The End of Always: A Novel (13 page)

I felt the word ripple through me. I was not a whore. I was nothing, just a tiny speck in the whole wide world, cast about by things I could not see and could not control, but I was not a whore. August loved me. He loved me. And Edwin was just a strange boy with strange ideas whom I had somehow come to know. I took a very deep breath. “But I—” I said.

My father stood up and slapped his rag onto the floor. “You shut up when I am talking to you,” he screamed. “You shut up now.”

“But I am not—”

And then my head jolted through black and there came a million pinpricks of jittery white light. The color in the room receded. The sound in the room disappeared in the shushing inside my skull. Everything around me vanished. I could not lift my head.

After a few minutes, the room began to brighten. I tasted metallic blood in my mouth. Now I could hear the bench creak. Now I could hear him breathing. He stopped next to me and I saw his spit-shined boots through the little space between my elbow and the floor.

“Next time, you are out on the street,” he said. “I will not have a hure in my house.” Then he kicked me and I cried out. He lifted his boot over my face and for a moment I thought he would stomp me into nothingness, into even less than I was at that moment. But he put his foot down without touching me and I lay breathless and weeping while his footsteps went down the hall. The back door slammed and he was gone.

Martha wrapped a cold towel over my cheek and tied it on top of my head but it did no good. My head pounded and my face pulsed and my mouth throbbed. She had washed my mouth but dried blood still flaked from my lips when I moved. A little trail of me left behind, pointing out that I was nothing but a whirling particle of earth. My father raved about equality and justice and freedom and the workingman, but in the end, that was all he cared about. Justice but not for us. Mercy but not for us. We were not citizens of his land. We were the land itself, something to conquer and master and turn to his hand.

I sat up and pulled the towel away. I touched the swelling along my jaw and flinched. I tried to pull my knees up to my chest but felt a sharp stab under my ribs and so let my knees drop. I lay down and wrapped my arms around my pillow and stared into the dark. I wished I had something that belonged to August so he would be with me. But I had nothing. In the flickering light of the hunting hut he had built a fire in a stone pit that stood under a makeshift flue and carefully unbuttoned my dress and pulled it over my head. He had let his palm slide down over my belly. He had lifted my chemise and pulled that over my head. I stood before him motionless while he unbuttoned his own shirt and then unbuckled his belt and let his trousers fall clinking to the floor. He held me against him before he kissed me. The light moved over the walls and the smoky fire filled the air with the smell of burning wood. The night did not fall away but grew larger somehow and deeper, as if the span of stars and the light of suns far distant and the moving of the earth we walked on were all new and we were alone among them, the first, the bearers of this unbearable secret, and joined together forever because of it. I knew that he would come back. But I did not know when and I grew worried in the waiting and then I told myself to have some faith in him and in the telling I knew that I had lost all faith. I listened to the throbbing in my head as if a terrible river of blood pounded against a different shore.

Something dark moved on the far side of the fence. The houses were still and our neighbors were not out in their gardens. No one bundled trash into the barrel behind the fence and no smoke curled to the sky. The dark shape moved again. I left my bucket at the pump. Edwin crouched at the end of the woodpile. When he saw me, he grinned and stood up. He reached over and patted my arm.

I thought of my father, not home yet but liable to come up the drive at any moment. “You cannot be here,” I said. “My sister will kill me.”
My father will kill you
, I thought,
if he even lays eyes on you
.

He squinted at me. Then he raised his hand and touched my face, very lightly, right along the jaw, where my father had struck me.

I leaned away. “Do not touch me.”

He pulled his hand back.

“You have to go,” I said. I looked around to see if we were being watched.

His arms flapped helplessly. “The armies that march come upon us in the open,” he said. “They ride dark horses and they come upon us in the fields and I was there and I saw what happened when the armies,” he said. Then he stopped. “I fought in that war,” he said miserably, and his face darkened. “I fought in that war, too.” He gazed past me to the open sky and searched the long line of horizon that ran out to the prairie and then east to the gray lake. His lips moved. Then he looked back at me. “What happened?” he said. He pointed at my jaw.

“It is nothing,” I said. “My father.”

“Why?”

I swallowed. How could I explain any of this to Edwin? It was impossible. So I said nothing and Edwin waited and watched me. Finally I said, “He says I am a bad girl.” And felt the truth of this drive me into the ground.

“You come,” Edwin said.

“I cannot,” I said.

“You come,” he repeated.

“No,” I said. “And you must go. You cannot be here.”

“
You
cannot be here,” he said. “You come.” He worked very hard to make the words. He leaned forward and patted my arm. “You come,” he said. “You come.”

“Stop it,” I said. “I cannot go with you.”

Edwin took a step toward me.

“Maybe I can come and see you later,” I offered.

He patted my arm and patted my arm, his face sorrowful.

“If you do not go,” I said. And then I stopped. I did not want to hurt Edwin. I did not want anything bad to happen to Edwin at all.

“Please,” I said. “You will only make things worse.”

He dropped his hand back to his side. He turned and walked in his long loping stride across the neighbor’s backyard. When he reached the street he looked back at me, his haunted face still, his hand moving against his thigh. Then he was gone.

The grass was heavy with dew and the air reeked of wild onion and the forsythia bloomed in frilly yellow hedges, broken branches, the promise of flowers everywhere in the antic green shoots under the trees. Spring.

Martha stood on the back porch with her arms folded across her chest. I waved but she did not move. I crossed the grass to the pump and picked up my pail. When I carried it up the steps, she stood back and let me pass.

“I do not suppose you will tell me who that was,” she said.

T
hree nights later I carried my dustpan into the backyard and August stepped out of the shadows. He said my name and I dropped the dustpan and my knees turned to water. He smiled and reached over and took my hand. I felt his touch pitch through me, the same warmth spreading like liquid through my chest, the same bucking of my heart, the same idiotic smile like something I could not control. He was here. He had not forgotten me. He had come back.

He took my hand and led me out of the yard and through the trees on our neighbor’s lot. He held my hand with one hand and held the branches back with the other, and I let him lead me into an open space where he put his arms around me. I leaned into him and lay my head against the coarse wool of his coat and stood breathing him in as we swayed in the dark. From far away, the sounds of the night in the city.

He put his mouth against my hair and said something I could not understand. He tightened his arms around me. I pulled away. My ribs throbbed, the bruise like something that had split open and begun to bleed again.

He took my arm. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “What is the matter with you?” He looked at my face and then looked closer and raised his fingers and brushed them against my blue jaw. “Jesus,” he said. “What happened?”

“Where have you been?” I said.

“What?” he said.

“You did not come.”

“I wanted to. I could not.”

“You could not? Or you would not?”

“I could not.” He ran his fingers through his hair. He usually wore a hat and one night he had dropped it onto my head when I was cold, and had slung his coat over my shoulders and I had walked next to him, feeling the warmth of him in his warm coat. He had pulled the hat down over my eyes and laughed.

“Where is your hat?” I said. I reached over and touched his hair.

“Lost.”

“Lost?”

He sighed. The clearing was very small and quickly ran out into the underbrush and beyond that, the backyard of the next house. “We should walk,” he said.

“No,” I said. I glanced at my house, visible now only as a faint square with dark windows through the trees, a block of light cast from the kitchen window into the yard. I knew that Martha waited for me inside. “I cannot,” I said. “We must stay here.”

“Then sit down. Here.” He gestured around us and then took his jacket off and spread it on the grass so I would have a place to sit.

The ground was cool and damp. We sat with our legs crossed. August picked up a stick and dug at the grass and scraped through the dirt by his boots. I sat very still and tried to breathe through the pain in my ribs. Finally he tossed the stick into the underbrush and leaned forward and took my hand. Then he dropped it and put his arm around me. I winced and pulled away.

“Stop,” I said.

“You are very mad at me.”

I lifted one shoulder and let it drop. I was angry but more than that I was ashamed of my pain. I thought it did more than hurt me but marked me and I did not want August to see that I was marked. I did not want him to see me as my father saw me, a girl who could be easily crushed. I wanted August to be in love with the girl I wanted to be, a strong girl who had been made out of the love we shared.

“You should be mad,” he said, off on the wrong track but he didn’t know any better. “To keep you waiting like that. You are right.”

I swallowed hard. “You do not understand,” I said.

“Every day I wanted to come to you,” he said sadly. He leaned forward over his knees, the shadows making his eyes seem dark as sockets, his mouth just a dark slash, his face unknown in its details. In that moment he did not look like August at all but looked like a stranger come to me under the trees. He picked at the grass and then sighed and looked straight ahead. In a very flat voice he said that he might as well tell me the truth. He might as well get the whole thing out in the open. He had not wanted to stay away so long but it was all out of his control. He had been in jail. It was a terrible mistake. The police thought he was someone else. They had been looking for a pair of men who had been seen boosting lumber from construction sites around town. The night after he brought me home they found him walking with his brother Alfred out on the edge of town where some new houses were going up and they took them in for no reason at all, just for walking down the street. He and Alfred had been locked up in the new city jail for days. They had tried to run and they would have gotten away if they had not come up against a barbed-wire fence that some farmer had put up to keep his dairy in one place. When they turned, the police were right behind them. The police had billy clubs. Which they had used and then dragged the brothers back to the road.

They rode in the paddy wagon into town and stepped out into the light under the street lamp in front of the courthouse and then the head policeman led them into the police station and down a long corridor to the jail. For two days they were the only ones there and August began to wonder if they would ever get out. But finally his father hired a lawyer. The lawyer had come to the jail under the courthouse and the man who kept the keys had unlocked the door to their cell and swung the door open just wide enough to let the lawyer in. The lawyer had sat there with them on one of those hard wooden pallets that pass for beds in a jail and had asked them to tell him everything they knew and of course they did not know anything. All they had done was go for a walk after dark. Just the way he had walked with her. Exactly the same. This was not a crime, was it? And the lawyer had listened and had written some things down on a piece of paper he had clipped to a board, including their names and dates of birth and where they usually worked and their home address, and who their employer was. He told them to be very quiet and not say a word to anyone and to keep their own counsel at all times and to give him a few days and he would see what could be worked out. And that was what they did. They followed the lawyer’s instructions to the letter and sat in the jail cell and did not say a word except maybe thank you when the woman who cooked for the prisoners brought them their meals. Very polite, to show everyone that a mistake had been made. But very restless because they knew their father could not work without them and they were losing money every day. And of course he wanted to get to her. That was the main thing, really. He needed to get to her.

They did not have to stand trial. And of course there would not have been any point because they were dead innocent. The lawyer talked to the prosecutor and they made a deal. The lawyer paid some money that their father put up. August and Alfred walked out of the jail that very afternoon. The first thing he did was go home and take a bath and find some clean clothes. Then he had a meal. When the sun went down, he sat with his brother on the front porch and watched the neighbors come home from work. He imagined the happy scenes behind all of those windows. Dinner to be eaten. Maybe sister would play piano after the pie. The women would all be fresh and pretty and the men would be turned out in nice clothes. Things like that. He liked to think about things like that. When it was full dark, he left Alfred smoking on the porch and made his way to my house. Watching the window of my house. Watching Martha at the sink. Watching a shadow behind her he thought must be me.

“And now I see I should have come here sooner,” he said. “Something has happened.” He picked up my hand and put it down. “Did he hit you?” he asked quietly. “Bad?”

I lifted one shoulder and let it fall.

“Just here?” He touched my jaw lightly and I flinched.

“And here,” I said, swallowing. I lay my palm flat over my ribs.

“He punched you here?” His voice tender, disbelieving.

“He kicked me,” I said.

“He kicked you?” He sat up straight.

I nodded.

“Because of me?”

“He said I am a whore,” I said simply. The word the judgment of a prosecutor from a land to which I did not belong, a far distant land I lived in every day.

“Because of me?” August rolled up onto his knees and put his hands on my legs and looked at me. “Just because of me?”

“Yes,” I said softly. “Because of you.”

We sat in the dark. I did not mind that August had been in jail. He had explained it in such a plain and straightforward way that I knew he must be telling me the truth. Another girl might have stopped short and perhaps I should have. But I did not. I held his hand in the dark. I understood prison.

After a time, August began to walk up and down in front of me.

“I will go and see him,” he said.

“You cannot,” I said softly.

He stopped and stood with his hands shoved deep into his pockets. He looked at me, at my injuries, and he slammed the heels of his hands into his eyes. As if my pain was his pain. As if he could not bear to see me suffer.

“It is what I have to do,” he said.

“You will make it worse.”

“No,” he said. “No. I will make it right.” He held out his hand and I took it and he helped me to my feet.

“I am afraid,” I said, but I did not tell him what I meant. Afraid of a sun that would explode through the sky and rain fire down upon me. Afraid of a great maw in the earth that would swallow me whole. Of course August would not know what I meant. He thought the world was the same for all people and all of those people were just like him.

He put his arms around me and ran his hand up and down my back as if he were trying to quiet an anxious horse. “Do not be scared,” he said. “There is no reason to be afraid.”

I pressed my cheek against his shoulder. I thought of leaving my father’s house and leaving my sisters and leaving the place I had lived with my mother and leaving the things that remained of her, that table, this chair, the pinch-waisted vase on the table in the front hall, her wedding picture in the front room. I felt the ground fall away when I imagined going with August, the ground and the sky and the great turning of the world itself. But he rubbed my back and told me not to worry. He told me to trust him. He said that everything in the world was hard but in this case things were simple. He wanted to kill my father for the things he had done to me but he would not. He would go to the tavern and he would stand before him. He would introduce himself. He would tell him that we were going to be married. And that once we were married, he would be the only man in the world who would be entitled to touch me. By morning, things would be fixed forever.