Authors: Charlotte Bacon

Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author), #test

A Private State: Stories (23 page)

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When George played, his whole head turned hard and red as an apple. My grandfather made him perform in the front hall, after drinks and before goose. When George was done and breathing really fast, my grandfather patted him over his ear in a way that looked more like a smack than a pat and said, ''Well done, lad."

The water was up to my chest. Then the geese started to cry louder than usual and we couldn't hear the bagpipes. The field near my grandparents' house was dark with the birds, but then they started to fly and it looked like a brown and gray carpet slowly being lifted from the ground. Now the sky instead of the field was dark with geese. I saw two brown streaks coming across the dead corn. They swerved to miss the hunting blind. Hector and Ajax.

My sister and I floated closer to each other. The dogs stopped at the bank, noses high. Then one stepped into the river and started to swim toward us. The other followed. The dogs' heads and the tips of their tails were the only things that poked through the surface, their ears like wide petals floating on the water. We started to swim, fast as we could, away from shore, away from them. We said nothing. We kicked the water to froth.

The river tugged harder on my body. We were near the current. I was almost ready to swirl into it and wash up somewhere downstream, at some other family's Thanksgiving, with mud in my ears and sand in my mouth. Anything would be better than being at that table, with those people and that conversation and all that silverware. I stopped swimming and it was almost like the water was a pair of hands on my legs. It would have been so easy to let the current pull us away. Then the dogs were there.

I could see the tiny wet pebbles of the nearest dog's nose. When he was so close his breath made my face warm, I hit him hard, on the head. "Go away, dog!" I hissed. I sounded like my father. My sister whacked the other one, who blinked and started to paddle back to the bank. She nearly beat him there. But the one near me

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was looking for something to put his mouth around. "Soft as silk," my grandfather said about the dogs' mouths, which were ridged and steamy and had never seemed soft to me. Then the points of his teeth were in my arm and pulling, and he tried to drag me. I wanted to kill him. It leapt in me, knowing this, the way a fish breaks the water's skin. "Goddamn dog," I shouted and I hit him with my other arm. Water splashed up my nose and I started to cough and swear at the same time. My arm had dents in it, no blood, but white dents. Another bruise. But he had left and I thought it was because I'd sworn at him. I had never said "Goddamn" out loud before. "Goddamn," I said again as I swam toward shore. It tasted odd in my mouth, a little like silver tarnished with egg.

My sister had pulled on her pajamas and they stuck to her in wet patches. "Did he bite?" she said. The dogs planted their front paws in the sand and sent a shiver down their backs. Sprays of water fanned off their fur. They panted loudly as if nothing had happened.

The door slammed and my father stood at the top of the porch stairs. I flopped back in the water, my legs streaming out behind me, my hands to my wrists in mud made sharp with broken oyster shells. "Did the dogs do anything?" he said loudly.

His face was bright with heat. I wondered what he could have done anyway. I wondered if he would have waded into the water and ruined his sweater for good to save us. He looked so tired. Floating there, my fingers squelching mud, I didn't know what he would have done. My arm ached. I wanted to be clean.

"No," I said. It was simpler this way. It was simpler to make sure no river mud stayed below my nails, then go and strap on my kilt.

"Have you seen the cat?" he asked.

I hadn't seen the cat. We wouldn't until just before we left. He disappeared in the woods and would have ear mites and a claw

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wrenched off when he came back. He always got battered down here. "No," I told him, but he wasn't listening. My sister darted past him.

Inside, my mother was on the phone with Grandma. My father was lying down on the cushions of the window seat. His arm covered his eyes and he looked like he might have been asleep, but he wasn't.

"Why don't you take off your sweater?" I asked, wiping mud on my pajamas.

"In the tub, little girl," he said but didn't move.

My mother cupped her hand over the telephone, her last ring clanking on the black plastic, and shouted, "Time for a bath." She said to my grandmother, "I'll tell Tom to get his gear together." When she hung up, she said, "I told Ma you'd shoot with Pa and Gerard after dinner."

"No, I won't," he said and stood up, a little teetery as if the blood weren't quite in his head.

She started cleaning breakfast plates off the table. "Take that sweater off, it's stifling in here," she said.

"No," he said, and walked out onto the porch and then down the riverbank where he sat down. It seemed to hurt his knees. I wanted to go and sit next to him, but my mother said "Into the tub!" meaning it.

In the bathroom upstairs, there was a dented can of Bon Amiand a bristly cleaning brush in the corner. The water was very soft and hot and smelled as if it were the river heated up. I made my sister climb in the front. I wasn't sure what I didn't want her to see; I just didn't want to be seen. I heard the door slam again, hard. My parents' voices rose from downstairs. I told my sister to spin the spigot so the water spouted out louder.

I was getting fat as a goose. I slipped the bar of soap across my chest where it slid up a bank of skin and then down again. It made me shiver. All I wanted was to find my book bag and the sour-

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balls. I wanted to put them all in my mouth at once and feel the sweet marbles shrink and slide, small and tangy, down my throat, but it was time to get dressed.

This year, my mother had found us matching kilts in what she called the "family tartan," Gunn plaid. I thought for a long time this was spelled "gun plaid," which seemed to make sense of my grandfather and uncle. Then I read the label on the skirt.

"Ready?" my mother called. We clattered down. She was fiddling with a gold earring the shape of a dog's head. "Give me a hand with this," she said and let me anchor the cold piece of metal on her earlobe. I looked into the folds and bends of her ear. It was just the right shape for a secret, but I never told her any.

"Where's Dad?" I asked.

"In the car," she said. My mother wore her double row of pearls. She folded up her knitting and put it on the window seat. It was clear this made her sad. "Fingers?" she said. We showed her our hands, scrubbed red at the tips.

My father, still in his sweater, slumped behind the wheel of the station wagon. Usually, for dinners up there he dressed more carefully than for the office. Today he looked as roughed up as the cat after a bad night. "I'll drive, Tom," my mother said. "You can join us once you've changed."

He said, "I'm driving and I'm going to the house now."

"Get out," she said, much louder. Then he started the car and it jerked forward, fast enough for the tires to spit out sprays of pebbles.

We stood there, watching the car go up the hill, the exhaust curling behind it. "Come on," my mother said, sharp as one of her needles. We started to walk quickly up the driveway, but her heels sank a little in the gravel, made her tilt.

We passed the hunting blind, which sat on low stilts in the middle of the field between my grandparents' and the Cottage. The geese had never figured out they shouldn't fly over the blind. Every year, I would listen to a pop rip open the sky, watch a scarf

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of smoke float over the blind and then jump a little when a bird thumped down, like a dark, heavy pillow. Sometimes the hunters hit it in the feathers of the chest and the stain would spread like a red starfish.

The station wagon was parked with its nose almost in the privet hedge that guarded the Big House. My mother leaned her shoulder against the heavy door with its knocker the shape of a brass bundle of corn. She didn't even stop to fix our hair.

My father was standing by the cart in the library where drinks were poured. The dogs barked when we came in. My mother shoved them aside, without looking. No one told them hush and they sniffed my sister and me, noses deep in our skirts. ''Nina?" my grandmother asked. Grandma wore a pink wool dress, belted at the waist. She looked more like a headmistress than the headmistress at my school.

My mother's hand flew to the earring I'd just screwed on. "Tom, could we talk a moment?" she said.

My father poured a stream of whisky in a glass. "Like a drink, Nina?

"For Christ's sake," Uncle Gerard muttered in a tough way. "Tom, get that sweater off and sit down."

Aunt Rebecca and my cousin Astrid looked at my father, but they didn't say anything. Astrid played with the buckle on her kilt made from the same plaid as mine. My mother's face was as yellow as the paper in the atlas that lay open on the table by the fireplace.

My grandfather coughed and the sound made a current run through the room. He sat behind the card table and started to shuffle his deck. The cards made slow, fat snaps against each other. He took a cigarette, brown at both ends, and made it glow with a small silver lighter. He stopped to look at his cards, slap red on black, put up an ace. Still looking at the cards, he said, lazy, almost bored, "Such a bad example for the children."

"Example?" my father said, breaking the word into three sharp

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pieces. His cheeks burned brighter. My mother's face looked like it had been torn in two. Then my grandfather laughed, like a human barking. The pleats on his neck shook, then he pulled on his cigarette and stopped making that sound.

My father picked up his drink, looked at it closely, as if he'd found a bug in the ice, then tossed it. We watched the way you'd watch the fall of a goose, but this was gold and glass and liquid, moving sideways. It smashed above the fireplace and burst into sharp feathers of crystal. My father turned and left the room. I could hear his footsteps, fast and soft and fading.

For a second, even the dogs were still. Then my uncle shouted at the children, "To the playroom!" When the door closed, my sister started crying, loud, like a crow. She stopped almost as soon as she started. Astrid and George grabbed the best chairs in the playroom and sulked. My sister and I went to see Lola.

And though grown-ups never went to see her, my father was there. Anyone Lola called Miss This or Mister That stood where wood turned to tile. Lola called my grandmother Mrs. Mac-Farlane, so as far as I knew, she had never seen her own kitchen.

But Lola pretended it was normal to have my father here. She'd made room for him at the table, even though he was red and breathing hard. "Sit down, chickens," she told us. "Have a cookie." There were lacy oatmeal ones and yellow ones with the single dark eye of a raisin. We stared at our father.

"Hi, girls," he said. We stood near Lola. He had driven off without us. He had thrown a glass. Lola's big stove warmed my back. Lola looked at us and said "Well, now." Later she would turn us slowly around, one hand on our waists, to see how we had changed since we had last seen her. She didn't care what the changes were, she just wanted to make sure she'd seen them.

"Smells good," my father said. The kitchen was full of the dark smell of goose. We never ate turkey at Thanksgiving like every-

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one else. Instead, we sat down to goose, a bird that my grandfather had shot and the dogs retrieved. Last year, my father broke a tooth on a lead pellet in the meat. My grandmother blamed Lola, but my grandfather was the one to clean the bird.

"I hate goose," I said loudly.

"They'll be missing you, Mr. Tom," Lola said, jerking her head toward the dining room, the library, my grandfather.

"I threw a glass in there, Lola," he said and got up from the table.

Lola put her spoon, tan to the middle with gravy, on the countertop. "Are you feeling all right, Mr. Tom?"

He paced a little. "If that sonofabitch tells you to pick it up, don't. I will pick it up. I broke it. Do not touch it." He stood there then said, "Come here, birds."

Lola said, "Whatever you want, Mr. Tom," and tucked us closer to her.

But he came nearer. "My girls," he said. "My birds." His hand on top of my head felt like a thick hot plate. I smelled him then, the denseness of him, mixed with something sharp and living from Lola, all wrapped together in goose.

He left the kitchen and before Lola could tell me not to, I followed him. He went to my grandfather's office, where the guns lay black and long in a glass-fronted cabinet. My father stood in front of it and the sheet of glass caught his face and a branch of privet bouncing in the wind outside. He took down a rifle and rocked it lightly in his hands. His eyes and face and the gun were shining.

"It's nearly time for George, Dad," I said.

He looked at me, with that crowded look. "You're almost a big girl." The rifle was quiet in his hands.

"No, I'm not," I shouted. "I'm not," and thought maybe if I shouted it again someone would hear.

He walked out toward the field and even though all I wanted to

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