Margaret from Maine (9781101602690) (2 page)

Chapter Two

L
ight came over the house from the east. A phoebe, nesting this year in the crook of the cowshed door, sat on the top line of a barbed wire fence and dotted its tail up and down, up and down, as if jacking the sunlight over the horizon. Light continued to spread and search, touching the muddy cow yard, the curled green hose near the water tank, climbing, at last, the 173-year-old white oak that guarded the house and shaded the front parlor. The phoebe began to call,
pheeebeee, pheeebeee, pheeebeee,
and an easterly breeze, passing from the Maine coast a hundred miles away, carried a single gull overhead toward the Androscoggin watershed.

In that moment, Margaret Kennedy's eyes rejoined the world. She was thirty-one that morning and she slept on the same side of the bed she had always occupied: the left. Her husband's side remained empty, tucked and smoothed, the pillows undented for six long years.

She did not have to consult a clock to know the time. She read the oak's shade and from the color of the light and the fritter of the leaves, she judged it to be shy of five o'clock. She closed her eyes a moment more and heard the phoebe calling. She wondered, absently, if it was the same phoebe year after year, or whether the barn proved such an attractive nesting opportunity that any phoebe would count herself lucky to grab it. She preferred to think of the phoebe as an old friend, a true harbinger of spring, a bird that fed her babies—once, Margaret had seen this—the translucent wings of a dragonfly. For an instant as she watched—how many years ago was it?—she could almost believe the babies ate light, because the wings sparked and glittered as they slid down the chicks' gullets.

Margaret stretched. She felt old this morning, and weary, but such thinking did not help. She pushed her legs over the side of the bed, stepped into her slippers, and went to use the toilet in the master bath. When she finished, she washed her hands and face, then gazed for a second at her features, wondering if she had ever been pretty. People said she had been. She always felt she had been pretty enough for Maine, for rural life, but that if she had moved away her looks would have suffered by comparison with other women. Thomas had marveled at her looks, but he was no judge, honestly, and she stared a moment longer, noting that her hair—red as flame, her mother said years ago—had dulled to the color of certain apples after frost. Burgundy now, she thought, like a good leather chair in a British drama.

Before she dressed, she heard the milk pump switch on and its insistent sound sped her along. She pulled on jeans and a heavy sweatshirt that read
Maine Black Bears
across the chest, then fished a pair of leather work gloves out of the belly of the sweatshirt. She clumped down the center stairs and kept going right out of the kitchen and onto the farmer's porch, pushing the screen door back, then stopped and slid her feet out of her slippers and into shin-high muck boots. A glance informed her that Thomas's father, Benjamin, had already made it outside. The sound of the milking machine told her that anyway, but she liked confirmation in the world and appreciated being able to avoid surprises.

“Morning,” she called as she entered the milking parlor.

Benjamin didn't hear her. He was doing something to Sally Mae, one of the thirty-three cows that stood with their heads in stocks while the milking machine sucked them dry. Margaret yelled a little louder, “Morning.” She didn't call so much to say good morning as to let Benjamin know she had arrived. It was loud in the milking parlor and it was common practice to make sure you didn't startle a person by suddenly appearing. Margaret saw Benjamin raise a hand without turning, indicating hello, he had seen her, all was well, and she nodded and went to the milk sink and began cleaning. She stood a moment and let the water run to hot, then she began passing teat tubes and sponges under the stream. She did not think as she performed the work, but her hands moved like elves, like small skilled creatures that could carry out a function without guidance. When she finished, she set everything to dry in an old dish drainer, then she made a circuit of the northern wall, checking the cattle. She stopped next to Tinkerbell, her favorite, a sturdy old gal with remarkable consistency as a milk producer, and patted her flank. She bent down and breathed the cow smell, which she loved, and it came to her quickly: skin and sun, clover and hay, mud and rain. She wondered if she was crazy to like the cows so much, to like farming. A battalion of flies flickered near the windows, tapping against the glass and turning to embers in the flashing light. Now and then she saw them land on a cow, and the cow, with her gifted tail, swatted and swayed, or lifted a foot to throw shadow at them, the pendulous milking apparatus dangling like a bell's tongue beneath the cow's wide stomach. She tapped Tinkerbell's flank again and continued on her rounds.

“Morning,” Benjamin said when she had bent down to remove the suck cups from the first three cows. “Gordon awake yet?”

“Not yet. I'll get him up when we finish here.”

“That boy likes his sleep.”

“I know,” Margaret said, feeling short with her father-in-law. “But we're going to run over to the hospital. Remember, he doesn't have school today. They have an in-service day.”

They had gone over this the night before. In that specific way—his slowness to store information, or recall it—he reminded her of Thomas. She had kept her head down when he spoke to her, but now she lifted it. He smiled. She smiled back.

“He's a slow boy in the morning,” he said.

“It's still early. There's plenty of time to get ready. You sure you won't come along?”

Benjamin shook his head. He preferred to visit alone, she knew, though she couldn't say why exactly. Maybe he liked a private moment with his son. Thomas was the proverbial stone in the pond, and the ripples went out in unexpected ways, caught people by surprise. She nodded and let it go.

“You make up your mind about Washington?” he asked. “That Mr. King called and left a message last night. He seems like a nice man.”

She had been asked to attend a bill signing sponsoring improved veteran care for coma patients. Thomas's status as a Medal of Honor winner was attractive to the legislators and she felt it was something she could do for him. Requests occasionally arrived, sometimes surprising ones and not always with good intent, but this invitation had come directly from President Obama's staff. A weekend in Washington, D.C., a signing ceremony, a few photographs. She had put off making a decision, but it was coming right up. She needed to give the organizers an answer.

“I'm leaning toward going,” she continued. “If you think you and Gordon can hold down the fort.”

“Of course we can. No worries there.”

“We could all go, you know? They'd be happy to have Thomas's dad. The invitation is for our family.”

Benjamin shook his head. He had the dairy to watch, she knew, but it was not every day you were invited to meet the president of the United States. He claimed he had been to Washington once, when his son was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, and that was enough. This trip, to stand behind the president when he signed into law a bill sponsoring increased funding for veterans in a vegetative state, seemed too political and too far from life on the Maine farm. At least that's what he said. Margaret suspected that Benjamin found the social demands—the chitchat, the stuffy meals, even the mandatory coat and tie—difficult to endure. He preferred the cows' company, and in that she did not blame him. She liked the cows better than she liked most people.

“You're better at that sort of thing,” he said finally.

“I'm not much good at it, but it seems to be for a good cause.”

“'Course it is.”

“I'm tempted to bring Gordon, but he's a little young. I'd like him to see Washington, but maybe he's not ready yet.”

“He'll be fine here with me.”

“I'll give Mr. King a call back then and say I'll do it. It's a little something we can do for Thomas.”

Benjamin nodded and smiled. For an instant, she spotted the family resemblance. It had passed from Benjamin to Thomas and now to Gordon. They were all big men—at least Gordon seemed headed in that direction—with plain, solid features and strong chins. Margaret often thought of them as trees, as a circle of oaks growing out from a central grand oak, their lives established by acorns carried deeper into the forest by slow, gradual progress. She found nothing hurried about any of her men.

It was a short morning. By the time she finished her chores, the sunlight had already become a bright bar in the barn doorway. As she returned to the house, she passed by the phoebe nest. Her boots made a loud clumping sound against the ground. Dew flicked up from her toes. A nice breeze moved across the north pasture and it stopped her for a moment. She put her hand to her eyes, shading the morning sun from her vision while she looked slowly around the farm. Spring, she thought. Late May. She took a deep breath, then another, and she watched for a moment as the breeze pushed the large web of a barn spider into a shimmering dance. She thought of
Charlotte's Web
, the story by E. B. White that always came to mind whenever she saw a spider's web.
What a pig,
she thought, then she continued across the dooryard, climbed the back porch, and pulled one foot, then the other, out of the muck boots. The boots released her feet slowly, gasping as they did, and she closed the screen door behind her, the weight of her step setting the china in the dining room cabinet to rattling and gossiping.

* * *

The boy—Gordon, six years old—had been waking for a half hour, sleep coming and going over him like a drawer hesitantly opened and closed. He lay in his single bed, his body making a bulge only halfway down the tube formed by the blue Hudson Bay blanket his mother had tucked around him the night before. A red plaid curtain lifted and fell, lifted and fell with the breeze that pushed across the farm. It was the same breeze his mother had felt when she stepped out of the barn, but the boy couldn't know that and neither could she.

Around the boy, in the mountainous contours of his blankets, several dozen green army men enjoyed a quiet peace in their endless war. The men—cheap plastic army men, perfectly green, stamped out in a factory near Shanghai, China—replicated poses more closely associated with World War II than Iraq or Afghanistan or even Vietnam. Near the boy's chest, fallen into a bunker near his armpit, a radioman, kneeling, held a World War II walkie-talkie to his ear and chin, listening for messages that never came, detailing their positions, which changed nightly depending on the boy's whims. On the other side of his arm, set up in an ambush, seven riflemen lay on their bellies and pointed their plastic rifles at the foot of the bed. One of the rifles had broken away, and the boy, hearing accounts of sawed-off shotguns, had decided the rifleman had one of those for a weapon, although he called it a saw-chuck shotgun without knowing better. The soldier with the saw-chuck shotgun was Gordon's favorite, although he resisted having favorites for fear it would prejudice the war games and make them hollow. Still, he often wondered if the saw-chuck soldier wasn't a little like his father, who also lay on his belly in the white bed, and whose snoring reminded him of sawing, which probably had something to do with that type of rifle.

He slept a little more, and then finally he felt a hand on his forehead, then lips. He opened his eyes. His mother sat on the edge of the bed, a white terry cloth robe wrapped around her. She wore her hair up in a towel, and Gordon saw a drop of water fall from her neck to her shoulder.

“Morning, buster,” she said.

“Morning, Mom,” he answered.

“You ready to wake up? Grandpa Ben said he's coming in to have coffee with you soon.”

He nodded.

“Where are we going today?” she asked him.

He knew the answer, but he felt shy suddenly and wouldn't reply.

“To the hospital,” she said, filling it in for him. “To see Daddy.”

“Daddy,” the boy repeated.

“That's right, sweetheart. Grandpa is finishing up with the cows. I've run a bath. Will you jump in and I'll be in in a second to help you wash, okay?”

He nodded.

He didn't want to get up until she left, for fear of knocking the soldiers out of their positions. The red plaid curtain lifted and fell. His mother brushed his hair back one more time, then stood and walked out of the room. He grabbed the saw-chuck shotgun guy from near his armpit and carried it with him when he went toward the bathroom.

* * *

On the back porch, Margaret stopped to smell the lilacs. They were common lilacs, purple, and smelled like wind mixed with something floral and difficult to name. She breathed deep and stretched her back. She liked what she wore—a simple cotton dress that hung smoothly around her frame—and she was glad she'd allowed her friend Blake to talk her into buying it. It was a good run-errand dress. She had a sweater to put over it if the hospital proved too cold. Blake had been right. Blake was usually right about such things.

She turned to go back inside, but then paused for a moment more beside the lilacs. Thomas loved lilacs; he cut them each spring, bringing them inside in bundles that he left in a small watering can beside their bed. There they stayed, trembling with each footstep over the bare wooden floors of the bedroom, the moisture of the can occasionally sweating a moat onto her bedside table. Even with them so near, she could not depend on smelling them. The scent rose and fell, disappeared altogether at times, then suddenly reappeared at the fluff of a blanket or the tuck of a pillow.

She cupped one of the lilac heads in her hand and brought it to her nose. Yes, the scent was there. She had already cut a half dozen and put them in the car for Thomas. She had no idea if Thomas could sense such things, but it couldn't hurt, and maybe, she liked to think, in some small, primitive part of him he still recorded sensations like these.
The doing of it would be the good of it,
she liked to quote.