Tide King (16 page)

Spears of fall began to poke at the bubble of summer—a few unseasonably cool mornings in August while Calvin planted the broccoli, cauliflower, and radishes in the field; a sweater draped on his mother's shoulders as she knitted on the glider; his father's gun parts gleaming on the table as he cleaned and assembled them for goose season. In class, he sat in his usual seat behind and to the left of Kate and wrote short-answer essays on
The Odyssey
on his final exam. When he finished, he stayed at his seat, watching the slow wave of Kate's hair cascade down her back as she looked to the ceiling, turned her pencil on her cheek and then moved it feverishly across the bluebook. When she closed it and stood, he did too, and followed her up to Professor Shillings, who held up his palm to Johnson as he turned to follow Kate.

“I'll be reading with great interest.” Professor Shillings raised an eyebrow as he took Johnson's bluebook. “Maybe we'll see you for the fall semester, Mr. Johnson?”

“I haven't registered yet,” he answered. “I liked your class, sir. Thanks for the opportunity to take it.”

Kate waited for him in the hall.

“How about an egg cream?” He smiled at her. He looked forward to talking about their schedules for the fall, kissing in his truck in the parking lot behind the bowling alley. She had grounded him. He didn't feel essential to himself, even alive in a normal sense, but he felt tethered to Kate, her gravity keeping his moon rotating, surviving its long trip around the galaxy.

“When were you going to tell me that you were going to New York?” They sat in the truck behind the bowling alley. He lit a cigarette and stared at the tip of the neon bowling pin that cleared the roof and poked at the sky.

“I'm sorry, Calvin. I wanted to from the beginning, that night at the drug store, even. But I wanted to spend time with you. I've always wanted to go to New York University. I just stayed close to home during the war so my parents wouldn't worry. I think they were hoping I'd be engaged or married by now to someone at Bowling Green and ready to pop out a baby.”

“What if I asked you not to go?” He turned and put his hands on her shoulders, his eyes locked on hers, and he tried to burn his feelings into her irises, her corneas, so even if she left, she'd see him, a shadow that stretched over her.

“I'd say you were asking a lot of me.”

“But I thought there was something between us…” he groped for words. She had erased his entire vocabulary, and new words had yet to form. “A connection. The way we talk…you're scared of what you're feeling.”

“Maybe. I don't know.” She dropped her head, searching for her own. “But I know I want to go to New York and I want to study art history and work in a museum and I've always wanted these things and you just can't sweep into my life, Calvin, and expect me to change everything.”

“I'm not asking you to change anything. I want to be a part of your life, Kate. I'll come to New York. I'll find a job, anything.”

“Calvin, you need to find your own place.” She smoothed the collar on his shirt. “I don't want you to follow me. You started going to school before you knew me. You wanted to be an architect, remember? And rebuild all those beautiful churches? I don't want to be the person who makes you stop that.”

“If I rebuild anything, it's going to be with my hands. I'm too dumb to be an architect.” He turned from her. “I'm sorry, Kate. You're a smart girl, and I hope you'll do something with your studies and not just wind up getting married to some rich guy.”

“Calvin, you're going to do great things with your life.” Kate smiled. “And I'm going to see you do them. It's just that, right now, I need to go to school.”

“I understand, Kate. You don't have to apologize.”

“You will write me, won't you? I should love to get letters from you. And I will write you back, I promise.”

“Sure, okay.” He shrugged. He would go to New York. He would find her and woo her. He did not know what else to do.

“Oh, wait.” Her hands went to her neck, and when they came together in front of her, they held a medal of Saint Christopher on the chain. “I want you to have this.”

He took the medal and turned it over.

“Si en San Cristóbal confías, de accidente no morirás,” he read the inscription. “What does that mean?”

“It means if you trust St. Christopher, you won't die in an accident,” she answered. “I want you to be safe in your travels. For when we cross paths again.”

“You really think we're going to cross paths again?”

“Of course,” she smiled. “I'm just going to school. We're not banished from each other forever, two wandering souls. You have to give it back then.”

“Why?”

“It was my brother Stephen's,” she explained. “He died.”

“When?”

“About a year before you came home. Of leukemia. For months, I dreamed that I would die so I could go visit him. I talked to him in those dreams, and I believed for a long time that those conversations were real.”

“What made you stop dreaming?” Calvin pulled a cigarette out of the Pall Malls on the dashboard and pushed the cellophane pack toward her.

“Well, it wasn't real…that kind of stuff,” she shrugged as helither cigarette, then his own. “I mean, when people are dead, they're dead.”

“You don't believe in miracles, or ghosts, or eternal life?”

“I don't even believe in God, necessarily,” she answered, exhaling. “Although that is strictly between you and me. My parents thought that sending me to boarding school would teach me how to knit a doily and drink tea and think thoughts becoming to a lady. And they would never have agreed to let me study in New York if they thought I didn't think those things.”

“So why are they paying for you to study in New York?”

“Because I told them I'd join the circus,” she laughed. “I guess I've always been a little fragile since Stephen passed away, and I know they want to keep me happy, lest I break down and be hospitalized and become some spinster. Plus, I kind of hinted to them I'd absolutely settle down when I was finished. That I just wanted to be cultured, a good wife. Ohio is terribly isolated, you know, and I could find a good family to marry into in New York rather than stay here and risk being some backwards rube.”

“Well, you're a pretty girl; I'm sure you won't have any trouble.”

“Oh, geez, you probably think I've flipped my wig.” Kate touched his arm. “I never tell anyone things like this, honestly. I just knew…you'd understand. I've always known. That first night in class, you felt so out of place, and I've felt that way so much in my life. Not that I show it…but I completely understood how, to you, everything here after the war feels kind of phony.”

“Do you really? Do you really understand anything about the war, about what happened to me?” He turned to face her. He let the chain slide from his hand onto the seat between them before scooping it up. “Now, I'm sorry, Kate—I didn't mean it like that. Sometimes I'm a little touchy about what happened…in Germany.”

“Take me home, okay?” She stared through the windshield as the streets put distance between what they were before, what they were to become.

“Kate, please write.” At her house, he grabbed her arm before she climbed from the truck. “I want you to understand me. And I want to understand you.”

She picked up the chain between them and studied it before affixing it to Calvin's neck.

“I'll see you in a few months. I promise. Write me back.” She kissed him and leapt out, heading toward the light of the porch before he could respond.

He did not know if he could wait those few months. He needed something, something that would tie things up, make him feel complete again. He wrote Stanley Polensky a letter at his Baltimore address, and when he did not hear from him he wrote to Green, from their unit. Green thought that Polensky had gone to Montana with some of the others to get jobs at the National Park Service. He remembered the Pole talking about it during the war. He had loved the big ponderosa pines out in the Hürtgen, the smell and look of them, even as Johnson could never imagine them again without thinking of diarrhea, of blood, of bone-hurting cold. But Polensky saw the good in everything, and now that Kate had taken what was left of his heart, Johnson needed a little bit of that goodness. He also needed to tell Stanley a few things—first, that he was his friend and brother. That he would die for him. And that only he would understand the strange tale of the Hürtgen forest. Maybe he, man of medallions and lamps, would know what it all meant, if anyone could.

Seasons opened and closed their eyes, batting leaves from trees, crumbling the stones of the bone house, lining the skin of the villagers. Children once her age had their own children, and their own grandchildren, and sometimes their own great-grandchildren. But she did not grow any bigger; her head got no closer to the ceiling of the bone hut, and she needn't not stoop to enter.

She picked burnette saxifrage, white, fan-shaped, from the far end of the woods, where she had gone with her mother long ago. They grew in regular grass and not in a circle blackened by the lightning. They did not look as radiant as the one she had hidden in the bone house, that had survived the fire and the ages, nestled in the skeleton hand of Bolek. But she dried them and boiled water and tried to make the tinctures she had made with her mother. She caught rabbits and mice and cut their bellies, their limbs. She buried them in the grave behind the bone house when they bled to death, variations of the tincture lathered over their wounds. She cut herself, jagged lines as wide as her arm, her thigh, and watched the blood drain for a minute before the edges of her skin began to draw together, the blood disappearing. When she awoke, the signs of her mutilation had dispersed like the morning fog, her skin shiny and taut in the sun.

“Do you think I should try a little more Chaga mushroom?” She asked her lalka, the raven-haired one her mother had given her, as she boiled potatoes to make vodka. It was named Barbara. “A little less amber?”

Barbara never spoke; her face, depending on the light through the roof or Ela's emotional weather, revealed a wry smile, a cooing sympathy. Sometimes at night it seemed to leer at her; others, she seemed remote, her eyes, her smile, reserved for someone or something else. Those days, Barbara wound up across the room, her legs flailing in the air, her face on the stone floor her own mother had made years before, pressing the largest and flattest rocks she'd found into the earth.

“What do you think of the little girl down the hill?” She tossed a potato, eyed and hard, in the air while looking out the entrance of the bone house. Several years ago, a family built a small stone-and-wood cottage down the hill and tried to farm rye. Most of the lots had been parceled and halved and quartered over the years, and those peasants who were not so lucky tried with little luck on the rocky, nutrient-less land in the widening perimeter of miles outside Reszel. The father had left several months before, and the expressions on the mother and daughter's faces had gradually changed, like the slow but irrevocable wear on a rock formation, from hopeful pride and excitement to confusion to the beginning dampness of despair, before the deluge. The broken, the hopeful, were the most desperate. The loneliest. The little girl became aware of Ela. Ela caught her staring up at the bone house from the valley below. “Do you think she likes us?”

Barbara smiled affirmatively from the bed, where she lay next to the blonde-haired lalka. This one had no name, no story. It merely smiled and backed up Barbara.

“I will wait a little longer.” Ela came back to the boiling pot and dropped the potato in it. “We must let her come to us.”

“You're not a witch.” A month later, the little girl stood by the opening of the bone house. “My matka says, when they burned the witch, they burned her daughter, too.”