Drowning Ruth (28 page)

Carl's head jerked. He had fallen asleep on his knees. Get up, get up, get going, he thought, but he wasn't sure where he ought to go. Slowly, he slid back onto the pew. The muttering woman had gone. He studied the wall lined with crutches left behind by those whom Christ had healed. He stood and rubbed his knees. At the door he lit a candle for Mathilda, feeling guilty, knowing he should have been doing this all along. He should never have left her alone.

It was dark by the time Carl's truck rolled into the drive. Imogene had gone home and supper was long since over. He made some vague excuse about having helped Joe with his corn.

“Next time you ought to let me know, Carl. We waited dinner for you and then supper, nearly an hour.”

“It won't happen again,” he said.

The night air was pleasant, still warm enough to sit outside, and Amanda had settled herself on the dark porch in one of the rockers with a bowl of late beans to snap. She could hear Carl behind her in the front room, opening drawers. He would leave them open, too—she would have to remember to close them on her way to bed.

“Looking for something, Carl?”

But he'd gone into the kitchen and didn't answer.

Carl sat at the kitchen table, going through the scrapbook Amanda had shown him when he first returned from France. He examined the pictures of Mathilda minutely. He wished he had a photograph of that girl, Imogene, although he'd recognized her relation to Mathilda more by general impression than by an actual matching of features. It was hard to tell exactly how they were similar when you looked closely at Mattie. Still, he was certain that the noses were the same shape and the width of the forehead, the set of the mouth. Yes, he was sure of that.

But if having that baby had killed Mathilda, how had she ended up in the lake? Who'd said that she drowned? Amanda. Who had lied.

Carl closed his eyes, trying to clear the confusion. Could Amanda … ? But to imagine her pulling Mathilda's dead body onto the ice, cutting a hole to push her through, revolted him. Maybe she did fall in and drown. Who said the baby's mother had died in childbirth? Amanda. Who had lied.

It was hard to think. Mathilda
was
dead. She
was
Imogene's mother. She
had
been in the lake. He pressed his palm on the table top as he articulated each fact he felt sure of.

Yes, she'd definitely been in the lake. Someone had found her there. Carl paged back through the yellowed articles Amanda had pasted into the book. The paste released its hold as he touched them and the one he was searching for fell like a leaf into his lap.

DECEMBER 6, 1919—MISSING WOMAN FOUND DROWNED

The body of Mrs. Carl Neumann was found yesterday evening trapped in the ice on Nagawaukee Lake by Mr. C. J. Owens of 24 Prospect Avenue, Milwaukee, and his son, Arthur, 5.

Mrs. Neumann had been missing since the night of November 27.

Carl started back from the table, his breathing quick, his fingers trembling. He was out of the kitchen and through the front room before he could think, before he could stop himself.

She sat in the dark, her rocker creaking, her fingers steadily snapping the beans.

“Amanda,” he said. He was surprised to hear how calm his voice sounded.

She looked up at him, and though he couldn't make out her features, the expectant tilt of her head was just like Mathilda's. Seeing that steeled him. The sisters were in on this together. He demanded an answer as if he were asking his straying wife herself. “Tell me who Imogene's father is.”

“Why, George Lindgren. You know that.”

“No. And Mary Louise is not her mother. I know about the baby, Amanda. Tell me who the father is.”

“How … ?” she began.

“Who is he?” He said it gently but firmly, as if speaking to a child.

Amanda stopped rocking. The crickets and the cicadas were deafening, their insistent chirping pounded like her own pulse. She'd dreaded this moment for so long that she'd almost felt safe, almost felt sure it would never come. She looked at Carl standing
in the doorway; the light was behind his head, so his face was only a blank shadow. She knew that face so well now.

Amanda leaned forward in her chair. He, who had also lost Mat-tie, would help her. He, who had suffered, would forgive her. She would tell him, and he would know what she had to do, how she could make it better.

“Is he the one?” Carl reached forward then, the yellow newspaper clipping in his hand. He pointed to the name. He would not be too afraid this time.

It was so easy. All she had to do was nod. When she looked up, the doorway was empty, as if he'd never been there at all.

I was just at the part where Maggie Tulliver, carried away by the flood, was trying to steer her boat into the current of the Floss, when he spoke to me from the doorway of my room.

“Ruthie.”

“Hmmm?” I could hardly bear to tear myself from the page, so perilous was Maggie's situation, but I glanced at him and took the strand of hair I'd been chewing out of my mouth.

He came in, the tails of his green and black checked shirt hanging loose, as if he'd already begun to get ready for bed. He sat on the ladder-back chair where I hung my skirt and blouse at night. I kept the book open, propped on my knees, my finger on the line. I leaned back against the pillows, waiting to hear what he wanted, but he just looked at me, not saying anything. Then he got up again and went to the window. I stole a look back at Maggie. Would she be able to rescue Tom?

“Ruth,” he said, turning back to me, “how well do you remember your mother?”

“I don't know. I remember her, I guess.”

“You remember living on the island with your mother and Aunt Mandy?”

“A little.” I was still thinking about Maggie. My neck ached with the tension of the flood—I had to get back to it.

“Why did your mother go on the ice, Ruth? Do you remember that?”

I did remember that. I remembered the ice, so shiny, so black, like running on the sky. “Ruth, come back!” my mother called. “Mandy, bring her back!” She howled like the wind. I stopped, but I didn't go back. And then she was around me, her heart in my ear. She was around me so tight I could hardly breathe. And then we drowned.

“No,” I said to my father. “I don't remember. I don't remember anything.”

At 6:30
A.M.
on September 10, 1931, Clement Owens was checking the hybrid alfalfa plants that had germinated at the lake but were now maturing in his little greenhouse in the city. Too bad he'd had to transplant them, but it was well into September, time the family moved back to town. Anyway, here he could continue his work after the frost.

“Mrs. Owens says to say your breakfast is ready.” Mimi, a new girl Theresa had hired as general help, stood outside the greenhouse.

“Look at this, Mimi. Five new leaves since Tuesday. Seven, if you count these buds. I think I should count the buds, don't you?”

Mimi hung back. “I don't know, sir.” Mr. Owens's projects had always made her uncomfortable, and she'd been particularly wary since the distillery in the cellar blew up in August.

“All right. Tell Mrs. Owens I'll be right in, would you?”

She nodded and hurried back to the safety of the house.

On the roof of the carriage house, Carl lay on his stomach, sighting down his rifle. His lips twitched in a sort of giddy giggle. Looking through the glass at this man in his bathrobe, it was hard not to think of fish in a barrel. Although he'd actually never shot a fish. Such a slippery target. Would it be easy? A small stone was boring into his chest, and Carl shifted his weight. There was something to remember about glass houses. Throw stones at people in glass houses?

All it would take would be one shot to the brain, and then Carl would be off, down the tree into his truck and back home. Where everything would be different. So different once he'd shot Mathilda's … this man in the blue and gold paisley bathrobe.

Of course, he ought to make sure—shout out the name, make him look up, maybe tell him why he deserved to die and watch the fear spread over his face. No sense shooting the wrong man.

But this had to be C.J.O. Who else would move with such assurance in a bathrobe, as if he owned the place? Owens bent over a plant and seemed to stroke its leaves. Carl thought of those fingers on her skin. What had she said to him? What had she done? Had she worn that light pink nightgown with the tiny silk bows? Had she been shy when he untied them one by one? Had she smiled at him that way? He shifted again uncomfortably. Had she held her hands over her breasts, so that the nipples peeked between her fingers? Or had she been different with him, a woman Carl hadn't even known?

Carl closed his eyes. He could feel the pinch of the cold metal as he squeezed the trigger, the noise exploding in his head, the recoil punching his shoulder. The blood would spread, red soaking through the blue and gold. Dark, wet red. He opened his eyes and aimed carefully. One shot, clean and quickly over. One shot to the head.

But he did not pull the trigger. There, with the man in his sight, the compelling fury that had driven Carl out to the island so often, the fury that had taken him to Mary Louise, that had pushed him through the scrapbook, that had shoved him onto this roof, dissipated like gas. He struggled to retrieve it. He reminded himself of what this man had done, of where it had led, of Mathilda spent and bloody. But these ideas had no connection to the red-faced man in the greenhouse. Maybe, Carl thought, if he'd seen them together, seen this man's thick fingers on the translucent skin of Mattie's breast, he could have shot him. But it was too late. Now Mathilda and Clement Owens came together only in his mind, and his mind wasn't nearly strong enough to make him kill a man.

He lowered his head and lay his cheek against the slate shingles. A moment before, he'd felt no fear, but now his heart began to flutter wildly, as if it had suddenly escaped confinement and was desperate to be away. He could sense the blood rushing through every passage in his body, making his ankles and his fingertips jump, and he pressed himself against the roof, willing himself still. For a few seconds, like a very young child, he even shut his eyes to make himself vanish.

At last he heard the greenhouse door close with the brittle snap of glass, and then the door of the house open and shut. He raised his head and in less than a minute scrambled down the tree, stole across the yard and hurried back to his truck.

From the cab, Carl watched the quiet facade of the Owenses' house and tried to stop shaking. Except that the brick looked warm and bright in the morning sun, it was no different from the way it had been three hours ago when he'd first seen it in the furry light of dawn, the lives inside undisturbed.

Carl knew he'd done the right thing. He'd almost killed a man, almost changed everything, but then he hadn't. At this moment, life was as promising as it had been yesterday. Yesterday he hadn't
seen that promise, but this morning he did. He'd teetered on the edge of disaster, but he hadn't fallen.

Light-headed with relief, he started the truck and drove west on Wisconsin Avenue, where the sun flashed against a hundred windows and clanging streetcars and honking automobiles hurried him forward in an exhilarating rush over the river and into the solid, quiet residential neighborhood beyond. And then these houses, too, began to thin, and in scant minutes he was leaving it all behind, that city in which lives went hurtling on, and his rifle lay stiff and silent on a carriage house roof.

On Blue Mound Road he had to stop. The tank was half full—he didn't really need gas—but he had to catch his breath and talk to another human being. He had to tangle himself in the lush world, the world in which he hadn't killed a man in a paisley bathrobe.

“Hey,” he said to the attendant who came out to the pump—he couldn't help himself, “I nearly killed a man back there.”

The attendant shook his head. “This road's treacherous. All them trees. You come up on a horse and buggy around one of them curves and one of you's a goner for sure.”

Carl nodded. It was all right, better, of course, that the man didn't understand. Just so he was able to say it. He wanted to shout it into the dappled light with his head out the window as he flew along the narrow road—nearly killed him! nearly killed him!