Vandal Love (14 page)

She drove more than an hour to D.C. At the station she let him out. They didn’t touch. Loose queues mostly
of black people were in the hall below. Bart, she said and he looked past her, then around. He lowered his eyes and turned and hurried down the stairs.

The paper never mentioned murder, only disappearance. It ran a photo of Levon from years back that on newsprint was grainy and too dark.

Barbara called the next day.

Jude passed away a year ago, she said, bless his soul. He couldn’t have been fifty. He got old so fast. We wanted to find you. And you only two counties away. Who would have known? We still have his ashes, bless his heart. You should come get them. It would make him so happy.

Yes, Isa tried to say and hung up. She closed her eyes.

She stood and went into her room and lay down and stayed there until morning.

In the days that followed neither Levon nor Bart seemed to have existed. She woke often to her own crying. She recalled waking in the barn apartment to the sound of Jude calling out hoarsely in his sleep. She tried to think of something tangible, his savage, scarred hand, sunlight in his red hair. She slept entire days. Dreams were glimpses of nameless avenues falling to distance, those first urban skies as she rode on his shoulders, clutching his hair, the faces along the street lifted as if looking at the sun. She woke to the full, silent moon and walked outside. Whatever passing had been his was the quiet enormity of nothing, and she gave herself to this shadow,
as if the pterodactyl of childhood had swooped low one last time and vanished.

The police came by again. She lied about everything, not caring or believing that any of it mattered. Occasionally, she felt guilty for Levon, that she’d brought Bart into their lives, but then she recalled that Bart and Diamondstone hadn’t come for her, but for Levon’s money. Otherwise, there were days at a time when she didn’t think of any of this at all.

One afternoon, she drove to the farm where she’d been raised. It was in disrepair, weeds high, most of the horses gone, likely removed by their owners. When she knocked, Barbara called her in. She was sitting, feet on a footrest and wrapped in blankets, her change from strong and rawboned complete. Her face was red and swollen, and her hair had been cut so that it frizzed about her head in that way of older women.

Come in, she hollered. Come in. I’d get up to give you a kiss but they had to go one of these days, my legs, that is.

Isa went over and offered her cheek.

I mean, Barbara said and kissed it wetly, I can walk. I just don’t like to. It’s too much work. My feet get all confused. Something to do with drinking, permanent, you know. She looked Isa over and commented that she wasn’t a little girl anymore. She talked a bit about the farm—Hard to keep it going, she said, and you so close, married to that black man? Her damp eyes focused briefly through her plastic glasses. You’ll be staying, won’t you?

Isa hesitated. How did he die?

Hell if I know. I didn’t see him around for a week. I sent someone over. I suspect he starved or drank himself there. I mean, it wasn’t anything violent. But who knows? Who knows? He couldn’t hardly have been fifty and drank like a … like a … Anyway, after a week you can’t always tell.

I understand.

But you ought to take a look around. It’s been hard getting good help. I keep thinking about selling it. She wet her lips. But dear, I am sorry about your father. He was a good man. When he went, the police dealt with it. Then I called Mindy. Remember Mindy, the trainer? Right, well, we drove down to get his ashes. She liked Jude and used to think there was something sad about him, that he was probably in love. We went and picked up the box. It was terrible. I got the giggles. I don’t know why. Mindy had bought these roses. Pink roses, I think. She said it guarantees a safe journey for the soul. I don’t know. We got back to the barn, and then Mindy started laughing too. We were both laughing something terrible. She said how heavy the ashes were, what a big boy Jude was, and we decided to weigh them. We went into the feed room and used the scale.

Isa listened as long as she could. Where is … are they? Barbara had become quite red in the face, her front lip lifted like a rabbit’s as if to breathe through her nose. She was clearly trying not to laugh. He’s on the shelf in my room. I figured he could keep me company.

Thank you, Isa said and went to get him. There was
also a box with boots and folded clothes, the old farm rifle and some papers. In it she found several identity cards: Jude at eighteen, shaped like a gladiator. A driver’s licence: Jude White.

May gave onto a windy, mild June. Honeysuckle sweetened on the fences. Now there wasn’t even small talk at the gas station or country store. She was the Mexican’s widow. A suspect, too. They studied her aloneness, surely eager to know what she would do, or else wondering why she didn’t also disappear.

Unreal weeks gathered into months. The house became a roomy extension of the sky. There was something else she’d been thinking. She’d never paid her body much mind and gave herself fewer ministrations than she did the horses.

She forced herself to change clothes and drive to the pharmacy. She bought a pregnancy test. Home, she locked the doors and used it. She sat. Nausea radiated in her like a sun, though this was just fear. She tried to picture herself transformed. But she felt cut off, insubstantial, her entire life something she’d heard from another, about someone else.

Isa thought of Bart more and more. What she’d felt for him was gradually coming back to life within her. Perhaps she’d made peace with the possibility of his guilt so that she could reconcile her own. Or simply, she
didn’t want a child with a missing parent. She recalled how, as a girl, she’d imagined the family she’d never had. She’d reread the part of
Jane Eyre
when Jane leaves Rochester and wanders through the woods to find her true family. Bart’s appearance had something of that magic to it. Perhaps desire was a form of prayer, and through Bart, the divine had economized, a two-in-one ploy, murder and love.

Though the police still stopped in every now and then, they no longer seemed terribly interested, and similarly, Levon’s death had ceased to matter for her. But even in death he kept her. He completed her isolation. She sensed his piddling ghost browsing bookshelves, threading phantasmal arms through bathrobes. She read late to reclaim the night, but he hovered at her door, bereft of the gold he hadn’t been able to take to the next world. She tried to banish him with fantasies of a new life, but only that immense shadow drove him off—Jude and all that had gone before, eclipsed even her feelings.

She told herself she needed to plan. She opened a bank account. She began putting aside modest amounts that she withdrew from Levon’s account with a card he’d given her. She would meet Bart. She reminded herself of details, wondering when he would call. He’s very religious, she said, not sure if she was trying to be convinced of his existence or his innocence.

Alone in her room for hours, she closed her eyes. An inaccessible region of her brain was constantly turning, thoughts dissolving into images as she verged on sleep. She tried to see herself as self-sufficient. What was she
lacking? Philosophers had written that there was no unrealized essence waiting to emerge, that identity was actual and had to be cultivated. There would always be temptation to exist when another turned his eyes on you, to live for love or against tyranny, to find meaning as a victim. All this had appeared simple when her fight was to stand against Levon’s rule, read eat write all night, think up something like poetry in the mountains. But with Levon and Jude gone, freedom was absence, and nothing, not even freedom, had meaning in itself. Bart still hadn’t called.

July and August passed, mercifully temperate, hardly summer, it seemed, the rains still occasional. By September the evenings were cold. The answering machine received a few calls from professors wondering what had happened to her, mentioning seminars or asking if she was still considering graduate school. She never listened to them through. Her belly had grown, though she carried the weight easily. She hadn’t been to a doctor. She gave all this little or no consideration. A few times she’d felt movements within her but somehow couldn’t think that this would be a child. Familiar silence occupied the house, the fields encroached upon the windows, the verandas were hung with a cloth of mountains.

Levon’s lawyer had called a few times. He explained there were laws regarding disappearances but that by now death could be assumed. Isa met with him in the
kitchen. It was a sunny late-October afternoon. He gave her a summary of accounts and assets.

Wow, she said without inflection.

But there’s a stipulation. He was a middle-aged man in the preserve of impersonality, lines on either side of his mouth, black frame glasses, a Clark Kent without softness. It seems, he said, that your husband loved you very much. He unfolded a letter. It began as she might have expected … If you are reading this now … but then startled her: Here is my vision for your life after my death. Fashion yourself as a Southern lady. I have always admired them though they have all but disappeared. Sit on the porch and read. Join a literary discussion group. Cultivate distinction, not eccentricity but conscious distance so all will know the depth of our love. Though, my dear Isabelle, I cannot enforce these things, I can make a few demands. My holdings have been placed in trust. You will be granted an allowance, but if you remarry, you will cease to receive this. You will lose everything. I hope only that this measure does not matter and that you cherish my memory of your own free will. Yours, Levon J.

She lowered the letter to her lap. Clearly it had been composed years ago.

And if I remarry?

His legacy, the lawyer said, will go to the creation of the Levon J. Willis Municipal Parks.

Parks?

Yes, he has planned for one, each with a bronze bust, in all of the nearby townships within reason of funding. If you decide to marry at seventy, there might be just one.

He smiled. When she didn’t, he explained her allowance and excused himself.

Beyond the windows the sun set in a sky the colour of struck ice.

She was suddenly awake within this anger: Levon’s future, her corseted, a frou-frou of lace beneath her chin. As if this were all of life she had a right to.

She went into the yard barefoot. That year’s rains had worked nails and glass shards free of the earth. The wind blew and lulled, dark clouds shuttling past a slight moon. The heads of wild grass clicked along the fence. Slowly she crossed to the stables.

In the aisle between the stalls she listened to the soft shift of hoofs in straw, all three horses come out to watch, nodding and tipping ears. They’d always been in her life, so present in disposition that riding lessons had never been necessary. She’d simply climbed on and observed herself at harmony. Had she chosen anything? Years had passed in attachment, not love.

On a bench lay the rifle that Barbara had given Jude. He’d used it on stray tomcats, on groundhogs or rabbits in the garden. She found the box of shells and worked in the glow of houselights through the window.

Nearby the stallion gazed at her. He was a silver Arab that Levon had bought and pastured near the road. She touched his neck. She stepped back. She put the stock to her shoulder as he lowered his nose, his ear above the rifle’s muzzle. She tried to recall the kick from when Jude
had taken her to the field and had let her shoot into the trees. A bat darted in through a stall door and up to the rafters. The horse didn’t spook but continued to watch. She felt for the trigger, wondering how subtle the movement would be, recalling her only jerky shot, the drab sky resonating above an ocean of leaves. She’d thought that the force of the bullet needed something strong in the hand. The stallion shifted closer to the barrel.

She let the gun down, then took out the bullet. She put her hand on the stallion’s warm neck and brought up dust with her fingers. Slowly she returned to the tack room. She wanted Bart, to lie against his chest until whatever seed of destruction, hurt or loneliness went away.

She pulled a horse blanket from the shelf, then unfolded the couch into a bed. In sounds and smells and memories, everything was here, the hours she’d spent with Bart, her youth watching Jude work. She just breathed, lying still until her mind was half coaxed by sleep. Once Jude had come in with the rifle. She’d been watching
I Dream of Jeannie
, and she wanted to show him how much she could be like this. She tied her shirt at her waist. He was sitting at the table and she put a red plastic bead in her navel and turned, her dress spinning out. Her spontaneous smile and confidence were strange to both of them, the brightness that she felt in her own eyes. He stood, all at once kicking his chair away, and she jumped back, arms crossed before her. He went out and through the grass, leapt the fence into the field and strode to where, in the evening, it disappeared towards forest. He shot three times at the sky. Then he swung the
rifle, long turning arcs, distant and strangely silent, steady as his ragged form dissolved into the dark.

The last fitful and evocative days of autumn had come, shaking the trees. On a cold afternoon, the officer stopped by to see how she was doing. He asked how far along she was, though she hadn’t thought it obvious.

At least your husband has one on the way, he said. Nothing worse than leaving this world without a child to carry your name.

She imagined people in town saying, The Mexican’s child. Oh, yes, that one’s a Mexican, too.

She saw then what it would mean to stay. Levon had been going to the stream for years and, in the week that Bart was there, had disappeared, and she accepted this. Murder no longer seemed so savage. There had been too many absences and unknowns. Her child was going to need a father.

She went into the kitchen. She ate more than she had in weeks. Then she listed materials for sale on pieces of cardboard and paper, the prices ridiculously cheap. She drove to the post office and the country store. She pasted the signs anywhere she could.