Thieves I've Known (20 page)

“All right then.”

When we came out from the tree line, we could see two small shadows stand up in the dark, like rocks suddenly come to life. As we approached, one of them began to lope toward the woods. The second groundhog paused and then chased after the first. I opened the truck door and Mulligan tore out across the yard after them. I watched him run, but the groundhogs made the edge of the trees before he was halfway there.

It looked like someone had dropped a grenade in the garden patch. Half-eaten onions lay scattered across the soil, and a short trench, where the carrots had been planted, stretched in shadows in the dirt. Roots from the leek plants were tangled around the makeshift wooden stands, snapped in two. We could hear Mulligan's barking from down the driveway, and the scent of the loose earth hovered above the wreckage, sweet and sharp.

Jake stood beside the truck as I poked at the some of the carrots, bits and pieces missing, and their long, stringy roots wrapped in knots.

“That's a lot of hard work ruined,” he said.

I nodded but didn't say anything.

He walked up the driveway after Mulligan and left me kneeling in the soil. I picked up a string of carrots, half-grown, and wiped at them. In the shed I switched the light on and found the trowel and the shovel, slinging them over my shoulder with the two empty buckets. I returned a few minutes later and dragged a heavy bag of fresh soil down the path. With the moon gone it was dark in the patch, but some of the brighter stars were beginning to appear on the horizon. Jake's boots crunched in the gravel down near the woods. I knelt in the soil and began to separate the vegetables, making two piles in the corners.

Fixing torn-up divots in the outfield at the baseball stadium was good practice for the job. I was already making calculations in my head—the number of seeds I still had in the house, how much time I had before winter, which rows, as a whole, might be replanted, and where I might get some wire fencing to put up around the garden.

Jake walked up to the patch, and Mulligan trotted behind him, his head hanging low, defeated. Jake stood with one hand in his pocket, the other holding an envelope facedown. “Grady,” he said.

I went back to separating the vegetables. “What's that?”

“It's for you.”

I took the letter from him, smearing soil across the envelope. The return address was from Frank Wood Hospital, Arizona, but it was addressed to Jake, not me.

“It's for you,” I said, handing it back.

“But it's about you.”

“Take it.”

He frowned but closed his fingers around it, pausing and then tearing the paper up the side. He slipped a letter out and unfolded it. Turning in place, he tried to catch some of the light from the stars, and I could see his eyes squinting and trying to focus. I thought I could hear those groundhogs out in the woods. I listened for them. Jake stood a few moments and I waited on him. He handed the letter back to me.

“My eyes aren't good enough,” he said.

I took it from him and read it, pausing between words, trying to make out sentences in the starlight. Mulligan sniffed at the onions in the garden, and Jake lit up a cigarette, the first spark of tobacco mixing with the scent of the soil.

After a time, I folded the letter up and stuck it in my pocket. I picked up the trowel and began scooping dirt back into the short trench.

“Go through that pile,” I said, motioning to the rest of the vegetables. “Pick out anything worth saving.”

I knelt in the dirt and dug new holes in the earth. Jake brought pails of water from inside the house and a stack of wood from behind the shed. He set the lengths of wood one by one on a bigger log, splitting them in thirds down the side with a hatchet. With the hammer from the truck cab, he pounded the fresh stakes around the edge of the garden, making a wall a foot and a half high. On the corners he put longer stakes, like the towers of a frontier fort. While I replanted the carrots and onions, dropping seeds into fresh holes, Jake disappeared inside and returned later with an armful of wire hangers. He clipped them near the top with wire cutters, twisted them together, and ran them like string from the four corners of the fence.

We worked all night, stopping only to share coffee from a thermos. When the orange glow from the sun appeared over the mountains, I had to squint from the brightness. All night long we'd worked in the light from stars.

I remembered then something my mom had told me. The first star at night appears like a point on a map—the only point—and from that position, other stars emerge. They scatter in unpredictable places, depending on where you are, and they begin to create meaningful constellations. When the sky becomes full, in the middle hours of the night, it's easy to pick out the dominant star—Vega on some nights, Polaris on others. But it's difficult to remember, looking up at the map, which star came first, which is the one that holds the rest in place. You think to yourself: which one of those stars up there was the brightest, when it mattered the most?

Grimsley kept a flower stem in his pocket, not so much for good luck, but to keep bad luck away, a trick his mother had taught him. In the summertime, he never wore a hat after dark. Of these things, he was sure. An apple or a tomato without a bruise was bad luck, as was reading the obituaries, unless you knew someone in there. Bats brought good luck, but you didn't want too many of them. A candle reflected in glass was a good sign, but its reflection in a mirror was, if possible, to be avoided. He never let a younger person take his picture. A moon in the morning brought great luck, and snow and sunshine on the same day was even better. Hail, though, was trouble all around.

In the office of the lumberyard he put on his galoshes, his hat (it was winter), and his overcoat and limped out into the moonlight, into the sleet and snow. In the yard he checked the fence line for breaks and shined his flashlight under the stacks of oak wood in the main yard. The machine saws were unplugged, and there were no teenagers hiding there: it was the wrong season for pranks. At the shoreline Grimsley splashed salt water on his face, watched the ripple of stars in the waves of the bay. Inside the mill, he dropped a bit of sand into his shoe for luck and rubbed mentholatum on his knee because it was old and it hurt. He kept away from the coffee on his doctor's orders. He warmed himself at the woodstove and watched the slow hands of the time clock and waited for his shift to end.

On his drive home he passed the lines of pickups and station wagons, lights on, driving toward work and school, slow in the morning's slush
and ice. He watched for animals from the woods. They came out fast if you didn't keep an eye out. Killing a raccoon was bad luck, and deer was worse.

At home, he left his boots just inside the trailer door, and he changed his socks because that was good for his circulation. His wife was in the kitchen, and an omelet—spinach, which he didn't much like—was frying in a pan. Mona rubbed lotion on her arm—an old habit, she'd been burned bad as a child—and squinted up at him as he sat down. She looked tired and old, although she was ten years younger than him.

“You put your glasses on, you could see,” he said.

“They hurt my eyes this early.”

“I could be a serial murderer with a chain saw, for all you could tell.”

“I know your walk,” Mona said. “A man with a chain saw doesn't come in here with just his socks on.”

He took a seat. “You get that prescription changed and you'd be all right.”

“I had it changed, and the lenses were too heavy. I'm not having that same fool conversation with you this morning. I can smell a cigarette on your clothes. You got no business giving me any lectures.”

Grimsley decided not to argue with her. It was bad luck. Although his mother hadn't taught him that, he'd learned it on his own. Mona set the lotion aside, pushed her chair away from the table. At the stove she flipped the omelet, pushed down with the spoon. They listened to the sizzle of grease, the ice slipping from the trailer outside. The sun was beginning to rise. He switched the lamp off and watched the shadows of trees on the frozen pond, the birds pecking at the snow. Mona set the omelet on a plate, brought him a knife and fork, a mug of juice. He ate quickly: the spinach didn't taste so bad when it burned his tongue.

“Today's Thursday,” Mona said.

Grimsley concentrated on the omelet. He counted the bites remaining—six if he was lucky—and said nothing.

“You said you'd go over there by the end of the week,” she said.

“Saturday's the end of the week.”

“Saturday you'll be out on your boat, and tomorrow you'll tell me a man needs to enjoy his Friday. Today's a good day to go.”

“Is she going to the hospital today?”

Mona sat down in the chair across from him. “The next time that woman goes'll be the last time, and then you'll have that hanging on your head. Don't make me get mean with you.”

Grimsley thought she was being mean already, but he kept the thought to himself. He ate a bite of omelet. He didn't like visiting the dying—that was big-time bad luck unless you were family or a minister—and he didn't like making promises without first thinking them through. He looked over at his wife.

“I'm just fixing things, right?”

“The woman's granddaughter is staying with her, and she could certainly use a little help. There's a hole in the bathroom and a leak in the kitchen. How'd you like some water running through your kitchen this time of year?”

“I guess I wouldn't like it very much.”

“You're pushing it,” she said.

He looked at his watch, bought a little time while he thought things through.

“I'll go over in the afternoon,” he said.

“This afternoon?”

“By the time you come home, I'll be there and back.”

“And those things'll be fixed?”

“If I can fix them in an afternoon, they'll be fixed. If not, tomorrow.”

“On a Friday?”

“Nothing like helping people on a Friday.”

Mona picked up the bottle of lotion and put her glasses on. “Helping someone doesn't have a time limit.”

Shelby set her book on the dresser and picked up the oxygen line from the tank. Her grandmother pressed her head back against the pillows, squinted her eyes. She coughed up something gray and solid into her
mask. Shelby wiped it out with a handkerchief. She rubbed her grandmother's temples, something the woman had liked weeks before, although now Shelby couldn't be sure. She cut back on the oxygen, set her grandmother up against the pillows, brushed the hair out of the woman's eyes. Out the window, she could see the shadows of trees against the pond and a single bird, pecking at the snow. Later, the visiting nurse—Karl, a man Shelby had a secret crush on, was terrified at the thought—changed the woman's dressings, the bedsheets, gave the woman an injection of pain relief though a tube into her leg. Shelby read her books in the bedroom, and when her grandmother slept, in the kitchen. History mostly, things she liked: Roman emperors who built a seawall for fishermen, who supported the arts and theater, who poisoned their fathers (she didn't like that), who built roads through what would become France.

Over the past weeks, she'd read about cave dwellings, about sea scrolls, about Amelia Earhart (two books about her), and about one of the first known cartographers, a Russian named Yirvus. She walked to the library in town on Mondays, a nurse—not Karl—stayed for most of that day, and Shelby brought back as many books as would fit in her pack. Her grandmother had been dying for many weeks now. Shelby had dropped out of the tenth grade. She read about da Vinci, about James Farmer, and about the first woman to reach the North Pole. She read and reread a book on the Dust Bowl of 1934. Shelby kept a notebook, copied passages that she wanted to remember. She'd not been much of a reader before, had liked television and the radio, but the sound bothered her grandmother.

In her reading, Shelby found that she didn't much like the British, though that was likely due to Churchill. She did like a nun in the sixteenth century named Elizabeth Byrd who had done little of anything, but who seemed to notice a lot: waterbirds, the sky at night, dragonflies. Meriwether Lewis was the best writer, Shelby thought, although Wilbur Wright was close behind. She read at a varied pace—mostly depending on her grandmother.

On this morning, she took out her pen, opened her notebook.
Do you not insist too strongly on the single point of mental ability? To me, it seems that a thousand other factors, each rather insignificant in itself, in the aggregate influenced the event ten times more than mere mental ability or inventiveness. If the wheels of time could be turned back, it is not at all probable that we would do again what we have done. … It was due to a peculiar set of circumstances which might never occur again
.

She read for a half hour, copying a passage here and there. After, she checked on her grandmother again, turned the heat up in the room, placed two tablets on the woman's tongue, sitting her up straight, pressing a cup of water to the lips. The woman looked at her but her eyes didn't seem to focus. When she was set against the pillows again, she mumbled, “It's too deep out there. You need to come in a little.”

Shelby sat on the nightstand and brushed the woman's hair, held her hand for a few minutes. A man's voice from the other room opened her eyes. She placed her grandmother's arm back under the covers and switched off the lamp. She closed the door behind her.

“Good morning,” said the man. He stood in the doorway to the trailer. He was old and stooped a little, seemed to keep the weight off one leg.

“Yes sir,” said Shelby.

He paused for a moment, as if she'd addressed someone else.

“I'm here to fix some things,” he said. “My wife's name is Mona, and I believe she talked with you.”