The Fence My Father Built (4 page)

Lutie stared out the window for a moment. “There's no reasoning with Linc, I’m afraid. The man hates us. That's the real reason.”

I frowned. “But why?”

Lutie sat up tall and drew in a proud deep breath. “Because we’re Native people,” she said. “Linc Jackson didn’t want the likes of us in his town. Pure and simple.”

“Good grief, this is the twenty-first century. How can there still be that kind of thing going on? Sounds like the Hatfields and McCoys.”

“You’re not in the city, anymore, Muri,” she said quietly. “Out here there's a whole different set of rules. Joe claimed
the creek because artifacts were found there. To him it was sacred ground.”

I stood up, feeling my blood surge. “If there are Native artifacts or ruins, aren’t they protected?” I glanced at the window to be sure the kids weren’t listening.

Lutie got up from the sofa and patted my arm. “What's written in laws and what really happens isn’t always the same thing, I’m afraid.”

She quickly changed the subject. “Here, you must be tired after your trip. Let's get you settled, and we can talk more later.”

Suddenly, I was tired. And confused. I nodded and followed Aunt Lutie down the hall.

“Well, I hope you’re planning to stay awhile,” she said. Aunt Lutie wanted to give me the grand tour. She led me past the living room down a short hallway to a bedroom. “We got plenty of room if you two girls don’t mind doubling up. The little guy can bed down in my sewing room—that's what I call it. Don’t worry; I already picked up all the straight pins out of the rug. You can have your daddy's spot. I left his favorite bedspread on.” She ran her fingers lightly over a faded chenille coverlet draped across a double bed that took up most of the space. A bureau with a small round mirror above it was the only other piece of furniture in the room. Lutie stood still a moment, as if she were listening for traces of her brother.

I listened, but all I could hear were the pigs outside, still squealing. “It looks very nice,” I said. I laid our belongings on the bed, careful not to disturb the smoothness of the spread, and peered out the dinky room's window. “How long did it take Tiny to build the fence?”

Lutie laughed. “Angels in heaven, child. That fence was your daddy's doing, and I was sure we’d soon be seeing the fire marshal. But he knew how to make things sturdy, and he
had a way of finding a use for stuff nobody else wanted. Your father loved to build things, just like my Tiny.”

The dreams I’d kept in the wallet of my thoughts threatened to dissolve. The educated, intelligent man I’d envisioned began to break down, limp as paper money run through the wash. Joseph Pond couldn’t possibly be this ordinary.

“Where’d he get the oven doors?” I asked, although I was almost afraid to hear the answer. What if he was a criminal? Or worse, what if he had been like Mother, compulsive about everything?

Aunt Lutie smiled; the edges of her eyes crinkled in a playful way. “When this appliance store went out of business in Prineville, he snapped up those old doors for next to nothing. By the end of the week we had us a fence. It's pretty crazy-looking, I suppose.”

“Very inventive,” I said, as she motioned me back toward the front end of the trailer. “How many people would think to use an oven door that way?” It was the most polite thing I could think of to say.

“Time was we didn’t need a fence,” Lutie said.

“To keep the pigs from escaping?”

“I know what you’re thinking.” Lutie gazed over our heads, as if the colorful barricade was a member of the family. “What kind of nut uses old stoves to make a fence?”

I must have turned white as library paste. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

Lutie waved off my apology. “Of course you didn’t. Even I thought my brother was odd. But Joe didn’t do things for fun. Your daddy put up that fence about five years ago, right after Linc started leaning on us to sell.”

“Did he tell you why?”

My aunt crossed her arms and paused a long moment. “I asked that very question. Everybody did. If I brought it up, Joe either got mad or changed the subject. Drove me batty.”

I stood there, confused. Why would a dying man build a wall across the desert?

Lutie seemed to hear my thoughts. “Joe never explained his reasons.” Her lip quivered. “But just before his passing, he said something I’ll never forget. ‘We can’t let our ancestors down, Lutie,’ he told me. ‘The fence looks silly, but it's for your protection, to ward off ghosts and grave robbers.’” Her eyes glittered with tears.

“I’m so sorry.” I touched her sleeve.

She patted my hand and smiled. “Whatever he meant, Joe built a sturdy fence. I’ve come to love those old oven doors, and that's reason enough for me. Every time I see that fence, I see your daddy.”

I nodded, not realizing how true her words would become.

Aunt Lutie stopped at a small bookshelf crowding the narrow hallway and pointed at the dusty books lining its shelves. “When Joseph took sick,” she said softly, “he only wanted to sit and read those history books of his, you know, Civil War and all. At the end I read them out loud to him. He loved history.” She paused, and then added, “Come on, honey, let's get the kettle going.”

I relaxed some. My dreams began to reconstruct themselves then; they spread themselves out to dry. If my father loved books he couldn’t have been ordinary at all. I followed her across the living room to the kitchen area. It was a good five-foot walk.

“Now these are for special occasions,” Aunt Lutie said after we’d gotten settled. She reached up into the highest kitchen cupboard and carefully brought down a pair of teacups and
saucers. I was ready to be served in Mason jars or glasses cut from old wine bottles. But these were genuine bone china. I picked one up and recognized the Spode trademark.

My stepfather had given Mother a full set of Spode Christmas dishes just before her death. It seemed frivolous to keep an entire set of china to use once a year, but then she had pumpkin plates for Halloween, a horn of plenty soup tureen, and various other occasional dishes. Mom never got around to using any of them. She just took them in and out of the china closet, washing them when they got dusty.

My aunt must have seen me peeking at the marking on the bottom of the cups. “This is a special occasion,” she said and smiled. A copper-clad teakettle rattled on the burner. The range, which looked to be from the same era as the oven doors outside, was pink with gray trim, like the rest of the kitchen. It was actually more of a kitchenette, the only nook of the place that wasn’t cluttered with knickknacks, piles of magazines, and grocery sacks brimming with aluminum cans.

In fact, it was difficult to tell precisely where the kitchen ended and the living room began, except for a small throw rug, which looked to be woven from women's nylons. I’d always had a problem with claustrophobia and already sensed my chest tightening. It didn’t help that the walls were framed in more of the same dark paneling I’d seen outside, or that sacks of empty soda cans were piled everywhere, like a bunch of cats taking over the furniture.

Chaz would have had a field day with the two paintings that hung slightly askew on the wall. One was a small oil painting of pansies that could have been a paint-by-number. The other was a reproduction of Jesus whose eyes followed me across the room. He watched us from atop the Aztec gold sofa. It was threadbare with a Mexican serape draped across the back.

“Can I help with something?” I asked. Mom taught me a great woman does everything with poise and grace, even when she’d rather not. She only said things like this in her more lucid moments, when she wasn’t polishing silverware for the fourth time in a week or re-waxing the floors.

Lutie laughed, and I marveled at how relaxed I felt. “Just like your daddy,” she said, “forever lending a hand. And you look like him: same black-as-chimney-soot head of hair and lots of it. I’ll bet you got the fire of the Holy Ghost the way he did.”

I sat at the dinette and started folding napkins in neat triangles. The only ghosts I saw came in my nightmares.

She counted out five cups for the saucers and set them on an old metal tray with a hint of rust around the edges. This was more like what I expected. It matched the mound of Oreo cookies and the rest of the decor.

In one corner of the living room sat a green Naugahyde recliner, its footrest stuck out. A wicker basket of yarns, alive with colors from vermilion to a glow-in-the-dark green, rested on the floor next to the chair, as a loyal pet might. Then I noticed the small side table beneath the fluttering lace café curtains in the window.

A gallery of framed photographs crowded the surface. I went closer and peered into faces of strangers that somehow didn’t seem all that strange. Several portraits were in sepia tones that made people look softer than perhaps they really were. Most were modern snapshots of men and women, children, and a dog or two. My eyes kept returning to one picture of a dark-skinned, bowlegged man dressed in western clothes.

“We were afraid you wouldn’t come,” Lutie said softly from behind me. “When Joseph up and died, we didn’t know what to do.” I heard her voice catch.

I picked up the photo of the man in the cowboy outfit and chuckled.

“Yeah,” she said, “Your dad was always horsin’ around. He was a real character.”

I stared into his eyes then, as if by doing so, I could tell for sure whether I was the daughter of Joseph Pond. When had I ever been accused of horsing around? Perhaps this was what was rolling around inside me like a shaken can of soda.

And what about Benjamin, the man Mom married a few years before she died? My stepfather had a nose that turned red whenever he was angry, which was a lot. He had shiny little hamster eyes and a funny chin that blended into his neck. He was mean when he’d had too much gin.

I saw none of those qualities as I gazed at the man in the picture. Joseph Pond's eyes were dark like mine and held plenty of secrets. That made two of us, I thought. Only I would probably never know what his secrets were.

I held my breath then, thinking for one silly moment that I would hear him whispering to me, explaining how he wanted to rescue me all along. But the only sounds came from Aunt Lutie, rattling the dishes. Suddenly, all I knew for sure was that I could use a shower and some sleep.

Tiny and the kids trooped in then. Tru was starved as usual, and Nova kept silent and clung to the fringes of the room. My uncle occupied a good portion of the living space, so I understood. Perhaps big and tall men weren’t meant to fit in subcompact cars or cracker-box trailer homes.

“Oh, my little Pearl, some of that tea would be nice,” Tiny said, smiling that same infectious grin. I hadn’t smiled much lately, but before I knew it the edges of my mouth curled up too. It felt as soothing as the tea. Tiny poured his from the china cup into a tall plastic tumbler and filled it with ice.

“Where's the TV?” Truman said, pushing his wire-rimmed glasses up on the bridge of his nose. The kid had never been inside a home without cable before.

“We can’t get much out here,” Tiny said, jiggling his tea so the ice clinked dully against the plastic tumbler. He sat on the couch, and it sagged nearly to the floor under his weight. “The hill behind the creek blocks most of the reception. After that last time when Jim chewed the cord, well, I just never got around to fixing it.”

Nova sat in the corner on a kitchen chair with a broken rung. “Couldn’t you just get satellite?” Her voice still had an edge of attitude. She picked at her dark blue fingernails, wisely avoiding my gaze.

“Hallelujah, sure. The Clackmans over at the Lazy P Ranch got one last year,” Lutie responded, eyeing Nova, but not backing down. “They’ve got to be mucho expensive, though. People like us got to save up.”

“Man, I’d sure love one of them dishes,” Tiny said, nudging Tru with his elbow. “Two hundred channels and HBO too.”

“Showtime's better,” Tru said, and they both nodded. “You surf the Net?”

Uncle Tiny looked puzzled. “No,” he said, “we’re on a fixed income.”

Nova smirked. “He means the Internet, not TV.”

“We know all about it,” Lutie broke in. “But I guess we’d need a computer.”

“Truman brought his Mac,” I said, hoping we could get into friendlier conversation soon. “Tru's kind of a computer nut.”

“Don’t you mean computer
nerd
?” Nova teased. I shot her “The Look.” My hands strangled each other, and my left eye twitched like mad.

“Nova, could you help me bring in some of the stuff from the van?” I said this so sweetly even Lutie raised an eyebrow. My daughter let out one of those loud sighs and flounced through the flimsy aluminum door, slamming it on her way out.

I followed her to the far side of the van. “Is it too much to ask you to be civil? I know you’re unhappy. This isn’t my idea of paradise, either.”

“We
have
to go back to Portland.”

I tried to make eye contact with my daughter. “Give it a few weeks, will you? I don’t plan to stay. But Lutie is my aunt, after all. I think I should try to get my dad's affairs straightened out.”

“Why do we have to suffer?” Nova's brows scrunched together. “I mean, why can’t Tru and I spend the summer with Dad in Portland? I’m already bored out of my skull.” She fingered the little tufts of hair next to her ear, crouching against the van as if she was ready to crawl beneath it.

“If you’ll remember,” I said, “Your dad is too busy.” I didn’t add that he was busy with Victoria.

She stared at me. I could practically see her mind processing the odds, weighing her options. She bit her lower lip and sighed again, this time the kind that concedes defeat.

“Fine,” she said, but her expression suddenly softened; her jaw got that hangdog look. “How could you? They live in a shack, Mom. A
shack
.”

I looked around the back bumper at the house. Nova's eyes watered as if she were going to cry, but then they narrowed again and turned a petrified blue.

I was the one who wanted to cry now. In order to stay tough I thought of Chaz once more. “This is only temporary, hon. I told you that. I had to get away from Portland to figure things out.”