new glasses the next.

“I need to drink more water,” said Aldah.

“I know,” said Alice. “We could all use more water.”

Miss Den Harmsel had talked about symbols in Shakespeare's plays. It was strange to hear talk about blood as a symbol of guilt in
Macbeth
and then to come home and see an innocent runt pig exuding blood from the teeth of an animal that had no control over its own impulses. Blood stains equaled the stain of guilt? What did the manure stains that infused her body say about her?

Actually, Alice thought, if anyone wanted to have symbols for what was happening in her family, hog manure stench combined with
constipation and magnified perception would have been good candidates. Symbols for what, she wasn't sure.

Alice knew Nickson would never be able to understand that hogyard scene, but she liked the thought of his seeing her now. If he actually thought he wasn't good enough for her, he might change his mind at the sight and stench of her. He was ashamed for cursing at some jerks? If he could have seen her in the hogyard, she could match his feelings of shame and one-up him big-time. Her mother seemed to detect the satisfying fantasy on Alice's face and stared at her with eyes that were more malevolent than any chewer's. Her father sighed a few times as they nibbled at their food. He read from Psalm 118 before his closing prayer, and stopped with verse 24: “This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.”

22

The next day the hog manure smell still oozed from Alice's body when Lydia sniffed like a beagle in her direction. “There's something rotten in the state of Denmark,” she said. Wasn't that from
Hamlet
? Lydia had been reading ahead but so had Alice.

“You could better have said, ‘Out out, damned spot.' I had the ultimate farm girl experience yesterday. The ultimate. I'll tell you about it if you think you have the stomach for it.”

“No thanks,” said Lydia. “I already have the nose for it.”

What a topsy-turvy world. Alice's heart—what she wanted to trust as the grand informer of all things good in the world, her guiding light, her connection to God—where was it now as the stink of her body overwhelmed everything beautiful? Whatever moment of freedom she had felt when she stood in the heart of the stench, being freed from it by being one with it, was gone. What was that anyhow, that strange moment when the worst part of farm life had swallowed her so totally that all fear and disgust of what was really happening was gone? So strange. That feeling must have been what Jonah felt when he was in the belly of the whale. That whale of the hoglot had spewed her back out into the real world but lingered as a malevolent odor that stood between her and her friend.

Lydia didn't draw away. She actually stepped closer.

“Wear this,” she said. “Build a little buffer zone.”

Lydia's suede coat had come below the knee on Lydia but was an inch above the knee on Alice. “Wear it,” said Lydia. “I was going to get it cleaned anyhow.”

Alice didn't like to build up a debt to Lydia, but she put on the coat. She'd build another buffer zone by faking a sneeze anytime somebody
got close. Meeting Nickson at noon in Miss Den Harmsel's class would be the biggest challenge. She got through her morning classes, though a few of the town girls turned toward her and wore the kind of smirk that showed they relished the fact that even though Alice did well in school she could still smell like a farm hick. No doubt about it: the smell was seeping through the coat. Alice saw it on their faces—that odd combination of disgust and smugness. Those spoiled brats whose cheap drugstore products made them smell like raspberry Kool-Aid.

When Alice met Nickson in Miss Den Harmsel's room, he trapped the smell in midsniff and didn't inhale any further.

“Something terrible happened,” Alice blurted out. “I feel terrible. I stink. Don't get close to me. I smell like hog crap.”

Nickson squinted, as if trying to understand a puzzling mystery, and Alice wasn't sure if the mystery was for him a rational problem or a sensory one. He grinned, not so much playfully as forgivingly. “It's not so bad,” he said.

For Alice, this was one of those moments when the best possible thing could come from the worst possible situation. His playful smile. The bright spark in his eyes. She wanted to leap up and hug him, but that would be the very kind of impulse that could bring his fear back and push him away.

“I know it's bad,” said Alice. “Lydia told me it's bad. The looks on people's faces tell me it's bad. I would have gone home sick but. . . .” She stopped herself, and then she said, “But I wanted to see you.”

Those final words were not ones that Alice had planned. Her bad smell could so conveniently have eased the way into a comfort zone of focusing on debate. It could have been a safety net, something that kept Nickson just far enough away that he would have time—slowly, increment by increment—to realize how wonderful their friendship could be, and then they would be able to restore their closeness. She'd be able to embrace and kiss him every time they were alone together. Now she feared she might be rushing him, and doing it through the repulsive fog of her farm girl odor.

“I'm glad you came anyway,” he said. “I really wanted to see you too.”

Alice was afraid he might have said that out of pity. Pity was better than nothing, but pity was not the kind of affection she was trying to find.

“I don't want you to think of me the way I must be smelling,” she said.

Alice rose from their debate table, walked slowly across the classroom to the window and looked out at the Iowa countryside beyond the school grounds. The glass in this old classroom window had a shimmering and distorting quality. In the distance, two figures in orange vests and orange caps were walking across a harvested cornfield. When she swayed to the side, their orange clothing grew brighter or dimmer with the window's varied magnification. A cock pheasant, with its distinct shiny brown color and long tail feathers, flushed from the corn stubble in front of the two figures. Their shotguns rose quickly to their shoulders and the ends of the barrels jumped with accompanying puffs of blue smoke. A second later the distant blasts reached Alice's ears. The pheasant soared on, swooping down over a distant hill, and the men in orange walked on, the barrels of their shotguns pointing up.

“Smells,” came Nickson's voice from behind her. “I don't really hate any smells. I have a high tolerance, you know.”

He pointed his nose in her direction to prove his point. If he heard the distant shotguns, he wasn't letting on.

“You don't have to humor me,” she said, and walked back to sit across from him at their debate table.

“No,” he said. “I have a lot of memories of smells, you know. I mean, I can smell Laos and Thailand in some of my mom's stuff.”

She dared to lean closer toward him across the table. “Are you serious? Even now? So long after that war?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. He leaned back in his chair and turned his head. Alice wondered if he was trying to avoid her smell, but he looked more like someone who was trying not to be distracted from the memories he was calling to his mind. “You can't get rid of those smells,” he said. “And you can't forget them. Mom's got some pieces of old parachutes that probably smell like dead American pilots. There's gunpowder smell in some of Mom's old clothes from when she was taking care of wounded people. From their clothes maybe, or maybe the smell of gunpowder in the air got into things.”

“You can actually smell that?” Her surprise at what he was saying was enough to make her unaware of her own stench for the moment.