Half Wild (13 page)

That is when our mother left for the Cole barn. This very same barn whose doorframe I now kneel in, dizzy, my hands shaking, spitting up what has risen in my throat into the hay and dust and dirt that has collected in the corner of the doorway. My head throbs, my legs ache, and I think, for a strange and elated moment, that I may die.

That is when I notice her sneakers. I lift my eyes and there is Rachel, redheaded, the girl with her mother's hair, standing in front of me, eyes wide, lips parted, as if I am some feral animal she has just come upon.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

I lean my hand for a moment against the wood of the doorway and put my head against my arm and whisper—it is all I can manage—“I think so. Yes. I think so. Okay.”

The girl just stands there, watching me. “Do you need some water?”

“Yes,” I say. “That would be good.”

“Wait here,” she says, and goes to the tap in the milk room and comes back with a Mason jar full of water.

“Here, take this,” she says, and I dust off my hands and
take a sip of the water. It is so cold, it makes my teeth hurt, and it is the cleanest thing I have ever tasted.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Sure,” she says, still standing there, looking at me as if I am crazy, or drunk, which I might still be, but she doesn't look scared anymore, or like she will go away, and I don't want her to, and am surprised to find myself thinking that.

“Need anything else?” she asks.

“No. I don't think so.” I manage to smile at her. “I don't know what happened.”

“It's okay.”

She smiles at me then, an old-hearted and gracious smile, for which I'm grateful.

Then she shifts her feet. “You want to come see the calves? I was just cleaning their stalls.” And like that there is a way forward. All I have to do is nod, and she leads me through the milk room and down a hallway to a small room with one window. It's one big stall and in it are three calves, each no more than a few days old. They stand on shaky legs and look up at me with wide, wet eyes, and when I hold my pale hands toward them they lick my fingers, their tongues rough as beach sand, and their dark eyes are so full of trust, as is this Rachel, who has brought me into this room, that I think I may foolishly cry. But I do not cry. Instead I think of Helen, and wish she were here with me, wish she could see these calves lick my hands and let them lick hers, wish I could
start over, but I let that thought pass, and simply kneel in the clean sawdust Rachel has just laid down, and let the small creatures lick the salt off my face and my arms and my hands.

“Sweet, huh?” Rachel says, and I nod, and then I stand up and look once again at her slate-blue eyes, and reach my hand out and touch her shoulder, and then turn and leave the barn and walk back up the road toward my own farm. I pause for a moment in that road with my arms at my side and close my eyes and think that maybe life offers us more than one chance to survive, or more than one way to be lucky, and then I keep walking, toward the place where I was born, toward the place where too many of my loved ones died, and from this angle the house and barn somehow look less solid, less violent, less permanent, their half ruin letting in some new kind of light, and the rivers, which at dawn looked like veins, now look like rivers, carrying cold water toward some larger, yet-to-be determined home.

“Ross,” I say out loud. I haven't said his name in such a long time. “Ross,” my voice broken, too loud, an animal in there. “I'm sorry. I'm so bloody sorry.” And he answers. His body everywhere. The field the grass the mud the barn.

Apple conceived in a field in early September 1987, the year she turned nineteen. She had named herself that after moving to Vicksburg, where hundred-year-old apple trees grew around all the old houses and sometimes appeared, gnarled and unruly, deep in the woods. The night she conceived she lay in the wet grass and watched the sparks from a nearby bonfire transform into a meteor shower that suddenly appeared above her. The man she slept with was a long-fingered married guitar player, passing through, but all of that was unimportant. When she found out she was pregnant, a month later, she wrote in her journal that a spirit had moved through her that night like a warm wind. Sparrow, she named her boy, for
the bird that sang outside her cabin window the June he was born.

Now, eighteen years later, Apple sits in her trailer, which perches on a hill above a large farmhouse. It's late December, a week before Christmas, and she rests her sock feet on top of the gas heater. Her feet are cold. The trailer is cold; the trailer is always cold. The house below used to belong to a woman named Cora, whom Apple took care of when she was dying, but now it belongs to a couple of thirty-year-old artists—a dancer and a trapeze artist—who rented the trailer to Apple and Sparrow two years ago. Sparrow was a junior in high school then, and the man and woman had stared intently and with curiosity into Sparrow's eyes. He was—is—a beautiful boy, deep, dark eyes and an overly serious look for his age, and most people find themselves drawn to him. “It would be nice to have some young blood around,” the man had said, and Sparrow smiled and told them he looked forward to being somewhere quiet, somewhere without too many neighbors. The couple looked at each other and smiled, and Apple had felt proud. They were good landlords. It was a good place to live. She liked having Cora's ghost around—her efficiency and kindness. Apple was happy here. Until the day after graduation when Sparrow came home and told her he had joined the marines. It's the things you can't imagine, she thought then, that sneak up and knife you from behind.

The trailer has a large picture window that faces the
field, and from where Apple sits, looking out, she can see the hill slope away toward the road and, beyond that, a bank of trees and, to her left, ninety feet downhill, the two-hundred-year-old farmhouse where the artists live. The barn that used to stand across from it burned to the ground not long before Cora died. The ashes from that fire are nearly gone; the grass grows abundant. Apple often finds herself watching the house and the couple who live in it without intending to. In summer they weed their large vegetable garden together, the woman (the trapeze artist) in a bikini top and a short cotton skirt, the man (the dancer), shirtless in cut-off jeans. Sometimes they do yoga in the yard. They are both thin and tan and have enough money to buy themselves this house and a brand-new four-wheel-drive Volvo, and to Apple they always seem happy. Now she watches as they come out of the house, dressed in snow pants and thick down parkas. They grab bright plastic sleds from the porch and hike up the hill in front of Apple's trailer. When they get to the top they lie down on their sleds and shoot down the old cow field together. At the bottom, before reaching the trees, they bail out of the sleds and throw themselves into the snow. Apple can hear their shrieks and laughter; she can see them crawl toward each other and start groping each other there in the snow in their big down jackets. Her eyes are still that good. Apple has been single, barring a few errant nights, for eighteen years.

Now she stands and goes to her bookshelf where she
keeps the letters Sparrow sends her. In the most recent one—received three months ago—he describes mountain caves and the bombed-out houses where they sleep in the mountains of Afghanistan; he describes fields of poppies and watermelon. He says they run into those fields, break the watermelon open, stick their faces inside, and devour the sweet fruit.
The only fresh thing we've eaten in six fucking months,
he writes. And then,
Hey Apple—more socks?
He never mentions guns or killing or fighting. Once a month Apple sends packages of clean white socks. There is no such thing as laundry, and they are on their feet in those leather boots fifteen, sometimes sixteen hours a day. Socks, Sparrow has told her, are the heroin of his brigade.

Once every few months he calls. It is always early, three or four in the morning. The connection is never good, and he can never talk for more than a few minutes, but for Apple, shivering there in the dark of the trailer in her nightgown, bare feet on linoleum, Sparrow's voice coming through that line is the most grace-filled thing she has ever known. He never mentions guns or killing or fighting, but it is all over the news.

Apple puts the letter down and goes to the kitchen to start dinner. She pulls carrots and kale out of the refrigerator, pours brown rice and water into a pan. She works as a cashier at the health food store in Nelson and has always eaten well—rice and beans, vegetables and tofu, unrefined
sugars. She has come a long way from the house outside Cleveland where she grew up: all that meat and potatoes, cake out of boxes, and Jell-O molds. A long way from her God- and husband-fearing mother. And yet, like her mother, she now lives and cooks alone. Which is why she finds herself, after all these years, calling her mother more often than she used to.

They don't talk about anything important, but Apple is surprised to find herself comforted by the sound of her mother's thin voice across all that distance. The last time her mother visited was sixteen years ago; Apple was living in a converted chicken coop, and Sparrow was two. When her mother asked where the ladies' room was and Apple pointed to the outhouse nestled between some pines, her mother said, “Oh dear,” and rented herself a motel room. The next day she told Apple she should get herself a mirror: “Don't you care how you
look
?” Apple had looked down at her body then: her full hips and flat feet and small, pointy breasts under loose cotton. She has a picture of herself from back then tacked to the window frame above her sink, and every time she sees it she is surprised at the raw beauty of her young face. Yes, she hadn't said: she cared.

But that was a long time ago. Now her father is dead and her mother talks about food and her sick parents and her neighbors. “How is our boy?” she asks toward the end of the conversation, and Apple tells her about the
most recent letter from Sparrow, or reports that she has heard nothing at all. “Well, God is with him,” her mother always says. “God knows best.” And every time Apple hangs up the phone, she cries.

Apple peels the carrots. It is the strangest thing she has known, to have a son at war. For years she has hung a poster above her bed that says
VISUALIZE WHIRLED PEAS.
When Sparrow was a boy she taught him to leave spider webs undisturbed, to catch mice in Havahart traps and wasps in jars. The small bookshelf in the trailer holds every book Thich Naht Hanh has written. Taped to the wall above her kitchen sink is his reminder to
Breathe peace;
to the wall next to her bed she has tacked his lines:
No birth, no death, no coming, no going.
The long road turns to joy.

Sparrow was a good teenager. He never did too many drugs or drank too much or went off any deep end like Apple had always feared. She wasn't sure if he had any close friends, but he liked his teachers and his teachers liked him. He would be going to the state college in the fall. He took art classes and made Apple ceramic cups and bowls for Christmas and her birthday. On weekend nights he took Apple's Subaru and went to parties but never got too messed up. If he drank, he spent the night; that was her rule. In the morning he would come home and they would sit in the trailer drinking coffee together and he would tell her about drinking games and skinny-dipping and other kids who did things that were stupid,
and Apple thought then that she was in the clear, that she had done everything right, that all those years of teaching peace and love and simplicity had been the right way to raise a child, the right way to mother, that if the world only did it like she had done it, the world would be a better, more humane place: without hunger, without massacres, without war.

He told her the day after graduation. Apple sat at the edge of the field waiting for him, the hardcover copy of
Leaves of Grass
gift-wrapped beside her. It was the book his English teacher had recommended. Sparrow pulled into the driveway in Apple's rusted Subaru and came and sat down next to her. He picked a blade of timothy and stuck it between his lips. “Apple,” he said, not looking at her. He smelled like beer and looked like he'd slept in a field somewhere.

“Yeah?”

“I have something to tell you.”

In that instant Apple had imagined all sorts of possible declarations: a girl knocked up, a one-way ticket to California, a drug felony or a speeding ticket or a night in jail. But never what came next. Apple had never imagined the cut of those words, the nausea that sliced through every vein in a heartbeat.

Before she could say anything he gave her two reasons. One, he told her, his pale fingers shaking, was that a war was being fought in the name of freedom and justice and if people were going to die for it, he might as well too.
He didn't look at her as he said it; his voice caught in his throat, too loud. It sounded like something he had read in a pamphlet and memorized. And, he had said, this time glancing at Apple, his lower lip beginning to tremble, they were going to pay for his college. “How else were you going to do it?” In that instant Apple felt her life unearthing itself like a flock of starlings taking off from a field. Every one of those birds was her mistake. Hers.

The light shifts in the trailer and Apple hears the door at the big house slam. She can't help herself—she goes to the picture window and looks down the hill. The husband and wife are brushing the snow off each other's pants and jackets with a straw broom. The man goes to the woodpile and fills his arms with a load of wood; the woman holds the door open for him, and they walk inside together. Lights come on in half a dozen windows. Apple goes back to her kitchen and throws the chopped carrots and kale into the pan.

She likes cooking without lights on. It's a new thing, not something she did with Sparrow in the house. When he was there she would turn on all the lights and cut vegetables at the table where he did his homework. Not that he needed her help—he always did well in school—but because she wanted to learn what he was learning and because she wanted to share his life with him. She often read his assigned English books so they could talk about them afterward. She read
The Catcher in the Rye
and
Great Expectations
and
As I Lay Dying.
“You can read your own
books,” Sparrow said once, but Apple told him she liked reading with him; she had been high most of her high school years, or having sex in the backseats of cars. She secretly imagined herself starting over with Sparrow. His English teacher had told his class that
As I Lay Dying
was the greatest American poem of the twentieth century, and Apple read it a second time with that in mind, though she still isn't sure she completely understands what it's about.

The rice water starts to boil and Apple turns it down to a simmer, stirs the vegetables. The clock on the stove and the stereo light create a pleasant glow. Outside, the sky looks like the worn navy on a velvet dress Apple once saw Cora wearing, mottled here and there with stars. It's not even five, but in December it gets dark so early.

In sixth grade Sparrow asked if they could move somewhere warmer, lighter, somewhere like Florida. “Why?” Apple asked, and he shrugged and said he didn't like the cold. But Apple knew he did like the cold; he liked sledding and making snow angels, and he liked to spend time outside by himself. That week Sparrow's teacher called to talk; she said the boys in Sparrow's class were calling him “Birdie.” She asked, “Does Sparrow like having his hair long, or would he prefer a haircut?” She said he often pulled his hair over his eyes and didn't take off his winter parka when he came inside. When Apple asked Sparrow about his hair and about the jacket and about school he said he was fine. It was fine. He just wanted somewhere warmer, that's all.

Apple brings her bowl of food to the chair in front of the gas heater. It's the only place in the trailer she likes to be now—a rocking chair draped with sheepskin—and when she sits there rocking she sometimes feels like an old woman and that feeling comforts her; the pressure to live a striking life recedes. Sometimes Apple looks down at her long, slender legs and is surprised that she is not even forty. Lots of women her age are just having babies.

A car pulls into the driveway below, and Apple watches two people climb out. They are just shadows against the snow, but Apple can make out their shapes by the light that streams through the windows: both elegantly thin. The couple goes to the porch and another car pulls up. Apple remembers it is Saturday, almost Christmas: the time of year for parties. Two more shadows climb out of the second car and go toward the house. The front door opens to reveal the trapeze artist standing in the doorway in a red cocktail dress and black high-heeled shoes. She laughs and embraces the silhouettes and they embrace her and then they all step inside, the door closing behind them. Apple looks down at her own clothes: a favorite wool sweater full of holes and a pair of jeans. She wonders for a moment if she should turn a light on in the trailer so they won't think she is sleeping or depressed or sitting in the dark, watching them. Her Subaru is parked outside her door, and if they see it there, they will know she is home, without lights on, but why on earth would they look up the hill and wonder? They are having a party!
Sometimes she feels like a god up here, looking out and down, and thinks how lonely it must be to be a god.

Sparrow used to tell her to go out. “You should go dancing. Or to a concert,” he would say. Once: “You're still pretty, you know,” and Apple had thought, looking into those deep and serious eyes, how happy he was going to make some woman someday. She had slept with lots of men but had not loved one of them. “The best thing you can do for your children,” she had heard someone say at a wedding, “is love their mother.” But who had loved her? Apple had looked at Sparrow then and pulled him against her body in a long and awkward hug, which he pulled away from gently.