The Talk-Funny Girl (28 page)

“For the Lord of God and this the food,” my mother said. My father nodded, and we ate. It seemed to me the air was alive with words, buzzing with them, but no one could grab hold of one and make it be still. Every time I opened my mouth to take a bite I was afraid a question would fly out.

Afterward, I washed the dishes, listening to my parents talking softly to each other in their room—where I was not allowed to go. I did my homework, washed the scratches on my forehead for the third time with hot water and soap, and went and lay under the sheet. I prayed for a long while, sending quiet words up into darkness. I prayed that Aaron hadn’t been killed, that my father wouldn’t go to jail, that I wouldn’t lose my job. And then, when I grew tired of praying, I listened to the rain and tried, as I sometimes did, to hear God’s thoughts behind it, to imagine my way into his mind.

Twenty-two

C
ertain things that would have been settled elsewhere by the law were settled, where we lived, in other ways. Enough people there had served time (“been time” was the way my mother and father put it) upstate, or had brothers or uncles, or sometimes wives or sisters or mothers, who’d served time upstate that they weren’t anxious to pick up the phone and call for the police when they encountered trouble. They were particularly wary of the state troopers, as if their beige Stetsons and forest green cruisers were the mark of some tribe that wanted to wipe people like us off the earth. What Aaron had done to me wasn’t a matter for the police—my parents and I understood that without having to discuss it. Even if he had succeeded in raping me it wouldn’t have been a matter for the police.

In spite of the rough way he’d treated me, the next day I was happy to see Aaron’s square head on the other side of the high school cafeteria. Seeing him there meant that my father hadn’t gone and killed him, or sliced off his arm, or something else. I watched, but there seemed to be nothing wrong with him. At the end of the meal he swiveled his eyes at me, and I stared back. In his face was something I recognized. Fear has a color to it, and no kind of face can really hide that.

After school, walking toward the cathedral, still wondering what
had happened and then turning my thoughts to the new rope-and-wagon system and wondering if it would really work, I made the corner onto North Main Street and saw Aaron’s truck parked and idling at the curb. It was too late to turn around, but I wouldn’t have turned around in any case. If I ran then, I would only have to face him another time, and then another and another, for the rest of my life in that town. As I drew closer to the truck, the door opened, and where I expected to see Aaron step out, I saw his uncle instead. Cary Patanauk. On his left forearm and hand he wore something resembling a huge white mitten. The bandage went most of the way to his elbow.

Mr. Patanauk stood in front of me on the sidewalk, blocking my way. I stopped a few yards away from him.

“You tell your father,” he said to me, “that he’s just a crazy man. No one’s afraid of him no more.”

“You on to tell him,” I said as calmly as I could manage.

Patanauk spat on the sidewalk next to his feet then scuffed at the spit angrily with his boot sole and looked back at me. He swung the arm with the bandage on it. “You tell him, he comes for my nephew and I’ll call and tell everything.”

“Call to which person?” I said, “And tell to what?” because I could hear in his voice that he never would call anyone, and I could see the same thing I’d seen behind Aaron’s eyes in the cafeteria.

“The states.”

“Call to, then,” I said. “Call to, and before he of goes on away he’ll to slice you up both. That’s the way how he is.”

Patanauk was half-bald, with a giant’s shoulders and neck and a small mouth all puckered up. I thought he was probably one and a half times the size of my father, but it wasn’t size that mattered in things like this; it was which person had a line they’d stop at in an argument or a fight, and which person didn’t. There was no line for my father and never had been, and I suspected everyone in town understood that.

“Whore like your mother,” the small mouth said.

I stood still. Cars went past on the street. My heart was banging in
my chest and I could feel a small trembling, like an electric current, in my arms and legs. “I’ll tell him you of told me for that,” I said, but it came out with a squeak of breath in the middle of it, so that the little mouth in front of me flexed into a smile.

“Do that,” he said. “Little whore moron who can’t talk good. And when he comes to my shop again looking for my nephew I’ll have my rifle loaded.”

“You’ll need of it oncet I tell.”

For a minute then the fear came up strong in me, cold and blue as an old frozen berry in the woods. I had the idea that if it hadn’t been daytime, and if we hadn’t been standing there with cars going past, then what I saw in Cary Patanauk’s face might be set upon me like a rabid coydog on a house cat. I thought I understood then who he was, and what kind of a man he was, and why my father had taken along his chain saw instead of going to the welding shop with just his hands and strong arms and no line to stop at. I could taste something like warm metal in my mouth, and I knew it was the same as it had to be with Aaron: If I showed fear to this man, then for the rest of my life I’d have to worry about walking along Route 112 alone in the dusk, and if he was coming by in his pickup, or if he was watching out his shop window. So I leaned one inch closer to him and steadying my voice I said, “My boss has a friend at the states. They knows it was you what of kidnapped that girl acrost the river.”

It was a wild thing to say, a wild shot that came from an odd intuition. But when I had spoken the words I watched something change in Patanauk’s face, a small change, the twitch of a muscle beside his right cheekbone. “And you’ll been time forever upstate for that. So go, give at me something I can tell now. Go head.”

Without waiting for him to answer, I started walking, my legs wobbly, my course only five or six feet to the right of where he stood. I didn’t look at him as I went past, but I waited for his good arm to reach out and take hold of me. When it didn’t, when I was beyond him and couldn’t see him, I felt as though cold-legged insects were scampering
along the skin at the back of my neck. I forced myself not to turn and look and not to change my stride. I heard him say, “Whore,” again, but quietly, and then I was well past him, my hands were shaking, and I was walking into the center of the town where I knew he wouldn’t follow.

T
hat afternoon, Sands and I put the finishing touches on our long ramp, three feet wide, strong enough to hold the weight of the wagon and two stones, but light enough that we could move it along the wall from front to back. At the top of the ramp Sands put together a small wooden frame and there he set up the pulley wheel. The last step in the process was to build a kind of shelf of two-by-tens, adjustable to various heights, on the indoor side of the wall. And then, after bracing everything, we were ready to give the system a tryout.

“It’s been an hour and a half,” Sands said. “Don’t you need to get home?”

I waited a few seconds, watching him. He didn’t seem to want me to leave. I shook my head.

We removed the wagon’s black handle and tied a heavy rope through the bracket there. For the first trial run, we put only one stone in the wagon, then rolled it to the base of the ramp. Sands climbed onto the staging and slowly pulled the rope through the pulley wheel while I walked alongside the ramp, holding the wagon steady with my hands. This worked well until the wagon reached the top of the ramp, at which point I could no longer stretch high enough to steady it, and when Sands tried to pull it up the last few feet, the weight shifted, the wagon turned sideways, dangled off the ramp, and the stone came crashing down, with the wagon following close behind.

Sands just stood there, looked at the ramp and down at the dented wagon for a few seconds, then he went for more wood. I loved the way he could think through problems and come up with ideas to solve them, and I loved the fact that, instead of spitting and grunting and throwing
tools when something went wrong, he just stopped what he was doing, looked at the work, and reasoned it through.

With me helping, Sands built a set of guide rails out of two-by-fours, attached them to the high end of the ramp, and we tried again. This time the wagon wiggled at the top but only bumped the rails and didn’t go over the edge. He took hold of it there and sent me down a big smile. I held the dangling end of rope so it couldn’t slip backward. Sands lifted the stone out and set it on the shelf, only a foot or so from its final resting place. He rocked back on his haunches and smiled at me again, this time in a way that made me forget Cary and Aaron Patanauk for a few minutes.

Soon we felt confident enough to put two stones at a time in the wagon. The stones fit as tightly into the bed as if it had been designed and measured just for that purpose. Sands learned how to pull the rope from a certain angle so the wagon didn’t wobble as much as it made the climb. And I knew just when to walk around to the other side of the wall and take hold of the dangling rope, just how much pressure I needed to keep on it, exactly the right moment to change my downward force as the stone was lifted out. I loved the teamwork and timing of it. Sands asked me again if I needed to get home. But I didn’t care about home then; I could have stayed there working all night.

Once we had twenty stones on the shelf—enough for about half the length of the wall—I mixed some mortar and Sands let me trowel it out in a smooth layer, like gray frosting, on small sections of the top of the wall. Then, one by one, he transferred the stones from the shelf onto the wall, tapped them into place with the butt end of the trowel, and filled the gap between with more mortar. It was my job to trim away the excess with something Sands called a “pointing tool”—basically a short, flat metal stick attached to a wooden handle. We didn’t stop to rest until the whole bucket of mortar had been used, the waste scraped away, and the bucket and tools sprayed clean with a hose. By then I’d been there nearly three hours. We stood in the churchyard
eating the blueberry muffins Sands had bought at Boory’s and drinking chocolate milk.

“I saw the scratches on your head,” he said when we were about halfway through the snack. I could tell he’d been holding the remark inside from the first minute he’d seen me. “Is that something you want to talk about?”

“Not way much.”

He nodded and pushed his glasses back and looked out at the street. It was easy to keep him from talking about certain things, but that time, after he fell silent, I wasn’t sure I really wanted to.

“My mother went p.g.,” I said. “Gone to, you know, make a baby.”

“Planned?”

I lifted my shoulders.

He gestured with one hand at my forehead. “Did she do that?”

I shook my head.

“Your dad?”

I shook my head again. “He went upset, but over the way my mom is to be. We don’t have money for another baby, that’s sure.”

“Why doesn’t he work?”

For a moment then I thought that if I gave the wrong answer, Sands would offer my father a job on the cathedral, which would have been, for me, like a death. “Back goes bad for him,” I said, and the words brought up the sour feeling inside me I recognized from other lies. “Permanent disable forever, he tells.”

Sands turned his eyes away and went quiet. There were crumbs on the front of his T-shirt. After a minute he brushed them away. “Having a child,” he said, in what I’d come to think of as his God voice, the voice he used when talking about church and praying, “is the most sacred act in life. The most important work.”

I wanted to ask him how he knew that, since he didn’t have any children. I thought about Aunt Elaine, and then about Cindy. I said, “There would be times better and not so better for it, though.”

He smiled in a sad way. “It’s going to be hard for your mom now. You should try to be kind to her even more than you already are.”

“Ma’s not that easy for a person to be kind at.”

“Well, you and your father should try.… And you should say ‘kind to,’ not ‘kind at,’ okay?” He looked out at the street. “She doesn’t smoke or drink much, does she?”

“Not that much.”

“Because that would be bad for the baby’s health. You know that, right?”

“Everybody knows it,” I said. I waited a few seconds to be polite, then pointed toward the ramp with the empty milk container in my hand. “I think we could might finish on this wall.”

I worried he’d remind me that I was only supposed to have worked for an hour, and had already worked more than three. But he said, “Thanks to your great idea,” and I was happy.

T
hat evening on the walk from the 112 Store, much later than I should have been coming home and a little worried still about the Patanauk men, I made an attempt to set all the pieces of my situation in a neat line in my mind—Aunt Elaine and Sands, my father and mother and Pastor Schect, Aaron and his uncle. The baby. Going over it all, I had a sense there was a missing piece. Or several missing pieces. Why hadn’t my parents punished me for running out of the house when Pastor Schect paid his visit? Why had my father cut up Aaron’s uncle and not Aaron himself? What had the police said to Pastor Schect and why had he come to the house in spite of that? Why had Cary Patanauk gotten that look on his face when I’d mentioned the abducted girl? With all those unanswered questions, I could feel that events were gathering into a new shape, the way clouds knit together in a summer sky before a thunderstorm, and I felt I almost knew what kind of storm was coming. Almost.

We were into June then, my favorite month. There must have been a steady breeze that evening, because I have no memory of the last of the blackflies bothering me as I walked. I noticed that wildflowers were growing in the band of grass between where the dirt of Waldrup Road ended and the real woods began. When I was nearly to our house, I went into the weeds there a few steps and made up a bouquet of flowers, blue, yellow, and white.