The End of Vandalism (23 page)

“Well, I don’t know about this,” he said.

“What?” said Emil.

“It seems flimsy,” said Dan. “I don’t know about this at all. I could make something sturdier than this at home.”

“If you want to use another box, it is all right,” said Emil. “If you want to use this box, that is all right as well. You can use whatever box you are comfortable with. What we need to know is where and when. This is the standard infant casket. There is only one. Our wish is to help. We take no payment when an infant has died.”

Dan and Ed stood and shook Emil’s hand. They left the funeral home. It was cold and windy.

“It isn’t such a bad box,” said Ed.

“Oh, I know,” said Dan.

“I’m not sure you should focus so much on the box.”

That evening when Dan got to the hospital, Louise was lying in the dark in her new room on the sixth floor.

“My milk has come in,” she said. Her breasts were large and hot. But Dr. Pickett had said the milk would go away in a short while when it became clear that no one was going to drink it.

“Isn’t that a relief?” said Louise. “It will go away.” Her voice had taken on a ripe, red quality because of all the crying she had been doing. Dan hugged her, and when he stepped back the front of her green gown was wet.

Dan went home that night and tried to build a coffin. He cut the parts out of pine, but his measurements were off just
enough that nothing fit together. He could have assembled the box, but it would not have been right. So he didn’t. He stacked the pieces in a corner of the basement and went upstairs. He drove over to Earl Kellogg’s place in Wylie. Earl sat in a lounge chair. The news had just ended and he was looking at television. His wife, Paula, was on the couch. The walls were covered with her quilts, including the one of Kirby Puckett which had been featured in the
Stone City Tribune.

“I’m sorry to bother you so late,” said Dan.

Earl turned down the sound. “It’s a repeat, anyway. How are you, man?”

“We could not believe it when we heard,” said Paula. “We just sat here and looked at each other. How is Louise?”

“She’s going to be all right,” said Dan.

“What caused this?” said Earl.

“They don’t know,” said Dan. “It’s called preeclampsia, and they don’t know why it happens.”

“We burn our lights in a wilderness,” said Paula.

“I still can’t believe it,” said Dan. “I mean, I know it happened, but I don’t believe it.”

“You look pretty bad. Would you like a beer?”

Dan nodded. “Yeah,” he said.

“We’ll get you a beer,” said Earl.

“Thanks,” said Dan.

The child was buried at the cemetery north of Grafton known as North Cemetery. It has another name no one uses, which is Sweet Meadow.

Louise and Dan went down to Darnier’s in the morning. The baby wore a white gown and lace cap. Under her crossed hands they put a locket with Lake Michigan sand from their
honeymoon and a photograph of the two of them, taken while Louise was pregnant. Then they each kissed her and closed the lid of the white box.

Emil Darnier brought the infant to the cemetery in the long black hearse. The back glided up to reveal the tiny casket. The walls of the inside of the hearse were burgundy. The grave was under a willow not far from the stone of Louise’s father and grandparents. It was the fourteenth of May, warm and mild.

Emil thought the way to get the box in the ground was for him and Dan to stand on either side and let it down with two ropes run beneath it. But Dan said, “I don’t want the box to tilt.”

“They never do,” said Emil.

“Why?”

“I been doing this a lot of years.”

“I will lower her with my hands. The hole isn’t that deep.”

“It’s deeper than it looks.”

“I don’t want the casket to tilt.”

“That’s how people hurt their back.”

“I’m in pretty good shape.”

“It’s not the weight so much as it’s an awkward reach.”

“Let’s not argue,” said Dan.

“No,” said Emil.

Dan knelt on a towel beside the grave. The hole was not really very deep. It didn’t have to be for such a small casket. He could not help but think of the winter frosts which would go three or four feet down. But now it was warm and the light poured from the sky.

There was a large turnout from Grafton, Pinville, and Wylie, people they knew from town and people they knew from their jobs. Louise had asked Henry Hamilton to read the
Scripture, and he had brought his family Bible, an enormous gold book that threatened to fall from his hands. “Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep,” read Henry. “The Lord himself is thy keeper; the Lord is thy defence upon thy right hand; so that the sun shall not burn thee by day, neither the moon by night.”

Louise sat in a lawn chair in the shade. Dan held the coffin throughout the ceremony and then put it in the grave. Louise stood and dropped a white rose on the box. Bumblebees cruised heavy-headed through the leaves of nearby bushes. Everyone lined up to turn a shovelful of earth. This baby is hiding.

Dan and Louise were the last to leave after the service. Louise put dark glasses on. They did not feel like going home, so they drove over to the nature walk by Martins Woods. They made their way through the trees and along the river, coming out in the prairie grass, which was golden in the sun. Then they drove to Walleye Lake and parked on the shore, looking at wind moving across the water. They didn’t say anything, holding hands between the seats of the Vega. The colors were vivid and real, but they felt that somehow they could see these scenes and no longer be part of them.

LOUISE GOT BETTER but did not go back to work. Perry Kleeborg hired Maren Staley for the summer and was teaching her to take pictures. Maren came out to the farm from time to time because there was so much that Kleeborg did not know about running the studio, although it was his name on the door.

Maren would report to Kleeborg that Louise’s coloring was poor and her eyes still seemed puffy or that she was suffering from headaches or that she was still taking blood-pressure medicine. Kleeborg would then order some Texas grapefruits or California oranges and have them delivered to the farm in cardboard boxes that would sit in the garage unopened, bearing bright pictures of their contents.

Louise walked in her sleep. She would go down into the cellar, and wake in the morning with dirty feet. She would take out and rearrange the food in the cupboards. Several times she woke in the middle of the night certain that she had heard a baby’s cry. She was out of bed and on her bare feet before she could think twice. She felt a stirring in her breasts even though her milk had long since gone away.

She did not take the crib down or change the baby’s room back to a spare room. People offered to put the baby’s things away,
even people she did not know well—the implication being that whoever was going to do the job, it should be done. She figured it must have been a custom at one time because mothers could not bear to do it. But the quilts and rocker and crib and dresser were the only day-to-day proof that there had in fact been a baby. Louise felt, or maybe imagined, the impatience of the outside world. She and Dan would wake early, as light crept into the room and mourning doves issued their three-part calls in the yard. At that hour time seemed to have stopped, and therefore seemed not to be carrying them any farther away.

Dan always had something to do. He emptied the trailer of her things and towed it behind the barn. Dan said the trailer now seemed like a terrible joke, although the loss of the baby did not seem to have anything to do with the trailer. He put in longer hours as sheriff. He would speak to anyone on any topic. He rewrote the shift system, which had become twisted and ridiculous over the years. Dan campaigned hard for the sheriff’s primary. Some people thought he was a little out of control or had some weird look in his eyes. But on June first he won the primary, and Johnny White, as predicted, filed enough signatures to run as an Independent.

One Sunday not long after the primary, Louise walked around the barn to see the trailer. The air inside was hot and still. She sat there, heat-stunned, sweating, drinking a beer, which she was not supposed to do. A wasp buzzed against the window. As she looked through the dusty glass, a bale of straw tumbled out the door of the haymow. She walked to the barn. It was cooler inside, and dark, smelling of ammonia and old wood. She climbed the ladder past the floor of the haymow, past several layers of straw, and into heat again. Dan was wrestling a bale in the sunlight streaming through the door.

“What are you doing?” she said.

He stopped and rested. “Fixing the straw.”

Louise looked at him. He was shiny with sweat and covered in bits of straw. “What’s wrong with it?” she said.

“It wasn’t stacked evenly, so the corner was about to give way,” said Dan.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” said Louise. “It’s Les Larsen’s straw.”

“I know it,” said Dan. “I know it is. It just bothers me to see something done so badly.”

“Why did you come up in the first place?”

“Who else is going to?”

Louise left the farm in August to go with Mary up to Seldom Lake in Minnesota. Mary went for two weeks every year because her sister and brother-in-law, Carol and Kenneth Kennedy, ran a camp on the lake.

It was late on a Friday when Louise and Mary arrived. The air was cool and they drove a winding dirt lane past tall black trees. Louise had not been here for years. As a child she had regarded Kenneth and Carol as exotic.

The house came into view, big as Louise remembered, lights burning in the windows. Kenneth and Carol rose from rocking chairs on the dark porch. They showed Mary and Louise to their cabins, and the four walked back to the house. Carol, Mary, and Louise sat at the kitchen table as Kenneth handed out cans of beer from the refrigerator.

“Well, it sure is good to see you two,” said Carol. She was tall like Mary, but heavier, and had an oval mark on her cheek from playing with a soldering iron when young.

“You know, I had forgotten a lot of it,” said Louise.

“We’re really not the same place you would remember,” said Carol.

“We built the rec center in eighty-two and the bathhouse in eighty-six,” said Kenneth. “In five years we’ve more than tripled our dock space.”

“Wow,” said Louise.

“I am looking forward to fishing,” said Mary.

Kenneth had been standing with his hands on the back of a chair, and now he pulled the chair out and sat down. He was one of those skinny, aging caretakers you see carrying boxes and rakes and things from place to place at motels and camps all over the country. “We wanted to talk to you about that,” he said.

“What?” said Mary.

“We… How should I say this? We made a mistake,” said Kenneth. “It was in the spring. We’ve always been blessed with good fishing here. Well, you know that, Mary. And I guess we just—”

“I’m sure you noticed there aren’t that many cars for the middle of summer,” said Carol. “This is why we can give you separate cabins.”

“Are you going to let me tell the story?” said Kenneth.

“Tell it,” said Carol.

“We pushed our luck,” said Kenneth. “That’s what we did. We pushed it. As you may know, we went to Finland last year.”

“You sent me a postcard,” said Mary.

“Mary, it was so beautiful,” said Carol.

“Anyway, we went,” said Kenneth. “Naturally we tried the fishing. In fact, we were able to write the trip off. But that’s neither here nor there. So. We were especially impressed by a fish called the bandfish. It’s a real fisherman’s fish, if you know
what I mean, and we arranged to have some shipped back live as a transplant.”

“Long story short, they chased the other fish out of the lake,” said Carol.

“That’s right,” said Kenneth. “All that’s left is scrup.”

“Is what?” said Louise.

“Scrup,” said Kenneth.

“That’s the local scavenger fish,” said Carol.

“Back home, Louise, a scrup would be called a chub or a sucker,” said Mary.

“I got you,” said Louise. “What happened to the bandfish?”

“Well, this is what really makes us mad,” said Carol. “Once the other fish were gone, they left.”

“After we shelled out all that money to bring them here,” said Kenneth.

“Where did they go?” said Louise.

“We don’t know,” said Carol.

“They could be anywhere,” said Kenneth. He laughed and the others joined in. “It would be funny, if we didn’t need the income.”

“Did you know I’m delivering newspapers now?” said Carol.

“You were doing that before,” said Mary.

“I feel bad you came all this way,” said Carol. “Of course, we had thought that by now some kind of fish would have returned. Because they feed on scrup. That’s why we didn’t call you and tell you not to bother.”

“It’s not a bother,” said Mary. “We’re glad to be here.”

“What would you like to do?” Carol asked.

“What would I like to do?” said Mary. “I don’t care what we do. We don’t have to do anything. I want Louise to get some rest, and beyond that I want to do whatever you want to do.”

“There must be something,” said Carol.

“There isn’t,” said Mary.

“Louise, what about you?” said Kenneth.

“Oh, I don’t really care,” Louise said. “I thought it might be nice to do some hiking while we were here.”

“Hiking?” said Mary. “I think you’d better take it easy. I’m not sure how much hiking you should do.”

“We have lots of trails,” said Carol.

Mary and Louise walked a curving cinder path to the point where it forked, and said good night. Louise’s cabin was stone, and had a soft blue light above the door, which was painted red with six panes of glass near the top. Louise ran her hand along the rough cool walls and went inside. Fireplaces built of sandstone blocks stood at either end of a big open room. There were bookcases and window seats with linen pillows. Above one fireplace was a deer head mounted on a wooden shield. The ceiling was made of wide boards resting on rough rounded logs. Louise hung her shoulder bag on a hat rack made of deer feet. She washed her face and brushed her teeth. Carol wrote poetry for the local newspaper, and taped to the inside of the medicine cabinet was one of her pieces, called “May Day,” which went,

The bed did not utilize any deer parts, and the sheets were stiff and cool on her feet. She thought about Mary and Carol, and how they did not always get along. Louise thought they had got more antagonistic in recent years, but it may have been that she was noticing it more. The turning point, Louise thought, had been the tablecloth Carol sent Mary for her sixtieth birthday. It was a white embroidered tablecloth. Mary said it was beautiful and that the pattern reminded her of some blue napkins she used to have. Louise thought nothing of this, but in several days Mary called and asked her to come over. She had dyed the tablecloth blue, or tried to, and cut it into jagged pieces.

“What should I do?” said Mary.

“What did you do?” said Louise.

“I don’t know what to tell Carol.”

Louise examined the remnants of the tablecloth. “Just say you purposely destroyed the tablecloth she gave you.”

“It was not on purpose,” said Mary.

“Well, you didn’t leave much doubt,” said Louise.

“To color something is not to destroy it,” said Mary. “People color things every day. The dye must be defective. I should go to the store and demand my money back.”

“You are amazing.”

“It could be something wrong with the fabric,” said Mary.

“Don’t say anything to Carol,” said Louise.

But for some reason she did. When Carol and Kenneth came down that Thanksgiving, Mary brought out the blue squares and laid them on the table. “What do you make of this?” she asked Carol.

“Your whole life, no one has been able to trust you with good things,” said Carol. “That’s what everyone used to say.
‘Don’t give Mary anything you value.’ Why do you think I got an ample trousseau when Kenneth and I were married, and you and Dwight got a shoe tree? A shoe tree! Did you ever stop and consider why that might be?”

“A shoe tree is not all we got,” said Mary.

“You got a shoe tree,” said Carol.

“You know damned well we got some beautiful porcelain,” said Mary.

Of course, the two sisters were capable of friendship. They enjoyed playing cards and trying to remember what had happened to people they knew from the old Grafton School in the forties, before the war took away the boys.

“Guess who I saw the other day,” Mary would say.

“Who?”

“Bobby Bledsoe.”

“Didn’t he play baseball with Dwight?”

“Yes, he did. Every town had a team back then.”

“Not Boris.”

“Well, not every town.”

“Didn’t Dwight and Bobby get arrested?”

“They got arrested in Davenport.”

“What was that about?”

“They would never say.”

“Bobby Bledsoe …”

“Now, do you remember Nick Bledsoe? You remember Bobby. What about Nick?”

“Yes! Poor Nick had braces on his legs.”

“That’s right. Bobby was a good ballplayer and Nick had the braces.”

“I liked Nick better than I did Bobby.”

“Bobby was all show.”

“But not Nick. Nick was kind.”

“Nick would do good deeds without seeking recognition.”

“I wonder what happened to Nick.”

The next morning Louise woke early and went outside in her robe. The grass was cold and wet on her feet as she walked down behind the cabin to a stream that must have run to the lake. Moss covered the banks, and a bridge made of rope and boards crossed the stream not far above the water and the round stones in the streambed. Louise walked onto the bridge and lay face down with her forehead resting on her fists. Between the boards of the bridge she could see the water coursing over the worn-down stones.

The sun came through the trees and belled on the water. Louise lay there shivering in her robe. She could hear the rushing sound of the water and the sound of her own breath, which rose as steam past her ears. Her breasts felt large and unfamiliar against the wooden slats. She wondered if they would ever go back to their former size. She felt or imagined a pull between the water in the stream and the water in herself. She considered how it is taken for granted that water gets to go wherever it wants. Sometimes water got in the basement of the farmhouse, and she and Dan once had to have the fire department pump it. “How can we keep it out?” she had asked Howard LaMott. “Oh, it’s
going
to get in,” he said. Now a dragonfly hovered under the bridge. She saw momentarily the blue wires of its wings. Then it was gone.

She got up and went inside. From her suitcase she took the blood–pressure cuff and stethoscope that she had brought along on the advice of Beth Pickett. She hooked the stethoscope in her ears, fastened the cuff around her upper
left arm, placed the black bulb in her left hand, pumped the cuff up to one hundred and sixty, and slowly let the pressure escape. Where the thumping began in her ears was the high number, where it stopped the low. Later, she lay on the unmade bed and chose a thin green book from the nightstand. The book, called
The Assurance of Immortality,
was published in 1924 and written by a man named Harry Emerson Fosdick. She opened the book and read this: “A traveller in Switzerland tells us that, uncertain of his way, he asked a small lad by the roadside where Kandersteg was, and received, so he remarks, the most significant answer that was ever given him. ‘I do not know, sir,’ said the boy, ‘where Kandersteg is, but there is the road to it.’”