Mr. Splitfoot (12 page)

Ruth feels something.

“There’s home between you and me.”

A nurse bangs through the door. The man steps away.

“Good news,” the nurse says. “Discharge day.” She stops. “Is this your father?” the nurse asks.

“No.” The man steps back from the bed. The nurse is fussing with a chart, checking levels. Ruth touches her scar as the man backs out the door and is gone.

Ruth lifts her dress to show the kids where she’s been stitched back up.

Ceph says, “Nothing special in you.” The pits of his eyes are vicious.

“What’s a Ceph?” Ruth asks. “Ceph? That’s nothing.”

Nat smiles to watch her spar, relieved to have her back. A week in the home without her felt like death. He and Ceph had gotten into trouble, hanging the crosses in the barn upside down.

“Fine with me,” the Father had said in a voice calm and chilly. “Since them hogs need castrating.” He sent Ceph and Nat to the pen with one pair of snips and two flat rocks so the meat wouldn’t give off boar odor when cooked. Five boy piglets. Nat and Ceph took turns in the easier job of leg restraint at first until Ceph developed a passion for smashing pig scrotum.

“Have you seen Mr. Bell?” Ruth asks.

“Yeah. I told him you were in the hospital. He says we need practice, get the jitters out.” Nat turns to Ceph. “You want to play Mr. Splitfoot?”

“What, a game? Like with a knife?”

Ceph is the opposite of Mr. Bell. No charm, no intrigue. “Not Ceph,” she says. “And it’s not a game.”

“He’s perfect. Tough customer.” Nat turns. “No, Ceph. There’s no knives involved.”

Ceph’s presence brings out the actor in Ruth. She draws a creepy circle with charcoal in the basement. She makes him sit inside it as punishment. “Shh,” she spits. “Total silence,” though he’d said nothing. “What,” she asks him, “are the rules? What makes the dead come back?”

“How the fu—”

“I’m not asking you. I’m telling. First. No perfume ever. The dead don’t go in for unnatural scents.”

“I don’t wear—”

“Second and most important, you have to pay attention. You have to notice them. Be quiet. Listen. Try to learn their names. If you don’t know their names, you probably won’t be able to see them.”

Ceph laughs like he knows better.

“And the last rule.” Ruth looks at Ceph. “Comb your damn hair. The dead hate your messy hair. So do I.”

“That it?”

“That’s it.”

Nat’s head begins to loll, sweeping across his chest from left to right. He draws in one very loud breath that alters his voice like a gulp of helium. When Nat opens his eyes, there are no eyes to be seen, only the whites. Ceph’s bottom lip cranks into a posture of disgust.

“Butter. Butter.” Nat sounds ditzy, far away. The original owner of his ribbed undershirt sweated yellow crescents. Nat sniffs the air tilting in toward Ceph. “Black walnut. Yeast scum.”

Ruth rocks forward and back, forward and back.

Ceph hollows out his chest. “Hell—”

She sinks her nails into the bulge of muscle above his bent knee to shut him up.

Nat’s head, caught again in a loop, moves from side to side.

“Please, Mr. Splitfoot,” she says. “Continue.” She keeps her nails buried in Ceph’s skin, rubbing the smallest patch of his thigh with her thumb.

Coal shifts in the bin but not enough for any of them to actually believe that a dead thing’s in there. Nat’s silent.

“Dammit,” Ruth says. “You messed it up, Ceph.”

But her words are a trigger. Nat lifts his head. “Hi.” Pure Lana Turner. “How are you? Name’s Tina.”

“Tina?” Ceph asks.

“Tell him,” Nat goes on. “No! No! No! That’s an old song, Teenie Weenie.” He snaps his left hand, keeping time to music Ruth and Ceph can’t hear. “Tell him, bye-bye. Tell him, bye-bye, Tina. Tell him.”

Ceph’s mouth opens.

“I’d be with you if I could.”

Ceph swallows hard. “Where’re you going?” he asks the voice. “Don’t leave me.”

Upstairs there’s a knock loud as a wake-up call. The air changes and Nat’s eyes open. More pounding. Someone’s at the front door. “Anybody home?” The faraway question leaks through the basement windows.

“Huh?” Nat acts surprised to find himself coming to in the coal bin.

“Tina?” Ruth asks him.

Nat shrugs. “Tina?”

“You don’t remember?”

Nat shakes his head. He pulls his legs into his chest. “Who?”

“Tina!” Ceph shouts.

“Who’s Tina?” Nat scratches the back of his head.

“My mom.”

Ruth lifts slowly. “Your mother’s name is really Tina?”

Ceph nods.

Ruth grabs his wrist. The threat of her nails rears again. “Did you tell him that was her name?”

“No.”

More pounding from above.

Nat stands. “He never said.”

“Did you tell anyone your mom’s name? I’ll rip your teeth out if you lie.”

“No.”

So she turns against a cold front behind her, something buried a long time ago. Ruth heads for the stairs. Ceph and Nat follow swiftly. The wood of the banister feels less solid because when Nat delivers something beyond the miseries at Love of Christ!, Ruth’s world gets pocked with holes, flooded with light, so much brightness and possibility.

Upstairs the sun makes them squint. The knocking continues. Ceph growls through his awful breath. Ceph’s a mad dog, an exposed nerve without his mom.

The front door opens. “Anybody home?” the knocker asks.

Nat barely looks at the man standing there. Nat walks out, ignoring the visitor, trying to get some distance from Ceph, who is crying after Nat like it’s his fault his mom is gone. “Where she at?” Ceph’s vicious. “Bring her back!”

But Ruth is stopped by the visitor. “Hi,” he says.

The guy from the hospital is standing on the doorstep. Did she forget something? She didn’t have anything. “Zeke?”

“I’m happy to see you,” he says.

“Me?”

“I missed you.” He steps closer.

“It’s only been one day.” She looks down. She’s not wearing any shoes. He brings his chin in line with her ear. His breath makes a humid patch Ruth feels in her stomach, lower. Her swallow’s loud as a gulp. “What are you doing here?”

Zeke steps back. “I’ve come to talk to your foster father. Is he here?”

“Him?”

“Yes. Please.”

“You know him?”

“Not yet.” Zeke smiles.

Ruth sees more holes. She backs into the house as Nat disappears down the drive.

“The girl’s not for sale.” The Father squints at the strange offer.

“Not sale. No, but maybe there’s some sort of trade we could make.” Zeke chews his lips.

The Father wouldn’t mind figuring out a way to strike a deal. He remembers how Ruth’s sister, El, turned eighteen, crying, animal sounds, moaning and thrashing. Awful. She’d clung to his truck, grabbing onto the gearshift. He had to shove her off the seat with his boot, out the door, and quickly lock the truck. He’d tried not to look back as he pulled away from the mall parking lot, but couldn’t stop himself, Lot’s wife in the rearview. A child he’d cared for, now tiny and alone and frightened in the world. Awful, awful business.

Plus the Father likes for things to multiply. Once he even had a job working on an assembly line and it pleased him.

He stares out at the land, considers this man’s offer. The bottoms behind the house run down to a tiny creek. If he could place Ruth in someone else’s care before she ages out, he’d avoid the nastiness of moving her along at eighteen. Ruth’s been with him for so many years. In the past he’s made arrangements for the young women no longer in his care. A number of senior members from his congregation met their wives this way. Brother Warren. Brother Brett.

The Father looks out at the land, feels like Moses. He’ll look for the virtue. This seems a decent fellow, has his own storage business. He’ll take care of Ruth.

The Father balances the ball of his hand on top of the porch newel post. He strikes it once. “The girl earns me around eighty dollars a month, and she will until she turns eighteen.” Practiced at husbandry.

“How old is she now?”

“Just seventeen. Not sure I can replace her. My thought is perhaps you make a small gift to me. Eight hundred dollars? In exchange, you’ll get my blessing and consent to marry her. It’s legal at fourteen when you’ve got parental consent.”

“Eight hundred.” Zeke considers the price.

“You and Ruth have discussed this?”

“Some. You’ll take eight hundred dollars for the girl?”

Father Arthur shudders to deal so plainly in humans.

The man sees his unease and tries to demonstrate the righteousness of the plan. “The universe brought me here, brother. The universe is right.”

The Father queers his eyebrows, unable to use the word “right” in conjunction with whatever this man has in mind for Ruth.

I
’M SMARTER NOW
that my smartphone is gone. I can pay attention in a different way. I know what strangers are thinking. I know when a town is coming before it comes because the pollution changes a half mile out. There’s a thickness to the air like when you bring the palms of your hands toward one another. It’s not magic. It’s just attention and observation.

One store, one diner, one post office, and a heavy machinery rental center. The first humans we see in this town are a pack of kids on bikes, five or six of them. They ride past, pretending we’re invisible. Ruth and I walk on, but in a few minutes the kids pass us again somehow traveling in the same direction as before. They’ve made a loop on the town’s secret byways. I raise my hand and call out, “Hello.” This greeting makes them pedal faster.

At the store I buy a loaf of bread, a quarter pound of Muenster, an eighth of salami, and yogurt. Ruth always eats yogurt.

The clerk says to me, “If you’re pregnant, you shouldn’t eat cold cuts.” Now that my belly shows, I’m public property. Strangers speak to me all the time. They tell me how I should do everything. They want to know, boy or girl? What will I call it? Cloth or disposable diapers? Breast or bottle? Women either tell me that pregnancy hurts or that it is a miracle. Old men say some variation of “Whoa! Whoa! I’ll boil the water and get some sheets.”

Nothing stranger than pregnancy could happen to a body. Not drugs, not sex. An unknown that gets bigger every day. An unknown I feel stirring, growing, making me do things my body doesn’t normally do. A program set to play. One day it will talk to me. It will die. How’s that possible?

I pay for the food. I wish the clerk hadn’t mentioned the cold cuts. Without a phone I can’t even check to see if she’s just coming up with random rules for her amusement. Making shit up.

We sit on the grass by the side of the store for a little picnic. There’s a spigot to fill our water bottles. Ruth divvies up some cheese, some meat, and passes me a sandwich. I peel the salami off and hand it back. I haven’t taken more than three bites before those kids show up again. The youngest screams out, “Howdy, yourself!” They deposit their rides outside the store.

“What’s that?” the oldest girl asks. She’s maybe eleven, boobs just starting to bud.

“Salami and cheese.”

“Where are you from?” As if salami is such an exotic lunchmeat. Elizabeth, Katy, Drew, Alex, Amy, and Charley are brothers and sisters. They stand in a half circle around us. I offer them food. Charley tries a slice of salami. The other kids watch him chew it.

“Why are you walking?”

I look up. The girl who asks looks smart.

“Why don’t you just ride a bus?” Questions flying from little mouths.

I take a bite. “Buses,” I tell the kids, “are for going to school.”

The children nod. Birds chirp.

“We don’t go to school anymore,” Drew, the oldest boy, says.

“That sounds like a bad idea.”

“Not just us. None of the kids here do. They shut the school down.”

“For good?”

“For a while. Our town couldn’t afford it.”

“That’s not what happened,” the smart one says. “The adults voted to cut the budget so the teachers walked out.”

“So. No school? What do you do for fun?”

Most of the village is visible from here. There’s one intersection. A notary sign hangs outside a ranch house. There’s an oak dresser on a porch with a
FOR SALE
sign duct-taped to the front. There’s a water tower with the town’s name painted diagonally and, behind that, the school—a chain and a padlock around the front doors.

“Two things. Come on.”

From hands and knees, I push up to standing. Ruth arranges the pack behind her shoulders and lies back, uninterested in fun or kids. She shuts her eyes in the circle of six unpeopled bikes. The kids stare at my belly as I stand. Charley, the little one, chuckles until Amy stops him. “Nothing funny about that.”

The kids lead me away from the store, oldest first. I fall in line behind small Charley. Out of earshot from the others, I tell him, “Well, it is kind of funny.”

Katy stops to pick up a stick, something to drag through the dirt. They tell me their mother had been born here, which is rare because there’s no hospital or doctors. She was delivered by a neighbor who’d given birth three times herself and so knew something about it. I tell them I have no idea how to give birth. They tell me their mother has a loom. She makes rugs and sells them to an outfit in New York City that marks the price of the rugs up 700 percent. The kids tell me their mother loves a man more than their father, but she hasn’t seen the man in twenty-five years and everything she loves about him has, at this point, been made up by their mother.