The Monsters of Templeton (30 page)

"What do you do, then, when you stay over?" I asked.

Her face folded into a little wince, and then she said, "You ready for this? We pray a lot. We pray over dinner, then before bed. Then we both get into our pajamas, and I crawl under the covers and he crawls above them beside me. And then he holds me all night long."

I couldn't keep the disgust at bay this time, and Vi saw it, and belted out a laugh. "I know," she crowed. "It's so pathetic. I know. But sometimes when I wake up and feel his arms on me, it's just nice. Just, I don't know. Really nice." She gave me a little tap on the cheek and said, "It's not that bad, Willie. Get that look off your face. I just hope you'll know how it feels someday."

"I do know how it feels," I said, but it came out weakly. "I think I do," I said, remembering certain moments, men sleeping beside me over my long and illustrious life as a bachelorette, the rhythm of their breath, the delicate swoop of their eyelashes on their cheeks, their manly smell. Vi shook her head, giving me an affectionate moue of disbelief. I thought of Primus Dwyer. "I really do," I said as I went in.

IT WAS BECAUSE I was thinking about Clarissa, and because when I thought about Clarissa I necessarily thought she was thinking about me, that I answered the telephone that night already talking.

"My God," I said, "am I glad to talk to you. Have you ever had those days where so much has gone wrong in your life that you just sort of find yourself in the calm epicenter of the storm while everything else rages around you? That's the sort of day I had. I'm not feeling horrible at all until I start to think about how horrible I feel. But don't listen to me. I am a total jerk to not ask you about how you are. So. How are you?"

"Great. And, yes, I have one of those epicenter days every day. Man, I'm really, really relieved to talk to you. I thought you were so pissed at me we'd never talk again, Queenie."

It took me to the end of the second sentence to understand that the voice I was hearing was a man's; it took me ten seconds more to understand it was Ezekiel Felcher's. But as I was trying to place it, time seemed to slow down, then stretch interminably, and he, at last, said, "And you weren't really talking to me, were you. You thought I was someone else."

I debated just hanging up then, so suddenly furious with this chunky old boy on the phone that I went numb and clammy in the extremities. But before I did, he said, "Okay, just hold on. I was prepared for this," and there was a distant twanging and some guitar playing and then, voices beginning to sing.

"Ooooh-ooh, so sorry I feel. Oooh-ooh-ooh, I'm sorry, for real."

The lyrics were embarrassing, but the guitar chords were complicated, embroidered, and I finally placed the harmonizing voice. Peter Lieder. Though he had lost all that weight, he still had the rich voice of a fat boy.

When the song was over, I was laughing so hard I could barely speak. When I was only hooting, wiping my eyes, I said, "Put Peter Lieder on."

There was a shuffle of the phone, and Peter Lieder's normal, thin man's voice was saying, "Hello? Willie? Hello?"

"Peter-Lieder-Pudding-and-Pie," I said. "Don't kiss the girls and make them cry. Tell your friend." And then I hung up.

Chapter
20

Noname

THERE WAS THE before, then the after.

The before was large. I ran through the grasses and trees. Twigs bit my winter-soft feet. My people moved in the night in silence, chased by something dark and bad. My mother's head bent with mine over the King James, pages like flakes of skin and her finger bright in the sunlight, tracing the words, saying them soft in my ear. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. The strange language slipping from her mouth, sounds glistening like fish. My mother's hand against my cheek, her arm strong around me. My father's face, growing sadder and sadder.

The after was seven strides in each direction, a dirt-packed floor, the color brown, a hut smelling of meat and men. One small room of wood and mud, a place where nobody touched me, my skin hungry for human warmth. Darkness and the sweet smoke of Davey's pipe, Davey's curious inward laugh, my grandfather's herbs drying on the ceiling. Alone in the hut during the day, the sound of the town below us a dream, the humming of a living thing that I could not see, but craved. The after was one new doeskin shift a year, my grandfather moving the awl in and out by firelight as the hounds snored at the hearth. His hands fleet as birds, weaving, sewing, stirring. The moon a buckle slipping over the lake. Longing the color of sky. A hut I couldn't leave. My silence.

The lake, slippery and speaking, infinite bright glimmers in my eye.

What was between the before and the after was a story my grandfather wove, strand by strand. He would tell it in the long night, in the fire-smoke, softly, beginning with these words: Your father, my lark, was Chief Uncas, your mother was Cora Munro. For years, your tribe had been threatened by the settlers in the lake land in the west. The settlers with their guns closed in, and your tribe moved often to keep from being found.

One day, my grandfather always said, you were found.

It was the autumn when Davey and my grandfather left the lake to go west, to search for my family and spend their last days with the tribe. But in each place they found the ashes still warm, the scent of bodies in the air. The last place they came upon, they were hours too late, and everything was smoldering, dusted with snow. There were babies on bayonets like spitted pheasants. Squaws' heads gazing upon their bodies from three strides away. My father and mother both naked, charred, holding each other. They knew Uncas only from the tomahawk buried between his shoulderblades. Cora only from her father's signet ring clutched in her hand.

My grandfather felt the life leaving him, looking at them. He wept, as did Davey. They dug into the hard frozen ground and buried everyone.

Later, in the dark, my grandfather chanting for the souls of the dead, there was a small movement by the edge of the firelight. Me, naked and blue, blood across my face, down my legs, darting toward the warmth. My grandfather saw my father in my eyes, my mother in my form. He was struck to stone, yet felt life flaming up inside of him again. I reached my frozen fingers toward the muskrat roasting over the fire, and put a handful of raw meat in my mouth. When my grandfather dug it out, he couldn't tell what was meat and what was tongue. Both were raw and bloody. I was missing half a tongue. I was four years old.

They returned to Templeton and, not knowing my name, called me Noname until they could find my real one. Speechless, I couldn't tell them. They never found another. They kept me indoors because women were scarce in those parts and a native was hardly deemed human. No telling what the woman-hungry settlers would do to me if they found me alone, even a girl as small as I, they said. What they meant by this, I wondered at, for hours, until one day I simply knew.

I did remember that night, though. But while my grandfather's story was whole cloth, my own was only in flashes, like the dark world turned strange in dry streaks of summer lightning. Of the last night with my mother and father, I remember the cold, the silence as we found our campsite and began to set up camp. I, stealing my mother's book to look at while she spoke with the other squaws. My father looking out, giving a cry, leaping up. Then, the roil, horses and men, loud reports, blood; one settler upon me, and the cold ground on my back and pain, and then a spray of blood where his head was, and my father with blood dripping from his tomahawk, carrying me by the arm, throwing me up into a tree. My mother screaming, and my father turning back; the King James still warm in my hand; the great fire. Then, silence for a very long time. For whole lifetimes, I sat in the tree.

When I climbed down, my grandfather's fire spun before me as I walked toward it. The muskrat smell made me shudder, and before I ran into the circle of light, I spat out the meat I had found in my mouth, my tongue, which I had bitten through.

It was thus that I came from a large life into a life so small that the smallest things became large. Two meals a day each became feasts. My grandfather telling a story became thrilling as the dances that I remembered vaguely, night and thrumming and voices and red-gold firelight with legs flashing black through it. I made pets of flies and brothers of the hounds and looked for hours out the window, watching the small changes of clouds, the shadows they pressed on the trees. All those years, there was an egg-shaped emptiness inside me, aching; all those years, time stretched long as late shadows. I dreamt and wove tiny baskets and looked at my book, brown-spotted with blood, until Davey showed me some letters, and then I learned to read, slowly, painfully, things I could not fully understand.

Queer old Davey, my intended; I always knew, I heard them talking. But he was good to me. So careful around me, not to look, not to touch, especially as I grew. But his heart was in the stews he made, in the first pale bud from wintry tree, trembling as he put it in my hand. A good uncle he was, until I reached twelve, and then I began wondering what husband meant. Once, alone in the hut with my grandfather while Davey was still out in the forest hunting, I asked about it, signing the way my grandfather had taught me, but he only smoked his pipe and watched me until I sulked away. I wanted to throw his pipe embers in his eyes; I played with the soft ears of a pup instead.

Times like those, I only pretended to be good. But I was never truly good, at all.

For, every day from the time I first came into the hut, I, bad, moved closer to the door. Outside was forbidden; I would have been punished if caught. After the second year, when I was six, I dared put a toe outside. For a year, when my grandfather went into the town to sell his baskets and Davey went into the woods to hunt our meat, I warmed my toe in the good touch of the sun. At night, I would feel my foot, warm from the day, and a wildness would rise in me like a sudden winter blizzard. My grandfather would look at me, and I would look away and Davey sat and talked and smoked, comfortable and warm, seeing nothing.

In another year, I dared putting my shoulder and whole leg out, looking out, feeling the wind. In another year or two, I stood in the shadows under the pines, listening like a doe to hear any footstep, darting in when Davey was still half a mile away. When a question was put to me, if I wanted an extra potato or some maple sugar, I sometimes spoke the opposite of my desires, and held my lie in me, like a warm stone. It made me laugh late at night when I was sleepless. I was shameless, and for weeks afterward, I would act nicely, cleaning the hut well, making beautiful baskets. And then it would slip again; I'd lie; my grandfather would look at me, and I would feel goodness curdle in me, sour.

During my tenth year, I dared walk twenty paces toward the lake that waved and sang to me. The wind held and released me. I was hungry for its skin on my skin. In the woods, I saw the drunken insects stuck together, and I wondered at this. Outside, the world felt rich with possibility. Inside, I felt some strange heaviness keeping air from my lungs.

During my eleventh year, I went all the way to the lake itself and felt the warm shallows move over my feet, felt the tiny nibbles of the minnows on the hairs of my ankles, and almost wept with the touch. That day, I waded in to my knees and, so frightened by my daring, didn't do it again until my twelfth year, when my shift began fitting differently, when my skin turned hot in places and Davey stopped looking at me at all. The wildness rose in me; I chased his eye, imagining during the long winter what would happen if I slipped inside his blanket. Then I would look at my grandfather, and, in shame, think of other things.

That badness in me grew, hardened. When my grandfather brought home his coins from his baskets, I once took a shining one and buried it under a pine. I made one of Davey's knives dull, because I could. I took off my shift and slept the long afternoons, skin to fur, until a step nearing woke me, and then I dressed in haste.

When it at last became unbearable, I went into the world, and that day I felt everything, the sun, the rocks, the small animals in the trees, watching me. I went to the lake and walked in over my head, and watched my hair float up to the surface, watched it weave and spin in the greenish light down there, the nits bubble up.

That day, when I came out I watched from afar as small figures of people moved on the streets of the town. I squeezed myself between the boulders beside the road and, hidden, watched the people pass, the ladies with their squeezed waists sitting on one side of their horses, the men galloping up feathers of dust. I saw a mother holding her son in her arms, lovers arm in arm, the squeezing of hands when they met; I felt it in my own body each time the people touched. I loved them all, the people, I loved watching them, imagining their words, soft and formless in my ears, but I mostly loved the men. The one with the hunched back and kind face, the fat and very hairy one, the lonely little boy one with the nose like a needle who spoke to himself, the very large one who had red strips in his white powder where his hat pressed in.

I slipped home, feeling the badness grow in me. I saw my grandfather in my mind, his sad face, but it did not stop me from laughing as I ran. The hounds greeted me, their cold noses sweet on my legs. The hut seemed like less than nothing.

All afternoon, I sat with the King James, letting the pulse of the words pull me through the hours. Like a window the words were to me, like light itself, and I could see my mother through them. Even as I sat there, with the book in my hands, wind through the window ruffling the thin leaves quietly, I knew I would go out to the lake again. I would steal to the shore again, go in again naked. I would banish my grandfather's face from my thoughts. The fishes would slide their smooth slide around me, the eels would nibble my hair. The lake weeds would part at my feet; the light would quiver as it passed through the deep. I would go in farther and farther until I walked my way along the rocky bottom to the town. And then I would come out of the water and join the others. I would move into their streets, walk into their lives, and they would turn to me. And the ladies would clap their hands with wonder and the men would embrace me with their strong arms and the children would run around me in circles and everyone would stop and smile. They would reach out their hands; they would touch me. I would pass like a babe from person to person, touching all the people of Templeton. At last, at last, everyone would welcome me in.