Iona Moon (10 page)

He remembered a girl he saw on the road one summer. Her legs were dirty, her feet bare. He asked her name, and she glanced over her shoulder as if she hoped a brother might appear suddenly to swoop her up in his arms and carry her away from the stranger.

He counted the years between them. He was twenty-four; she was ten. The days he'd have to wait for the child seemed impossible, but the decades of his future collapsed and his whole life seemed terrible and quick.

No brother came. She told him her name. The wheat moved in waves across the field behind her; her hair waved too, the same color as the grain, and he felt the wind on his face for the first time, though it must have been blowing all day.

He knew her people. They lived in a trailer near the woods, six of them in a tin shack at the northern edge of the Flats. Her father hauled junk from the dump, cleaned it up, and made it work long enough to sell it in town on Saturdays. Frank had seen Clayton Cislo parked in the lot at Pick-n-Pay, his truck bed crammed with toasters and bicycles, rewired lamps, a chair with one new leg, a pot with a makeshift handle, knives freshly polished and oiled, so the blades eased from their sheaths, gleaming in the sun.
Riffraff
, Frank's mother said.

He must have seen the girl many times, sitting in the cab of the truck with her older sister, but the glass blurred her features and kept him from seeing what he saw now. She was too skinny to be pretty. It was nothing as simple as that. The bones of her face were sharp, without disguise of baby fat, so she looked at him as a woman, her mouth closed, lips tight, as if to tell him she'd answered enough questions for one day.

The boys arrived on the bus the next day, and Frank drove to town to pick them up.

Rafe and Dale crowded each other in Hannah's doorway, each one shoving for his share of space, a better view, but neither one bold enough to come near his mother's bed.

Leon leaned against the windowsill, his thumbs hooked in his pockets, staring at the old woman, his mother, forty-one and wrinkled, skin gray and dry as paper.

Hannah's eyelids fluttered. Iona thought she only pretended to sleep. She remembered the dream, how the boys floated above the bed with their fat baby bodies and their grim adult heads. She felt sorry for them now as she watched their useless childish gestures and pathetic faces. She saw that each of her brothers was ludicrous in his own way. Rafe wore a pair of loafers, silly city shoes that would do him no good now that he was home. Dale's down vest made him look even fatter than he was, and Iona wanted to tell him to take it off. Leon had grown a scrubby beard and was chewing tobacco. Every few minutes, he had to leave the room to spit. She wished they would all go downstairs so that Hannah could open her eyes.

They left soon enough, and Iona saw that Hannah wasn't pretending. She counted the painkillers in the bottle and realized that her mother must have taken five or six before the boys got home.

Frank stayed with Hannah all day, hoping she might wake for a moment. Even if she told him to go away, that would be something. Once he thought he heard her mumble a word or two, and he leaned close but couldn't make her repeat it. “I'm afraid,” he whispered. Her gnarled hand batted the covers and she clutched his fingers in her sleep.

Iona tried to give her water, but it dribbled out her mouth.

The brothers sat in the living room, smoking their pipes, waiting for Iona to come downstairs and cook their dinner.

That night, Hannah Moon curled into herself and began to dream of cows with wings. When Frank tried to take her hand, she pulled it away and hid it beneath the blankets, tucked it against her own chest. Even Iona's touch startled her, made her jerk in fear. “Don't,” Frank said, “please don't.” And Iona didn't know if he was talking to her or to Hannah.

He went to the window and pressed his fingertips to the cold glass. He saw a barefoot girl with yellow hair. She ran down the road. He ran after her. And he was ashamed of himself: he wanted her to fall so that he could pick her up.

Iona touched his back. “What is it, Daddy?” she said. “What do you see?”

At the bottom of the hill there was a creek covered by thin ice, at the edge of the woods a grave where Iona's sister was buried. Shadows in the trees moved like women.

Just before dawn, Hannah Moon gasped and opened her eyes wide, remembering the most important words. Iona and her father leaned close. She breathed hard but did not speak. She died instead, as if she had seen the day ahead of her and could not face the struggle.

Frank and Iona were surprised when the light did come: it was neither terrible nor loud. Clouds lay low and thick on the horizon, so the passage from the night was merciful and slow, and they felt it had been this day forever.

They washed the body of Hannah Moon. Her bloated feet were milky and blue as fish underwater. Frank sponged them, tenderly, though they seemed strange to him, not at all like the long knobby feet he thought he remembered. He washed her swollen knees and fleshless thighs; he washed between her legs. The pubic hair was gone, and he saw that the distance between girlhood and old age was painful and brief.

Iona couldn't look at her mother's body, though she had seen the shriveled breasts and sharp hipbones every day for months, though she knew each sore on her mother's buttocks. Now she washed Hannah's face and imagined her as only her father knew her: as a child on the road, as the girl in his bed, as the woman who reached for his hand and pulled it toward her belly, as the wife who said:
See how warm it is
.

Iona's brothers slept in ignorance while Iona chose stockings and shoes, a pale green dress, a pair of gloves, a ribbon to tie in her mother's dry hair.

Later, after an uneaten meal, the boys all sat around the table and watched a plate slip from Iona's hands and shatter on the floor forever and ever.

Alone, she stood in the kitchen as a drip from the faucet filled a cup in the sink. Each drop made the surface tremble, and she felt the water move in her own body. The thin golden light of winter streamed through the window, so beautiful she wanted to lie down and die in it.

Visitors came and went. Hannah's sister Margaret arrived from Boise. She wheeled their senile mother through the house. “At least Hannah got to live her own life,” Margaret said. “Look at me, tied to this old woman.” Iona thought she saw her grandmother's face twist with understanding. Margaret stooped in front of the wheelchair and wiped drool from her mother's mouth with her own sleeve. “But you're a sweetheart, aren't you, baby? You don't give me any trouble.” The old woman grinned, a great toothless smile that made her whole body strain and quiver. She didn't know why she was here;
Hannah
was just a name like any other.

Hannah's two brothers paid their respects, then sneaked out back to drink whiskey from the silver flasks they kept in their pockets. Quinte and Ray Cislo had fifteen fingers between them—a man and a half, they liked to say. Their wives stayed in the kitchen, chopping vegetables and making pies no one wanted to eat. Iona heard their chattering complaints, their endless gossip and weightless threats:
I
told him my bag was packed
. But when Iona opened the door, they hushed and looked at her in a pitiful way that made her ashamed.

Her father's sisters called from Wolf Point and Sheridan. The roads were bad; they weren't coming. They sent their love. Everyone said that.
I
send my love
. What did it mean?

Frank's parents were dead, but that didn't stop them from visiting the house. Iona hated them for her mother's sake.
Marry a young one
, Delbert Moon said. His wife sat beside him on the sofa, her arms folded over her big chest.
I
told you she was too frail to outlive Frank
, Eva said.
I'm surprised she lasted as long as she did
.

Clayton Cislo came too, drunk as he was the night he died. He winked at Iona.
She thought she was too good for us
, he said.
Couldn't wait to get away from her ma and me. Well you can see where it got her
.

The unnamed child found her mother, brought her tiny bag of bones and laid them in the hollow of the woman's pelvis. Iona was jealous of the baby and longed to be cradled, body within a body, just that way.

Iona's brothers didn't go back to Missoula that winter. No one asked why. Every night they sat at the table, each one in his place: the father at one end, Leon at the other. This never changed.

No one but Iona noticed how the mother's absence filled her chair, how her hand fumbled with the fork. No one else saw her rise from the table to close the faded curtains and block the glare of the setting sun.

Iona sat beside the empty chair. The sun made her blink and squint. She stood and moved toward the window. Her limbs floated, her bones were water. Slowly she drew the curtains and said, “Sun's in my eyes.” Her own voice made her dizzy. One of her brothers burped. None of them stopped eating. She had to lean against the sink.
Whatever happens, happens again and again
. The sun flared as it set, and the trees at the crest of the hills seemed to catch fire. Her father's spoon scraped across the bottom of his bowl, and Iona Moon sat down to keep from falling.

6

Jay Tyler knew the woman was dead. His mother had clipped Hannah Moon's obituary from the paper and left it on the kitchen table. He wondered if she knew about him and Iona, or if she was just trying to make a point about what could happen to mothers, even young ones. He felt sorry for himself and then angry, as if Delores wanted to blame him somehow.

Willy Hamilton talked about it too. He sat by Jay's window and Jay lay on the bed. Willy hadn't been to see Jay since the second cast came off, since the day Jay had said:
I
don't need your fuckin' pity
.

Willy said, “I just keep thinking of Iona pulling that cat out of the river, saying she'd touched plenty of things that had been dead longer than that.”

Jay remembered Iona Moon touching him, the part that was dead now. He wanted Willy to leave. “I'm tired,” he said.

Willy stared out the window, at the bare black trees and the icy street. “She touched her too, after she was dead, I mean.”

Jay felt Iona's long hair brush his cheek, the warm rag on his chest, imagined her washing his body as she had washed her mother's body. “It's late,” he whispered.

Willy stood up. “I should go,” he said. The room was dim, full of shadows, and Jay was glad for that. Objects lost their outlines, furred, and grew indistinct, as if they were crumbling slowly in the night air. He'd wake to find himself outside, lying on the frozen ground, the house and everything they owned fallen down around him. “I saw Muriel Arnoux at school this week,” Willy said. “She looks all right—if you want to know.”

It
was a boy
—
if you want to know
.

He didn't want to know anything.

He drank himself to sleep and saw a dirty girl in overalls grab a chicken by the neck. She swung it over her head in great windmill loops. Bones snapped. The chicken fell to the ground and ran twenty feet, its head dangling, before it collapsed in the yard.

He woke cursing Willy Hamilton. What did he care how Hannah Moon died, or what Iona touched. What did it matter if Muriel Arnoux looked all right when she'd already made it clear she was never going to be all right again.

He had taken his mother's car twice since the accident. Every time he hit the brakes he felt the stab in his shin and knee. Once he drove to South Bend and paid a woman twenty dollars for a blow job. He didn't want to take his clothes off, didn't want to see her face or feel her breath at his ear; he just wanted to unzip his pants, close his eyes and leave his body. But he couldn't come. She gave him half an hour and finally said, “Look, baby, I don't have all night.” Weeks later he headed north to the gorge where the cliffs plunged sixty feet and the squeezed river grew fast and wild. He thought of the woman who'd jumped from the bridge and was saved—bad luck or bad planning; people miscalculated all the time.

Now he took the car again. He parked by the high school three days in a row before he spotted Muriel. He didn't know what he wanted. Slouched in his seat, he hoped she wouldn't notice the Chrysler.

She walked with her head down. She looked more like her mother already, puffed up in a down parka so she seemed thick through the middle and slow, taking tiny steps, afraid of falling on the ice.
She looks all right
. It was a lie.
If you want to know
.

He parked in the same place on Thursday and again on Friday. Both days she passed him quickly, without seeing. She was still a clean girl, Jay thought, but if he held her in his arms and pressed his nose into her hair, he thought she'd smell of wet leaves and damp earth.

He couldn't find her on Monday and wondered if she'd seen him after all. He worried that she might be sick and envisioned a long illness that would leave her body wasted and her mind fogged. It was very important to see her before this happened.

The next day a letter came for him at noon—a small, square note with no return address. His name and street were printed in careful, tiny script. Though he couldn't remember seeing Muriel's handwriting, he was sure the letter was from her.

He took it upstairs to his room, locked the door, sat down on the bed. He wanted to tear it open but restrained himself, easing one finger under the flap gently, the way he knew Muriel would.

He hoped the letter contained some secret message, some words he could not imagine until she spoke them, a line of forgiveness to heal him, a burst of longing to make him whole.

The note wasn't signed and didn't begin,
Dear
. There was only one sentence:
Stop it, Jay
.

He wished he could have been kinder to her that day last August when she'd come to the house to tell him that their child was a boy. If he had, she might speak to him now, might sit beside him in the car and feel some tenderness or regret. For two days he stayed home, but on Friday he waited again. At three-thirty he glimpsed her in the rearview mirror and knew she saw him too. She looked startled, about to run. He thought he'd have to chase her, but she walked toward his side of the car, her stride swift and deliberate. He rolled down his window, and she said, “Leave me alone.”