The Sisters (39 page)

“I never saw him hanging there—not with my eyes—but I still see it in my head,” Grandma said. “And I used to get letters. From Mabel. Never from Wallace. They’d come to me from the post office in Juniper—for years, they came. I wouldn’t read them. Burned them all in the stove. Your grandpa, he never knew anything about it. Didn’t even know I had a sister.”

“Oh, Grandma.”

Bertie rubbed her eyes hard with her fingertips. “I’d give a lot to have just one of those letters. Maybe so I’d know what really happened. If they were sorry.” Grace pulled some tissues from the box on the table and pressed them into her grandmother’s hand. “I thought I saw her once.” Grandma dabbed her eyes and nose with the tissue. “What’s that program comes on Sunday nights? With the ticking clock?”

“
60 Minutes
?”

“That’s the one. I thought I saw Mabel on there one time. Years ago, now. I was in the kitchen doing the dishes and I could swear I heard her voice, so I came out to the living room, but there was just this old woman on the television. Of course, Mabel would have been old by then. They called her something else, Miss Something Else—but I guess that could have been a married name. Only I think they said Miss. Or it could have been that funny one the women make you say now—Ms.” Whenever Grandma said it, the
S
buzzed like a bee.

“So do you think it was her? What was she on for?”

“I don’t remember too much, talking about some men she knew—seems like they might have been soldiers. It was that nice-looking colored man with the woolly beard doing the interview. But I remember they said she made her living taking people’s pictures, so it couldn’t have been her. Mabel hated pictures.”

After that, Grandma had fallen asleep, and she’d slept the whole afternoon. She stirred awake for a few minutes when Mother got there. Grace kissed her good-bye, told her she’d see her in the morning, and Grandma clutched her hand, motioned for her to lean down so Rainey, who was busy fumbling in her purse for her cigarettes, couldn’t hear. “You go home and get that picture for me,” Grandma said. “It’s up in the high cupboard, over the hall closet. All the way in the back in a long box. There’s a glove in there, too. And a hair ribbon. You bring it to me.”

Grace had gone straight to the house and found the slim gray box, nearly invisible against the back wall of the cupboard. She remembered the picture exactly, as if it had sat in a frame on her dresser all these years. Mabel in her lace dress, pretty, with long, shining hair. Just like Grandma said, she had the look of a girl who didn’t like to have her picture taken. Were the glove and the ribbon Mabel’s as well? Or Grandma’s? They were yellowed a little, but looked like they’d both been put away nearly new. And there was one other thing Grandma hadn’t mentioned—a lovely antique silver button, carved like a rose bloom.

By morning, Grandma had lost her speech again, and then late in the afternoon, when Grace had gone downstairs to the cafeteria with Aunt Alma while Mother and Lynn stayed in the room, Grandma died.

Grace called Ken and asked him to come, to bring her some fine silver wire and the small mandrel, and that night, in the dim glow of the table lamp in her grandmother’s bedroom, while Ken slept, Grace turned and cut hundreds of rings, weaving them into shining blossoms, joined to meet in the center at Grandma’s rose. She’d worn it to the funeral. She’d worn it on into the next morning, when she woke Ken and said, “Marry me. Today. Tomorrow. As soon as possible.” And she’d gone on wearing it every day since, the oils of her skin dulling the silver to a rich, soft gray.

“Does he bite?”

Grace looked up from her work to see a man trying to hold a toddler back from Charlemagne, who was sitting up in his splendid height, panting and whipping the grass with his tail. “He’s a pussycat,” she said. “Really.”

The man looked uncertain. Even for a German shepherd, Charlemagne was large—enormous, in fact—but when Grace lightly pressed his shoulder, he dropped to his side, rolled onto his back, and lolled his head to gaze up at the little boy and beg for a belly rub.

“Registered?” The man was now squatted down beside the dog, scratching his neck.

“Stray,” Grace said. “Starved rib-thin. All our animals were—except the goats. We even found our horse wandering loose in the woods—no bridle, not even a rope, hooves split—just turned off, I guess.”

“So you live around here? I figured all you people came up only for the fair.”

Did he think they were Gypsies? Had the man not at that moment given Charlemagne a final pat, said “Let’s go, pal,” to his son, and swung the boy up onto his shoulders, Grace might have demanded he tell her why it was so remarkable that anything people might actually think was worth spending their money on could come out of a place called Pilgrim’s End.

It was a good thing Ken wasn’t here. He’d have put the guy straight. Ken loved this place, their place—they both did—though it had been Ken’s far longer than it had been hers. The day he got his orders for Vietnam, he’d walked out the door of his father’s house and taken off in the car, just driving, he said, driving as far as the gas tank would take him, not looking for anything except maybe some limestone cliff he could drive off of. Deep in the country, far from Newman, the car sputtered to a stop and Ken got out and walked. Hours he walked—through fields, over fences, down dirt roads he wasn’t sure were roads. But he wasn’t sorry, he said, because it was a bright blue day and around him there was the kind of quiet that’s not quiet at all—the wind through the autumn leaves, the tiny whoosh of birds settling among the branches. He swore to himself then that he would find out the name of the place, and if he made it through the war, he would buy land and live in the quiet that wasn’t quiet, quiet soft enough to sleep through but loud enough to pull his thoughts away from all the talk in his head.

That’s what he went out to the woods for, Grace thought, what he went looking for. He was always searching for that quiet of his dreams, but though Nature fulfilled her part, Ken couldn’t muffle the voices inside his head, not for long anyway. He never said so, but Grace imagined those voices staying with him all the way into the woods, waiting in the branches while he set up camp, chattering when he lay down to sleep. For a few days after he came back, things would be worse between them than they’d been when he’d left, but then he’d get better and for a little while, a few months sometimes, he’d be able to abandon himself to the present and stop in the middle of weeding the corn to turn his face up to the sun.

Though the Ken she had fallen in love with was the one who had come back from Vietnam, Grace wished she had something, anything—a photograph, a crumpled third-grade report of his summer vacation, a high school love letter, or some tale from his childhood—that could shape for her an image of the boy he’d been before, the boy who had stood on the precipice of that all-changing moment when he opened the envelope from the selective service. But long before she knew him, Ken had left all traces of that original boy behind, shedding that self like a winding-sheet to seek transfiguration in Pilgrim’s End.

Grace wanted to go home. Right now.

There were still a few hours left for the fair, but the crowd was thinning and they weren’t buying—not from anyone today—so she nudged Charlemagne’s foot with her own and said, “What do you say, Majesty? Pack it in?” They could be back on the road in an hour; she could be cooking supper in two.

Maybe Ken would change his mind, satisfied by a long ride in the woods, and come home tonight. If he did, she would fling herself into his arms and tell him that she loved him, that she was glad she’d married him, that she blessed him for having brought her to this place with the sweet, funny name no one seemed to know the origins of.

Her packing was slowed by three or four people who suddenly appeared, wanting to buy things they’d noticed earlier in the day, but Grace managed to get rid of them without too much talk.

In the truck, Charlemagne rode like a passenger, sitting up, looking around at the scenery and peering at the people in passing cars. The sun was just going down when they got home, and she let the dog out of the truck for his evening run and went to feed the goats. Pilot wasn’t in the barn, so Ken hadn’t come home, but he might yet. She’d keep the soup simmering on the stove just in case.

The soup was nearly cooked down to stew by the time Grace turned off the burner and went to bed. In the morning, she tended to her chores, patting the animals, talking to them, shooing the cats out of the lettuce patch. By afternoon, Ken still wasn’t home, so she worked on the coif, first measuring it on her own head and then putting on one of Ken’s hats to estimate his size. In the last of the light, when she was in the yard, tossing a stick out over the field for Charlemagne, she saw the low beams of a car winding down their road. She couldn’t make out the color, but from the shape, it looked like a trooper’s car.

It was.

When he got out of the car, the trooper touched the brim of his cap to her, looked into the field where Charlemagne stood alert, and said, “Fine dog there.” He asked her was her name Grace Vincent and she nodded. “Kind of hard to find you out here.” He waited while she called Charlemagne to her. Grace knelt on the ground, her arm tightly around the dog’s chest. And then the trooper said a name she didn’t recognize, explaining the man was from Chicago, just down to do a little hunting.

“When he heard the shots, two shots, he got worried, since he’d brought his son along—nice boy about fifteen, his first hunting trip. Father said the boy’d gotten away from him, so when he heard the gun, he was afraid his son might be in some trouble.”

The trooper took a small black notebook from his pocket, didn’t open it, and told her the rest.

Ken had shot Pilot first. Clean through the head, quick.

Maybe then, or maybe before that, he’d set out his gear far from where he was going to lay his own body down, far enough so there wouldn’t be any blood spatter. He’d made sure the piece of paper with his name and address was the first thing anybody would see when they unzipped his rucksack.

Grace still knelt on the ground, her arm tightening around Charlemagne as the trooper held out a piece of paper, a neatly folded square. “I believe this was meant for you, ma’am.”

When at last she reached for it, the bracelet on her wrist flashed Ken’s name at her:
Pfc. Kenneth Raymond Vincent, USMC, 7-12-68
.

She released Charlemagne, but he continued standing guard beside her while she unfolded the note, smoothing it open against her thigh.

Ken had written—in letters so prettily made, he must have taken his time—
My Grace. My sweet little Grace. Sorry. Sorry.

T
WENTY-TWO

Archaeology

November 1997

Newman, Indiana

RAINEY

“W
ELL, YOU
’
RE GOING, AREN
’
T YOU?
” Even across two thousand miles of telephone wire, Sally’s tone came through as clearly as if she’d been standing right in front of Rainey—one hand on her hip, the other on her forehead, her eyes agape with astonishment, her mouth a twist of impatience.

“I hadn’t even thought of it,” Rainey said.

“Of course you have. That’s why you called me.”

Sally was right. Of course she had. Ever since she’d opened the newspaper this morning.

Reading the weekly college page in the
Newman Herald
was a habit started years ago—not long after Rainey had heard the buildings of the old Anderson County Junior College had been bought, renovated, and renamed Newman Community College. She’d only just walked in the door from work one evening when Mother handed her a clipping and said, “Didn’t you go to school with that girl?” It was just a tiny notice, but Mother read the
Herald
word for word—even the court docket. Ann Naylor, a girl Rainey had known slightly in school—they’d shared a cutting table in home economics once—had, according to the newspaper, been named to the dean’s list.

“Imagine that,” Mother said. “In college at her age. Whatever for?”

Before, Rainey had only scanned the paper, never more than glancing at the college page, but the notice about Ann had made her curious. In the years since, she had occasionally seen the name of someone else she had once known, and she would linger over the words, wondering what had driven them back to school—whether they had lost their jobs or were just bored and had nothing else to do.

This morning, it was the photo that had struck her first. And then, for the rest of the day, after she’d read the accompanying article, she had merely watched her body going through its motions—doing the billing, lunching in the company cafeteria, driving home, watching the evening news and then a few silly programs, waiting for the long-distance rates to drop at 11:00
P.M.
so she could call Sally and figure out what to do.

Marshall—identified in the newspaper as Dr. Marshall Turner, Professor of Archaeology at Arizona State University—was coming to speak at Newman Community College.

“It’s really just for the students,” Rainey said to Sally. “It’s during the day.”