The Talk-Funny Girl (14 page)

“How many places do you know where you can go and sit and be quiet?” he asked. “Let your mind be quiet?”

“My room for late if no one wants being up then. The stream in the woods. Those of two places.”

“How many churches do you know where you can do that?”

“They locked every of them. The man said for why.”

“None, right. Sometimes you have to formalize things, to have a practice, in a certain kind of space. To have a public structure that stands for something other than making money.”

I looked at him. He had a crumb of blueberry muffin caught in the corner of his lips.

“You have to take a little time to appreciate being alive and breathing instead of wondering what you have to do next all the time. You have to stop and do nothing for a little while every day.”

I thought then that he must be slightly crazy. There was something in his eyes and voice when he said those things, some note of urgency or pain. It might be, I thought, that he
was
crazy, in the religious way, like the people at Pastor Schect’s, and he wanted to convert me to some new religion. It would be a waste of time, I almost told him. They’ve already made me have one religion. They’ve already converted me.

He pushed the glasses back up against his nose and waited for me to speak.

“All right,” I said. “Now we have at to work again by now, don’t we?”

“No, we don’t.”

He seemed suddenly angry. It was very strange. All the times I’d expected him to be angry, he hadn’t been. When I broke a shovel handle by accidentally dropping a stone on it, trying to lift more than I was able to; in the beginning, when I hadn’t known to wash out the wheelbarrow right away, and the mortar dried in it, and we’d lost an hour chipping it off. Neither those things nor a dozen other small mistakes I’d made—none of it had brought out this tone of voice in him.

“No,” he said again, in the same forceful way. “At this point you should understand what it is you are making.”

“All right,” I said. “I do.”

“I don’t think so.”

I had words coming up fast and couldn’t catch them in time. “You just don’t want for paying on me, that’s all. Now you’re in mad, because you don’t want for paying on me. I’m doing at the work as hard for I can, and—”

“I’ll pay you. Of course I’m going to pay you. Your aunt already has the money as a matter of fact. You’ve been working like a team of oxen, you learn faster than anyone I’ve ever seen, why wouldn’t I pay you? What are you talking about?”

“Why else being so mad then?”

“Who’s mad?”

“You. And to convert me.”

After a second or two of watching me, Sands reached out and put his hand on top of my right arm. It was, after the hello and good-bye handshakes in the 112 Store parking lot, only the third time he’d touched me. He kept his hand there for a moment, then squeezed gently and removed it. “I’m not mad,” he said in a different voice. “And I’m not into converting, you or anyone. I have nothing to convert you to.” He made what I thought of as a bashful sound, almost a laugh, but not really. “I’m sorry.”

I think it was the first time in my life that an adult apologized to me, and coming as it did on top of the worry about not being paid, and
Sands’s unexpected anger, it brought up a quick spurt of tears. I blinked them away.

“I’m sorry,” Sands said a second time. “I just wanted you to see something. I went too fast. I do that all the time. I’m not great at talking to people. I have all these thoughts bunching up inside my head and then they come out like a dam bursting or something. I’m sorry. You’re a great worker. You just go around every minute like you have to work twice as hard and twice as well as any normal person—”

“You’ll fire me off the job if I wouldn’t. I don’t want being fired off.”

“I’d be crazy to fire you.”

“I like on this job.”

“I’m glad. But … who’s this now?”

As if in a scene from a bad dream, I looked up and saw my father standing on the sidewalk, just where the old man and woman had been a few minutes earlier.

He was wearing the floppy leather fedora, color of a potato skin, that he put on for special occasions: the funeral of his one real friend, Mac Kins; Easter service at Pastor Schect’s; and on the first day of school every September, when, even into my high school years, he drove me in his truck instead of letting me take the school bus, and got out and watched me go up the front walk, as if there might be evil men lurking in the bushes who wanted to kidnap me and kill me or sell me into slavery. He hadn’t shaved around the edges of his beard in a day or two and the reddish stubble looked like a blood shadow on his throat. His eyes seemed even farther back in his head than usual, focused on something else there, and I thought, for a moment—I don’t know why such things came to my mind—that he’d come to kill Sands, or me, or both of us. I sensed instantly that something had changed in him, and I’m almost certain now that my mother had been working on him, talking to him about me, my job, the skirt and blouse, the lack of any income from what I said I was doing.

It was a warm day, but my father had a flannel shirt on, red and
black checked, and he’d rolled up the sleeves so the muscles of his forearms showed like cables under the skin. He had his good overalls on, and his work boots, stained with chain-saw oil. In those clothes, and standing there with one shoulder lower than the other and his eyes peering out from another world, and the hat brim pulled down, he reminded me exactly of Dad Paul. I saw that he had gone out and bought chewing tobacco, like Dad Paul, and pressed it back into his cheek. It had been three years since I’d seen my grandfather, but the memory of him was etched on my inner eye. His hands were always moving, and yet when he looked at you this way, the air around him was like the hum of death, an emptiness, a stillness that seemed to echo a violent scream. When he’d been a free man, Dad Paul hardly ever spoke to me, though I believed that if I’d been a boy he would have taken me into the woods and taught me the things he’d taught my father, and taught me to fight and whistle between my fingers, and how to talk to girls. He had—I would learn later—been discharged from the army for repeated violent behavior, been fond of going to see the street whores in Montreal when he was young and then picking up men when he was older—a great shame among people like us. He’d fathered a child with a woman almost twice his age, a coworker at the mill. He chewed tobacco, often spitting it in the yard so that my mother yelled at him about it one time and afterward my father smashed dishes in the kitchen sink, then went away for three days and we wondered if he was ever coming home. There were times when it seemed like Dad Paul was half-tree or half-animal, just a pillar of urges and needs dressed up in human disguise.

Dad Paul would visit unannounced, at strange times. I’d wake before anyone else, in the morning darkness, and find him sitting with his slightly rounded shoulders at the kitchen table, waiting silently for someone to make him coffee. When there was a bad snowstorm he’d often venture out on the roads in his old powder-blue Dodge pickup, cement blocks in the bed for better traction, and come fast up our driveway with snow splashing out from under his tires, and he’d work in
silence, shoveling furiously while the snow was still falling. He’d leave after he’d exhausted himself, and soon the wind would cover over his work and my mother would laugh about that. In warm weather he’d come and split wood, shirt off, his chest coated in a fine fur of white hair, muscles running beneath the skin. “Dad Paul has a like of to work,” my father often said. “A true like.”

T
o me, on that May afternoon, the signs were all bad—the hat, the tobacco, the way I was thinking of Dad Paul, the look in my father’s eyes, the feeling I had that his mood had turned suddenly vicious. All bad. He shifted the lump of tobacco around in his cheek, glanced at me, then fixed his eyes on Sands and spit on the sidewalk.

“My dad,” I said, the words slipping out of me in a patch of sound that was as weak as a dying flame whispering in a woodstove. “That man is my dad.”

Sands stood up. My father, who was not without a sense of manners, took off his hat and stepped closer. “This here’s Majie, my the girl,” he said.

Next to my father Sands looked like a giant. He wiped his right hand on his pants and held it out, and though I knew my father hated to, he shook hands.

“Good to meet you,” Sands said, pushing the glasses back against his eyebrows. “Your daughter is a good worker, a good girl.”

My father turned his head to the side and spit again, then lifted his eyes to Sands’s. “Came for that she gots paid.”

“Really?” Sands said, and I wanted to go hide someplace then because what I heard in his voice was a note with no fear in it. A drop of sarcasm, a little curiosity, but not the smallest hint of fear. “I thought maybe you came to admire the work she’s been doing.”

I saw a twitch in the muscle near my father’s left eye. I wanted to say something to make Sands understand.

“Don’t take kind to who don’t pay.”

“What makes you think I haven’t paid her?”

My father turned to me. “You, Majie. You had on it?”

I shook my head, barely able to. My father spit again. His eyes dropped to the hat, which he was holding in his two hands, then he raised them to Sands’s face and I saw something in them that I had never seen before, even in his worst moods: I saw clearly then that he could kill a person. It was written there as if in letters. I remembered him taking me once to check his traps in late winter and coming upon a squirrel caught in one of them, still alive. “Don’t to look away on it,” he ordered me when I made a noise and turned my eyes. He found a branch, broke it in two over his knee, put the pieces to either side of the squirrel’s neck, and snapped the bone there as casually as if he were taking the plastic cap off a milk bottle. I watched him looking at Sands and I thought of that.

“I paid her aunt,” Sands said. “This morning. That was the agreement.”

“Not ’ith me.”

“No, not with you. But then, you’re not working for me so I don’t give the money to you and I don’t make agreements with you. Would you want to see the work she’s done, or wouldn’t you?”

“Enh,” my father said. It was a syllable that meant no, and, as always, it was accompanied by a quick sideways and downward jerk of his head. Sands leaned toward him an inch. The difference between them was the difference between a beech tree, its bark smooth and its branches horizontal to the earth and strong enough to hold ten people, and an old black cherry tree with scaly dark bark and a crooked trunk and the branches weak and way up out of sight. Like a man lost at sea and rationing his food, my father kept a small daily supply of words. It seemed to me he had used them up and that he would shift one of two ways then, either to some action or deeper into himself. He stood there for what seemed a long time, his eyes just to the left of Sands’s face, his fingers pinching the hat brim. And then he swung his eyes slowly to me, like a frog following a fly. “Douse ya,” he said, so
quiet I wondered if Sands had heard, and he turned his back and started walking. I watched his legs go, his left shoulder tilted down, and I wondered where he’d parked his truck, and why he hadn’t driven there, and I pictured what he was going to do to me when I got home. After his recent kindness, it felt like he had slapped me, or kicked me again, and a big sadness welled up under the skin of my face.

Sands watched my father until he’d turned the corner and was out of sight, and then he slapped his hands together a few times the way he usually did before he went back to work. There was more force to it than I remembered seeing before.

W
e nailed up the staging on one side of what would be the south wall, eight feet high and braced in all directions so we could lean a ladder against it and lay different-size stones on it and it would hold steady. We needed the rest of the afternoon to do that. While we worked, Sands did not speak to or look at me, and I was sure then that I’d be fired. A boss didn’t need crazy people coming to the work site demanding money. As sometimes happened in those years, my thoughts started on a downhill ride, one bad thing after the next: I’d be fired, I’d be doused, my father didn’t love me after all, I’d never find work like this again. And so on. It required all my energy to keep working underneath that hard waterfall of bad imagining.

Shortly before five o’clock, Sands said, “That’s enough for today,” the signal for us to start putting away tools. With the work site right there on the main street, and with things the way they were in the town, he knew as well as I did that we couldn’t leave anything out overnight, not even a hose or a dented wheelbarrow. There was an entrance into the rectory basement, no window, padlocked, and we brought the wheelbarrow and saws and other tools in there, set them on the damp floor, and pulled the string on the lightbulb, then closed and padlocked the door. I kept waiting for him to tell me I was fired, but he was silent and seemed distracted.

At the end of the afternoon Sands always stood for a few minutes, looking over the work we’d done. Ordinarily, I loved that part of the day. I took up a position a few yards away from him, behind and at an angle, so I could look at the work, and also at him. That day, though, I could feel the bad thoughts crawling around inside me like carpenter ants in a rotted piece of wood, chewing, destroying, scurrying here and there. Sands didn’t look at me and wouldn’t turn around. I waited. After he’d run his eyes over the low walls and the new staging, he finally turned to face me, but instead of firing me, he said, “I’m driving to Boston on Sunday, just for the day. Have you ever been?”

I could not get a word to come out of my mouth. A little flame of hope had been lit.

“Have you?”

Boston, Pastor Schect had told us, was a place filled with colored people and prostitutes, men who did not obey God, who spat upon his face and did the devil’s work of deceiving him. I managed to shake my head.

“Would you want to come along?”

I felt the word
yes
, like a satanic breath, skipping from side to side at the back of my mouth. I swallowed hard. “We have church for Sundays.”