A Hard Witching (3 page)

“No, Grandpa,” Max said, “let’s look for a Clovis point. We can find one, I bet.”

Grandpa shook his head. “We should get back,” he said, and
without waiting for the rest of us started walking to where the car sat white and shimmering in the heat, like a bone.

Of Aunt Cherry, Max and I knew little. We had glimpsed a photograph of her in Uncle Aloetius’ bedroom, but for obvious reasons had never lingered over it. There were two others in my grandmother’s album. The first was a rather distant shot of a bride and groom standing solemnly on the steps of the Catholic church in town. They were both frowning a little, perhaps at the sun, and held their arms straight at their sides, Cherry’s plastic bouquet half covered by the white dress that flared out a little at her knees. The only indication they were even aware of each other’s presence was their shoulders pressed firmly together. Underneath, my grandmother had written in neat blue pencil,
Cherry and Aloetius.

Next to that photograph was another of the two of them, but this time with my grandfather, almost unrecognizable in a clean white shirt and suspenders, a fedora cocked to one side over his unhandsome face. He lounged easily between them, an arm slung across each of their shoulders, his mouth partway open. Uncle Aloetius stood almost as solemn as before—as though bearing all my grandfather’s weight in that arm—except that something in his face had relaxed. Not a smile, not quite, but the closest thing to it I’d ever seen on Uncle Aloetius. On this younger man, this boy, thin and pale in his dark suit, that smile made any relation to the man we knew—the man of the gout and the suspenders and the walking stick—all but inconceivable. Yet something in the young man’s expression was unaccountably Uncle Aloetius, some element of anxiety, as if nothing light came easily to him. In that photograph, he
reminded me sometimes of Max, though I couldn’t have said why, and I didn’t like the parallel. Some tension in the line of the jaw, perhaps, nothing more. Serious, even on his wedding day. It made me wonder, had he never been happy?

Cherry was something else entirely. In the second photograph, she had turned halfway around, her teeth bared in what looked to be a laugh, as though Grandpa had just said something tremendously funny. The hand that held the bouquet had blurred now, being raised or lowered, we couldn’t tell. Three other people were in the photograph, anonymous people, two men, and a woman in a frumpy knee-length dress and a hat with a veil. But they stood rigidly, staring straight ahead. At first, we’d thought the woman was Grandma, but she’d said, “No, I didn’t know your grandpa then. That was before my time.”

A dog had wandered into the frame, too, his head and front leg just visible in the foreground, tongue lolling in a crazy grin. Max said it must have been Grandpa’s dog; he could tell by how the dog was looking right at Grandpa. But I didn’t see how Max could tell that. The dog could have been looking at any one of them, at no one. The top corner of the snapshot had been torn away, just a chunk of sky, the edge of a cottonwood tree, that was all. Beneath this photograph my grandmother had written simply,
With Mattias.

The morning we heard Uncle Aloetius was dead, Max and I were out in the garden picking what would certainly be the last of the peas, the plants still cool and swollen with the night air, and Uncle Aloetius—as far as we knew—still across town smoking happily, or at least not unhappily, in the old
leatherette recliner on his front porch, cap tipped far back on his head the way he always wore it and a thermos of Nescafé between his knees. It was late August, and the sun had already bleached the edges of leaves and baked the earth too solid for a hoe. Grandpa came over from the neighbours’, hauling their Rototiller, ready to till up the pea plants when we had finished. He scooped a handful of pods from the metal bucket and unzipped one, dragging the peas out in one smooth motion with his thumb.

“Eat some,” he said. “They put hair on your chest.”

The phone rang in the kitchen, and Grandpa asked us if we knew how to make a peapod into a whistle, and Grandma came to the back door and stood barefoot on the edge of the steps, frowning at us as if she had forgotten something, and Grandpa dropped the empty pods and walked over, but only halfway, and they just looked at each other, their hands hanging motionless at their sides, with the morning’s first cabbage butterflies like tissue paper everywhere and the cool green smell of peapods.

And then Grandma said, “Aloetius.”

Grandpa stood there a bit longer.

“What is it?” Max said.

“Come.” Grandma waved us in through the screen door. We went to stand by the window, and Grandma came up behind us, said, “Leave him alone now.” But she watched too, a hand on each of our shoulders, as Grandpa fired up the Rototiller and began plowing through the garden, not just through the peas but through unharvested pumpkin and squash and rows of corn. Max and I looked at each other and then at our grandmother, her mouth settled into its usual puzzling calm.

“Grandma,” Max said, “what’s wrong?”

But she just sighed and lifted her shoulders a little.

“Someone should go out there, I guess,” she said, finally. “Before he does something foolish.”

“I guess you’ll call Cherry,” my grandmother said that evening at supper, after phone calls had been placed to relatives and arrangements made for Uncle Aloetius’ funeral. She said it evenly, as if it were a fact, but from the way she looked at Grandpa, Max and I could tell it was a question. “She’ll want to come back,” she added.

We were eating much later than was typical with our grandparents, the sun already at that point of descent when its power seemed unbearable. It was hot in the kitchen. On any other day, we might have filled our plates and sat in the shade on the back steps, listening to the after-supper sounds of lawn mowers and children and dishes clinking against each other through the open windows of our neighbours’ kitchens. But this day we stayed at the table, as if in some sort of penance, our legs sticking to the vinyl of our chairs.

Grandpa mashed at his boiled potatoes, shook salt liberally over everything and began to eat without looking up. Grandma wiped her brow with a tea towel and took her seat. She picked up her fork, put it down, picked it up again. Max and I exchanged a glance across the table.

“Still in Thunder Bay.” Grandma took a bite and chewed in that slow, careful way of hers, as though everything were riddled with fish bones. “From what I hear.”

Thunder Bay. I loved the exotic, stormy sound of it, mouthed it quietly to myself, feeling the weight of it on my tongue. I imagined waves spraying a black shore, great pointed pines, wolves. I imagined lightning, brush fires sparked, then
smothered, by the wild unpredictability of weather. I imagined smoke. Cherry; yes, if your name was Cherry, you would live in Thunder Bay. You would stand on the rocks, watching the storm roll in, rain whipping at your hair. You would have strong, beautiful hands. You would not, you could not, be married to a man like Uncle Aloetius.

Grandpa looked up, scowling into the sun that pounded through the kitchen window. “Pull that damn blind,” he said to me.

I laid my fork carefully by my plate and got up, lifting my chair rather than scraping it against the linoleum as I usually did. Outside, a flock of noisy sparrows had gathered, shrieking and flapping over what remained of the garden. The tilled plants had already lost their greenness, lay wilted and browning in the heat, ears of corn rotting in their sleeves. There will be rats, I thought with a shiver, we’ll get rats now.

No one had mentioned the garden since that morning, not since Grandma had said, “Someone should go out there, I guess.” Max and I had watched from the window while Grandma, barefoot still, stepped steadily across the green swaths and pulled the key on the Rototiller. When the engine coughed itself out, Grandpa turned on her.
“Job foya mutt,”
he snarled.
Damn you to mud.

But Grandma just stood there, and so he muttered,
“Es nutzt dich nicht,”
knowing she would not understand, using that ugly awful language against her, as he did when he was angry sometimes, against all of us. But it was nothing this time.
Mind your own business.
That was all. And Grandma said something back—we could see her lips move—but neither Max nor I could hear her. Maybe Grandpa couldn’t either because he kept staring at her until she turned around, the key to the Rototiller wrapped in her palm. She walked back to the house, lifting one soiled foot and then the other across the swaths,
bending only once to collect the metal bucket of peas that Max and I had left behind in the sun, as if that was her only reason for going out there in the first place.

The key (though, oddly, not the Rototiller) had been returned to the neighbours’, and the bucket stood now in the cool of the back porch, the peas waiting to be shelled, blanched, packed in clear plastic bags labelled neatly with the date on a strip of masking tape and frozen. They would be, I knew. Work was not left undone at my grandparents’, not for anything. Nothing was wasted. And I wondered, when they ate those peas next winter, when Grandma pulled the bag from the freezer, would she see that date and think of this day, this one long day?

“Sit down,” she said now behind me. “Finish eating.” I returned quietly to the table.

“I have Cherry’s number,” she said to Grandpa, “unless she’s moved.” She paused, watching as Grandpa raised his coffee mug. “But I don’t think so. She would be there still, I think.”

Max wriggled in his chair and I tried to send him a warning look—
don’t speak, don’t even move
—but he fiddled with his fork, tapping it to some unidentifiable tune against the rim of his water glass,
ting ting ting.

“You can call after supper,” Grandma said.

Ting ting ting ting.

“Or I could—”

“What for?” Grandpa finally spat, flecks of potato flying from his lips. Max dropped his fork on the floor with a clatter and we all stared at it. Grandpa wiped at his mouth with the back of one hand. “So she knows the cheques won’t come?”

“Mattias,” my grandmother said.

“Thirty years she takes money from a man not even—”

“Mattias.”
Grandma looked over at Max and me. Our
grandfather glanced at us briefly, pushed his plate away. Not even what? Not even thanking him? Not even visiting?

“She’s his wife still,” she said. “She should know.”

“His wife,” Grandpa sneered.

“It’s been so long,” Grandma said, leaning forward, “to keep blaming. Matt. Listen. After all this time. Who is there to blame?”

“Blame,” he growled, head down. “You don’t know.”

I snuck a look at his face then, was shocked to see his nose was running, like a child’s, the way Max’s did, that he didn’t bother to wipe it.

Outside, beyond the drawn blind, the sparrows lifted in a sudden rush, the way they do. The quick, rising sound of air being beaten, as if they were flying right at you, and then that impossible hot silence. Grandpa shook his head heavily.

“You don’t know,” he said again, but the force was gone now. It was an apology, of course. Somehow, we all knew it.

“Yes,” Grandma said gently after a moment. She bent to pick up Max’s fork, wiped it with the hem of her apron. “Yes, Matt. I do.”

And whatever they were angry about seemed to be over then. But later I thought about what they had said. That Aunt Cherry took money from Uncle Aloetius, a man not even—what? Not even her husband? But, no, she was his wife still, Grandma had said. There were the photographs from the wedding; I’d seen them. So, what?

I asked Max about it that night, long after we’d climbed into bed, after the door to Grandpa and Grandma’s bedroom softly closed, after the long summer light yellowing the walls had finally gone.

It took him so long to answer that I assumed he was already asleep, so I closed my eyes, too, felt the length of that day settle along my bones, until I heard him say, “Who cares.”

But it was so late then, I couldn’t be sure he’d spoken at all. The room was dark. I could have dreamed the words. And I thought, After all this time.

I had written her name out sometimes in the back of my school notebook, in big looping writing, with flourishes on the
A
and the
C
and the
M.
Aunt Cherry. Cherry. Cherry Mueller (though this last only rarely, as it called too vividly to mind images of Uncle Aloetius). We, Max and I, didn’t blame her for leaving Uncle Aloetius. Who wouldn’t? I imagined her fleeing across the prairies—her white wedding dress fluttering behind—to far-off, mythical Thunder Bay. Often, she became the heroine of our make-believe games, the princess fleeing the ogre.

Sensing the slightly illicit nature of these games, we would choose remote spots in which to indulge ourselves: the alley behind the house, the abandoned lot beside the post office; the garage. The last time we played was in the spare room upstairs, the day after Uncle Aloetius died. It was hotter up there, even with the windows open, so we stripped down to our underwear, though Max, for some reason, retained his socks.

“Max,” I said, losing patience, “you can’t be Aunt Cherry.”

We went through this argument nearly every time, but on this day we had something new to fight over: an old wide-brimmed hat, mauve with a veil and yellow roses and a wide satin ribbon along the crown. It must have belonged to Aunt Cherry, we knew. It couldn’t possibly have been our grandmother’s. Max clutched it against his bare chest.

“Max,” I said, pulling at the hat, “let go. You’re a boy. This is a girl’s hat. See? Do you want to look like a girl?”

Max tugged, his face set in that bullish look.

“Okay,” I said, letting go and crossing my arms, “go ahead. Make a fool of yourself.”

Max jammed the hat down on his head and pranced around on the tips of his toes, lifting his knees high, his long legs absurdly white. “I’m Aunt Cherry,” he said in a ridiculous falsetto. “Look at me.”

“Max,” I said, snatching the hat away, “don’t be stupid.” I took these play-actings seriously, and for the first time I realized that to Max they were only games, nothing more. I realized that, to him, Aunt Cherry was no one, a photograph in an album. She might as well have been on the moon.