The Late Child (46 page)

“He wouldn't eat no steak, he wouldn't eat no gravy, he didn't touch the peach cobbler I made him and he didn't do nothing under the quilts, neither,” was how her mother described that day. “Usually on Thursday night Sty does something under the quilts, but he didn't that night, nor the next Thursday either. Who would think an old tree falling over would make that happen to a healthy man?”

“Under the quilts” was her mother's euphemism for sex.

“I've seen Sty lots of times with his behind dragging nearly down to the floor but it didn't stop him eating and it didn't stop him under the quilts, either,” Ethel added. “I think he went off in his head and never came back, that's what I think.”

“It was a shock to me that any people would be so ignorant as to cut down a shade tree, in this country,” her father said, when he discussed the loss of the sycamore. “There wasn't no trees in this country a-tall, when my folks settled here. My mother ordered that tree and planted it with her own hands. I doubt Dad was much help to her, either. Dad worked so hard he didn't notice whether he was in the shade or in the sun. But Momma carried water from the well to water that tree—that was long before we scraped up a dam and made this pond. My mother watered it herself and it finally took root and grew. There wasn't a better shade tree in this whole county. How could people be so
ignorant that they'd cut down a shade tree for firewood, on the plains?”

Usually, when he thought of the lost tree, her father would grow melancholy. He would go off alone and sit with his mule for a while. For an hour or two he would be so wrought up that he couldn't stand human company.

“I think he misses his mother,” Neddie theorized. Harmony wasn't sure. In her childhood she dreaded occasions that reminded her father of the tree. It was as if the fact that the thoughtless vagrants had cut down the tree said something bad to her father—bad about human nature itself. When he dwelled on it too much he always decided that he preferred the company of mules to the company of humans, for a while.

Harmony's own memories were more wrapped up with the stump than with the tree. It was a big stump—big enough that two people could sit on it. Sometimes the same boyfriends who threw the beer bottles in the pond would work up their nerve and kiss her while sitting on the stump. Sometimes, while she was necking on the stump with some boy, the boy would try to get his hands inside her bra—that was about as far as even the boldest boyfriends ventured, in those days.

Also, many of her talks with her father had taken place on the stump. Often, at the end of the day, he would walk down to the pond and sit on the stump for a while, to smoke and fish. Sometimes Harmony would go with him. They would sit together, watching the dragonflies skim the surface of the pond, watching the bullbats circle, listening to the coyotes yip, as they often would at sundown. If her father happened to catch a fish he would usually throw it back—having a line in the water just seemed to fit with the occasion. Sometimes they would sit long enough to see the moon's reflection in the water—then her mother would begin to yell at them to come and eat dinner. Her father would wince a little, when they heard Ethel's voice.

“She reminds me of a squeaky gate,” he said, more than once. “I can't figure out how I ended up married to her.”

Harmony had often wondered about that herself—but then it
was hard to figure out why anybody ended up married to anyone. Neddie married Dick because there wasn't much of anyone else to date when she was dating age. Pat had ended up married to various men because she slept with them a few times and got carried away. She herself had ended up married to Ross because he looked so helpless she thought he might not survive if she didn't move in and take care of him. Those things happened—afterward, particularly many years afterward, it was hard to remember why.

This time, just as she was settling herself on the stump, she felt something pass between herself and the moon and looked up in time to see a great blue heron, flying away. It had been feeding in the marshy grass at the edge of the pond. For a second she was scared—the heron's wings were so long. But when she saw the heron in the sky, flapping away toward the fields, she lost her fear. After all, it was just a bird.

Harmony watched the little swallows skim the water until it was so dark she could only make out the water when a bird skimmed its surface. The water would be touched for a moment with a little fleck of moonlight.

Watching the heron fly, or the birds skim the water, reminded her of the time—most of her life, actually—when she had enjoyed just watching various aspects of life—not beautiful aspects, always, but interesting to watch. She had taken a part of her happiness just from looking at living things, whether it was Eddie or Pepper, or a little bird or a large bird, or a man sliding into bed with her, or people in the casino, or the way the other showgirls did their hair. It could be almost anything, for example a little baby just learning to stand alone that would sometimes turn loose of whatever it was holding and just stand there a few seconds, not realizing what was taking place. She had taken pleasure just in the way guys laughed, or in the way certain dealers handled their cards, or even just in the way the sun shone on sunny mornings in the desert outside Las Vegas. The external world was a neat place; she could never get enough of looking at it. Even during low periods, after a breakup with some guy, when the salt had sort of lost its savor, there were always things to watch. Once Eddie came along there was always
Eddie to watch—watching him had kept her perky for five and a half years.

The nicest thing so far about coming back to Oklahoma was that Eddie liked her father so much, and her father liked him. Having a grandfather to take him fishing, and to take an interest in his point of view, would make up for having no father; at least it would make up for it a little bit.

But, apart from Eddie and Sty, her homecoming really didn't feel as if it was going to work out. She was sitting on the old sycamore stump she had sat on in her girlhood, on a beautiful evening with a full moon rising over the plains, with birds flying around, and yet she didn't have much sense that she was even there. She couldn't get out of herself, not even under the beautiful moon. Pepper's death had taken away the external world, the very world whose beauties had sustained her for so long. The external world was still there; she could look at it; it hadn't vanished. But it might as well have vanished because she couldn't reach it anymore.

Always, before, she had found it easy to get out of herself—easier to get out than to stay in, for that matter—but now, even though the moon was full and the prairie breeze did smell good, she wasn't outdoors in her spirit. She was inside, with her grief about Pepper. All she could see was the hole in her life, where once there had been a person who would never be there again. Only the hole would be there—and in the hole was a darkness so dark that the light of the world couldn't reach it; only, now and then, there might be a flicker, like the streak the moonlight made on the water when a little bird touched the surface.

“Why are you sitting there?” Laurie asked. “Are you sad?”

She was trying to crawl through the fence and seemed to be a little snagged. She finally got through, though, and picked her way toward the pond.

“Can I sit with you, or are you too sad?” she asked, when she finally made it to the stump.

Harmony made room on the stump; of course Laurie could sit with her.

“Eddie and his grandfather really connected,” Laurie said. “I thought I ought to leave them alone, so they can make up for lost time.”

“I should have brought Eddie sooner,” Harmony said—it was obvious that Eddie and his grandfather should have had a chance to know one another years ago.

“My grandfather was killed in World War Two,” Laurie said. “He might have taken me fishing or something if I'd met him.

“My good grandfather, I mean,” she added. “In my fantasies I've made him the perfect grandfather, and the fantasy will never be tested, because he's dead.”

“What about your other grandfather?” Harmony asked. “Is he dead?”

“No, but everybody wishes he was,” Laurie said. “He's never showed any interest in me, only in my brothers. He didn't particularly like my mother and I think he expected me to turn out like her. Boy, was he wrong.”

“What does he do?” Harmony asked. She felt she ought to show some interest in Laurie's family, but in the state she was in—the state of not being able to get out of herself—it was hard. Laurie seemed to realize it was hard.

“He plays golf—let's talk about something else,” she said.

“What about your dad?” Harmony asked. She wasn't trying to be polite, exactly; she was trying to get out of herself, to breathe the same air other people breathed. In that air people had some curiosity about one another's families.

“Dad fell in love with a twenty-seven-year-old, and divorced Mom, and married her,” Laurie said. “He plays a lot of golf too.

“I think you came here to be alone,” Laurie added. “Maybe I should go back to the house.”

Harmony
had
come to the pond to be alone, only the pond wasn't far enough away to provide much aloneness. Across the pond, across the lane, across the yard, she could see the lights in the windows of her parents' house. Eddie was probably there, talking a blue streak, while her father cooked the fish. Her mother
didn't cook fish, and never had. When there was fish, Sty cooked it and Ethel stood in the kitchen and complained. “Fish belong in water, steak belongs on my stove,” she often said.

“I want you to stay,” Harmony told Laurie. She was thinking of Eddie and her father, when she said it; she didn't want to intrude on their time together. It was her problem that she could no longer breathe the air other people breathed. It was her problem that she couldn't find aloneness, even by the old pond, even in the dark. It was hard to be alone when you had memories: where could you go, other than death, to be beyond memory? All she knew was that she didn't want to go upstairs, in her parents' house—up the stairs to the bedroom she had left at sixteen. The thought of going up those narrow stairs that led to the past made her feel sick.

When she asked Laurie to stay, she took her hand.

“Of course I'll stay,” Laurie said, squeezing Harmony's hand.

“I don't know what's to become of me,” Harmony said. “I have to stay alive, because of Eddie, but I don't know what's to become of me. I don't have any money. I don't know if I could hold a job—not an everyday job, not right now.”

“I can hold a job,” Laurie said. “I'll live with you and support you.”

Laurie did look confident. Undoubtedly she could hold a job. Yet she was the young one; Harmony felt she ought to be taking care of Laurie, not the other way around.

“I've had twenty-three jobs, since I left college,” Laurie said. “I only got fired twice and that was because I had bosses who wanted to fuck me and I wouldn't. But mostly I didn't get fired, I just happened to get jobs with infirm businesses. Quite a few of the businesses just slowly expired.”

Just then, from across the pond, they heard a thin but desperate squeaking. A frog had been a bit careless, careless enough that a water snake had caught it. Now the frog was going to be swallowed, and was squeaking out its last few frog sounds before the end.

“What's that?” Laurie asked. Harmony remembered that Laurie was a city girl. She wouldn't know how a small frog sounded as it was being swallowed by a water snake.

“That's a frog,” Harmony said. “A snake's swallowing it.”

“Well, we're about to swallow Eddie's fish, I guess that's nature,” Laurie said.

Harmony didn't know whether she had been right to identify the sound for Laurie. Some people were delicate. Even though they knew the facts of life they might not welcome the news that a squeaky sound by a pond was the sound a frog made as it was being swallowed. Gary had once ruined a little dinner party of hers by recounting an experience he had had in Singapore—the experience of ordering a puppy in a Chinese restaurant and then eating the puppy after it had been killed and cooked. Actually it was Gary's boyfriend who ordered the puppy; Gary had once been so in love with a rich Asian kid that he followed him to Singapore. Gary claimed he had only been able to choke down a bite or two of the puppy—Gary was of the try-anything-once school—but it was definitely Gary who told the story and ruined her dinner party.

Harmony was thinking of Pepper, though. She had died of a disease that held her and slowly swallowed her, as the water snake was surely swallowing the frog. Laurie had been with her as the swallowing took place, too. Now she and Laurie were hearing the sounds of the end of a life—a frog life, but still a life. It was silly to feel so disturbed just because she told Laurie about a little fact of nature of the sort that occurred all over Oklahoma many times a day. Yet she
was
disturbed: she felt as if a million eggshells might break inside her, if she misspoke.

“I was thinking of Pepper,” she explained. “Anything bad, even a little frog getting eaten by a snake, makes me think of her now.”

“You're right,” Laurie said. “AIDS swallowed her. One day she was fine and the next day it had her by the leg. Two months later she was dead. The only difference is, Pepper didn't squeak. She just gave up.

“Pepper had no fight in her, really,” Laurie added, after a
moment. “Even if we just happened to have a squabble, she wouldn't fight. She just gave up. I wanted her to try some experimental treatments, but she wouldn't. She preferred to give up. It only took her eight weeks to die.”

Just as she said it, the frog stopped squeaking. There were crickets singing around the pond, but no sound from the frog. Somewhere in the mud at the pond's edge, the snake was slithering away, with the frog inside it.