The Talk-Funny Girl (6 page)

“You want for making it so you live there?”

“I’m going to build a cathedral here, what I call a cathedral anyway. I designed it myself and I’m going to build it myself and use it to show people what kind of work I can do. I have some money. I’m going to have a business here in this town, building walls and stone houses and doing repairs.”

I looked at the piles of stones, the weeds growing out of them as if there were green-haired spirits hiding half-underground, the streetlamp casting a light over all of it and against the two-story box of a building at the rear. The man was making up a story. Who bought a church and lived in it? Who did that?

“Did you ever have a big dream for your life?” he asked.

I shook my head and kept staring at the rubble. If he let me go I was going to carry a lie home to my mother and father. I never lied to them, almost never, because they had a miraculous instinct for secrets, fibs, and tricks, and they would penance me if they thought I wasn’t telling them the absolute truth. But this time it made no sense to tell the truth. Why was I late for supper? Because the man from Warners’ had told me to talk to this other man who was buying the blown-up church
and building a new church over it. I went with him alone in a truck to see. We stayed there a long time while he talked.

“Well, this is my dream for myself,” he was saying. “To design and build a cathedral, a place of worship, but not ordinary worship. A place of peace, not rules. A place you can go and be quiet and be left alone and not need a priest or a minister or a rabbi to dial God’s number on the phone so you can talk with him. Come on, let’s get out and do a quick inspection.”

I didn’t want to leave my backpack in the truck, but when I started to pick it up the man reached over and put his hand on it. “Leave that,” he said, and I felt the cool sparkles go up my back muscles again.

He got out, and I got out, too, and followed him across the sidewalk and onto what had been the church’s front lawn. Some of the larger debris must have been carted away—the roof, the burned wood—but there were piles of rubble everywhere, stones of different sizes, chunks of concrete, a few pieces of metal and wood. Weeds growing out of it all. The man was lying or he was crazy or both. It was cold.

But I walked up the front steps and followed him, using the light from the streetlamp to keep from stepping on the rubble in a way that would make me fall.

“See this?” Mr. Ivers tapped his work boot near what had been the back end of the church. He raised his eyes to the street for a second and I thought he might be looking for a police car, waiting for someone to come and chase him off church property. “The floor here is in good shape, except over there where the boiler burst up through it. The foundation is about eighty-five percent solid. I’m going to clear this rubble off and build a cathedral on the solid part of the floor. It won’t be as big as the church, at least to start with. I’m going to do it in sections.”

“With all just your own hands?”

He made his small nervous laugh and I didn’t know then if he was tricking me or making fun of me or if he was a good man and just shy. There was something in the laugh, and in him, that was different from any person I had ever met. In the light he looked older than he’d
looked at first, and not as dark, and I tried to examine him without letting him see. “A long time that’s to take.”

“Exactly. And I’ll need a helper. You came very highly recommended … unless you think a girl can’t do the work.”

“She can do.”

“Do you have any skills?”

I looked at him. I knew what the word meant, of course, but I never thought of myself that way, as having skills.

“Can you do anything special with your hands?”

“I have … I know to take out a fishhook with one hand out the mouth of it. My dad showed. I can to chop wood. Clean up good. A little cook.”

“That’s it?”

He seemed then almost to be mocking me. He was a big man, four or five inches taller than my father. Big shoulders, big arms, but thin in the middle, as if a child had been putting together a toy figure from two kits and had mismatched the muscle man’s arms with the little boy’s body. “Nobody can does work harder of me.”

“Than I.”

“Nobody does. You won’t be sorry if you ask me for the job.”

“It’s not a job exactly, it’s an apprenticeship.”

At those words—“not a job exactly”—I felt something drop out of my insides. I thought about how long it would take to walk home from there, about my backpack in his truck, about my mother’s voice.

“Why you made it for me to come here then?”

“A paid apprenticeship. You can learn the trade of stonemasonry.”

“To pay?”

“Right. I pay you. Except indirectly.”

I looked at him. I heard cars passing behind me on the street.

“You’d get money every month, through your aunt.”

“How are you to know her?”

“I met her at the hospital a long time ago.”

“She works at there even still.”

“I know. I’ll pay her. She’ll pay you. I’ll give you a two-week trial period, and if you can keep up, I’ll guarantee you a job as long as we’re both still alive. How’s that for a good deal?”

I had been starting to think he wasn’t a bad man until he said “both still alive.” There was something not right about him, and as good as I was at reading people, understanding their motivations within a few minutes of meeting them, there was a dimension to this man that puzzled me. The mix of strong and shy, of manly and boyish, the idea of building a church for himself—who had the money and time to do that? And it seemed strange and wrong not to be paid directly; with all the work I’d done in my life, I’d never had a job like that.

But when he talked about his cathedral, a tone came into his voice that didn’t sound like anything evil. For a few minutes it had seemed he would let me work, and pay me regularly, and not hurt me, and then he said the part about being alive. If my aunt Elaine really knew him, she’d never mentioned it. No one named Ivers. No one with a ponytail. No one with part-dark skin. I looked at him. I was accustomed to my father moving all the time, shifting his weight, playing with the stump of his missing finger, his eyes running over every object within view, his head tilting right and left as if he was trying to shake water out of his ears after a swim in the quarry. I was used to my mother’s smoking and the constant twists and secret messages of her mouth and lips. But this man was standing as still as an oak tree, studying me, and in the shadows his face gave away absolutely nothing.

“Want to give it a shot?”

“I’m not knowing yet.”

He lifted his eyebrows, surprised. “Why don’t you think about it, then? And if you want the job, come here tomorrow after school and we can start. You’ll have to wear boots, though. You can’t do this work in sneakers or shoes, too dangerous. If I don’t see you, I’ll assume it wasn’t right for you and there will be no hard feelings.”

I looked at him. “I have boots only for the snow kind.”

“Well you’ll have to buy some then. Steel-toed.”

I nodded, and could feel the warmth running beneath the skin of my face.

“Now I’ll drive you home.”

“You didn’t say what money.”

“What do you mean?”

“What money you are paying me for, you didn’t tell.”

“You’d work three afternoons a week for two hours, at first. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And six hours on Saturday. Twelve hours a week to start. I’d pay you a hundred dollars.”

“In a month?”

“A week.”

I looked at him.

“That’s a little more than eight dollars an hour. I’d nudge it up as you learn the trade, and in summer you could work more.”

The legal minimum wage then had just been raised to three dollars and eighty cents. At Emily’s Dough Nuts, I had been paid two dollars and fifty cents an hour, cash money. I looked at him. I bit down on my lips. I put my hand up and took hold of a small fistful of my hair behind my right ear, tugging against the roots but not too hard.

“You think about it,” he said. “I’ll take you home.”

“Just to the 112. Then I could walk to home for there.”

“Fine.”

We rode back along the highway without speaking. I kept replaying everything he’d said, and every few hundred yards I turned and looked at the side of his face. I wondered if there were any seventeen-year-old girls in the world who made eight dollars an hour, or if it was just part of his trick, an impossible promise like that.

When the truck pulled into the lot and stopped and I had my fingers on the door handle and the backpack on my lap, I said, “If I want for the work I come on tomorrow when school has done.”

He turned to face me, the lenses shining in the light. “I believe I
understood that, yes. Tomorrow after school, with steel-toed work boots. You can buy them tonight. The mall is open until late. And if I don’t see you, that’s okay, too.”

He held out his hand and I shook it, feeling the calluses there. I thanked him and got out and waited until he’d driven away before I showed what direction I would walk in. By the time I’d gone along the dark, cold stretch of highway and down Waldrup Road and turned in at my house and seen that my father’s truck wasn’t in the driveway but my aunt’s car was, I had already made up my mind.

Five

O
nce a month—twice a month on those occasions when they had a little extra money—my mother and father would disappear for a night and a day. This usually happened not long after my father received his disability check—which arrived in a gray envelope with the olive green check visible in the window and the name of an insurance company printed in the upper left-hand corner. If my mother hadn’t gotten there first, it was one of my jobs to fetch the mail from the mailbox at the end of our short dirt driveway. I’d pull down the squeaking metal door of the box, take whatever I found, and bring it inside. Sometimes there were bills—property taxes, electricity, a reminder about an old unpaid dentist visit—which sent my mother into half-hour spells of muttering. On Wednesday there were always store coupons in a newspaper insert, which she balled up and stuffed in the woodstove. (In summer, when the stove wasn’t used, these newspaper balls overflowed the black iron belly so that, after the middle of July, the door never closed all the way. When heating season came around again in the fall, she’d scoop out most of the balled-up newspapers and leave them in a pile on the floor, put in some kindling and one or two of the dry hardwood billets my father stacked in the yard, and light a match.)

Every two weeks there was the eight-page
True Home and Country
newsletter in the mailbox. If she was in a good mood, my mother would read aloud from it at night, with my father sitting at the other end of the couch, eyes turned away, listening closely, sometimes pressing his lips into a frown if he found the news—what the government was doing to us, what a conspiracy of environmentalists or homosexual activists or Jewish financiers was doing—especially disturbing.
True Home and Country
had other articles I sometimes looked at: articles claiming nuclear power was a trick of the government to make people sick and control them; that Jews, especially, but Catholics and Muslims, too, had spies and scouts hidden in the population. They were searching for Christ, who would come in disguise this time. Perhaps he had already come and was hiding from these demonic groups. When they found Christ, who, the Bible told, had promised to come to America this time instead of Egypt, these scouts were going to take him to a secret location in the mountains of California, torture him, kill him, burn his body, and scatter the ashes in 144 different places on earth so he would never be able to return to save the good white people, the people he had come to protect in the first place, since the Egyptians were the only whites in all of Africa.

Mixed in with these feature pieces were other, shorter articles, giving practical suggestions about hunting, trapping, fishing, putting up vegetables and salting meat, books to read and never to read, ways of arguing with non-churchgoing people so you could convince them of the truth, and tips for chastising children according to what the newsletter referred to as the Ancient Way of the Lord. Dousing. Facing. Boying or girling. Hungering. And so on. It was through the
True Home and Country
newsletter that my parents had found Pastor Schect (who had relocated to West Ober from parts unknown eight years earlier), and these articles and the pastor were all the spiritual guidance they seemed to need. It felt to me, though, even then, that they needed this guidance, and needed the newsletter and the visits to the church in West Ober, in a desperate way, as if without the advice of such people,
they would find themselves adrift in a world so complicated and terrifying it would, as my mother put it, “run you right off insane.”

In terms of the most anticipated mail, though,
True Home and Country
stood in a distant second place behind my father’s check. When the check came, my mother and I always made sure to put it on top of the small stack of mail one of us carried into the house. During the day, my father liked to be out in the forest, or splitting stove wood in the yard, or—if it was pouring rain—nursing a draft beer at Weedon’s Bar, where he was allowed to run a tab. So it would almost always be my mother who first saw the mail I brought inside. She would be balanced up on the counter on her small hips, smoking and drinking; or she’d be standing over beans and creamed corn at the stove; or she’d be lying down in a “sorry mind,” as she called her bad moods, on the worn sofa that had been there since Dad Paul’s hunting days, with her face pressed into the corner of the cushions and an ashtray on the floor near her dangling arm. Whatever position or state of mind I found her in, I was supposed to immediately show her the mail. If she saw the envelope from the insurance company it would be as if you snapped on a flashlight and shone it on the features of her face. She’d sit up on the couch, or step away from the stove, or slide down off the counter. For a second, a twitch of a smile would show in the muscles of her cheeks, and a sense of relief would surround her, as if she had spent the past fourteen days and nights imagining various scenarios in which the money failed to arrive. She would never dare open the envelope, but would take and set it in the middle of the dining room table, with nothing around it, so my father would see it as soon as he stepped into the house. Then, if she hadn’t already started cooking, and if there was time to send me to the 112 Store (where we were also allowed to buy on credit), she would prepare his favorite supper—hamburger and onion fried crisp, mixed with a can of tomato soup and poured over white rice. The presence of the envelope in the house would change the language of her body. Sometimes, if the meal was ready and my father wasn’t
yet home, she’d take a shower (my parents never used the timer and could stay in the shower as long as the hot water lasted) and change her shirt, and then anyone could see that she really had been pretty once, as people said. On the night of the check’s arrival—I understood this as I grew older—my parents would drink a little and talk a little until I went to bed, and then they would have sex. I could hear the sounds of it from my room. The head of their bed would knock against the wall in a certain urgent rhythm, and my father would be saying, “Hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt!” loudly, while my mother made sounds that fell somewhere between whimpers of pain and small bullets of laughter. I’d lie in my bed, looking up at the dark ceiling, wondering how much of what kids in school said about it was true.