Two Rivers (10 page)

“College?” I repeated.

She sat up and looked out the window at the blue-black sky. “Just the state college, in Castleton. It’s not so far away. I’ll be home every weekend.” She was talking quickly, almost manic, tugging at a loose thread in the cuff of her mother’s sweater. Thunder roared as she went on and on. “I’ve been thinking about studying art. Photography. Music, I don’t know.” She shook her head.

When lightning split the sky, I felt it rip through me.

Betsy pulled the thread slowly, carefully and meticulously unraveling.

“You
can’t
,” I said.

She stopped talking and looked at me, her face blank.

“My mother is dead,”
she said, loudly. Angrily. It was the first time she had ever yelled at me, and I felt like I’d been punched. “I don’t want to wind up like her. I don’t want to be some housewife making potpies and pitchers of Kool-Aid. It
killed
her. Can you try to understand that?”

“Betsy,” I said, already sorry.

“Please,”
she said, exasperated. “Turn out the headlights. Let’s just watch the storm.”

P
aul and Hanna have known me for ages. When we were kids, I went with Betsy to their house for dozens of Sunday suppers. We continued this Sunday ritual all through high school and even later whenever we were both home from college. By the time Betsy died and Shelly and I moved into their little house by the river, the smell of a New England boiled dinner, mixed with Paul’s sweet cigar smoke, already felt like home. Even now, when Hanna ushered us into the foyer, the smell of turnips and tobacco was pacifying. It even made me feel a little homesick.

“I hope you brought your appetites,” Hanna said, smiling. She was wearing lipstick in a color I didn’t recognize, an orange-y hue. Her lips were cracked, and the color bled garishly around her mouth, making her look clownish. She couldn’t look me in the eye, even as she took my hand and led me into our old room to show me what she’d done.

“That was my mother’s machine,” she said, gesturing toward a treadle sewing machine. It was in the window where my bed used to be. There were baskets brimming with fabrics and yarn all over the room. A chair that used to be out on the porch was in the corner where my dresser had been. There were bright new curtains, yellow with white polka dots, and I realized that this was probably what she’d been wanting to do with this room for twelve years.

“It looks great, Hanna,” I said.

She nodded. I had left Shelly and Maggie in the kitchen with Paul. I had one ear listening to Hanna, and one straining to hear what might be going on in the other room.

Hanna looked toward the door, checking to make sure we were still alone. “Your
mother’s friend’s daughter
?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Come to help out with Shelly?”

I nodded. I tried to remember if I’d ever met my mother’s college roommate. I had a vague recollection of a woman with long blond hair. I’d met her only once, and at the time I don’t think she had any children. Certainly not a girl like Marguerite.
Margaret.

“You could have asked
us
for help, you know.”

I realized then that Hanna was less concerned with Maggie’s sudden appearance and more hurt that I’d somehow sought help from outside the family. She thought that I hadn’t been able to do things on my own, that I was already failing in my efforts to parent Shelly myself.

“You could’ve always come back here—if it wasn’t working out for you. If it was too much. You didn’t need to get somebody, a stranger…” she started, her voice trembling.

“I know, Hanna,” I said. “But with Shelly starting seventh grade, and everything, it was time for us to get our own place. We all know that. And Maggie’s just going to be with us for a little while.”

Hanna dabbed at her nose with a tissue she had pulled like a magician from the cuff of her sweater.

“Besides, where would you have set up shop?” I tried to make light of what was becoming an uncomfortable situation.

The smell of turnips was suddenly almost unbearable.

“I only hope she’s not a bad influence on Shelly,” she whispered then, leaning into me. “I mean, what with a baby comin’, and her not even being married….”

I scowled at her.

Hanna’s gasp was audible. “Oh, honey, I didn’t mean nothin’ by it. You and Betsy, your wedding came long before…” Tears welled up in Hanna’s eyes, and it made me feel terrible watching her try to back out of this one.

“I know,” I said, squeezing her hand. “I’m just trying to help out one of my mother’s friends. That’s all. And this will be good for Shelly.” As I spoke, I tried to convince myself of it as well. I hadn’t even considered how to explain the mystery of Maggie’s baby’s father to Shelly. I’d have to think of something before Maggie took the explaining upon herself.

“How far along is she?” Hanna whispered again.

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Maybe four, five months?”

“Is she going to keep the baby?”

I thought about Maggie in the woods then, the river and the accident, muffled cries in the distance. I thought about the aunt in Canada, about what her father had planned for Maggie’s baby.

“I don’t think she’s gotten that far,” I said.

“Okay, okay,” Hanna said, shaking her head. She straightened a basket brimming with fabric. “None of my beeswax. Let’s go have a nice supper. I made popovers.”

Maggie laughed at something Paul said as she spread butter on one of Hanna’s famous popovers: golden and crisp on the outside, filled with sweet hot air inside. I must have eaten five or six of them without realizing it. I missed Hanna’s cooking. Shelly must have too; she was shoveling beef and potatoes into her mouth as if she were starving.

“Hey, Harper, real sorry to hear about Tony,” Paul said, as Hanna was serving up hot spoonfuls of apple crisp for dessert. (She’d passed on Maggie’s unholy Bananas Foster.)

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Here, honey. Have some ice cream on it. It’ll cool it down a little,” Hanna said to Shelly, who was blowing into the hot apple steam.

“Your friend, Tony Kinsella. Didn’t you pal around with him in high school?”

“Brooder.” I nodded. “We called him
Brooder
.” My throat felt thick as I said his name. I hadn’t uttered it in nearly twelve years. “Why, what happened?”

Hanna shot Paul a look that was both a reprimand and a plea for him to stop talking.

“What?”
I asked.

Hanna set down the casserole dish and reached for my hand. It was the first time she’d looked me in the eyes since we got there.

“He’s
passed away
,” she said.

I felt like someone had hit me in the gut.

“Passed away?” Those were words you used for someone who dies in his sleep. Who simply closes his eyes. I knew that nothing about this could be peaceful.

Hanna clenched her jaw tight, pointed her chin toward Shelly, and raised her eyebrow.

“What
happened
?” I asked again.

“Shelly girl, come see the birdhouse I’m building,” Paul said, rescuing us all.

“Can I come too?” Maggie asked, gobbling a giant spoonful of apple crisp and ice cream.

“Sure, honey. Come along.”

When the screen door slammed shut behind them, Hanna said, “It was his wife that found him. He used his grampa’s shotgun.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said, more invocation than curse.

R
ay Gauthier and Brooder were buddies of mine from first grade on. When I wasn’t with Betsy, I was with them. Ray came from a big French Canadian family (six older sisters) and Brooder lived alone with his grandparents in a farmhouse out in the sticks. The story was that when Brooder was just a couple of years old, his mother left him and moved down south to Florida, where she worked as a mermaid at Weeki Wachee Springs, a roadside attraction where women dressed as mermaids and performed, seemingly breathless, in an underwater theater. He had a black and white photo postcard to prove it; a dark-haired girl brushing her hair under water, a shimmering tail curled underneath her. He kept the picture over his bed like any other pin-up.

Brooder’s grandparents were good people; very old and mostly oblivious, which was probably a good thing to be with Brooder living under their roof. Italian immigrants, neither one of them spoke much English. Between the two of them, they were pretty useless when it came to keeping Brooder out of trouble. Brooder was behind almost every stupid thing I did as a kid. He initiated every fight, every drunken escapade, every misdemeanor. He was hardly the kind of friend my mother envisioned for me. She wouldn’t even acknowledge him when I brought him by the house. He was unswayed by her treatment of him, bringing her more than one straggly bouquet of roadside wildflowers, paying her more than a hundred compliments on everything from her hair to her miserable cooking. “He’s like a wild animal, Harper,” she said to me once after he dropped me off after school. “A wild, rabid animal.”

Indeed, Brooder was an instinctual creature, acting almost always in response to either some base need or desire without regard for consequences. By our senior year in high school, he’d even started to look the part: his curly hair growing outward like an untrimmed hedge, a mustache and beard growing in thick and wolflike. His permanent scowl, which had engendered his nickname when he was only a baby, was now topped by a row of bushy eyebrows, which intensified the brooding quality of his expression. Girls liked him because they thought he was deep. Plus, he could play the guitar, and his voice was pure and sweet, like thick maple syrup. Betsy was unimpressed. “He’s going to get you in a lot of trouble some day,” she said.

Ray, like me, was a follower. With six older sisters, he’d learned early on to just give in. He’d been dressed up in doll clothes, pushed in strollers, and generally humiliated his whole life. Rather than fight what would certainly prove to be a futile battle, he submitted to their whims. Becoming one of Brooder’s sidekicks was probably a relief; at least Brooder didn’t make him wear makeup. What Brooder did do, however, was set into motion all sorts of regrettable situations. I can blame every episode that caused me either embarrassment or shame on Brooder. But there was something about him that made it virtually impossible to say no. He was as cunning as a medicine show doctor, but loyal. He might get you into a world of trouble, but he’d never stab you in the back. He wouldn’t so much as utter an unkind word about you. He was loyal to a fault. I have to remind myself of that now.

After Betsy’s mother died, I started to spend more time with Ray and Brooder. I was uncomfortable at the Parkers’ house now. It felt haunted somehow, now that she was truly gone. I was also hurt that Betsy had decided to leave me in Two Rivers to go to college. That winter of my senior year I spent a lot of time with the guys, preparing myself, I suppose, for when Betsy was gone. Punishing her for leaving me.

The winter of ’63–’64 was a bitter one. I’ve never been one to complain about the weather, but there was more than one time that winter that I wished I had the common sense that both the birds and Brooder’s mother had had to go south. One particularly frigid afternoon, Brooder got a wild hair up his ass and wanted to go sledding. In the middle of the day. In the middle of the week. In the middle of Old Man Keller’s pasture. Keller was a notorious asshole, shooting at kids who snuck onto his acres and acres of land to steal apples or at couples who wandered there accidentally looking for a place to make out. He had three dairy cows and a new pig each year. He always won the blue ribbon for his swine at the county fair and, to me, had more than a few porcine qualities himself. He lived alone in a big old stone farmhouse at the base of a beautiful rolling hill. This was what Brooder had in mind.

Keller owned and ran the feed store in town, which was open late on weeknights, so we figured we’d be pretty safe until nightfall. We parked the truck out at the Catholic cemetery and trudged through about three feet of snow to Keller’s clearly marked property, Brooder spitting his mouthful of chew at the
NO TRESPASSING
sign, which was nailed to a tree.

It had to have been near zero, and I wasn’t dressed for sliding. (In Vermont it’s called “sliding,” probably because icy hills lend themselves more to sliding than sledding.) Brooder had pulled me out of the cafeteria during lunch, giving me little time to grab more than my jacket and a hat from my locker. I had boots on, but no mittens and no long underwear. Ray didn’t even have a hat, and his ears, which already stuck out from the sides of his head like wings, were beet red by the time we got to the top of the hill with the dented metal flying saucer Brooder had stolen from some kid’s backyard. It was overcast out, not a ray of sunshine penetrating the gray.

“Have some of this,” Brooder said, pulling a metal flask from his pocket. “That’ll warm you pussies up.”

I took a sip (bourbon, which was sweet in my throat and warm in my chest) and then passed it to Ray, whose nose hairs were starting to crystallize. He took a swallow too, even though his daddy was a raging alcoholic, and normally he never touched the stuff.

Brooder was the first one down, of course. He had to demonstrate. There was, actually, a bit of a trick to it. Keller’s house was right at the foot of the hill. To the left was a giant elm, and to the right was a small duck pond. It was more than likely frozen over, but you didn’t want to take a chance like that. And so we aimed, instead, for his back steps. Brooder hurled feet first toward the stone steps, stopping himself just before he flew into Keller’s back door. I was the next to make the trip, actually flying up two steps. By the time Ray went, he almost smashed into Old Man Keller’s kitchen.

All afternoon we slid. From atop the hill we could see the road leading toward Keller’s property as well as the winding driveway. The way we figured it, we’d have more than enough warning that Keller was on his way home.

We were all pretty liquored up by the time the sun went down, numb in every possible way. It felt good. We were whooping it up when the first stars started to shine through the cloud coverage. Brooder was doing some sort of elaborate dance in the snow, and I was watching him as I almost always watched him, with both fascination and dread. Ray was on his way down for about the hundredth time. By the time we realized that the lights in the distance were headlights in the driveway, he’d already pushed off again, screaming something in his daddy’s drunken French all the way down the hill. I turned to run in the opposite direction, over the back side of the hill. I was drunk but not stupid, and I knew it was my only chance. Brooder yanked my arm though, not letting me go, and made me watch what ensued.

Ray’s feet hit the door, and the saucer flew up into the air just as the lights went on inside the house. He scrambled to his feet, but being both knee-deep in snow and drunk as a skunk, his attempts at escape were futile. He was able, however, to grab the saucer just as Old Man Keller swung open the back door and raised his shotgun. And as Keller fired, Ray ran, using the saucer like a shield, scurrying up the icy path our sliding had made. We heard the shot hit the metal and then everything was quiet all around us. It was snowing, big girly sorts of snowflakes—the kind you wish for on Christmas morning. Ray had fallen to the ground, and was lying underneath the saucer just a few feet away from where we had been crouching. I watched Old Man Keller, apparently satisfied, shoot his rifle into the air one more time and then close the door.

I knocked on the saucer, the echo of my bare knuckles on metal louder than I’d intended. Ray moaned underneath. Brooder lifted it off Ray and helped him get up. We all walked silently back down the hill, and in the dim glow of the one streetlight that illuminated the cemetery’s entrance, we examined the sled. There were three holes, still hot, right in the middle where the shot had nearly gone through the metal. We marveled at it, and I shook Ray’s hand, frankly in dumb wonder at his being alive. Ray whooped, and I echoed his joy and relief. Brooder, however, remained silent, ushering us quickly into his truck, peeling out of the cemetery and heading straight for Keller’s house. At the foot of Keller’s driveway, he cut the truck’s lights and rolled quietly up the drive.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “What are you doing?”

But Brooder only opened the truck door, grabbed his shotgun from the rack in the back of his truck, and started walking toward Keller’s barn. Ray and I sat stunned in the cab of the truck. The liquor was wearing off, and so was the blissful numbness.

“What’s he doin’?” Ray asked, trying, as I was, to make out Brooder’s shape in the darkness.

The shot rang out loud, but not as loud as the squeals of Keller’s new baby pig. Several more shots went off, this time from Keller’s gun, as Brooder ran back toward us. No one said a word when he got back in the truck, or during the entire drive back into town. There wasn’t room for conversation. And I couldn’t get that awful sound out of my ears for weeks.

Brooder enlisted in the army not long after that. He shaved off his wild man mustache and beard, went to Betsy’s father for his first flat-top. I figure now he probably knew he wasn’t likely going to graduate, and I knew, after that night, he was capable of terrible things. Maybe he did too.

Sometime that winter, I decided to go to college. Despite the escapades of our fumbling triumvirate, I was a straight A student. But my academic ambitions had little to do with getting an education and everything to do with Betsy Parker. When I finally accepted that she was really planning to leave me behind, the choice was clear. I gave in to my mother’s pleas to become a matriculated student at her alma mater; with her legacy and my good grades, I was almost guaranteed admittance. Besides which, Middlebury was only about thirty miles from Castleton State College, where Betsy Parker would soon be a bona fide coed.

I never told Betsy what happened that night at Old Man Keller’s. I was too ashamed. She understood people, and she’d been right about Brooder.