The Talk-Funny Girl (26 page)

My father’s truck was still in the driveway, but I didn’t see him. When I came through the door my mother’s eyes hit me like pointed fingers in the face. She was leaning back against the kitchen counter with an open bottle of wine behind her arm. She was wearing a certain expression, something I’d seen several times in the past, a concentrated fury that seemed to say there was nothing, absolutely nothing, she wouldn’t do. “Who’s now gonto be willow-whipped,” she said, and it was the farthest thing from a question.

I stood still and faced her.

“Who’s now gonto,” my mother repeated.

“You and Pa go ahead to whip me,” I said, meeting my mother’s eyes. “Go to whip me and I’m to move out to live at Aunt Elaine. No more of money for you and Pa then. No more of help on a baby.” My
legs were shaking. My shirt and pants were wet in back. The hunger seemed to be crawling up and around inside my middle.

My mother stared at me a long time, stunned, I think, that I was talking back to her that way. And then quietly and deliberately, with just two corners of a smile on her mouth, she said, “Kill you then, you Majie.”

“Then no all money for you then,” I shot back. A gigantic anger was shaking my lips and making my hands into fists. “Then Pa and you for a baby and no money from me and from at Aunt Elaine. Kill me, go. I’m not afraid of you killed me as you of no money.”

I wanted to step into the kitchen and grab one piece of bread. I believed I could smell it in its plastic bag there on the counter. But if I did that I thought my mother would take hold of me, hit me with the bottle, cut me with a knife, maybe kill me right there, so I turned and went into my room with her eyes burning into the back of my skull. I changed out of my wet clothes and left them on the floor. I put two pairs of pants and two shirts and one sweatshirt on the bed. Underwear, socks. No one had touched the cathedral book, so I set it on top of the pile of clothes, not caring if anyone saw. Then I lay down on the bed with one hand on the book and I waited. I listened the way my father had taught me to listen in the woods, long before, when I was a little girl and there had been a different feeling in the house. I listened for the smallest sound, a whisper of air, a twig crackling, a word. After a time I fell asleep.

I was awakened by the sound of the front door banging open. My stomach throbbed. I felt the hard edges of the book against my fingers, and I heard my mother and father talking but I couldn’t make out the words. His low voice. A space. Her voice, higher, insistent, as if she was trying to convince him of something and for once he was resisting. His voice again. I waited for them to come into my room and take me out for my penance, but then there was quiet. The light was changing to late-afternoon light. I heard the front door again, then the truck doors, one after the next, then the engine backfiring and spitting as my
father’s pickup went out the drive. Still I waited, expecting some trick. When darkness fell, and I was sure my mother and father had both gone, I got up and went into the kitchen, where I opened a can of beans and ate it with a spoon, without pouring the beans into a bowl and without heating them. I drank three glasses of water and had two pieces of bread, then a Coke, and then I walked outside and around back and threw the two empty cans far into the woods. I went back to my room, took the hidden stash of money and put it in my pants pocket, and sat on the bed for a long time, staring into the open closet. My parents didn’t come home. I thought of what I’d said to Pastor Schect about Aunt Elaine and what it would be like to go to her for help now, after having said that. I imagined looking into her face and having her say she loved me. And then I took the clothes and the book and set them on the floor in my closet. I pulled off my pants and shirt and crawled under the covers and slept.

I
n the morning, my parents were still not there. I stood in the shower a long time without using the timer. I made myself two pieces of toast with butter. I took my backpack, put the book and my school papers into it, then two cans of Coke from the kitchen, and set off down Waldrup Road toward the highway.

Twenty

R
iding the bus to school that day—we were close to the end of the year—I nearly told Cindy about Pastor Schect. It would have meant breaking our unspoken agreement, but I’d kept so many secrets for so long by then that they seemed to have swollen to the bursting point. Cindy and I sat together as we always did, and for a little while we had the middle part of the bus to ourselves, with the boys yelling and wrestling some rows behind. Cindy—short, plump, blond-headed, and barely able to manage her schoolwork in the lowest division—was bubbling over with news. There were two parts to her news. First, she’d heard over the radio the night before that another girl about our own age had disappeared, this one over in the middle of the state, not far from the highway Sands and I had taken on our way to Boston. She hadn’t heard this part on the radio, Cindy added, but her mother had told her there was a witness this time, and the witness claimed the abductor had been a black person, or at least someone dark, dressed in dark clothes, driving a dark vehicle. “I have a feeling it’s going to happen to me or you next,” she whispered when other students had come onto the bus and sat not far from us. “I’m taking a knife with me now everywhere. You should, too.” She reached into the pocket of her
dress and pulled out a small hunting knife with a three-inch blade. “My dad give it to me.”

“They would take it away on you, while they see it in school.”

“My dad showed me how to wrap it up in the finger of a work glove. Lookit.” She tugged a leather glove finger out of the same pocket and slid the knife into it. “He said they can’t know it then.”

I gazed out the window at the new green on the hills and thought about the look on Pastor Schect’s face when he’d come into the house, and what amount of good a knife might have done if he’d found me there alone, or if he’d climbed all the way up to the big rock in the woods. “Of what time was it?”

“When they took her? Early in the night. She was maybe coming back alone after staying at her friend’s house after church or something.”

“We didn’t go yesterday,” I said. I was trying to make myself tell her about Pastor Schect, but I couldn’t seem to do it.

“Why? You always.”

“My mother was felt sick. She came better now, today.”

“There’s something else, too … about me and Carl.” Two boys came down the aisle, shoving each other and laughing in a rough way. “I’ll tell you later,” Cindy whispered.

W
hen school finished, instead of taking the bus home or getting a ride with Carl and his friends, Cindy said she’d walk with me as far as the cathedral. She wanted to see it up close, she said, and Carl was going to meet her at the doughnut shop in his friend’s car and take her riding. We walked from the school down Mitchell Avenue to where it intersected with North Main Street, and we turned and walked down the long slope there, past old Victorians that had once belonged to the factory owners and that stood, some of them freshly painted, behind large front yards. On the long bus ride to and from school, of all the
objects made by people, it seemed to me that those houses were the only beautiful thing to see. Maybe the cathedral would change that. Maybe Sands was going to start a trend in town, making things look good for no reason at all.

Before we even reached the commercial strip, Cindy said, “Me and Carl went the full way.”

“Did it to hurt?”

“A little at the first and then it felt nice like nothing you could ever do by yourself.”

“Do you want to be p.g.?”

“I don’t. But if I did I wouldn’t care that much and Carl wouldn’t neither.”

“They might make you to go from school.”

“I don’t care that much.”

“The kids could laugh on you.”

“They do already.”

It seemed that Cindy wanted me to be excited about the new adventure, and so I pretended I was. It took some effort. All day I’d been replaying the sight of Pastor Schect coming across the threshold of our house. Even by the standards of our family life, it was something odd and horrible, a new level of trouble. And with the news about another abducted girl, I was finding it more and more difficult not to tell someone about the look on Pastor’s face when he’d thought he’d found me alone. The question was: who to tell? Cindy? Aunt Elaine? Sands? My father? The police? There were problems in each case, and I couldn’t be sure if it would mean more trouble for me or less, if it would help anything, if the look on his face had anything at all to do with the abductions. His car was dark but he wasn’t. And, compared to the other men I knew, there was a weakness about him in the arms and hands, not the kind of thing you’d expect in a person who was grabbing teenage girls from the roadside and killing them.

“There was no feeling ever like it,” Cindy repeated when we were in the middle of downtown.

I was pretending to be interested, keeping a curious, admiring look on my face. We walked past the storefronts as if carrying between us the weight and thrill of all the world’s secrets.

“You should let Aaron do it so you’d know the way it feels,” she said as we came within sight of Sands’s cathedral.

“Maybe I would soon.”

“You should.”

When we reached the cathedral property, I saw that Sands was already at work. I waved to him and he waved back. “My boss,” I told Cindy.

“It looks like a small church.”

“His own private one. This part he wants of making this summer and then more parts for later.”

“Is he black?”

“Partways.”

“Really?”

“Sure.”

“Is he weird?”

“He’s nice. You can to talk on him if you want that.”

Cindy shook her head. “Watch out for everybody,” she said. “My dad can get you a knife, you know.”

“My dad could to get me one. I might to ask him.”

Cindy nodded in a worried way and said good-bye, and I stepped onto the work site and felt, as I always did there, a small lift of good mood under my feet. At home, in school, with Cindy, I almost always felt younger than my age, as if I’d learned to play a role, hiding my real thoughts and abilities, tamping down whatever intelligence and maturity I possessed as if they were ugly, threatening things. For just the first few happy minutes with Aaron in his truck and talking with Aunt Elaine, and when I worked—those were the times I felt like what I thought a seventeen-year-old girl should feel like.

I changed into my boots. Sands was standing, hands on hips, working out some puzzle in his mind.

“The walls are getting pretty high,” he said when I stood beside him. As he spoke, he was looking at the work, not at me, so I understood he was having one of his shy moods.

“It’s not hard to build the staging up that high,” he went on, scuffing one boot on the old church foundation and punching the glasses back against his nose with his gloved index finger. “But how to get the stones up there is what I’m wondering. I could buy a chain fall, I guess—that’s a tool for lifting heavy things—but I kind of like lifting them up by hand.… It slows us down, though. Now it’s going to get even slower. I can’t picture putting them one at a time in a knapsack or something and hiking up the ladder, can you? It would take forever.”

“You could to use small stones,” I said.

“
We
could, Laney. It’s not just my project.”

“We could of.”

Sands turned and looked at me, as if he’d heard something different in my voice. He ran his eyes over my face then turned back to the walls. “It would look funny. Plus, another few feet up and we’ll be at the top of the walls for this section. And that’s where we have to put a notch for the roof rafters. They’re going to bear the weight of the roof, and the more mortar there is—the higher the ratio of mortar to stone, I mean—the weaker the walls will end up being.”

I walked over to my backpack and removed the book he’d given me. I checked to see that I’d been careful enough with it, that there were no marks on the hard cover, no bent pages. Then I carried it over and stood next to him, paging through. Without exception, the stones near the tops of the walls of all the great cathedrals were the same size as those on the bottom. “How did they do for it those days then?” I asked him.

“Ropes and pulleys and ramps, from what I’ve been able to read.”

“Then we could of the same.”

Sands was shaking his head. “They had teams of men rolling or sliding the stones up the ramps, or using ropes and pulleys to lift them up in big wooden crates.”

“What about to make steps like for the sill ribbons and to lift on them up like it?”

“We could. It would be very slow.”

After a minute, I said, “I’m not strong, aren’t I? Because that’s what’s wrong.”

“You’re fine,” Sands said, but I could tell he didn’t mean it. I wondered if he would hire a man to help us, or even to take my place, but I’d noticed that he wasn’t particularly comfortable around men. Whenever we went to Warners’ with an order, or when someone came to make a delivery, I saw that the shyness in him blossomed out. He could shake their hands, and even sometimes make a joke with them, but there was something else running under the skin of his face, a kind of fear or discomfort or defense that reminded me of myself at home.

The largest stones we needed to lift were about two feet long and a foot high, cut square and flat on their four edges, but front and back they were “beveled,” to use Sands’s word. I looked at the wooden staging already in place and the straight walls. We were almost ready to fit the windows into them; just another few courses of stone and we’d reach the tops of the window holes, where Sands said we had to make arches like the Romans did—from stones he’d ordered special at the quarry in Barre. Another few courses beyond that we’d be ready for the roof. “What if we made high ramps up?” I said. “Of a kind you could make to higher when you wanted. And then what if we had a little kids’ cart on it, wheels, and we put one of the stones to the cart and pulled on a rope to get it high? When we got it high what if we slided the stone over in a line at a shelf there, and then put the mortar, and then slided them on?”