Women & Other Animals (18 page)

"Jerk," I said to myself and returned to my room, but I couldn't clear my head. No longer did I want John Blain to hug me, but somehow I had tasted my mother's desperation, and I couldn't go back to not knowing it. When I found myself unable to sleep that night, I took out my photo album. On the first page was a picture of Page 119

my father. His was a face I couldn't remember without reference, the hair as dark and curly as mine, the bloodshot eyes which looked angry. It was a handsome and peculiar face, but it wouldn't stick in my mind. Mom once said he was half Indian, but another time she said that was one of his lies. Daddy had always been full of jittery energy when we lived in the trailer, and about my only memory of him was wishing he'd be still so I could sit beside him. Now the vision in my head was just as restless, moving in and out of my memory even as I looked at his picture.

I flipped forward, then, to the pictures of our farm: the rustcolored barn, Jessie and newborn brownandwhite calf, the chickens, the bridal bushes. Mom had taken a photo of me standing in the soft muck outside the cow barn wearing rubber boots, holding my stainless steel milk bucket. I rubbed my cheek against the plastic which covered the picture of our rabbit Snoopy. I'd taken the picture right before he escaped from his cage and got killed by Ripley.

With my pillow and blanket under my arm, I slipped past Mom's room and outside. The barnyard was quiet at this time of night, chickens asleep on their perches, cows resting and ruminating. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the blue earth became brown, and the strange landscape became familiar. Fireflies sparkled in the bushes and around the apple tree outside the barn. I shook out some fresh straw in the cow stall and lay with my head on Jessie and my feet on her calf. Ripley stretched and yawned atop a bale of hay nearby. Crickets chirped intermittently. Jessie's giant belly moved rhythmically, and I fell asleep to the sweet smells of alfalfa and manure. But I was immediately jarred awake by what felt like sadness in the air around me. We'd sell the calf in a few months, and Jessie would be alone until she had another baby. My mother said she had no idea where my dad was—he could be lost and alone, maybe without a home. And now that John Blain was going to stay, he couldn't come back to us even if he wanted to. It occurred to me for the first time that my father must be sad when he thought of me.

In September, my vegetable stand was covered with tomatoes, squash, and melons. Since John Blain had started paying the bills, I Page 120

kept my vegetable profits in coffee cans in my closet—so far I had about $550. I was at school until three o'clock, so I left an empty metal box on the stand, and, as far as I could tell, most people were honest and put money in when they took something.

In October, I saved John Blain's life. Or that's what he told me. He finally got around to taking the engine out of his car and putting it in our station wagon. In the process, he cut the end of his thumb on the oil pan and had to explain to me how to pressurebandage with gauze and duct tape while he bled all over the ground in front of the barn. He refused to go to the doctor, and, after that, he couldn't do much with his thumb.

In November, we sold the heifer to Mr. VanderVeen, which meant I had to milk twice a day, and Jessie gave way more milk than we could drink even though I convinced John Blain to drink his coffee halffull of hot milk.

Two nights before Christmas Eve, I woke to shouting in the next room. A wine bottle crashed to the floor but didn't break. "What's the matter with you?" yelled my mother. I got out of bed, put a coat over my pajamas, slipped into snowmobile boots, hat and gloves, and went outside. My garden was dead from frost, and my stand was shut down except for bottles of milkforcats that froze solid after a few hours. The air was crisp, and the sky was clear, with a zillion stars in sharp focus.

Jessie was alone now, and each tree seemed alone without its leaves, and any creature who braved the winter night had to do so alone. There was no society of crickets or fireflies this time of year. I reached into the rotted crotch of the tree where John Blain kept his badtasting alcohol—whiskey or ginger brandy usually—and found instead a halffull pintbottle of peppermint schnapps. With each sip, a warm shiver traveled into my legs. I leaned against the tree and looked back at the house.

The light from their bedroom was on, a tiny bedside glow, reflecting the pinpricks up there in the heavens. My window was dark as I'd left it. Gradually the peppermint schnapps softened my vision. Though the roof sagged and the paint had all peeled off, our house looked beautiful surrounded by the leafless sticks of bridal bushes.

Because I couldn't hear them, I imagined that Mom and John Blain had stopped arguing once and for all, that they had settled their dis

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agreements and would live happily ever after. The stars changed from pricks to tiny blurs. I placed the empty bottle in the crotch of the tree and stumbled back to the house where it was warm.

The next morning I woke to a sky so bright it burned my eyes and to the sound of Jessie mooing crazily. The clock said quarter 'til nine. I hadn't slept this late in all the time we'd been on the farm. My mouth was dry and my head hurt, but I bundled up, grabbed my bucket, and ran out to the barn. On the way I saw John Blain crumpled up, sleeping on the ground near the apple tree, and I yelled, "Wake up, you!" and was surprised at the way my own voice hurt my head. Maybe he'd needed his schnapps last night and would be mad that I'd drunk it.

Jessie's bag was swollen as though it would burst, and a halfhour later, when I finished milking, John Blain was still lying there with his legs curled toward his chest and his hands between his knees. He wore a flannel shirt, wool socks, and jeans, but no boots and no jacket. "Come on, get up," I yelled. When I nudged him with my foot, his head fell back and he faced me. His lips were waxy white, and his unblinking eyelids opened onto dull, frostedover marbles. When I screamed and dropped my milk bucket, Ripley came bounding across the frozen ground to lick up what milk he could.

I leaned against the wooden fence, unable to focus. A crow flew up out of the frozen garden with a startling "Caw! Caw! Caw!" Ripley, when his appetite was sated, padded over and rubbed himself from nose to tail against my leg. Cars rolled past on the road, somewhere far off a train whistle blew, and the sun rose a little higher in the sky. John Blain's hands remained locked between his knees. I knelt beside him and felt his neck for a pulse, but the skin was cold and silent. I pulled back his sleeve and touched the little eagle on his arm. I pushed his hair away from his forehead. The skin around his eyes was puffy as though he'd gone to sleep crying. I said,

"I'm sorry, John Blain."

For a long time I stood beside Mom's bed. Her skin was creaseless. She reeked of wine, but her breathing was deep and regular, and she looked cozy under her blankets. I called to her over and over, raising my voice until I was screaming. I shook her violently. "John Blain's Page 122

dead!" I yelled. "Dead! Dead!" She opened her eyes groggily, then closed them again. Never in my life had I felt so tired. I worked open the window beside her bed and propped it up with the lamp, and let icy air pour into the room. Then I tore the covers off and threw them on the floor. She shivered, curling smaller and smaller, into the same position as John Blain. I dragged her to the side of the bed, made her sit up, and turned her face toward the open window. "John Blain's dead, Mommy!

Look!" Finally, she moaned in realization and leaned out the window toward the figure on the snow, knocking the lamp out so it hung by its cord, still burning, six feet down the side of the house. I pulled her back inside, reeled in the lamp, and closed the window.

Mom bolted and then appeared outside, leaning over the body, touching John Blain's face and then laying her head on his chest so her hair fell around him. I remembered him saying that was how he wanted to die, but Mom was a little late in getting to him. I went downstairs and met her as she stormed back into the house.

She threw on her winter coat and boots over her slip, got a shovel from the utility room, and marched off past the body, into the pasture and up the incline. I was fastening my chore coat as I chased after her. She went near the spot where I had found John Blain lying the time he said he wouldn't leave us. "You son of a bitch!"

she yelled. She was trying to dig, but the cold had made the ground hard.

"Mom, I think we'd better tell the police."

"The police don't give a damn about him."

"You can't just bury somebody. What if the police think we killed him?"

"Did I kill him, Reg? Did I kill the son of a bitch?"

"He didn't mean to die, Mom!" I yelled.

She dug furiously, her shovel making only tiny dents in the frozen ground, her hair flaming around her head. "I need the mattock, Reg. Go get it for me." And when I hesitated, she screamed, "Go get it!" Against my better judgment, I ran down the hill to the barn and returned dragging the mattock. By now Mom was on her knees, beating the ground with her fists, calling John Blain names and demanding, "How could you?" She grabbed the mattock and started chopping at the ground, her knuckles whitening as though

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fusing to the handle. With each stroke I worried she'd chop off her own foot, but she only went on like that for a minute or so before falling onto her knees again and dropping her face in her hands. She said, "Reg, it doesn't do any goddamned good to love a person."

If only I had not drunk his liquor, I would've woken at my regular time to milk Jessie, and John Blain would've lived. He depended on me to wake him up. He thought we had an understanding. Maybe he'd been out looking around for a bottle that wasn't empty. I could imagine him on the moss right here, sitting up to light a cigarette, asking why I drank his booze. I looked to the sky for a clue, but there wasn't even a cloud. Of course John Blain knew a lot, so maybe he'd known we lived in a world where all it took to kill a person was sleeping late.

"Mom, we're going down to the house now." I grabbed her cold hand and held it, though it didn't hold mine in return. She had become weak enough that I could boss her. I left the tools where they lay and led her down the frozen pasture, shutting the gate behind us so Jessie couldn't get out. I took her into the kitchen and started some coffee in the drip pot before calling the Alexander police. When they arrived, Mom was sitting as stiff as a fence post with a cup of coffee growing cold in front of her, her snow boots and parka still on. While we waited for the medical examiner, I told the two men that Mom wanted to bury John Blain on the hill, and they looked at each other as though we were crazy, and then Mom agreed to have the body taken to Peas Brothers Mortuary.

In February, because the mortuary hadn't heard from any of John Blain's relations, they gave Mom the ashes in a metal box. That night she tried to drive his car drunk, but she crashed it into a tree before even getting out of the driveway. She didn't hurt herself, but the car wouldn't run anymore. One Saturday, after we'd had a week of thaws, Mom spent all day digging near the pines. She became a tiny silhouette of a woman, very far away. I didn't dare take my eyes off her, for fear she'd become smaller still and then disappear. She took the box of ashes up to where she had been digging, dumped them loose into the hole, and covered them with dirt, as though she expected him to grow again next year.

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That night Mom cried and cried in the room next to mine, and since there was nothing I could do for her, I dressed warmly and dragged my quilt out to the barn. The moon was silent and half full beneath the blanket of sky. I curled beside Jessie and pulled the cover over both of us. Hopefully Mom was wrong about loving people, but I had never thought about John Blain in terms of love anyway. I just knew for sure that he didn't mean to leave us—he'd stayed as long as any of my tomato or squash plants, and in a way he was still there, if you counted his ashes. I was grateful his car was busted so Mom couldn't try to drive to the U.P. or the Alexander Bar

& Grill. The smells of hay and manure mingled, and I held Jessie around the neck with both arms and breathed in the warmth from her body. Gazing out the barn window, I thought I could see the burning red tip of one of John Blain's cigarettes, a comforting little glow, but really it was only a star, or maybe Mars. As Jessie chewed beside me, rhythmically, peacefully, I thought about the garden I'd plant in May. Lush rows of beans and tomatoes curved through the barnyard and up the incline in my mind, and in my muscles I felt the pull of the young, strong plants toward the sun.

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Celery Fields

The police called as Georgina was swallowing her last bite of plain Cheerios with skim milk. ''Ma'am, do you own a white Ford pickup?" Georgina didn't think of herself as a ma'am. "That's my husband's truck," she said. That's the truck that cost half as much as this house, she thought, the truck he'd bought without consulting her. Georgina stared into her empty bowl and clicked the clearpolished nails of her free hand on the polyurethane tabletop. As a kid she'd eaten at a varnished pine table that softened when anything wet spilled on it. "My husband's not here."

Andy was supposed to be out with his brother cutting firewood for their dad. On Saturdays, if he wasn't pouring cement, Andy usually did something with his brother.

In late November they'd clip on their licenses and go deer hunting, which meant they hunkered in a dark field with a hundred other orangeclad men until the sun rose, and then they went to a chain restaurant near the game preserve and ate a lot of fried meat. At other times they'd go fishing or attend outdoors shows or gun shows at Wings Stadium. Georgina spread her fingers out on the table; for a moment she was surprised that her nails were clean.

"The truck's bogged down on some private property," said the

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cop, "and the owner called to complain. Your husband might want to tow it himself right away, save everybody else the trouble."