Two Rivers (20 page)

W
hen Brooder pulls his truck off the main road, Ray follows behind him down the old logging road. In the back of the truck, the man has slumped over again, making Harper wonder if he only imagined the cries. The orange moon has risen and is so bright it could rival the sun. It makes Harper feel exposed. He looks behind them, at the road disappearing, wondering who might be out there watching. He runs his hand through his hair over and over again, trying to smooth down a stubborn cowlick. A nervous habit. A tick.

“He’s going to the junction,” Ray says. “Where the rivers meet.”

Harper remembers standing knee-deep in cold water, casting out into the rushing current. He remembers the smell of coffee and dirt in the can where he kept the night crawlers he plucked from the ground before dawn. He remembers the prick of the hook, the sharp sting and the blood. He remembers Betsy peering into his empty bucket.

“She’s really dead?” Harper asks then, as if Ray could make it untrue by simply denying it.

He looks at Ray, at the Sox baseball cap pulled down over his ears. He’s worn it everyday since Ted Williams’s final home run in 1960. The brim is worn, the insignia faded. It is familiar. Comforting. Harper looks at his friend, eyes wide and scared, and he waits for him to take everything away. To tell him that she’s not dead at all, that it has all been a misunderstanding. A terrible dream.

But Ray just holds on to the steering wheel and stares straight ahead. “He’s just gonna scare him. That’s what he said.”

T
hough she couldn’t smile or even really speak (her jaw was still wired shut), my mother beamed when my father showed her the makeshift printing press he had set up in her office. She clapped her hands together and threw her arms around his neck in a way that reminded me of an adolescent girl instead of a forty-three-year-old woman. My father seemed suddenly bashful, pleased as punch with himself. It had taken two decades, but he’d finally used his talents to make her truly happy.

By the summer after my sophomore year at Middlebury, the
Freedom Press Monthly
was in full operation with a circulation of about a thousand. When I arrived home for summer vacation, there was an electricity in our house that I had never felt before. It was infectious. Each morning my mother woke before dawn, the smell of coffee infiltrating my dreams. By the time I managed to drag myself out of bed, she would have been up for hours already and would read her works-in-progress aloud to me as I ate breakfast.

“‘While Klan activity in the South is often overt, the Ku Klux Klan may be New England’s best kept dirty little secret. Because despite the Klan’s subversion, it is experiencing a frightening resurgence in the northern states.’”

“The
Klan
?” I interrupted.

She put her fingers to her lips. “Shhh. Listen. ‘The history of the Klan in Vermont, for example, might be surprising to those who currently live there. A state that is known for its tolerance and political progressiveness has also served as a hotbed for Klan activity throughout history. Presenting itself to these communities as an organization resolute on promoting family and patriotism and religion, in the early part of this century the Klan quickly gained followers. By the 1920s, over 14,000 Vermonters had paid the $10 initiation fee to the organization.’”

“Ma, that was forty years ago.”

“Last summer someone set a cross on fire at the home of a Negro family in Rutland.”

“Wow,” I said.

“It’s not something people around here want to talk about. It’s festering just under the surface. I want to open it up. Make people look at their neighbors. Look at themselves.”

But while my mother’s motives were obviously admirable, it just didn’t seem relevant to me. There were still no black families living in Two Rivers. I was pretty certain the family in Rutland might have been the only one in the entire state. The handful of black kids at Middlebury were athletes. They lived together, ate together, socialized together. My mother’s passion seemed to rise up out of a place I couldn’t understand.

As if sensing my detachment from the discussion, she said, “It’s not just Negroes they hate, you know. It’s French Canadians, it’s Indians, it’s
women
.”

Three days after my mother’s article hit the stands, someone set our mailbox on fire. Convinced that the two incidents were related, my mother asked my father and me to help her catch the culprit. We replaced the mailbox promptly, and as my mother pounded away a journalistic account of the episode as well as her speculations regarding those at fault, my father and I set the bait. We gathered literature my mother had accumulated from the SNCC. Left the mailbox door wide open, the article titles taunting a would-be racist. When more than two weeks had passed without further incident, even my mother seemed to believe that it had perhaps just been a fluke. Just teenagers raising hell, not a brood of hooded men. My mother’s activist zeal didn’t wane, but I was just so grateful to have her home, to be home again myself, that nothing could dampen my happiness.

I mowed the cemetery lawn two days a week and helped Betsy at the barbershop on my days off. I loved the smell of the shop, the antiseptic scent of aftershave and the soapy smell of shampoo. I took over the books for Betsy, who had always struggled with math, and she seemed grateful to be relieved from this particular duty. We closed up shop as soon as the last haircut or shave was finished, usually around six o’clock, and then we were free. With me home again and with Howie Burke out of the picture (shortly after his thwarted attempts with Betsy he’d enlisted in the army—a move I felt was rather extreme, but a blessing nonetheless), I thought that everything would return to normal. I figured that now Betsy and I could just slip back into our old lives. Like a comfortable shoe. A worn pair of jeans.

The previous summer we’d spent a lot of time with Ray and Rosemary, bowling, doubling at the drive-in. But they had gotten engaged this summer (an event expedited by Rosemary’s pregnancy and Rosemary’s father’s proverbial shotgun, according to Ray). They didn’t go out much; Rosemary was sick all of the time, and Ray was spent from his work at the mill. Besides, Betsy had no patience for our usual activities anymore. Bowling and drive-in movies, swimming and bike rides—nothing made her happy. She was edgy and impatient. Restless. Maybe it was because her daily life had become so mundane, but after she closed and locked the barbershop door each night, she seemed to need more excitement than she had before. It had always been exhilarating to be with Betsy, but sometimes she almost scared me now. I kept wondering when she’d go too far.

We broke into the first camp in early June.

Because of the blackflies, most of the summer camps on Lake Gormlaith were unoccupied until the Fourth of July. And the vacant cottages were easy to find: lights out, blinds pulled, boats stored away in sheds. The key to this one (and to every one after) was hanging from a hook behind a loose window shutter. The first night, I was terrified. I was sweating, wiping at my forehead long after it was clear no one was home. As Betsy raced from room to room, I stood in the dark kitchen waiting for her to get scared and go home. “Come here,” she said from the upstairs. The walls on the summer homes weren’t insulated, and even her whispers were loud. The floorboards creaked underneath her feet. I followed her voice up the stairs to an open room with exposed rafters and two beds with bare mattresses. She was standing at a cupboard on the wall, touching something inside. “Feel this,” she said, reaching for my hand. “I bet a thousand people have slept on them.” When I touched the sheets, carefully folded and put away for the winter, it didn’t take long to understand what she had in mind.

We never stole anything, not even the sheets. But Betsy always made sure to strip the beds when we were done and put the sheets, soiled by our bodies (the dirt, the sweat, sometimes even the blood) in a laundry basket, which was almost always waiting, empty, in the bathroom. For those rustic camps that didn’t have indoor plumbing, she would fold the sheets and put them in a brown paper bag by the door.

By early July, when the summer people started to arrive, we must have broken into twenty camps. Sometimes, Betsy took photos. The idea of the lives that had passed through these temporary homes thrilled her. She wanted to document these places that, once occupied, would evolve from this strange dormant state into a place of activity. Of life. “It’s like a shell,” she said. “And the summer people are like hermit crabs. They crawl inside, and suddenly it belongs to them. But just for a while; then they crawl away. And it’s empty again.” She took pictures of the pillows without pillowcases, blue and white ticking stained with circular drool stains. The empty drawers. The empty closets. The empty cupboards. She photographed the cobwebs. The dead flies on the windowsills.

On the Fourth of July not a single camp was empty, though we must have circled the lake twice looking for the telltale signs. Every window was filled with light. The boats were moored to the docks, which bobbed in the water in the moonlight. As I drove around the lake for the third time, Betsy started touching me. She knew I was incapable of driving while she was doing that. I was incapable of doing
anything
when she was doing that. “Stop,” I said. “I’ll drive us into the lake.”

“There’s the tree house,” she said.

“We can’t.” I shook my head. The McInnes family owned the camp that had the tree house. We knew them because we borrowed their boat once to paddle out to the island. They were home tonight. I had seen Mr. McInnes and his wife, Gussy, sitting on their sunporch each time we’d driven past their camp. “They’re home.”

“But they’re not in the tree house,” she said.

I couldn’t argue with that. Their only daughter was our age, too old for tree houses.

Betsy was halfway up the tree before I had even gotten out of the car. I’d had to wait for my body to return to its unexcited state, and she’d left me behind. She must have used her hair clip to jimmy the padlock, because by the time I’d climbed up, she was already inside.

“Oh, Harper,” she said, looking around and smiling. “It’s just like that Paul Klee painting. The one of the tree full of houses.” I’d kept the postcard she gave me in my underwear drawer at school, like a secret.

The tree house had four walls, a roof and windows. There were bunk beds but no mattresses. A small desk built into the wall. It was dark inside, but I could see the outline of her body as she undressed; the one window that faced the lake filled with color as the first of the Fourth of July explosions went off. Gormlaith was normally quiet, this holiday excepted. I was grateful for the noise, because as we began to move together, the tree moved with us, and I was sure that the beating of my heart was louder than any Roman candle or M80s. The McInnes’s porch was about ten yards away, and all their windows were open.

“Do you have something?” Betsy asked, breathless, her lips grazing the skin of my torso.

I shook my head.

“Damn it,” she said, rolling off me.

“Sorry. We can, we can do what we used to do…you know, I won’t,” I stumbled and stammered and pleaded. Since Rosemary got pregnant, Betsy had insisted on birth control. Where crossed fingers and prayer had worked before, now only rubbers would suffice.

“No,”
she said.

“I’ll be careful,” I pleaded. “I promise.”

She stood up and started to yank her clothes back on. “Harper, I don’t want a baby. I don’t ever,
ever
want a baby.”

“Fine,” I said, struggling awkwardly to get my pants back up. “You’ll thank me later,” she said. “After the swelling goes down.”

I knew I should have been grateful for her prudence, but something about her definitiveness on this matter made me feel slighted. Like she’d just made up both of our minds. Forever.

We crawled down through the branches, careful not to make any noise as we snuck across the McInnes’s lawn to the car, which, thanks to my flustered condition earlier, was parked in a ditch. Fireworks detonated and then fell like rain over the lake in showers of red and green and gold.

“Get something before tomorrow night,” she whispered in my ear when I dropped her off and moped back to my own house, defeated and more than a little hurt.

Inside, my mother was printing the latest edition of the newsletter, the whir and clack of the press in the other room drowning out the sound of the TV, which my father and I parked ourselves in front of immediately after reheating me some dinner. He had made spaghetti, heavy on the garlic. The whole house reeked of it. It was too loud to watch TV so I mouthed, “I’m going to bed,” to my father and then went to my room to sulk and hopefully sleep.

With the clack-clacking of the printing press as my lullaby, I quickly fell into a deep slumber, the kind where you don’t move, rendering one or both arms completely numb. It was in this paralyzed state that I found myself when I woke and saw my mother coming through my bedroom door. She rushed to my bed and pulled back the sheets, yanking at my useless arm. “Harper, get up! Get out of bed. There’s a fire!!”

“What?”

“Fire!” she screamed. “They’re trying to burn the house down.”

Within minutes the town’s only fire truck had arrived, and everyone in the neighborhood was standing on our front yard watching our house burn. My father was sitting dumbly on the grass, Indian style, as if this were only a Boy Scout campfire. My mother was standing in the middle of our street in her nightgown, wringing her ink-stained hands, looking up and down the street. “Someone needs to call the police!”

“What happened?” I asked my father.

“I must have left the burner on. I don’t remember.” He shook his head sadly.

I went to my mother then, who was still standing in the middle of the road. “Mom, Dad said it must have been the burner. On the stove.”

Her mind was somewhere else. A sprinkling of ash landed on her bare shoulders, and it could have been snow.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “They found me.” She was frantic, pacing.

Betsy came running from across the street and reached for me. “Oh my God,” she said. I put my arm around her, and we watched the house fall in on itself.

Suddenly the front windows, the windows to my mother’s office, blew out, glass shattering and littering the front yard. The flames reflected in the glass, a thousand tiny fires in the broken shards. The smell of hot ink was nauseating and thick. It was then that I saw what my mother must have already known would be there. At first, it could have been ash instead of paint, but when the fire grew, lighting up the sky as bright as any sun, the words scrawled in black paint on our driveway were unmistakable:
NIGGERLOVER
.