The Sisters (46 page)

The first piece—born so unexpectedly the night of Ken’s funeral.

Beginning with the night the trooper had come to tell her about Ken, and each time in the days following when she called to update her mother about the arrangements, Grace tried to ask Rainey if she would stay over, just for a few days, but whenever she started the question by saying, “After the service…” her mother would say, “You should just come home with me.”

“I can’t do that, Mother,” Grace said. “I have a farm to take care of.” She didn’t have the energy to argue back when her mother asked, “Isn’t it time you left all that behind?”

When the funeral was over and she and her mother walked away from the church toward the car, Grace was again on the point of asking her not to leave, but then Mother said, “Now that you’re free of your burdens, there’s nothing to stop you. You’re still young. You can be anything you like.”

For a long time after her mother left, Grace had stood in the driveway, wearing her hastily bought dress and high heels, holding the startlingly small urn that held Ken’s ashes. What was she to do with them? She and Ken had never talked about such things.

She couldn’t face the house, not then, so she whistled for Charlemagne, went into the barn she and Ken had built together, and, seeing his coveralls hanging there, stripped off her dress, pulled on the coveralls, and shoved her feet into her husband’s work boots. She had already started filling the bucket before she remembered Pilot wasn’t there to drink the water she would pour into his trough. With the dog trotting at her heels, she fed the goats, put out food for the cats. She picked up Charlemagne’s bowl and put it down again on the shady side of the barn, where he liked best to eat in the spring and summer; then she sat down on the stump she and Ken had long ago decided to preserve as a stool. The maple tree they had planted beside it now shaded her seat. After nosing his food for a moment, Charlemagne came to sit beside her, laying his head in her lap. They stayed like that for a long time.

She remembered that feeling of blankness, of feeling that somehow her body had vanished even as, like a collection of phantom limbs, it was too heavy to move. Always she had wondered what it meant in books when people described a suspension of thought, and now she knew. She was aware of her own mind, aware that it was there, but just as much aware that it turned itself to nothing other than the sense of her invisible, burdensome body.

She might have sat there through the night, frozen on the stump, if the setting sun had not caught the sheet of tin Ken had left lying in the grass. Just the week before, when he’d pulled down the decaying shed, he’d said something about keeping the tin, making use of it somehow, but she couldn’t remember what.

Now, she could not remember thinking about going to pick up the tin before she did it. But she could see herself then, in the twilight, dragging the rusted sheet into the workshop, starting a fire in the stone hearth. She set out her tongs and hammers, and when the heat was right, she laid an edge of the tin first across the fire and, when it was hot, across her anvil. She could see herself beating out the ridges in the tin, beating as hard as she could, all the while remembering a line from a book or a poem that she had never since been able to locate: “on an age-old anvil wince and sing—then lull, then leave off.”

She did not leave off until the tin was flattened, not until she had curved it around her anvil into the crude, arching shape and seen in that shape a shirt of armor. In the morning light, with the promise of armor, she suddenly knew what to do with Ken’s ashes, so she took up the urn and shook some out under the oak where they had picnicked the day Ken had first brought her to see his land. She went into the barn and set the urn on the ground while she opened with two hands the latch that had made her want to become a blacksmith, opened the door the latch had secured against their clever horse, and scattered some of the ashes in Pilot’s empty stall; and then in the grape arbor Ken had built with hopes of jelly and wine; to the garden he had made; then to the creek and into the woods—but not to the clearing where the stranger from Chicago had found him.

She emptied the last of the ashes outside the door of the workshop Ken had created for her out of the black barn that had once been left to tumble. And then, she crossed the threshold to the newly smoothed tin. Through the rest of that day and into the night, working and resting, working and resting, she cut the tin at the curve and shaped for herself a crude breastplate, then a backplate, which she fastened together with strips from a snapped bridle Pilot had once worn and that Ken had set aside to repair.

“You make jewelry, too?” Taylor was standing at the center worktable, holding in the sunlight a necklace, an asymmetrical web of gold.

“I started with jewelry,” Grace said. “You can ask your mother. Little bits spread all across my desk—instead of homework. Used to drive her and your grandmother crazy.”

Taylor laid the necklace down again and traced an imaginary line on the table to balance the design. “It will be so beautiful when it’s finished. Will you send me a picture?”

Grace came to the table and lifted the golden web, draping it across her hand. “It’s for you,” she said, holding it out to her niece. “And as finished as I can make it now.”

Taylor blushed with embarrassment. “I’m sorry.… I didn’t mean to…”

“Never mind,” Grace said. “Let me show you.”

It was a glimmering garden, a carpet of blossoms—daisies, roses, pansies, tulips, birds-of-paradise, the fluted trumpets of lilies. But only when Grace began to follow the pattern with her finger did Taylor see the letters—each formed of fine braided wire, each stretching out to other letters, running like vines through the garden. Grace laid her finger on a scrolling
F
placed at the center of the chain. The stem of the
F
curved and split, forming the edges of a letter
M
on the left and a
B
on the right.

“That’s on the shield out front,” Taylor said.

“The
F
is for Fischer.” Grace stroked its swooping lines. “That was my grandmother’s—your great-grandmother’s—maiden name. She was Bertie. And see here?” She touched with her fingertip a ring that connected Bertie’s initial to an
H,
for Hans, and traced the connection down to the lovely letters representing Alma and Rainey. From Rainey’s
R,
Grace let her finger follow through another generation. “You’re here.”

Taylor touched her
T
. Not only had Grace linked her mother’s
L
to her father’s
S
for Sam, she had drawn the ends of the initials down and around the
T,
like an embrace.

Taylor sat quietly, gazing at the necklace and following with her eyes the intricate web of her family. “This is your husband,” she said, fingering the link that joined Grace with Ken. “He killed himself, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” Taylor looked down, as if in shame. With one hand, she clutched her hair. “I mean … What I mean is, was it too much for him? Living? Was he … Was it…”

Grace looked into Taylor’s eyes and there saw fragments of a feeling that had pierced her child’s heart, a feeling her young woman’s mind now struggled to name. Grace took her niece’s hands in her own. “Was it despair?”

Taylor nodded.

“No. Partly—but not just.” Grace brushed a lock of hair away from Taylor’s eyes. “I think it was sacrifice.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I,” said Grace. “I think that’s how it is with sacrifice. It matters. But we don’t always know how.”

A tear spilled over Taylor’s cheek. She looked again at the necklace. “What’s this question mark linked to Grandma Rainey?” She looked closer. “There’s a heart inside it.”

“That’s my father,” Grace said. “I don’t know his name.” She traced her finger back along the vine to Bertie. “Look here. What do you see?” The letter was clearly a
B,
but only by looking intently could one see that Grace had shaped the lower loop ever so slightly as a heart, and that floating within it was a tiny
W
turned from wire finer than a hair. “Before she died,” Grace said, “just before—Grandma told me she had loved a boy named Wallace. Whatever we carry inside us shapes everyone we touch.”

Taylor lifted the necklace from the table and let the golden garden drape across the back of her hand as Grace had done earlier. “And this
M
? Who is it?”

“My grandmother’s sister.”

Grace told Taylor then all that Bertie had told her—of Mabel, of Wallace, of her graduation day and Jim Butcher. “Someday,” she said, taking the necklace from Taylor, “if you want, I can add in the family you make.” She stood up to close the chain around her niece’s neck. “But the pattern will always be out of balance. I can’t tell Mabel’s story.”

Taylor let another tear spill over. “Thank you for this.”

Grace leaned down to press the girl’s cheek with her own. “Now,” she said, “how about you go join the party?”

Taylor turned to look at her with a sly grin. “You mean my party.”

“Yes, darling.” Grace laughed. “Your party. You go on. I’ll be along in a minute.”

Grace leaned in the doorway, watching her niece walk, skip, and then dance in twirls toward the house. The others came out on the far side of the barn—Sarah must have been showing them the goats romping in their lot, clattering up the gangplank and butting each other off the platform Ken had built for the first pair, years ago. She saw Taylor wave, and a moment later, their family of women gathered around her bright light, leaning in—she must be telling them about the necklace. It pleased Grace to think of Taylor telling the story, learning it by telling it. She would let the tale belong to her niece for a little while, and only when she was sure Taylor had told all she remembered would Grace join them.

The others probably wouldn’t believe anything Taylor said about Mabel and Wallace, and they would tell Taylor she must have misheard. Grace turned back to her worktable and slid open the shallow drawer that ran nearly the full length of the table. “For the jewelry parts,” Ken had said. He’d made it to open from either side of the table, so she could always work on the side with the best light and still keep her wire and rings and small tools at her fingertips without cluttering her work surface. Long ago, further back in the drawer, she had placed the slim gray box Grandma had sent her from the hospital to find. In it still lay the glove, the pale green ribbon, and the photograph of Mabel. She would take the box to her family, and, wearing the necklace she had worn every day since Grandma died, the chain of flowers with the silver rose button at its center, she would open the box, show them the photograph, and tell them all she knew.

She sat down at the table and took Mabel’s photograph from the box, tilting it to keep it out of the strongest sunlight. She wished she could know what had become of that pretty dark-haired girl on the swing and wished even more to know what had caused the fear that seeped through those eyes.

Grace smiled at the beautiful young face. Whatever the reason for it, Mabel’s departure had changed the direction of Bertie’s life, and from that change had grown their family. The necklace Grace had made for Taylor, an orderly tangle of links, vines, and blossoms, was in many ways a map of sadness and loss. Only by standing back a little could one see how beautiful it was—like a forest floor renewed by fire. Grace’s life—this life and place she loved—had risen out of the ashes of so many.

She closed the box and clutched it to her chest, stooping at the door to stroke her fingers across the ground that had long since drawn in the last of Ken’s ashes. Words of gratitude and love swirled in her mind like motes of dust sparkling in the sun, settling on Mabel, on Wallace, on Bertie and Hans, on Ken, and then—as she took her first step out of the barn and toward her gathered family—on all of them.

T
WENTY-FIVE

Departure II

June 2007

Indianapolis, Indiana

MABEL

“M
AMA? ARE YOU ASLEEP? MAMA-BEL?
Jenny’s here with Bonnie.”

Mabel heaved her eyes open to look for Daisy. It was Daisy’s voice she heard, but there was only a blur before her, and inside the blur was an old, old woman.

“Where’s my Daisy?”

“I’m here, Mama,” said the blur. “Right here.”

“You’re old.”

Daisy smiled and stroked Mabel’s cheek. “Sure am,” she said. “But not as old as you.”

When the blur came closer, Mabel could see her lovely Daisy. The old woman was gone and in her place was the girl with the copper hair, pinned up in a clumsy twist. “Your hair’s pretty that way,” Mabel said. “I can help you fix it so the ends don’t come down.”

Daisy lifted her hand to her hair and became an old woman again. “Jenny’s here,” she said. “Jenny and Bonnie. They’ve come to see you.”

“Bertie?” Mabel tried to pull herself up, tried to see the door her sister would come through.

“No, Mama. Bonnie. My granddaughter. Your great-granddaugter.”