Driftless (22 page)

Though it was clear there would be no accumulation, Maxine regarded the sight as a harbinger of doom, a signal that the relentlessness of time would soon bring deep winter. The yard would be covered in snow, icicles hanging from bare trees, the ground as hard as concrete and owls arching forward on twisted branches beneath a silver moon, searching the white, barren land for the bodies of mice moving toward the gaping holes in the Smith foundation. Destiny could be neither diverted nor delayed; it marched forward like glaciers down a slope. And though she knew the meandering, porous gobs of falling snow possessed an intrinsic beauty, it was of a mocking kind.

“I hate to see it snow,” she said.

“I know,” said Rusty. He crumpled up an invoice from the lumberyard, poked it beneath a piece of wood on the corner of the pile, and lit it with his cigarette lighter. The calico-patterned flame disappeared under a worn, grooved shingle. A sudden trill of smoke curled upward and a bright yellow flame leaped into the pile of dried-for-a-century oak and cedar.

Though it was early in the evening, it soon grew dark. Maxine went inside to make supper while Rusty gathered another load of shingles and dumped it on the burn pile. He remained in the field stirring the fire with his rake, the snowflakes falling around him. Looking into the flames reminded Rusty of when he and his brother had hunted in the woods above the old quarry. They had always built a fire to sit around as the dogs worked the coon up trees.

While he was watching red-orange sparks rising into the dark sky he remembered the sound of the dogs, their voices sharpened to a hysterical pitch by trait breeding, far in the timber. He remembered the thrill of anticipation as he and Carl took up their rifles and ventured away from the fire, following the distant howls, into the woods.

Maxine called him inside, and they ate in silence.

After watching the news, they went to bed.

At one o’clock in the morning Rusty became convinced he would never be able to sleep, climbed out of bed, and dressed. Maxine woke up an hour later, put on her robe, and went to look for him. Walking from room to room, turning lights on and off, she finally saw the small, bright spot of fire in the field north of the barn. In the back yard she found him filling the wheelbarrow with shingles.

“It’s the middle of the night, Russell.”

“It’s light enough to work.”

“Let the workers pick them up—it’s hard on your knees.”

“The workers aren’t coming in the morning, and my knees are fine.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Yoders aren’t coming today. They have a community work day—helping some new Amish family move into the neighborhood. I didn’t know how to tell you.”

“Come inside. It doesn’t matter.”

“Maxine, we aren’t going to be ready.”

“It doesn’t matter. My family will just have to see us the way we are.”

“But this
isn’t
the way we are,” said Rusty.

“Come inside, Russell. It’s starting to snow again.”

“I’ll just finish up this part of the yard.”

A NEW SONG

G
AIL SHOTWELL WOKE UP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. SHE tried to go back to sleep but a feeling-idea she could not quite identify attracted her attention and she carried it downstairs.quite Her house seemed different in the dark, softer and more intimate,

Her house seemed different in the dark, softer and more intimate, and she avoided turning on the lights. The cool air felt especially clean against her skin, and beyond the windows several stars focused on the sleeping earth like faraway telescopes. She opened the refrigerator door and an oblong box of blue light silently expanded.

She sat with a can of caffeinated cola at the kitchen table and thought about the feeling-idea again. Its only definite character, as far as she could tell, seemed to be an unusual mental disturbance—an emptiness with the power to draw her into it.

Then a memory from her childhood replaced the emptiness: standing under the tamaracks beyond the porch, her father coming toward her, tears running out of his eyes. He said her school friend Georgia Wood had been killed by a Jersey bull. He took her hand and they went in the house.

This memory was replaced by another, in which her brother gave her a ride in his first car. They drove all the way into Luster and bought two root beer floats. When they drove home it was after dark, the moon so bright that Grahm turned off the headlights.

Gail looked at her hands and the feeling-idea returned again. This time she knew what it was: a song—a melody trying to come out. Acting on the urge to free it, she located her bass and began searching for notes that related to each other through the same emotional quality as the trapped feeling inside.

Such an inspiration had never really visited her before. Not like this. Though for as long as she could remember she had heard music
in her head—life-sustaining, sorrow-repairing music—the tunes were never her own. She only remembered them.

This was different. The feeling inside her had never been expressed before, yet it longed for expression and had chosen Gail to accomplish the deed. It was jiggling out of the primal psychic strands of whatever memories and passions made her. She had been chosen, and though she couldn’t quite hear it yet, she felt the inspiration trying to make a sound through her. It wished to be born. This newness, or rather the compelling urge to make something that would later become new, had mysteriously lodged in her unconscious, and it ineptly yet vigorously signaled to her conscious self. This new song would be like no other. She felt like a small child again, sitting in a room of adults and yearning to find a way to tell them that most of what they said was wrong, to correct the folly in a beautiful way.

Three cups of coffee and hundreds of notes later, the imperial round-faced clock on the wall announced a quarter to eight. Robins, blackbirds, and finches moved around outside in the morning light. She had fifteen minutes to get to work, and, consequently, would be late.

“Drat,” she said, thinking how unfortunate it was that deadlines could be so easily ignored; they would be so much more useful if they prompted compliance sooner, instead of saving all their nagging force to spend on the last few moments.

As she rushed into her work clothes she promised herself to return to the rescue mission later, and she buried the feeling-idea in a safe place in her memory where she could find it again.

Her old convertible bumped, rattled, smoked, and flew as well as it could into Grange; she ran across the asphalt lot and into the side door of the plastic factory. The punch meter greeted her with a whirring noise and she exchanged a few short comments with people on their way to the front office. At her workstation, she draped an olive gray apron over her neck and began shoving squares of warm plastic into small cardboard boxes.

Within an hour misgivings arose. The sound, sight, and smell of the hot machines hammered mercilessly against the song that was still
trying to come out. The grim resignation on the faces of the other workers made it difficult to keep in contact with her inner self.

During morning break she drank a soda with five others from Packing, increasingly unsure of the possibility of staying at work. The possibility soon nose-dived when her future song informed her of a chord progression that might serve as a ladder for getting the rest of it out. And the attending excitement was irrepressible.

At eleven thirty-five Gail went to the main office and complained of being too sick to keep working. There was simply no way she could go on.

“You have no more sick days left,” the man said.

“I can hardly breathe,” said Gail.

“Go see a doctor, and get a note proving you were there.”

On the way home, another piece of her song broke through—a lyric. As she imagined particular chord changes, a phrase jumped into her mind: “More than wonder, more than love.” She leaned over and popped open the glove compartment, searching for a pencil and paper to write down the words and chords, fearful she might not remember them. The dashboard’s inner compartment looked like the inside of a Dumpster, and due to not watching where she was going she forced a blue Chevy onto the shoulder of the road. The driver honked.

“Drat,” said Gail, steering back to her side. Finding nothing to write with, she parked in front of a tavern and hurried inside, borrowed paper and pencil, and bought a glass of beer. In a corner booth she set to work, frequently sipping from the glass and gnawing on the eraser in moments of deep concentration.

“Hello, Gail.”

“Oh, hi, July.”

“Mind if I sit here?” He was carrying a cup of coffee and an egg sandwich, wrapped in oiled paper and resting on a white plastic plate.

“Sure, I’m leaving, though. I’m writing a song.”

“Not working at the factory today?”

“No.”

“Can I hear it when you’re finished?”

The front door banged closed and three men dressed in farmer clothes came in.

“Maybe. Sure. I have to leave now. This place is getting too crowded. I’ve got to go home and try this out.”

“I’m glad you’re writing a song. You probably don’t remember this, but many years ago when you were little you and your friend Georgia Wood used to walk from Georgia’s house to the creek on the other side of my farm, and while you walked you often sang songs together. I don’t know how to say this, but your voices, they sounded as close to angels as anything I ever heard. You’ve got music inside you, Gail. And Barbara Jean said the same thing that night after hearing you in the bar. Can I look at what you have?”

“No, it’s not finished. And besides, I have no idea how to do this, I mean the right way. These scribbles, no one else could understand them. I’ve never done this before.”

She gulped down the remaining beer in her glass and rushed through the room and out the door.

At home, the sound of the bass helped jog loose more of the song and she worked on it all that day and into the night.

FINISHING UP

T
HE DAY BEFORE MAXINE’S MOTHER’S VISIT, ALL THREE YODERS were on the roof laying new shingles and pounding roofing nails. Rusty had gone to the lumberyard. Maxine cleaned out the kitchen cupboards, replacing the contact paper on the shelves. As she worked she reviewed the meals she had planned. The radio on top of the refrigerator was tuned to a classical music station, and every time she climbed up on the stool to gain access to the high cupboards, she looked out the window. Along the state highway cars moved slowly, and Maxine watched for Rusty’s truck. A weather report noted that a storm front moving out of the Dakotas had headed north instead of west and for that reason milder weather was predicted.

On the highway a black buggy pulled by a team of bays turned the corner onto the blacktop and headed toward the Smith house. This was not an unusual sight, and Maxine paid no attention as she wrote “ginger” onto her shopping pad. The next time she climbed onto the stool and glanced outside she saw two more buggies in the distance. These also turned onto the blacktop.

When Rusty returned in mid-morning from the lumberyard with the new tongue-and-groove flooring, there were ten buggies and four wagons standing behind twenty horses in his yard. In the wagons were assorted tools, boards, and ladders. A dozen Amish were on the roof, hammering shingles. Two other Amish nailed flashing into place around the chimney. Others wielded paintbrushes from ladders at varying heights around the house. Still others handed sacks of mortar and boards back and forth through the holes in the foundation as they worked to remove the jacks. Though Rusty did not actually count, more than thirty identically dressed men appeared to be
attached to his house. Three or four young boys ran back and forth from the wagons, fetching tools and carrying messages between the adults. Among them was the boy Rusty had first seen in the Yoder house. A salt-and-pepper-bearded man walked over and asked in an abrupt manner, “That the flooring?” Rusty nodded as the man busily gathered up the wooden bundle and carried it away.

Inside, Maxine was frantically making coffee and sandwiches, which covered every inch of the kitchen table—lunch meat, egg, tuna fish, leftover meatloaf, and peanut butter.

“Russell, go down to the basement and bring up all the canned pickles you can find,” she barked. “Thank goodness I bought a month’s worth of bread. And look in the freezer for something else to put in the sandwiches. There’s ham somewhere.”

“Since we didn’t invite them, maybe we don’t have to feed them,” said Rusty.

“That’s all the more reason,” said Maxine.

But before he got a chance to go into the basement an Amish man walked right into the kitchen and said, “Excuse me, but we’re going to need more paint. It’s drying about as fast as we put it on.”

“Right behind you,” said Rusty, and they went outdoors.

It was well after dark before all the work was completed, including the floor in the guest bedroom. Eli himself had overseen the staining and finishing, making sure the new portion of flooring matched the old. Before leaving, the Amish picked up the rest of the trash in the yard and threw it on the burn pile in the field.

Driving the Yoders home, Rusty said to Eli, “Give me a fair figure for those men. Nobody is working for me for nothing.”

“Nobody expected to,” said Eli.

Rusty lit a cigarette and said, “Maxine appreciates it.”

“Yup,” said Eli.

“You people are all right,” said Rusty, “despite your religion.”

“Jha,” Eli laughed, “but it’s because of our religion that we’re all right.”

When Rusty returned home the yard light illuminated Maxine,
pushing the tin wheelbarrow from one horse dropping to another, loading it with a scoop shovel.

“I’ll do that,” said Rusty. “You go on inside. It’s been a long day and you’ll probably need to be calling your mother and sister about the trip.”