The Hour of Lead (28 page)

“I don't know what to do,” Matt said. “I got no idea.”

“Me neither,” she told him.

The next night, straying rounders insulted each other with bawdy language outside his tent. Matt tolerated it until a tall fellow with legs thin as a kildeer's pissed on the canvas. Two steps and Matt tore the tent flap open and two more and he was on the man before he buttoned his trousers. The rounder's cheekbone broke with the first blow and the blood warmed Matt's hands. A second cost the man an eye socket and a third a half-dozen teeth. The man's companions pinned Matt's arms, but he wrestled loose, throwing two into a ragged locust. Half a dozen more were required to end the beating. The rounder lay on the cold ground, pants still undone, walleyed as a pike. Matt had split two other lips and broken a nose. No one spoke. Together, his cohorts carried their man off. Matt returned to his pallet. Angel cried and Wendy tended her.

An hour later a Bureau security officer opened the tent flap. He held a notebook.

“What'd he do to instigate this?” the man asked.

Matt shrugged. “He's got no manners,” he told the man. The man wrote the answer on his pad and nodded to himself.

“Nothing else?”

Matt shook his head.

“Well, it's a dangerous world for the discourteous,” the man replied.

30

N
O HOUSES WERE TO BE
had in town. A weedy field beyond B Street sat unused, though, and Matt pilfered pallets and gleaned salvageable plywood sheets from the scrapped forms. When he had enough, he began a wooden foundation and, after, framed, quilted the plywood scraps into a square floor. He hijacked the sheets he found nearly whole for walls and sawed one hole in the front and stapled it over with clear plastic. Nothing anywhere was sturdy enough for a roof beam, so he settled on draping tent canvas over a two-by-four frame. A scrapped Franklin stove from a dump kept heat after he welded the back plate and strung new pipe.

He presented the lodge to Wendy hoping she would be relieved to escape the community tents, but her response was unenthusiastic even when he unveiled the washbasin he'd pilfered from the Bureau surplus. Each day, Matt rose early and carried the day's water from a pump a half-mile away. He repeated the tasks daily. Some mornings, when the early hour turned particularly bright with frost or pungent with bloom or the coulee flattened the dawn
to a hard red line and the liquid light arced and sprayed from it over the shabby town and the vacant lot in which he and his family resided, he ruminated upon the progress of lives. His own appeared a thrown stone; he had no idea the arm that directed it. Its path remained invisible to those without his history. And rather than concluding on some dirt road or resting beneath a crag's shadow with several hundred similar stones—the former constant, and the latter at least among companions—he was, instead, in a lake or river, descending invisibly, the only evidence of his passage ripples wrinkling the water. A similar description might apply to his wife: the sweep and innocence of it, her muffled fall and slow descent at the mercy of the current and gravity. Some moments the notion threatened to turn philosophy or a resigned sort of religion. He was content to be at the will of a greater force, whether it be nature or fate or providence or gravity.

The spring warmed and, for a while, the weather was pleasant, but no trees shaded the hovel, and when in May an early week of summer descended, the tenthouse was stifling. Matt bought ice by the block and set it whole in an army surplus footlocker to keep the food from spoiling. By summer, Wendy was soaking the child's clothes in the cold pools. She herself went about in undergarments and doused her head with a water glass at regular intervals.

Evenings when Matt returned, he and Wendy undid the tent flaps for the breezes that proceeded up and down the coulee each night. The three of them perched upon shipping crates Matt fabricated into crude furniture and enjoyed the cooling evening. Matt's white T-shirt glowed in the setting sun. He began to construct a hobbyhorse from the shelter scraps. Nothing to admire, but he curved it enough Angel could boot the stirrups and gallop. In the meantime, Wendy stitched army surplus blankets into pajamas and purchased discounted fabric bolts to cut shirts and blouses and trousers. Light flooded through the plastic into the room and warmed her and the
girl during day. Angel turned circles in the glow as sunshine fell on her as lazily as rain.

Early in June, Wendy recognized she had become pregnant. She applied the early hours each day to washing and hanging clothes upon the rope Matt tied between the shack corner and a spindly birch. By nine, sweat dappled her blouse; the cheap fabric clung at her arms and chest and, when it was past tolerance, she would collect Angel from a cool place in the morning shade and drag her in a rusted wagon to the city park.

The willows cut the sun a little and she had discovered a grassy place under a piece of basalt that offered shade most of the afternoon. At the entrance, the county erected a cinder block lavatory, which included a shower. Wendy undressed the girl and together they showered two or three times a day. Angel danced and Wendy sang “The Ballad of Bonny and Clyde” or “The Old Gray Mare.”

Afterwards, they dressed again and ate sandwiches and traded lemonade in a thermos. Often other children joined them with mothers, some doting, some so distant they hardly noticed their charges. Angel remained content to entertain herself. Wendy had struck up conversations, but most withered into graceless silences. Maybe years could pass in the same way.

Angel drew circles in the dirt. Over and over, she followed the same track, trying to make it good. Wendy reclined in the shade with a book. She felt reading a secret luxury, one she kept so because it was a frivolity. She snuck books like Matt's mother had drinks, hiding them all over the house, taking to their clean pages only when she'd put Angel down or when Matt worked the late shifts. It was over a novel she made her first acquaintance. The woman's name was Ardith and the book
Appointment at Samara
. They talked of John O'Hara and Katherine Porter and Edna Ferber. An hour of talk passed without Wendy's notice; to lose oneself was suddenly
liberating. She gazed at Ardith, who was smiling—she most times seemed to be on the edge of laughter.

Angel kept in a large oak's shade. Her mouth straightened. That was her father in her, or perhaps her mother. Her womb had never carried Angel and the girl seemed to know it in that animal certainty that children possess. The thought embittered her, but she couldn't restrain herself as her baby approached. Wendy rubbed her belly and felt the child rising to meet her.

“I so enjoyed being pregnant,” Ardith said. Ardith's sleeping infant lay between them. Wendy reached across him and took Ardith's hand. She lifted it and set it over her tight stomach. Ardith rubbed it softly. They sat like that a long time in the quiet, until finally Ardith gathered her son to leave.

“Come with me,” Ardith said.

Wendy nodded. She and Angel followed Ardith across the park to her car in ragged line. Ardith opened the door and Angel piled in. Inside the car, the wind riffled Wendy's blouse and blew her face dry. Ardith halted the car at a split-level house, with the grass neatly trimmed. Inside, a swamp cooler chilled the house. They put their faces in front of the vents. Angel giggled and spoke a broken word into the air whir. Ardith ran water into the bathroom tub. She offered Wendy a towel as thick as her pillow.

“Take as long as you want,” Ardith told her and shut the door.

The water was fragrant with rose petals. Suds whorled near the spigot and lifted from the water. Wendy touched them. The temperature was cool and it surprised her until she considered the weather. It seemed a bath could be about more than getting clean. She undid her worn blouse and trousers, unrolled her stockings and stepped into the tub. On her knees in front of the spigot, she drank, then lay back. The water climbed past her ears, stopping sounds. She thought nothing and wondered at the relief it brought her.

Ardith dropped a drink for her on the tub's edge. It was fortified
cola, full enough of whiskey that her head lightened. She remained a long while. The window light had burned enough to know late afternoon had descended when she finally forced herself to rise and dry. She noticed a second drink and her clothes missing. She rifled the drawers and the hamper, but they were nowhere. A new outfit with tags lay on the counter. She sipped the drink and stood naked and dried with a plush towel. The clothes seemed of the same material. She touched them and realized they were a gift. Underneath, she saw fresh underwear and a brassiere and even stockings. She dressed slowly and with great care. Outside the door was a pair of new sandals.

The living room was still cool, like the bath. The mahogany buffet held china and the thin shelves tiny Hummels. A picture of a mountain hung upon one wall and a gramophone lined a cabinet. Wendy caught her reflection in a long foyer mirror. She appeared for a moment like this could be her house, save the stunned expression on her face and the raggedy little girl who had moved across the room to see what the woman she knew as her mother found so compelling.

31

L
ATE
A
UGUST OF
1942,
IT
rained a week entire. Each morning Wendy rose to a mist draped upon the river. The ground turned dark and rich like fresh wheat country, the weeds silver with dew. She regarded it with a pleasure rare in the bone-dry summer. The weight of the child stretched her abdomen and she made water nearly every hour in the tarped outbuilding Matt constructed. Once, upon seeing Wendy's T-shirt rise, Matt inquired about touching it. She'd not allowed it. He said nothing, and she wondered again about the womb that had carried Angel before.

The girl slept fitfully, cutting molars. Her cries woke them two or three times before each dawn. Matt attempted to soothe her with a bottle, but she usually spat the nipple because it irritated her gums. He soaked a rag in cold water to help her gnaw tooth through gum, but it did little good. Wendy finally rose from their pallet and took the child from him. Matt watched as she whispered songs to her and Angel calmed. She rocked, and the baby cooed. He emptied the bottle and wrung the rag over a pail, then lay on their bed behind
Wendy where he could see Angel's face. Her eyes had closed and her hair dampened with sweat. Wendy hummed, tabbing it a little victory. She had wrested a bit of the child for herself.

Matt's routine mornings commenced with building his lunch and arranging his family's breakfast: for Angel, cereal and fruit, and a soft boiled egg for Wendy. Yet Wendy woke the following dawn to their makeshift kitchen clean but with no meal. Matt returned late that evening. The Bureau offered overtime and he was recruited first because he finished the pressing jobs in less time than others. He had transferred from the buckets when the ironworkers required his size to sledge tie rod. He was exhausted the first week, but cleaned out by the third. At the end of the fourth, no one could stay with him. The labors creased his arms and chest with muscle and sinew.

Late, Matt pieced together dinner in the dark house from what they had left him, and warmed a kettle and washed in the bathtub. Too big for the house, he'd put it outside. Through the plastic window, Wendy saw steam meet the cool air. He and Wendy had not been with one another since she announced her pregnancy. He perched at the tub's edge a long while following, but she was asleep when he finally lay down and so was the child.

The next day he lingered for overtime again and the one following the same. He added weekend shifts, as they paid double. Weeks pushed the year into autumn; Wendy felt rent from him and all that was outside herself, and she realized the sensation was not all that different than when he was present. Each day, she and Angel sat and Wendy read aloud from a box of books she purchased at a library sale. Angel often as not hauled the book behind her while Wendy performed her chores. Seeing the child move toward her was satisfying. She had constructed an ally.

The following night, Wendy watched Matt through the plastic. He was by himself in the cold, standing under a streetlight. She
tucked the child into her blankets and turned out her light and her own. She heard Matt arrive and undress and lie next to her, though he never offered her a word, nor she him. The next day he did the same and the one that followed. Evenings, she would glance up from cooking or reading and recognize him at his post across the street waiting for them to end the day so he could, too. She thought of him studying her those years before and the gifts he'd left. They changed her life. Not the possessions, but the receiving of them. She wondered now if they were injuries he'd inflicted upon her, or she on herself, each present a limp or a polioed arm until she was weak enough to take him.

She shook her head, and the child glanced up at her quizzically. It exasperated her, this kind of thinking. She'd hoped she might be above it. Her life was her own doing. She thought of him in the cold. He'd smoke more than he ought to, trying to keep warm. It wasn't healthy. The streetlight barely made his shape from the shadows. That was where she loved him. It frightened her. She realized it must have him, as well. That the best in him she could only see from a distance, that up close it disappeared like words from a page if you tried to read a book sitting on your nose.

Her hands twirled Angel's locks. She pursed her lips for a kiss, and Angel, who knew enough to press hers together, made a smooching sound. She looked at the child. She'd once again taken the best from him and left him with just the shell.