Homeland and Other Stories (17 page)

“Sure,” Gilbert says, “there's something you can do, but not necessarily linseed. It depends on the thickness of the veneer, for one thing.” He pauses. “I'd have to see it.”

They knock on Nola's door and she takes them upstairs, holding her huge key ring in front of her like Diogenes with his lantern searching for an honest man.
She must spend her whole life locking and unlocking things
. When she opens the attic door they're blasted with heat; it's like checking the oven.

“The first thing we have to do is get some cross-ventilation,
so we can breathe,” Gilbert says. He walks across and throws open the north window. “Now we'll open this one,” he says, dragging open a sash on the south side facing the street. “Now let's have a look.”

His mouth turns down, like a doctor's, as he listens to Nola and examines a coffee table with a leafy pattern inlaid in light and dark woods. Sulie is touched by his concern. He knows everything in the world about antiques. She jots down notes for Nola on an envelope.

Before they leave the attic Gilbert closes and locks the front window, brushing at the papery shells of dead flies on the sill. As Sulie and Nola start down the stairs Sulie sees, out of the corner of her eye, an amazing thing. Gilbert goes to the north window, but before he closes it he picks up the hat, holds it between his fingertips out the window, and lets it drop. She can only presume it lands two stories below, on the privet hedge behind Nola's garage.

 

Who would I report it to, if I did? Would I have to go to the police as a witness? An accomplice? Me on parole, casting the first stone
. Sulie knocks on his door that evening, knocks and waits, but there's no answer. Then she hears them talking over the fence, out back by the garbage cans. She lingers by the bushes near the water meter. Only because she knows it's there Sulie can see it behind them, in the shrubby dimness behind Nola's house, nested like a white bird down in the privet hedge.

“One of my Fiestaware plates, broken right in two,” Nola says, rapping her knuckle on the garbage-can lid on her side of the fence.

Gilbert is tall and handsome like a man in a movie. His hand rests on the fence.
He gave me the Golden Gate Bridge
. The paperweight sits under the lamp beside her bed, a globe of light.
She can feel the kindness of his hands on her skin as they curled together on the rug. His hands under the soft sweater.

“He knows what's good, I'll give him that much,” Nola says. “He goes right for the things I love the most.”

“It's like you said,” Gilbert tells her. “He knows how to get at you. He's demented.”

It's exactly what Nola wants to hear. She leans across the fence toward him with tears in her eyes. Her thin hand reaches out and clasps his wrist.

 

Well I didn't aim to get caught, I always knew I didn't want to end up in here, but it's hard to see who I'm hurting when I do it. The rehab therapist just nodded, trying not to let anything show on her face, and then another woman in the group dragged on her cigarette and flicked pale straight hair out of her eyes and said Honey I can see who I'm hurting, I just don't give a shit
.

 

Sulie has been hired to paint a house on the north side of town, in a younger neighborhood than this one, with fewer old trees. To paint a house sky blue. She's loading pans and rollers into her truck, ready to leave for work, when her shoulder is touched from behind. It's Nola, dressed in a green silk blouse, a ragged half slip, and spectator shoes. Her hair straggling down her back is surprisingly long. “Now it's happened,” she says.

“What's happened?”

“He's found his way into the attic.”

Sulie feels her neck go red. “How do you know?”

“Do you remember my husband's fedora, from our wedding day? It's gone. It would have been more like him to ruin it some way, but he took it.”

A cluster of sparrows chatters up in one of Nola's date palms, fussing over the ripe dates.

“I'm sorry, Nola. I've got to go to work right now. When I come back this afternoon I'll help you look for it.”

Nola ignores her. “He reads my mind,” she says. “That hat had been on my mind. Whatever I'm thinking about, he gets to meddling with. I'm afraid to leave my house now. I'm afraid even to turn my back.”

Sulie drives twice around the block, parks, and goes back into her house. She can't climb ladders today. She sits on her bed with her arms crossed over her stomach and listens to her young man moving around on the other side of the wall.

 

He keeps it in the lacquered armoire next to the fireplace. During the day he locks the cabinet and carries the key in his pocket, turning it in his fingertips until the brass shines like an icon. At night he wears it, moving quietly between the bedroom and living-room mirrors. Or he opens the cabinet door and just stares, letting the rest of the room go into soft focus. He has never doubted the rightfulness of this; it's his. He needs it. It is such a completely perfect thing it improves the room. Everything else is perfect by association.

 

Sulie was gone so must hear secondhand from Estelle about the two police cars and the ambulance. Evidently Nola called the emergency number complaining of a fluttering in her chest and they came in to find her lying in bed, weeping, in a fur hat. She's in the hospital now.

“They said she's got a son,” explains Estelle. “Up there someplace, it was either Idaho or Iowa, one. Divorced. They called him and said he's flying right down.”

Sulie's stomach hurts. “What's going to happen to her?”

“Well, I told the police they ought to explain to the son about the condition, you know, of the house, and they said he seemed real understanding. I'm sure he had no idea. As soon as she leaves the hospital, if and when, he'll put her in a home. It's the best thing. I guess he'll clean out the house and maybe they'll spruce it up and sell it.”

Estelle and Sulie stare at the house. Around the gable windows, where sparrows are nesting, ivy branches wave like arms under the birds' slight weight. To Sulie the house looks completely different without Nola in it.

 

The two front windows are shuttered from the inside with plywood, making the house seem blind. Sulie leaves early for her housepainting and comes home late, but still she has to come home. On a Saturday afternoon she sees him coming back from the bus stop. The person coming down the sidewalk toward her, wearing the fedora, is Gilbert. He stops in front of Nola's blinded house, clicks his heels together, and lightly touches the brim, smiling, holding her eye. Sulie looks away.

The very night after he'd done it, he talked to her all sweet and innocent. I waited by the water meter because I saw them talking across the fence. Nola with tears in her eyes, reaching over, her hand making a circle around his wrist like a bracelet of bones
.

She will go inside now and put what she needs in boxes. There are places for rent on the north side. The pink beaded sweater she'll leave on the bathroom tile, folded, weighted down by the glass paperweight. She'll think about it there, left behind for someone to find. Her own things she'll take. By the end of the month there will be nothing she cares about in either half of that house.

I
T MAY ALREADY BE TOO LATE
for the pandas, the man on TV says. When Westerners first discovered them they were so fascinated they just couldn't kill enough; now there are only a few pandas left, and the best efforts of science can't seem to bring them back. Paired up in zoos, they turn their backs on one another and refuse to participate in family life. It's as if the whole species is suffering from a terrible sadness—as though they'd looked around at what had happened and just given up. Grace doesn't blame them. She sits rigidly in bed next to her husband, arms folded tightly over her chest. The program shows an old film clip of men emerging in high leather boots from the bamboo forest, holding up panda skins stretched on wooden frames. The image gives her chills, it is so full of evil. It's like seeing a child's toy flayed.

“They shouldn't tell people it's already too late,” Randall says. “If people think that, they won't care anymore.”

“But it's the truth,” says Grace. “That's how things are with the ocean and the ozone and everything. Once they get around to looking, they find out that things are already way more messed up than anybody thought.”

“That's not true. There's somebody someplace that knows
when things start to get poisoned, but they try to keep it a secret. They know people would get mad. It's never too late to get mad,” he persists, looking at Grace, needing for her to agree that there is hope. There has always been this difference between them, a deep gulf she can't swim.

“I wish Jacob could see this,” she says. The boys are in bed. Endangered species are Jacob's hobby—his room swims with posters of every possible kind of whale. When Grace stands in the middle of them, picking up socks in a great fishbowl, she can fathom the depth of the ocean's despair. Jacob knows all the numbers: how many tigers are left, how many mountain gorillas.

“This is the last thing in the world Jacob needs to watch,” Randall says. He thinks Jacob carries it too far.

Grace wants the program to stop, but feels it would be wrong to turn it off. It would be turning away from truth. A Chinese woman scientist measures bamboo shoots on a tiny plot of ground. It takes acres of bamboo to keep a panda alive, she explains, and most of it has been cut down to make way for rice paddies. Over Grace's head, rain strikes the roof like bullets and makes her tired. Tomorrow she and the boys have to drive a hundred miles to have dinner and go to church with her relatives. It's Easter weekend, only once a year, she shouldn't resent it. Randall thinks Grace is afraid of her family, which of course is a mistaken opinion, but she does dread the trip. A storm has settled over all of central Kentucky and she knows the drive will be hard.

Every so often, the scientist says, all the bamboo in a whole mountain range will die back to the roots and there is massive starvation. In the old days the pandas could go somewhere else, but now there is no place for them to go. A film clip shows emaciated panda bodies like sad beanbag chairs littering the forest floor. Grace presses her knees together and holds her elbows to resist the urge to get up, again, and see if the boys are still breath
ing. Ten years ago, when they were babies, she argued with Randall that crib death was real, that something really could happen. Now she knows it isn't rational to need to see, half a dozen times every night, the slight movement of their chests under the covers. Randall calls her a worrier. Now, with so much on TV about addiction, he's decided that's her problem—he has said he thinks Grace is addicted to sadness.

 

The early weather report said the storm was expected to continue through the weekend. There isn't much rain right now, though, only a fine mist that occasionally freezes on the windshield. The road could be slick, but it's impossible to know that until you try to stop. Red taillights waver and leap in the dimness ahead of her like sparks escaped from a fireplace.

“What did you bring for church?” she asks the boys. Randall says they're old enough to do things for themselves—to pack their own clothes, for example. She does try.

“Our good shirts and jeans,” Matt says. She smiles at the tops of their two brush-cut heads in the mirror. “Good shirts” means bright colors—turquoise, fuschia. Matt has a pair of green sneakers with red tongues. She imagines her two sons flowering on the church pew among all the brown-suited farm boys like butterfly weeds in a bean patch. Her grandmother would die if they skipped church, but she would do worse than die if she saw that. They'll have to borrow jackets from Rita's kids.

The boys are good on trips—they can both read in the car without getting sick. Jacob has a new National Geographic book on the condors. Matthew, who's a year younger, is making an elaborate crayon drawing of a brontosaurus, which now the scientists are calling something different, Grace forgets what. Matt knows all the names. His infatuation is not whales but dinosaurs—species that are already gone. It strikes her that by the time her
sons are grown there will be little difference. Their own children will view whales as kinds of dinosaurs—mythical beasts—not something real, to mourn. They will never believe those huge, fishlike creatures moved through the seas in modern times, while people were driving around in Hondas and drawing money from bank machines.

 

They arrive late. Rita, Grace's cousin, has been keeping dinner warm in the oven for two hours. Grace hadn't even worried about the time; she'd forgotten the country habit of eating the main meal in the middle of the day. She hurries the boys to the table while the men bring extra chairs from the kitchen. Grace sees how much she's forgotten—these meals of baked ham with pineapple and marshmallows, and slices of Wonder bread passed around on a plate. Her grandmother Naomi accuses Grace of putting on airs since she moved away from Clement, but Grace has never tried to put the past behind her. Large parts of her childhood just seem to erase themselves quietly while she's not looking. Naomi and Rita will mention important family illnesses, even vacations they took, and to Grace it's as though some child she's never met did all those things.

After Naomi says the blessing, the silence dissolves into a din. The table is crammed with people: Naomi, Rita and her huge husband, Donnie, their three children, and Grace's unmarried cousin Clarence, who's tall and thin, all elbows. Rita and Clarence spent their teenage years as Grace's older brother and sister, more or less, because their father—her Uncle Vale—lost his hands in a hay baler and their mother got to drinking whiskey. It's hard to imagine how they spent those years under one small roof. After concentrating on the long, quiet drive, Grace feels overwhelmed by the sudden commotion and plates of food to be passed. The boys seem right at home, though, talk
ing with Donnie and Donnie, Jr., about the Kentucky versus Louisville basketball game. At the same time, Rita is talking about how easily you could have a moment of carelessness you'd regret your whole life. On
Donahue
she'd seen a woman who allowed her toddler to fall in the washer and drown. “She turns her back one second for the fabric softener, and there he goes in with the sheets,” she says.

“No more static cling!” cries Donnie, Jr., who is old enough now to work at a gas station.

“Boo Boo Hardrick blowed his finger off with a M-8o,” says Rita's daughter Caren. “He pulled off the bandage at playtime and made me look.” The way Rita's children talk shocks Grace. Maybe she has put herself above her family, as Naomi says.

“Caren, now hush, if you can't talk about something nice,” Rita says. “Is that Michael Hardrick, or Bruce?”

“The big one. Bruce.”

“Was it blown clean off, honey?”

“He said clean down to the bone.”

Grace notices that Rita's hair is darker than last year. She's started covering the gray. She and her brother look more alike as they get older—as angular as scarecrows. Grace's husband Randall is tall and thin too, but in a nicer way. He has long, slender hands and feet that she finds beautiful.

“I can't believe how grown-up the kids are,” she tells Rita. “Donnie Junior working. Our babies aren't babies anymore.”

“They get growed up behind your back when you don't come home but ever seven or eight years,” says Naomi.

“Grandma, that isn't so, they come ever year,” cries Rita. Grace guesses from the way they all shout that Naomi has grown more hard of hearing.

“What's Randall up to?” Donnie asks. Donnie, who seldom talks, has a voice that booms down in his throat like a bass
drum. You could just talk with Donnie on the phone and know he was big.

“Same as always,” Grace says. “Welding the front of a car to the back of a car, about a hundred times a day.” Randall works at the automotive plant in Louisville. He likes his job. “He wanted to come,” Grace lies, “but he couldn't get off.”

“Anymore that's about all anybody around here is doing too,” says Clarence. “Working over to that Toyota plant the Japs put up down at Campbell. Don't seem like nobody can get a whole living out of farming anymore.”

“It's the truth,” Rita says. “All the men have to go someplace else to work. There's nobody left in Clement now, of a daytime, but women and children. Somebody could just march in here and take the place I guess.”

“Going up to First Methodist with me tomorrow?” asks Naomi suddenly.

Rita leans toward her and shouts, “I told you, Grandma. Me and Grace want to try out Woods Baptist!” This is the first Grace has heard of it.

“Now, who's the pastor there?” the old woman demands without looking up from her plate.

“She knows very well,” Rita tells Grace. “She's dying to go see for herself, only she's too proud.” She shouts, “You know very well, Grandma. It's the Beltrain boy.”

“Oh, yes,” Naomi says, reaching for a slice of bread.

“You remember Nestor Beltrain, Grace. He lived next door to us for a while there. Next to your-all's house on Polk Street.”

Grace can tell from the way the men are smiling at their plates that there's a joke hanging over the table, but she can't remember the Beltrain boy. If his getting the pastor's job was any big thing, Rita would have told her about it. Rita writes Grace regular letters in her curly cursive hand—the news and calami
ties of Clement all rendered benign by her fat
o
's and
c
's. She keeps in closer touch now with Grace's mother and father—who live in a trailer court in Tucson, Arizona—than Grace does herself. Sometimes Rita lords that over her, too, but Grace tries to be understanding. It would be hard to grow up in somebody else's house without a mother of your own.

They're all looking at Grace. There is some secret here. “Well, I can't place him,” she says. “I'm sorry.”

“You couldn't have forgot Nestor,” says Rita. “Nobody could forget Nestor. His daddy was Colonel Beltrain, remember, that was on the school board and had his own parking place down at the courthouse? Nestor had asthma or something. He was a little skinny old boy with ears that stuck out of his head like tree funguses. The teachers used to grab them like handles. He was so bad.”

The men are practically laughing out loud. “You men hush up,” Rita says. “It isn't that funny.”

Clarence says, “You ought to remember him, Gracie. He liked to have hung you.”

Rita interrupts him. “David, stop making such a big show out of it and chew what's in your mouth,” she says, and Grace is uncertain of what Clarence has just said.

“I can't stand this stuff,” says David, Rita's youngest. “It's stringy and's got too much salt.”

“Well, it's Kentucky-cured ham, honey, that's just how it tastes. You liked it fine last year.”

“I remember the name,” Grace says. “Nestor Beltrain. But I can't picture him. Clarence, what did you say he did?”

Rita gives Clarence an odd, warning look, but he answers anyway. “I said he liked to have hung you from a tree.”

Grace's hand rests on her throat. She looks at Jacob and Matt, who seem intent on their food. “What do you mean, hung me?”

“From that old mulberry tree out there,” he says, pointing
toward the window as if it were still there. But this is a different house.

“I do remember the tree,” Grace says.

“You was just little,” Clarence says. “He stood you up on a chair and put a rope around your neck and said to jump any time you was ready.”

“You talking about that time he tried to string her up from the tree?” asks Naomi. “You two wasn't living here yet, I'm the one seen it. Grace, your mother and me was setting in the kitchen doing up a mess of break beans and she looked out the window and all the sudden commenced to whooping and hollering.” Naomi pauses for breath. “She grabbed up one of her new Revere Ware pots and throwed it at him, right out the back door. I never heard the like of language come out of her mouth.”

Apparently this is the story Rita wanted to put a stop to, but now she laughs. “She must have scared him good. I don't think he ever did come back in your-all's yard.”

“Law, he used to come over pestering you a awful lot, Grace, and trying to get you to look at dirty magazines under the lilac bushes,” says Naomi. “Your mother would get mad, but not like that time.”

“Well, he did so come back, Rita,” says Clarence. “Me and you and him used to…”

“Clarence, I think you'd just better shut up and clean your plate,” Rita says.

“Used to what?” Grace asks. She does know that Rita and Clarence were often put in charge of her for whole afternoons, when her mother had to take in ironing. Sometimes Grace thinks Rita hasn't quite given up the job of being boss.

“You wasn't but about three or four,” says Naomi. “When he tried to string you up. I don't expect you'd remember it.”