The Painted Drum (8 page)

We grind out the cigarette stubs with the ends of our shoes and then she nods and steps up into the bus. She settles into the driver’s seat and looks away from me as she starts the engine. She is an oddly put together woman, with exquisite black eyes and a big white dumpling of a chin. She wears no makeup and cuts her dark hair in a boxy helmet. As she shifts the bus into gear, she lifts her face keenly forward and moves down the bumpy road. She knows all about me, as people on this road do who have known my family since my grandparents came here. Most of all, she knows what happened. She would never wonder why the orchard is forsaken, or try to fix it. I suppose she pities me in some abstract way, as they all do. But that is neither here nor there.

I get back into my car. Driving toward the Tatro place, I am stricken with a familiar and weary repulsion. Everything around me is ludicrously, suddenly, worthless. The Assembly of God sign is even blank. Mrs. Eyke’s black laughter and the hard edge of her grief have invaded my thoughts, and I even feel complicit in the death of her son because of my uneasy relationship with Krahe. I am too tangled in what happened, it disturbs me. Perhaps it started on the day I tried to unwedge the Eyke car from the V of birches. Or it started when I looked too long at Krahe, and he at me, and we knew that we were going to sleep together.

Later that day, as I am taking notes on the contents of the Tatro kitchen, I remember the orchard. It occurs to me that I must develop a more serious plan to thwart Kurt in his next helpful policy. I’m not sure our conversation at Sweet’s Mansion persuaded him to leave those trees alone, and I plan to call him that night. I practice several ways to let him know, again, why his attentions aren’t wanted in the orchard. I plan to tell him my reasons for leaving the place unkempt, blowzy, unproductive. I want to make sure he lets those apples rot. Fewer blossoms every year, the apples crabbed with thrips and worm-riddled. Branches down, dying, silvered in the heavy sun. I want the long grass to shield the starving mice who gnaw rings around the bases of the apple trees, girdling them, choking them off, bringing them down. But even as I’m thinking this, I am too late. My imaginary conversations and persuasions are a waste of time. For he is revving up his chain saw, macho New England accouterment. He is striding into the orchard and lopping off deadwood with furious ease. Even as I am leaving the Tatro estate, he is piling brush. As I drive home he is putting a cone of fire to the driest twigs. I see the white spiral of smoke as I turn onto Revival Road, and breathe the scent of burning apple wood.

There are weeks of dry warmth, which is bad for our wells and ponds but wonderful to see in the woods. The willows blaze in tender bud. Drifts of wild plum blossoms float among the cavern pines. The rapturous trilling of spring peepers begins, that electronic sexual whine. I keep the windows slightly open as I drive the back roads to the Tatro house, and breathe the watery air. The road’s final quarter mile is now almost impassable, the bedrock sunk against gaping holes, swamp grass and overgrown ponds to either side where the peepers warble and moan at a throbbing pitch. As I bounce along I quiet the frogs, momentarily, so that I seem to be continually piercing a wall of sound.

In the orchard, the tiny cold buds are deep pink at the base, white at the tip. The apple trees with their low, thick crotches are shooting out leaves from every node of trunk and every branch behind the cuts. I sit an afternoon away in the snow-drifted grass, the sun-blasted grass, the grass thrown back in long shines of wind, the new grass rising underneath in shy waves of power. I want to remember the orchard as cold, sleeping, wrecked, and still mine, before it happens.

One hot ninety-degree May afternoon throws the switch.

Full moon, a spring midnight. Over everything like clear glass the light falls evenly, a tarnished silver. I am awakened by something stealing up on me, creeping through the window screens, over the drum. A breath of orchard sweetness sails, curls into my room, and I remember the days when the orchard bloomed this way every spring.

My little sister was alive then. Over the years I’ve warped my life around her memory, I think, even though sometimes now I can’t picture her at all except from photographs. I cling to what I do remember of her—little incidents. The time she ripped my fairy book or squeezed the paint from my paint set, or left my clay out to dry. The times she crawled into bed with me after bad dreams—her telling me about them, her breath hot along the side of my face. She tickled spiders out of their webs and wore pink Keds with laces she colored blue with a ballpoint pen. She was a very good sister who loved me so much that she sacrificed herself for me without hesitation and for no use, no use at all. It happened out there in the orchard.

With their deadwood sawed away, the trees have come alive. Each is loaded with as many open blossoms as the live twigs can hold. I rise and walk to the window and sit there with my hand on the drum. I can see her, running in her checkered shorts, with her flag of brown hair flying. She is climbing, quick and nimble. I can just make out the dim shapes of the trees, their twisted arms that hold her. There is no wind and the odor of white blossoms is so profound that it makes steps into the air. Only old wood can bear such rapture, I think, but maybe you have to die first, like the trees, like her.

I am making eggs for breakfast the next morning when I hear the putter of the lawn mower. I’ve woken furious and self-berating. I dragged my heart around like an apple on a string. Dangled it, daring some man to take a bite. Now Krahe sinks his teeth into it and I’m terrified to be devoured. I jerk away and swing wildly out of reach. And now the lawn mower! I turn off the stove and charge outside, but when the mower comes into view Kit Tatro is behind it with his shirt off. Kit’s bare flesh. An unforeseen drawback. His skinny chest heaves as he cuts the rise. The arrowheads and amulets on cords around his neck tangle as he strains to round the bitten stump of an old elm. His arms are ropy and sickly pale. His tender skin is an affront. I want to tell him to put his shirt back on, but don’t know how I would say such a thing without hurting his feelings. He waves at me and then I have to wave back. He cuts the engine, walks toward me.

There’s a couple of things he wants to ask me.

“You should ask my mother,” I say quickly. “She’s the one with the cultural knowledge.”

“Well, this is about the grass.”

“Oh.”

We talk about whether to reseed some bald spots and how there are new shade-friendly varieties. For a man with a grown-over, junked-up yard, he is surprisingly critical of the quality of my lawn.

“Some of it’s just quack,” he states. “Around the back of the house you’ve been invaded by creeping charley. And there’s dandelions. I don’t even know where to start with those. What do you want me to do?”

“Just leave them.”

He looks dubious, skeptical, pained. To divert him I change the subject.

“Do you know how to install a new lock and key set?”

“Of course.”

I show him the back door to the stairway that leads to my room, and he tells me that he can drive to the hardware store for a new lock and that he’ll change it as soon as he finishes the lawn. Later, while I am working upstairs, I hear the whine of his drill and the fumbling and knocking of his tools as he sets about the task. Once, twice, I nearly go down and ask him to quit, but then I look out a back window onto the trees, the bursting clouds of blossoms.

The summer passes and I handle the sale of the Tatro collection to a Cincinnati museum, all except for the drum. I’ve grown very attached to having it in my bedroom; I touch or gaze upon it every time I enter. The drum exerts the most connective hold upon me, and it even starts to influence my dreams. Years ago, my sister stopped coming to me at night. I stopped dreaming of her, and I missed that because it was comforting to imagine that she lived a life parallel to mine and was not dead but merely somewhere else. I even wrote down things she said to me. She spoke in the form of poems. Now I am surprised to dream that she’s learned to play the piano. Her hands move with an alert grace, and she glances up at me and nods. She has a husband, a dark man walking at a distance. She is a woman, all grown up in spite of death. Bach’s Thirteenth Invention fills my dream with dark rigor, a precise contrapuntal tangle of notes. I confuse her fingers with the passionate mechanism of the spider, and I wake up sweating and cold again with loss. I lost myself along with her back there, I know it. When I touch the drum and think of her, though, I feel much stronger. I feel she has come back to help me. And so the summer, with my dreams of her that return, precious and specific, passes too quickly, as they all do here. The time of the year comes that I am always surprised to find so hard.

The orb spiders have taken up their posts in the unmowed fields of August. Just as things come ripe, the creatures always set their webs, sewn with perfect zigzag seams, across the swathes of grass, jewelweed, goldenrod, milkweed, and burdock behind the sagging barn. Last week, we were approached by a chain restaurant that specializes in false folksiness. Were we interested in selling the wide, weathered boards? Only if you’ll take the orb spiders, too, Elsie said. But they just wanted the barn board, and of course she would never destroy the barn. So the spiders wait. I am careful not to disturb their quiet weavings. I watch each spider closely, admire its curved and tapered legs. They are black with hot yellow death’s heads on their bellies. They are patient with the gravity of their intent. Of their means of survival they’ve made these elegant webs, their beauty a by-product of their purpose. Which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as humble as the spider’s, what is beautiful that I make? What is elegant? What feeds the world?

Today, my art is blackberry jam. I gather my equipment. It is time. Late summer builds to a steamy and forgiving lushness in New Hampshire. There is the crushing scent of heated earth. The audible drinking of taproots of white pines. Maples sucking deep. Best, there is the threatful joy of blackberries, bushes so lush with fruit that to pick them I brave the summer’s last ticks and stinging flies. We used to pick them, my sister and I, and because of the dreams I think of her with special intensity as I walk. Past the orb spider field, through the laden orchard, down a ravine, and into the boggy cutover land belonging to an absentee landlord, forty acres dense with bramble and slash. I’m heated up, sweating; my hair falls out of its tail and swings down my back. The first blackberries that I pick ring the bottom of the light old lobster pot of dented aluminum, which I’ve vowed to fill. As soon as the bottom of the pot is covered, a berry-picking stubbornness comes over me. I am a determined picker, lusting after the loaded branches, taking care not to knock off the berries so dense with sweetness they’ll let go if the bush is roughly bumped. While picking at the edge of a clearing, I am buzzed low by a helicopter, its loud ratchet an excitement. The metal creature dips so low I can see the features of the men inside of it, and then it veers off, over a fling of young maples. I search my way through the half-dried muck of hidden ponds, skirt the edges of our neighbor’s horse pasture, probe the deeper woods for an opening where sunlight has brought from the ground sweet berry bushes and burdened them with fruit. Everywhere, I find jewelweed, or touch-me-not, frail bushes of tiny, fierce, golden-mouthed flowers, spitting seeds.

As I return from my berry picking, carrying the lobster pot with both handles, I brush through the jewelweed. The light seeds bounce off me, ping off the curve of the cheap old pot. Some tear like tiny cannonballs through the webs I’ve tried so hard to avoid. I stop, of course, and watch the spiders. Exiting the field, I leave them to the suave calm of their thoughtful repairs. My scratches tingle and my hair’s a knot of twigs. I’m slick with sweat and gritty with scrapings of bark and wood rot, and I’m peaceful. I have reached an understanding in the woods, as I always do.

Perhaps, I think as I settle the pot in the deep sink and run the water, cold from the gravity-feed well and pure as the rocks it has dropped through, my purpose in life is to pay attention and to remember. Here is my real history: a father I loved and feared, a sister I simply loved, the loss of both, then mother and I together. There were hospital stays, jobs that never quite took, loves that foundered. I always came back. The relief of returning to live with my mother got stronger every time. There was always the pleasure of constructing a secure and orderly design to our days. And our work is varied and often strange so there is always enough to think about. Of course, there is now Kurt, who in his suffering has become dangerously close. But the important thing, I think now, is to preserve what Elsie and I have made between us. Our breakfasts and dinners. Our net of small doings. Our thank-you notes. Our web. Our routine.

Which is about to be disturbed.

Three things happen in swift order.

My mother begins to sing to me. We are raided by the town police. My blackberries boil to a purple foam and then overflow the blue kettle I have transferred them to. It is a much heavier pot, sort of a large Dutch oven, sandcast and coated with thick enamel. But first, the singing, which mother often does. I don’t mean that she actually serenades me. Her singing occurs when we are together in the same room pursuing mutually exclusive tasks. This afternoon, even in the heat, she is knitting an intricate afghan. After I brought the berries in, I showered so I am cool. My hair is slicked back and braided. I am washing away the detritus of the woods, swirling leaves and thrips down the drain, when Elsie starts to hum. Soon, there are words. Of course, as these are songs from my childhood, these words fill me with an awful poignancy. “Bye-bye Blackbird.” “Autumn Leaves.” And yes, a few songs in Ojibwe, mainly hymns that my grandmother sang in the old language. From way back, we have been converts. As for the love songs, which she returns to, “Green Fields” and “Greensleeves” and “Silver Dagger,” they have solemnly bitter endings. All the good ones do. Still, can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?

I pour sugar into the berries ready to boil in the blue enameled kettle. The berries soon fill the kitchen with a fruity steam, and stain the insides of the pot blue-black. As I stand there stirring down the dark mass, the calming motion of my spoon and the sweet curls of fragrance allow me to think with indulgence about the old controversies that once surrounded the kettle I am using. This kettle was a source of enmity between my mother and my father, and so it remains for me a souvenir of their eternal contest. They argued viciously about this pot. It seems a humble thing to argue over, but for them, everything was monumental. Nothing was too small.

My father didn’t like that my mother had spent so much money on it. And yet she made most of the money in the family—her business was well run even then. She even met my father through the business—he was there when she came in to assess the contents of his mother’s house. They married quietly. He was fascinated with her background, I think, as though she had some mystical connection to the natural world that he lacked and loved. That was, perhaps, true enough. Their main pleasure in their first years was planting, gardening, digging wells, ponds, making patios, and setting up benches where, still, one can sit and watch the fireflies signal. I came along and surprised them, and my sister a little more than two years after. Although she was younger and followed me everywhere, her personhood was always stronger than mine. Netta had all of the sandy-haired sun in our joint personality. She burned hot. She was just my opposite. Where I was quiet, neat, untiring when it came to detail, Netta was bold and impatient; she could be careless and even cruel.

When she was still six and I had just turned nine we caught fireflies in Mason jars. We wanted lanterns, so we filled the jars with at least a dozen bugs each, then lay in the backyard across an old car blanket and played a game of memory, our favorite game that summer. We played with three decks, the cards spread facedown all around us. By dusk and by firefly light we matched the cards slowly, one to the next, concentrating fiercely on the placement of each. I think that early training is the reason I remember anything at all. The lights ebbed and burned, but at last the fireflies seemed to tire. We gathered up the decks of cards and secured them with a rubber band. I let my fireflies out and watched them waver into the cool weeds and willow bushes that bordered the yard. Then I turned to see where my sister was. Netta had smashed her fireflies onto her face and chest so that she glowed in the dark. She ran, danced, an eerie slash of heat.

Our father was an underpaid professor of philosophy, endlessly reworking his thesis on Miguel de Unamuno into a book on faith and science. He commuted thirty miles to the college town, but only three days a week. He had a way of alternating vast musings with petty concerns, announcing that
the mind is a wolf
and explaining how our illogical longing for a life after death is an animal hunger, and then stopping to castigate Elsie’s blue pot. He’d light on me and my sister.
Your mother is the Renaissance and I am the Reformation
, he’d explain.
That’s why you are reasonable children. Who’s the most rational today? She gets the last cookie.
Both of us would reply. He would pick only one. He was very clever at setting us against each other—choosing me, then my sister, or my mother as his favorite. I remember the heat flooding into my face as he pointed out and laughed at my drooping socks or the expression on my face, and the slick black joy when he praised me at my sister’s expense.

He was a striking man who cultivated a wild professorial mop of hair. Grayed prematurely, as if by the conflict of his thoughts, it flopped in long curls down either temple. When he was in a good mood, he let us brush it and arrange it and mother took pictures of him with a head full of plastic barrettes. He didn’t mind looking absurd as long as he was prepared for it and was in charge of the circumstances. Caught off guard in a mistake or foolishness, he would lash out. Scream. His hair would fly around his face. On campus, no one dared touch his famous hair. I remember one trip to his office, watching from a high window as he appeared, hair first, a puffed mass that bobbed as he threw himself across the paths of the central lawn. Physically, he was a graceful man with a scholar’s bowed shoulders and bloodless hands. He dressed like a forgetful monk, but he was no saint, in fact he was a liar and he was frightening—he would repeat things I said and they would be wrong. I remember that. His pants were just a bit too short, and his socks often did not match, even though my mother bought many pairs of one color to prevent this.

I’ve inherited the slender bones of his face, the delicate chin and severe, pale mouth, and perhaps his dark striving for explanations. But my sister had a happier love for inquiry, or would have. She was a questioner, could never get enough of things. And they looked alike, too, even though I had his features. She had his hair, only pale brown, and all of his expressions. She had his hands. She had his unmatching socks and distracted frown. She was like a whippet, and very strong. They had the same frame, Elsie said.

As I stare into the melt of blackberries, I remember my father’s habit of folding his metal-rimmed eyeglasses down his nose while looking at me keenly. It was a gesture I found both sweet and stodgy. He was not a person you could feel one way about. Because like my sister, he had a cruel streak that came out in surprising ways, because he managed somehow to control my mother and sometimes exerted upon us all a disfiguring attention which set us against one another, I came to realize, even back then, that we both loved and faintly disliked him. Pop wisdom has it that the unpredictable parents hook you deepest with intermittent reinforcement; you become that rat who presses the lever a thousand times for a kind word, a gesture of love.

When he died, mother gave away everything he’d owned down to the last paper clip in his office, which has since remained an unused room except for storage. It is filled with boxes that we never open, things that we don’t want to look at. The blue pot escaped the purge and reminds me of him, though.

As I am standing there stirring down the blackberries and remembering my father, a siren, strange and alarming, goes off at the turnoff to our road. Our first instinct is to worry that our neighbors have suffered some calamity, and to stare out our window where soon, as the sound enlarges, we expect to see the squad car hurtle past. But the revolving white blue flashers and the wailing noise halt in front of our windows. I’m still stirring, mesmerized, as our town police officer, Lonny Germaine, emerges from the car, from which a magnified radio distorted voice carries. The electronic voice gives indecipherable orders and Elsie, who has stopped her singing, says, “He’s drawing his pistol from the holster!”

I remove the dripping spoon from the berries and hold it over the kettle as Lonny rushes to our door, which we can see through a side window. We crane to watch him invade our house. With a mighty swing of his booted foot, Lonny kicks in our door, which gives so easily that he stumbles into the entryway, then rights himself and walks bent-kneed into the kitchen with his gun out two-handed, police fashion. Elsie gasps. “For heaven’s sake, Lonny, the door wasn’t locked! Put that down!”

All I can think of is that he’s come for the stolen drum. I am found out. I am finally exposed. I cannot move. Lonny gapes at us and then lowers his gun. He mutters foolishly. Outside, the radio-voice squawks like some great, hungry bird. I am released from my fear.