Half Wild (14 page)

Inside the house down the hill the dancer lights a candelabra, and the guests gather around the table and sit down. They pour wine and raise their glasses to toast something; they laugh and smile. A month ago Sparrow's company slept for a week in a bombed-out house without food, only fresh water dropped by plane. Every day she went to the library and looked at pictures on CNN's website: marines behind mud walls holding machine guns, marines playing with chickens, marines dashing across bullet-sprayed fields. One of the bodies in camouflage looked like Sparrow from the side, but Apple couldn't tell for sure: an all-American-looking boy. When Apple thinks of her child holding a gun, she feels the world fall out from under her. She thinks of car accidents and police brutality and childhood leukemia and the seagulls
dead from oil spills in Alaska or the Gulf of Mexico. She's afraid, sometimes, to breathe. She hasn't washed her hair for days.

Apple finishes her food and puts her bowl in the sink. She'll do the dishes in the morning. She won't mind; she likes washing dishes. It's what she will do after she washes the dishes that worries her. The
now
to contend with. Thich Nhat Hanh says our true home is the here and now. He says,
Breathe! You are alive.
Apple sits back down in her rocker and wishes, as she sometimes wishes at night now, that she still drank. Just a little. Not like her father, but just a little bit of wine. She says the words out loud: “Breathe, you are alive.” She repeats them in her head as she closes her eyes and practices her breathing.

When she opens her eyes again there is motion in the big house below: people clearing plates, clearing glasses, carrying them through the door that leads to the kitchen. Then they are lifting the tablecloth off the table, moving chairs, moving the table itself. Apple can no longer see the table, and she is wondering at what kind of dinner party people disassemble the table, when the couples come back into the room and start dancing. They dance beautifully. The men wrap their right arms around the women; their left hands cup the women's slender fingers. The trapeze artist twirls under her husband's arm, and her red dress spins out around her like an inverted poppy. Another woman is wearing blue jeans and a top that looks
like lingerie. She and her partner dance with their knees bent, shaking their elbows and hips and heads. The third couple holds each other so tight that from where Apple sits they look like one large person, spinning. The sky above the house is filled with stars, and it is a beautiful thing, all that stardust lighting up the snow, the people on earth dancing.

She hasn't been to a party in a long time. When Sparrow was five Apple got stoned and lost him. Or he lost her. All she remembers is a bonfire at the edge of Sunset Lake, people drumming, kids running loose, a woman singing Tracy Chapman's “Fast Car,” a joint being passed her way. She remembers thinking this is how it would be in other parts of the world—the Amazon, Africa, an earlier America—kids barefoot in the dark, their own tribe, their own wilderness. She remembers feeling happy and not-alone there at the fire, singing along, her body swaying, the warm night fragrant with pollen. She remembers a short and muscular and handsome man playing a fiddle; she remembers he had been the one to pass her the joint. After that was a blur: a child screaming somewhere in the woods. A woman calling out, “Where are the kids?” and people running this way and that. Then a man's voice calling out “Got him! He's fine,” and a wet boy, not hers, being dragged out of the water. His mother wrapped him in sweaters and jackets, and his father carried him to the fire. The mother
started singing in the boy's ear, and the father smiled, kissed him.
Fine, baby, you're fine,
he sang, a mantra of comfort. But Apple couldn't find Sparrow. “Sparrow?” she called into the woods, toward the water. “Sparrow? Where are you?” No one noticed her prowling around out there in the woods by the water's edge, stoned. No one heard her calling. It wasn't until what seemed much later, after the lake-wet child's hair had dried and his limbs had stopped shaking, after people had finished celebrating his rescue, that Apple heard the whimpering. She followed the sound until she found Sparrow, crouched against the wall of an empty lake cabin, a long way from the fire. There was a long, thin scratch on his left shin, a trickle of blood. “Mama,” he had said, looking up at her, his face wet with tears. Apple sat down next to him and wiped the blood with her skirt, then reached for his hand and held it. She couldn't find words to say. Her legs felt too long, her hands small as a child's. She sat that way until her head felt steady, until her heart calmed, until he stopped making that awful sound. That was the last time she got stoned.

A side door of the big house opens, letting light spill out onto the porch for a moment, then closes. A shadow floats across the lit yard, then disappears into darkness. Apple wonders if someone is a closet smoker, or is making a phone call in secret, but that kind of deception feels unfitting to these people and their happiness. Inside, all
she can see is the couple wrapped together, tilting their heads back and away from each other, their bodies still entwined, still spinning, as if they are a plant growing outward.

The last time she spoke to Sparrow was twenty-three days ago at three fifteen in the morning, a few days after they cleared the road and his company returned to food and water. She leapt out of bed and stumbled to the phone, picking it up with her breathless “hello,” and then there was the pause she wanted, the pause she is always hoping for, the pause that tells her someone is calling long, long distance. It always feels a little like communicating with the stars. But all she could hear was Sparrow's voice saying a few muffled words she couldn't understand, her name—
Apple—
rising like a question, and the crackling snap of the connection ending. Then it was just the dark trailer, and the refrigerator buzzing, and her cold feet on linoleum. Since then the fighting has escalated. It is all over the news: insurgent attacks; marines dying in helicopter crashes; marines dying from friendly fire. She is almost sure she saw him in a photo on a website a week ago: a company in the mountains, mud-spattered, in combat, and at the far edge of the frame a boy, Sparrow-like, too thin, running.

Apple closes her eyes and does the breathing thing she has taught herself to do: long inhale through the nose, count to three, exhale through parted lips. She breathes,
and as she does so she erases those pictures from her mind. Her heartbeat slows, her limbs relax.

She learned a lot that year she took care of Cora as she was dying.
The snow,
Cora had said, her voice barely audible, her thin hand in Apple's.
Oh how I love the snow.

Apple feels her toes on the heater, her long body in its chair. One, two, three, exhale. It is working. She is growing sleepy. She is almost asleep, and in her half dream she is floating across that open, snow-covered field, spinning like the dancers down the hill. The refrigerator comes on, rattles, goes off. The wind picks up outside. Her boy is a small thing, suckling on her breast, and she is sure-of-heart for him. They are there by that abandoned cabin near the lake, her arms wrapped around him, his blood drying on her skirt, and she is whispering,
Fine, baby, you're fine
. He is flying back over the ocean, toward her. He meets her somewhere in that dull sky, up above the field.

A knock at the door and Apple startles. She opens her eyes and feels a momentary jolt of excitement. Sparrow? It is an old instinct. But the knock comes again and she is suddenly fully awake.
A knock at the door.
Her stomach dips, acid swarming. Isn't this how it happens? Two retired marines, parking at the bottom of the hill and walking up the snow-covered road. Or just a couple of kids in their Blue Dress uniforms, not much older than Sparrow, death already in their eyes. Either way, two bodies standing there in the dark and cold, eyes turned down.

No lights, she thinks. No lights. They don't have to know I'm here. If this is it, I cannot take it, I cannot hear it, I would rather live in the dark than know. Another knock but Apple doesn't move: body stiff, limbs tingling, metal taste on her tongue. Breathe! She wants to will herself back to the dream: that flying, that field, those arms.
No birth, no death, no coming, no going.
The knocking stops and does not come again: silence, and that eerie light of the moon streaking now across the room.

A few minutes pass and she gets up, walks quietly to the door. She cannot feel her feet or hands. She thinks of her mother's sturdy God, of that night at the lake and all her failures. She opens the door. A cold wind hits her face. She blinks, squints, inhales.

At first all she can see is the snow that has begun to fall: drifting shadows. Then, the gray streak moving down the driveway, a figure against all that white. A whimper escapes her lips that sounds, in her own ears, like a cat dying. Watermelons, mud, boys in fields.

But there is a skirt, swaying. Her eyes are adjusting. A woman. A skirt under a down jacket, the swing of female hips: the trapeze artist's red dress. Apple releases the air out of her lungs. Her eyes fall to the step below her. There is something there, a plate covered in tinfoil. She reaches out and brushes the tinfoil off with her toe: pie. A piece of pie. Even in this light she can see the juices, pooling in concentric rings. A beautiful slice of berry pie.

Apple's limbs start to shake before the tears come. She
can think of times people have given her money, loaned her cars, helped stack her wood, but this is so surprising: this woman, this skirt, this gift.

She stands in the open doorway, cold air filling up the trailer, snot and tears running down her face, her body heaving in sobs, and she does not feel cold. She does not feel cold here at the top of the hill, watching it snow, immersed in the magnificent silence that comes with falling snow. He will come back, she says, and believes it. He will come back.
The long road turns to joy.

The morning of the day Tub died we went out driving around looking at houses. We took the back roads we grew up on: Butterfield, Stark, Stickney Brook, Cowpath 40. You could say it was a hobby of ours. This driving. Looking. Every time we drove one of those old familiar roads something was different—a new house popped up, or an addition, or an old house sold, or an old house torn down. We'd been doing it for some forty-seven years together. “Could sell our brains to some historical society when we die, Tub,” I said.

Tub chuckled. “Worth a buck or two,” he said. “Maybe.”

Dying both was and was not a joke between us. It seemed to come up at least once or twice a day, without us even meaning to. “Not like I'm gonna go jump off a bridge,” one of us would say. Or, “Well, when I die don't go complaining I didn't treat you nice.” Or, “Well, kill me
why don't ya.” It was a joke because Tub and I were always jokers. It wasn't a joke because of Tub's heart and because it seemed that what neither of us was saying out loud was spurting out every other goddamn place like in a broken fuel line. I guess those holes are where the truth gets out.

And that day was just like any other. It was mid-November, the air blue as a robin's egg. We didn't work on Sundays, so we got into our thirty-year-old green diesel Rabbit and drove around. We brought a thermos of coffee, ham sandwiches, and a couple beers, which we propped between our legs. It was cold out, “cold enough to freeze them titties,” Tub said that morning as we walked out the door.

“Ha,” I said, “what's left of them.”

That's Tub and I: meant for each other. We went east on Stickney, then turned left onto Lake, then crossed the green metal bridge that goes up onto the ridge above Silver Creek. We passed the old Adams farmhouse that got bought in the seventies sometime by some hippies and turned into a commune.

“Little house on the prairie here,” Tub said, and I took a swig of my beer and pinched his thigh.

We passed Bud Williams's trailer and garage where he fixes school buses. His girlfriend, Shelley, was out in the yard putting leaves on her flower beds, her bare legs under her dress fat as watermelons. Tub honked and waved, and Shelley looked up and waved back. “First time I see that girl work outside in her life,” Tub said.

“Girl,” I said. “She's probably fifty.”

“Not as perty as my girl,” Tub said, and leaned over and pinched my wrinkly, seventy-some-year-old all-bone thigh.

We took the car down Auger Hole road and turned left onto Butterfield. Tub finished his beer, and I reached into the backseat and handed him another. Only a few leaves still clung to the trees, and it hurt me a little in the chest to see them hanging on and shaking like that, all brown and ropey. We passed a hippie house tucked up against the bank of the river, shingles and glass everywhere, a stained-glass window and a falling-in porch. We used to bet on how long each of them hippies would last. Most of them didn't, or they moved out of their little shacks and built themselves houses their daddies paid for and got themselves jobs, or they turned the shacks into big glass houses. The men Tub would chuckle at:
Goddamn hippies,
he would say. But he loved the young pretty women with the long hair. He told me it was for business that he was so friendly, but I know Tub well enough to know he was charmed like any other good man by a pretty woman's smile.

He was charmed by me, too. Sixteen in a truck, pretty then as any of these young back-to-the-land women are, but I knew how to rope a horse and build a shed and strip the bark off a tree. Now I've been good and weathered by sun and wind and I know I'm missing one front tooth, but it's okay. Tub loves me just the same. That I know.

At the top of Farm Hill Road, past the Maises' and some goat-farming ladies' place, Tub surprised me by pulling the car over on the side of the road. I knew his old family cemetery was around there somewhere, but I couldn't remember quite where. Tub got out and took a leak in a ditch. I got out too and stretched my arms up above my head, and then he headed into the woods where there's a break between the stone walls and I followed. “Say hello to the corpses,” Tub said. I just nodded. Like I said, it's what we don't say where the truth slips out.

It's not far through the woods: a half mile at the most. Just when you start to think you're lost you can make out the stone wall that surrounds the graves.
1790
, the dates on the first stones say. Quite a few have the last name Stark, like my Tub. Their stones are falling over this way and that in the leaves, like some people's teeth I know.

“Looks like our teeth, Tub!” I called out from where I stood, looking down at them this way and that. Tub grinned, showing me his.

He rubbed his thick fingers over the names and started shouting some of them out loud; Constance, Ezekial, Zipporah, Desire. The lucky ones died at birth or of old age. The unlucky, midway. There's lots of ways we could have died if we stopped to think of it: one widow-maker limb, one dumb cut, the horse's sled overturning in a rut. I thought for a moment of Tub's heart, and then I put that thought away like cold cash locked up good.

Tub sat on a stone with his hands on his knees. He pulled his half-empty beer out of his pocket and took a slug, then looked up at the sky. He was still handsome as the devil: pink cheeks and hands like a bear. I pulled out our ham sandwiches and sat down on the wall next to Tub, and we ate. The wind bit at my ears, and I pulled my coat up around them. Tub, he moved closer, put his arm around my waist. I could hear the sound of his chewing in my ears, he was so close. He smelled dank like old skin and sweet like apples. My man. My man with the way with women and horses.

When Tub was around the horses he would get quiet, his breath deeper, move slow and steady and calm as a leaf in pond water. He knew just what would make those horses spook, and he was always looking ahead for it, seeing it before they would, pulling on their reins ever so slightly, touching their flank so they would know even in that moment who was in charge. When he spoke to them his voice was low and strong and he didn't waste words, just said what they needed to hear and then they'd do it. It was a beautiful thing to see, even for me. “Women and animals,” I've said to him forever. “You know how to work them both.” And Tub, he'd just show me his handsome set of yellow teeth and flash his devil's grin.

But that day he was feeling something different. I could see it in the way he was moving his fingers—rubbing them back and forth on his jeans. The doctor said his heart was
bad because of diet—that Tub should stop eating red meat and drinking beer, but I said he had a weak heart because he has always had a weak heart—for women and for animals and for woods and most especially for me. But that doesn't mean that heart didn't keep me up at night. His breathing was heavier than it used to be, his face veering on a shade of plum.

It started one day last September while Tub was delivering wood to a woman on Butler Road, a big ranch house with a pool and an attached garage. Tub dumped the wood where he had always dumped it, and then this Barbara Stokes comes running out of the house screaming and yelling something about a rhododendron and Tub thought
Somebody's tendon?
Like someone must be hurt there in the house and so he ran toward the door all worried until he realized this woman was upset at
him
and she was squawking like a chicken he said and flapping her groomed arms all around and finally she calmed down enough for him to figure out that he had dumped the two cords of wood right on this lady's newly planted bed of rhododendrons.

That's when you know there's a part of them that doesn't really respect you.

That night after dinner Tub's heart began to hurt. After that it hurt him every day, though he wouldn't make a fuss over it. Like that morning amongst those stones. “Look at them crows,” Tub said, and he pointed to the
edge of the clearing where two big ones sat in the top branches of a hemlock tree.

“Love birds,” I said, pinching Tub's thigh. “Crows are birds that mate for life.”

“Damn racket hounds.”

“Damn ugly love birds,” I said, and giggled, and Tub he turned toward me and said, “Least they ain't missing their teeth,” and we both giggled some more.

After that day at Barbara Stokes's he hadn't thought too much about his heart at first, just went out with the flashlight to the lean-to and fed the horses like he always did and gave them fresh water, and when he came back in he was breathing heavy and kind of holding his chest, and I said, “Tub, honey, you don't look too goddamn well,” and he said it was nothing to worry about so we just climbed into bed early like that, him all quiet and me lying next to him wide awake as a buzzard.

The next day it wasn't better, so I said, “Tub, you and me going to Doc Whatsihoosit.” Tub said okay, which I knew was bad. We walked down the trail and got into our VW Rabbit and drove to the doctor, who said sure enough, Tub's arteries were mostly blocked and that he was lucky he come in when he did and that Tub should have bypass surgery, and when Tub said, “No goddamn way in hell!” the doc said well then you're gonna have to change some things about the way you do your living. No red meat, no drink, no hard work for a few months. Slow
and easy walks are good. Clearly Doc didn't know my Tub like I do. And, the doctor said, there's a good chance you'll die.

So there we were, sitting looking at dead people's stones in the middle of the day facing winter low on cash and grain and something else too. Spunk, maybe. All that summer, despite Tub's efforts to help, I had to get the firewood out and split and into the truck by myself, which meant we only sold half as much. Tub could drive the truck still and do the delivering, but he couldn't be tying the chains around the logs and he couldn't be working Shoehorn and Jake and he couldn't even lift the logs onto the splitter. It's okay—I know how to work the muscles in my short arms and legs—but it wasn't good for Tub to see me doing all that work and him just sitting by holding his chest and breathing hard. “It's okay, Tub,” I had said to him a few days earlier. “You're still the best man in fifty miles square.” But that didn't seem to heat him up much. He just grunted and said, “Sorry, Vi,” looking like he'd swallowed some rusty piece of metal.

“Ready to hit the road?” he said. The wind had picked up even more, so I nodded and lifted myself up from the stone wall with a little grunt.

“So long, old folks,” I said toward the loose gray stones. Tub's dead people didn't say anything back to us, but the crows in the trees made a racket.

Tub kicked some leaves in the direction of the stones. “Don't go running off on us now,” he said to his dead
folks. Then he spit into the leaves by his feet and took my hand and we walked back to the car like that.

We climbed in and started her up. I opened the thermos of coffee and poured some into the Styrofoam cups we kept on the floor. We sat there for a while at the side of the road with the motor running and sipped the black coffee. It warmed my tongue and the back of my throat and my belly. No cars passed. Just Tub and me, sitting there like that, drinking coffee and admiring the view.

We emptied the thermos and Tub started driving home. He took some of the skinny back roads we like going on; Turnpike, Old Farm, Fox. They're roads we'd known our whole lives. Roads we'd seen change like our own faces. You could map our whole lives on these little two-bit dirt roads and not have to go farther than forty square miles. I don't say that like I think I'm missing something.

At the corner of Turnpike and Fox the trees open up into a field and there's a view past Round Mountain all the way to Monadnock in New Hampshire. Tub pulled the car over there, and we climbed out and stood with our backs against it and looked out at the hills. We've logged half of the woods we can see. Lenny Whitman owned this field, then Otie Hollows, then a fella from down south for just a few years, and now some silver-haired college professor who lives alone, quiet, like the rest of us. Little family-tree maps of who owned what back as far as I know for every piece of ground I see. There were no houses in view from where we stood, and I was happy
for that. But at the far corner you could see where Rich Miller had sold large chunks of Whiskey Mountain—my cousin Sugar's unowned haunt—for subdivisions fifteen years ago.

“Goddamn,” Tub said.

“Horse-ass,” I said.

“We should go down there with dynamite.”

“Take the horses in there and have them shit all over the new floors,” I said, giggling. Tub snorted and looked at me, and for a moment the fear disappeared from his round face, and he came over and picked me up like he sometimes does—I'm barely five feet tall, just over a hundred pounds—and swung me in his arms like I was a little girl and said, “Vi, you're the best, honey
,
” and then he kissed me straight on my mouth.

So that's the kind of guy Tub is, or was. Heart as warm as an in-ground tuber.

We drove home the rest of the way in silence. Round Mountain Road, North Branch, Old School. When we got to our track we left the Rabbit parked at the road and climbed up to our place on foot. Our house is way back in the woods in a place you can only get to with a truck in summer and a skimobile in winter. It's more like a collection of rooms tied together than a house—each covered in tar paper and whatever kind of siding came our way at the time—tin, plywood, pine. We don't have electricity and we don't have running water inside—just a hand pump well that sits out in the yard a ways. I guess that's
why we never had kids, Tub and I, because we knew they never could have stood it, or liked it, like Tub and I do. Now there's only a moment or two here or there when I wonder—when I think about Tub being gone and what on earth is going to happen next—when I wonder what I might have done with a little squalling fish of a baby, milk squirting out of my two-bit breasts. But I don't wonder about it much.