Volt: Stories (15 page)

Miriam stepped to the porch rail. The green sky hung bearded, the curves of the maze alive, flexing, swelling.

They pulled chairs around the sofa where Miriam lay propped by pillows, played gin rummy. Samuel wore Evelyn’s denim work shirt and big gray sweatpants. Between games, he peered out the windows. Rain drummed on the clapboards. The parlor’s wainscoting was dark, and though the lamps were on, a gloom resided over them.

“Put on the radio,” Miriam told Evelyn.

Evelyn switched on the radio, turning the tuner dial, unable to find anything but static. Miriam hadn’t heard his steps on the porch, but saw a figure in orange just outside the screen door. The figure called for Samuel.

Samuel turned to the voice. He looked to Miriam, asking permission. Miriam nodded, and he crossed the room and opened the door. There waited Seamus McGahee, in a hunter’s slick and cap, his thick beard and high rubber boots glistening wet.

Miriam clutched her cards to her chest. Samuel asked Seamus to come in, but the man just gazed at his boots.

“My boy’s missing,” he said. “My oldest says he’s in that corn. Says you run him off ’fore he could find his baby brother.”

The child was seven. Seamus had been searching for two hours. He stood in the dingy porch light, his eyes seeming to bore through Miriam. Samuel said he’d help look, and stepped onto the porch to grab his jacket and shoes.

Evelyn squeezed Miriam’s arm. “Stay here.”

Miriam felt as if the storm raged inside her. She pressed a hand to her sternum, said, “Flashlights are in the pantry.”

Evelyn ran down the hall and returned with the lights. She held a palm to Miriam’s forehead. “Maybe you should just get to bed,” Evelyn pleaded, gazing into her mother’s eyes. “Please don’t be stubborn, Mama,” she whispered. “Not tonight.”

A nod was all Miriam could manage.

Evelyn kissed Miriam’s head, then hurried out on the porch.

Miriam watched through the screen door as Evelyn handed each man a flashlight, then lifted a red poncho over her head. Miriam eyed Seamus McGahee’s orange slicker, Samuel’s light-gray legs, as the men stepped off the porch and down into the slanting rain.

Miriam lay on the sofa, the rain ticking like pebbles against the windows. Gradually, the storm relented. Unable to rest, Miriam stepped out onto the porch. Wind trickled damp against her cheeks. The air reeked of mud. Water dripping from the eaves was all that moved, the maze steeped in molasses dark. Miriam was sure this was what death would be, dark and quiet and terribly lonesome.

Then she didn’t want to be alone. She rushed inside and dressed in her rubber boots and winter parka. She trod slowly, cautiously, down the hillside. Clouds parted to a spattering of stars. Where they’d normally enter the maze, Miriam searched for the twine, but the rain had flushed the grade and it wasn’t to be found.

Mud sucked at her heels as she listened for footsteps, for voices. Shivering, she wandered. Hall upon hall, each bowing indistinctly, every selfsame corridor an empty aisle of quiet.

She stumbled upon the rotunda, the little table blown over, blankets strewn about. The rotunda corridors were the mouths of mines uncharted. Miriam picked one, bent a stalk to lean over the gap. If she returned to the center that hall would be marked.

She plodded again into the maze, the halls bending, endlessly looping. Time dripped as rain from her fingers. Her elbow throbbed. The bones of her knees knocked like flint against flint. In her mind, each sparking step was a day removed from her life.

Moonlight glinted off something in the mud. Was it metal? A pipe? Miriam shuddered, crouched over the object. It was the tea pitcher, its rim veined with cracks. Shreds of mist wafted overhead and Miriam yelled Evelyn’s name. She closed her eyes, an ear turned to the sky. Listening became physical, her shoulders flexed, her neck stiff.

Miriam heard nothing but the wind, and then it struck, churning tumults of rain, and she hugged her knees, chin to her chest to shield her face. Trembling in the bubbling mud, Miriam felt her mind sliding. She willed her imagination toward the way her mother used to sing Sunday school songs while she gardened, the way she’d wrinkle her nose when working her puzzles.

But Miriam’s will faltered, and she bolted from her stance and flailed into the corn behind her, swimming through the rows. She cried as she had that evening when, outside Freely’s Diner, boys in school jackets taunted Evelyn from the bed of a pickup, yelling filthy things, whistling, with everyone around, Walt Freely and Pastor Hamby, Doc Peterson and half the church, as they’d all just come from her mother’s funeral. But no one rebuked the boys. They all just shied away to their cars, and Miriam couldn’t tolerate such a disgrace, and shouted down the boys, a terrible scene of cursing, wailing, of men ushering her away.

Evelyn drove them home. Miriam didn’t want to go back into her mother’s house and walked down into the field, the corn to her knees, wishing, even then, it was high enough to hide her from the world, and the world from her.

Miriam stepped from the corn and out into a corridor like all the others. The clouds had cleared. In the sky hung a crisp white moon. Nubs of stalks glistened, as did puddles pocking the field. Many puddles were impressions of boots, and Miriam followed them.

Soon the corridor dipped into a swale of standing water. Miriam paused before going down. She gazed into the water, struck by a flash of recognition. She’d stood here before. Stood in this very spot, squinting down into darkness. Suddenly she felt it, a memory in her muscles, the weight of a pipe, the cracking jolt up her arm.

She rushed down into water to her shins, to her thighs. Bracingly cold, she thrashed, grasping through the muck to find what she knew was there. But it was only water, only mud. Miriam crawled out wheezing. She sat slumped, her boots still in the pool. Boot prints covered this rise, frantic prints gouged in the mud.

Miriam sensed someone behind her. She turned and through a blur of tears saw a yellow shirt at the top of the slope, a bow poised, an arrow aimed down at her.

The arrow passed as a hiss, a bee sting to her ear. The boy gaped down, the bow now at his side. He turned, ran. Miriam pressed a hand to her ear. Blood came off on her fingers.

She moved without thought, rising, following the prints in the mud. Where they ended, the boy’s legs stretched out from the rows. He sat upright, his bow clutched to his chest, his eyes craters of rust, lidded, vacant.

Miriam knelt beside him. His skin was cold, his thin body quaking. Her parka was wet, but dry inside, and she wrapped it around his shoulders. He leaned stiffly against her. She pulled him to her, then laid them back in the corrugate.

Corn tassels glittered above them, framing the night sky. The boy began to moan, his teeth pressed to her throat, his cries far more than sounds, as if some violent brood were clawing to escape him.

Miriam steeled her grip on the child and studied the stars in their multitudes. Points of light slowly took form, the black matter of space a shoreless lake of stars, a latitude of boundless depth, and she strained her eyes, trying to see beyond her vision’s means, trying to glimpse the flesh of an upturned palm.

4

Dawn rose hot. The ground steamed. In Miriam’s yard, the sheriff made calls to mobilize volunteers. Evelyn cleaned and bandaged Miriam’s ear, as she sat on her porch under a blanket. Miriam said nothing about the boy shooting the arrow, and now watched him and his father out in the drive. The McGahees stood separate from everyone, spoke to no one, not even each other.

Pastor Hamby arrived by eight thirty. Miriam watched him talk with Helen, who’d met him at his car. He shook hands with Seamus. Miriam saw Seamus nod, and then Pastor Hamby spoke to the boy, who stared at the gravel and didn’t move.

By nine, twenty men from the volunteer fire department mingled in the yard. By nine fifteen, K-9 units from Fairmont pulled into the drive. Evelyn made muffins, offered them around. Helen came onto the porch and told Miriam to stay put, assuring her they had plenty of help and would find the boy.

Then Seamus McGahee was there at the bottom of the steps, his eyes glaring sullenly up at her. The boy stood at his hip, his hair still flattened with mud, still wearing her parka. Helen turned to them, as well, and they were all quiet.

“Warned them boys to stay out your field,” Seamus said, in an awkward explosion of words, glancing sideways at his son.

They watched the child, waiting. Then Seamus smacked the boy’s head, and the boy blurted, “Sorry, ma’am.”

Miriam stared at the child, at his ugly expression.

The boy took off the parka and dropped it on the porch steps. His yellow T-shirt, now ripped across the neck, clung to his thin frame.

Then the McGahees turned and stalked back up the driveway and toward their truck. Once they climbed inside, the sheriff peered down at Miriam.

“Anything I ought to know here?”

The volunteers had begun down the hill, stumping toward the field. Miriam watched McGahee’s truck rumble slowly away, and shook her head.

Members of Miriam’s church arrived, hauling food and water out to the volunteers. Searchers scoured the stream bank, peered into every shadowed corner of Miriam’s barn. Helen asked Miriam to search her own house, and she and Evelyn crept about like the undead, opening closets, moving boxes, shining a flashlight into the attic, into the narrow slot behind the boiler.

All the while, seventy police, with eight dogs, and fifty firemen methodically paced the corn without ceasing, dozens of civilians flanking the field’s edges in case the boy emerged unnoticed. The mud made things terrible, Miriam overheard a red-bearded fireman tell Helen. Hard enough to keep their footing, let alone find a child. The staties brought in a helicopter, circling low, the stutter of its propellers drowning out the baying hounds, voices hollering the boy’s name.

Miriam sat on her porch in a rocker, just waiting for them to find him, to see him carried out, a rag doll in some stranger’s arms. But they found nothing. A little after five, Samuel Franklin trod up the hill and told Miriam they were having trouble keeping track of the rows, that the searchers were confused by the maze.

She knew what he wanted. “Cut it down.”

“You sure?” Samuel said.

Miriam nodded.

He patted her shoulder.

Evelyn sat on the top porch step, her head leaned against the banister. She’d not spoken, not moved, for an hour. Now she stood and faced her mother. “I’m going to lie down,” she said.

“All right, sweetie,” Miriam told her.

Evelyn slunk past them, disappeared into the house, and Miriam heard her footsteps going upstairs.

“This sure is a thing,” Samuel said, gazing out over the valley, the yard a scuttle of commotion.

“He’s in there,” Miriam said.

By seven dusk had passed, the air hardening to a chill. The crews sulked back to their trucks. Miriam watched them from the parlor window. The house lay dark, but she hadn’t the will to switch on the lights. Then they were all gone, even the pastor and sheriff sliding off without bidding good night. Miriam didn’t mind. They must all feel it, too. Everyone exhausted. Everyone just a little bit lost.

She found Evelyn sitting on her bed in a nearly dark room, a suitcase opened at her feet, underclothes and shirts neatly packed.

“Evelyn?” Miriam said, softly, from the doorway.

Evelyn’s shoulders lifted and fell.

The night was clouded. Scant light trickled in through the windows. A clock’s red numbers glowed on a nightstand. Miriam stepped in beside her daughter’s bed. They’d never bothered to change Evelyn’s comforter from when she was a girl, still a pink and purple quilt with little balls of yarn fringing its edges.

“I had a terrible dream,” Evelyn said.

Miriam picked up a stuffed animal, a tattered elephant they called Mr. Gray.

“About that boy,” she added. “About them finding him in the trunk of my car.”

Miriam tapped Mr. Gray’s floppy ear.

“I have to get away, Mama,” Evelyn said. “Going to go get set up again for school.”

“All right.”

Evelyn leaned over and Miriam heard the suitcase being zipped.

“You could go tomorrow. I’ll make you breakfast.”

Evelyn’s shoulders fell slack, her chin to her shoulder. “Can’t sleep here anymore.” Her voice quavered. “Got to go. I’ve got to.”

“Wish I could, too.”

Evelyn wiped her eyes, raised herself up. “I’ll be all right. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”

Miriam lowered herself onto the bed. So many nights she’d sat here, reading stories, singing songs to her daughter before tucking her in. She grabbed Evelyn’s shoulders, trying to embrace her. At first, Evelyn held rigid, but then she turned toward her mother and Miriam felt her daughter become flesh.

They clutched each other, the heat of Evelyn’s breath warming Miriam’s neck. Miriam wanted them to lie on the bed and not ever get up again. But then Evelyn let go, and Miriam did, too.

Evelyn grabbed her suitcase and left the room. Miriam stayed on the bed, listening, as Evelyn clipped downstairs. Soon the kitchen cupboards squeaked, cans clanked in the pantry, and then, at last, the front door opened and closed.

Only then did Miriam rise. She lagged downstairs to the parlor window and looked out over the drive. Evelyn loaded her suitcase in the backseat of her car, loaded another sack into the passenger seat. Then her daughter was but a shadow behind the wheel, the headlights brightening the old Ford and a swath of trampled yard.

The little car paused at the end of the drive, its brake lights holding, and Miriam imagined Evelyn having second thoughts before the car finally turned onto Old Saints Highway. Then the car was gone and no lights shone anywhere Miriam could see.

With the first glint of dawn, Miriam rose from her chair in the parlor. She’d not slept, her tiredness an atrophy to her body. She shuffled into the kitchen, struggled to lift the coffee down from the cupboard. She made an oven’s worth of biscuits and scrambled two dozen eggs, fried an entire slab of bacon. She changed from her slippers into her sneakers, pulled her hair into a ponytail.

Then they were there, a truck horn honking, voices calling outside. From a window in Evelyn’s room, Miriam watched them unload tools from a truck, the morning hazed and damp. Men clapped each other on the back, some smiling, laughing. They sipped from thermos cups, the hoods of their sweatshirts drawn over their heads. If she hadn’t known what they were preparing for, she might think they were building a barn or digging an irrigation trench, just any workday between weekends.

The food sat in the kitchen, on trays covered in foil. She’d planned to set up a table on the porch. But now, facing them seemed unimaginable, like a ghost greeting the living. Miriam would’ve sent Evelyn out in her place, if her daughter was here.

Miriam turned to Evelyn’s bed, smoothed out wrinkles in the comforter. She told herself she couldn’t lie down, that she had to go out among those in the yard. But then she was clearing away stuffed animals and stretching herself out on the bed.

By the bedside clock, Miriam saw it was noon. All morning she’d been numbed by the drone of machinery, the buzz of saws, and now forced herself to sit up, to lift her feet and drop them to the floor.

She peeked out the window, careful to not be seen from below. Nearly a third of the field had been cleared, a harvester parked out there, men toting corn knives and chain saws, others gathering felled stalks and heaping them in great mounds. A fire burned midfield. A black gout of smoke split the sky, the clouds sagging tedious like things soon to fall.

Miriam was a husk, nothing but flesh and thought. She grabbed a pillow from the bed and lay on the floor, on a little shag rug. Beneath Evelyn’s bed, there in the cramped darkness and clumped in dust, the unblinking eyes of a toy elephant peered out at her.

She heard knocks on the front door, heard him enter the foyer, calling her name, heard him taking the stairs. Then Pastor Hamby was in the room and helping Miriam off the floor to sit on the bed. She said she was sorry, trying to explain she hadn’t been sleeping much at night.

The pastor just sat holding her. “I get you something?” he finally asked.

“I’ll be all right,” Miriam said. “I’ll get up and get moving now.”

“Evelyn around?”

Miriam shook her head. “She went to the city, back to school.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Should’ve gone back a month ago.” Then Miriam stood and brushed at her clothes.

He stood, too, more than a head taller than she. “Birdie?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re not alone.”

She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear, stepped past him and toward the doorway. “Sometimes you are.”

“That’s not true. Not ever.”

Miriam wanted to be alone, wanted him gone. She wanted to lie back down on the rug and go back to sleep. But she knew he wouldn’t allow it. She walked out of Evelyn’s room and forged downstairs as if she’d found new purpose, though once in the parlor she didn’t know what to do with herself.

She saw them in the yard, all the searchers, the news van parked out on the shoulder of the road. She turned away from the window, passed the pastor once more, and ducked into the foyer, figuring this as the only place there weren’t any windows. She plopped onto the stairs. Pastor Hamby leaned against the banister, staring off at the door.

“They find him?” Miriam asked.

He shook his head.

Miriam rubbed her knees. “Don’t know what to do. How to act with all this.”

The pastor stood upright, his hands in his pockets.

They regarded each other in silence, Miriam staring up into his big solemn face. Then she glanced off into the parlor and became aware of the fading light, of how late it must be.

“I’m going to take a shower,” she declared.

“Should I stay?”

“I can wash my own back.”

The pastor didn’t laugh, or even grin, but simply moved toward the door. His hand on the doorknob, he turned. “Promise we’ll have that breakfast soon.”

Miriam nodded, crossed a finger over her heart.

Miriam showered until the hot water turned cold. She slid into her robe, wiped steam from the mirror. She’d never liked her face, not even when her skin was young. Something in its angles made her harsh. She believed people avoided her because of her face, even Evelyn’s father, whom maybe she’d once loved but hardly thought of anymore.

Then Miriam considered her own father, who was killed in a war, somewhere in Cambodia, when she was a toddler. She clearly recalled her mother weeping in the parlor, church ladies in gloves and hats stroking her arms, another lady bracing Miriam on her lap and whispering
there, there, darling.

Miriam sat back on the hamper, trying to recall her father’s face. She closed her eyes, searching her mind, but couldn’t see him at all, not a single image that wasn’t from a photo, and this seemed terribly sad to her, though she didn’t feel sad.

Studying her legs, the blue veins webbing her shins, Miriam felt eyes set upon her. She glanced up quickly, as if a face would hover there, but saw only a light fixture damp with steam, the silhouettes of bugs gathered in the bowl of its globe.

The field was shorn, the yard empty. The search had gone elsewhere. Miriam considered calling Helen, or Pastor Hamby, for an update. In an impulse of bravery, she decided to drive into town. But she balked on the porch, staring out at her mother’s old truck, then found herself tromping down the hill.

The field was bowed like the back of beast. She stepped over nubs, trudged through the mud. Soon the ground rose and became firm. Like in a dream, she glimpsed objects on the land, found herself in what had been the rotunda. The table was tilted but standing, the chairs pushed in. A white candle stood perfectly erect in the mud, as if atop a child’s cake.

Miriam glanced back at her house perched atop the hill. How remarkably close it seemed without the corn. An engine downshifted out on the road. From a distance Miriam noticed a white truck trolling by, slowing. Someone in the passenger side rolled down the window to get a better view. Miriam didn’t recognize who it was, but raised her hand, and the truck sped off.

It took her most of the day, but she found it. On the slope of a swale, half buried, she lifted a length of pipe, grooved at one end, a welded joint at the other. She inspected it closely, tried to wipe it clean, the mud smearing over its cold dull metal.

Back in the kitchen, she ran hot water in the sink. She used dish detergent, the water steaming, almost too hot for her skin to bear. She scoured the pipe with a pad of steel wool.

Then she took the pipe into the pantry, studied the pantry’s full shelves. Miriam decided upon a spot, slid the pipe behind large tins marked SUGAR and FLOUR. She rearranged the tins, shifting them one way, then back over again, eyeing it from every angle until the pipe was thoroughly hidden.