Marry or Burn (34 page)

Shelley said, “Maybe we should leave this Earth.”

Mr. Burney pulled one of his gray eyebrows down. “Dear lady,” he said to Diana, “this was her parents' place. But,” he added, “the kids went for it in a big way, in those days. Get 'em up in the tree house and you wouldn't see 'em for days.”

“Tree house?” said Diana.

“Look there. Left of the end cabin. Look up. High.” And there it was, a neat structure with a slanted roof, on a platform.

“Holy shit,” Diana said. “That's high.”

Shelley said, “How about when the tree sways?”

“You hold on. Sure. But we got cables up there, we got shocks. Auto shocks. The problem was snow. First one, the roof fell in. So we made it a lean-to. My son came up with that.”

“How did you get it up there? Can people go up?”

“Can if they get a ladder truck in here.”

“How did you get up and down?”

“Had us a rope ladder. She said it had to come down. A guest'll get on a ladder every time. We had a groom go up there and call for help. No way would he do what he was told. We had to have our boy go up. The little fella. Coulda walked a sheep through a wolf pack. Went up after the guy and brought him down.”

“No kidding. I bet Shelley could get up there. She does that stuff. Don't deny it, you do. Well, I guess I'll have to settle for the swing. Now, save my place.” She patted the log by Mr. Burney. “Bet you climbed up and hung the swing too, didn't you.”

“That'll swing a mile. Many's a kid jumped out and banged himself up, till she”—he waved his splint at the house—“tells me I have to take that down too. But I never did it.”

Then for a few minutes we just sat there in the noise of the wind. “Shelley was just reading me about that sound,” Diana called from the swing. “There's a tree book in the cabin.”

“Her dad was your serious bookworm,” said Mr. Burney. “Like her.”

The loudness of the wind, as if a bellowing crowd were massing out of sight, was giving me a feeling that was part exhilaration and part the wish to go indoors. This would be the sound that Eddie talked about, of casual threat. Eddie kept track of sounds. He said an eagle sounded like a mouse, not a kingly
bird. A bear foraging sounded like a larger, more appalling pig. As for wind, he saw himself as some sort of apostle of it, though not someone who would let it intimidate him. The birds could vanish, the deer bed down, Eddie would stay out in the wind for the joy of it. I argued with him. I know I was always arguing. Let it have its own joy. Who was he to stand up to wind?

Outdoor people. My theory was—here he would back away with his hands up—no, really, they weren't really outdoors, these hikers and climbers, these mountain bikers with their gripper tires. They made it all a kind of indoors. They went into the elements as if there were a two-way friendship out there. Even Shelley forgot her suspicions and talked about birdcalls and the moon. When what was out there was wind, with its purpose that could not be gauged. Wildfire. No friendship. A bear was out there.

Without our noticing, it had gone completely quiet. Mr. Burney reversed course on the dangers of the place. “Here comes Bob now. I told him, we got the tents, you come out here with the little guys, put 'em in a sleeping bag and see if they don't have a time. We used to be out here with our guys. We had three.”

I should have asked where the three were now but I was still thinking,
Bob?
Bob was the husband. The dead husband.

But he meant Bobby, Gerda's son. She had two; Bobby had flown in from the Midwest with his family and Glen from Florida with his. The men—they were boys, really—were coming down the path from the cabins without their wives. Both of them stopped at the rope swing.

In no time Glen was confiding to Diana that he had had to put this part of the country behind him. It was ruined for him, the Northwest. Was it, Diana wanted to know, maybe a little creepy
to be back? It was, and he wasn't sure why his mother had picked this particular bed-and-breakfast, when she had never been here either. It was nowhere near the other place but it was
out here.

“Hey, it's a nice place,” Bobby said. “We always camped on the east side. Just look around you. That's why they'd bring us over here. Look at those trees.”

“Incredible trees,” said Diana, raising her eyes with their suggestion that things around her might be extensions of herself.

Bobby said, “See that thick bark.” The bark on the pines had a pattern of segmented creatures swimming over each other to reach the top of the tree. “Smell it. Vanilla. There's nothing like that ponderosa smell.”

“Mm, I see what you mean,” said Diana. “More like caramel.”

“Yeah, we hiked, we camped,” Glen resumed. “We rock climbed, we orienteered. You name it. They made us go hunting, for Christ's sake. Our dad—”

“That's the dumbest thing I ever heard,” said Bobby, socking his brother on the arm. “We wanted to go hunting.”

“I've never camped,” Diana said, pumping the swing. “My feeling about camping is that I would passionately hate it.”

“Come on, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't,” said Bobby. Neither brother seemed to know where to locate Diana in the family. She was swinging with her legs out in front of her. She scuffed her boot heels in the dirt and leaned back with her hair hanging. The brothers on either side, not quite arguing, did not push the swing but slapped at the rope when it passed them.

Shelley spoke up from the bench. “You wouldn't hate camping.”

“I really want to crawl into a three-foot space and lie down.”

“When you crawl out in the morning, it's just the world and you.”

“I need more than that.”

We heard loud whoops, and Bobby's two little boys came running down from the cabins, with his wife Cindy behind them, and Becca, short and stocky as a child herself, with a child's dusky tan, carrying her baby in one of those car seats with handles. “They wouldn't go down for their nap,” Cindy said tiredly but without irritation. “Maybe that means they'll go to bed early.” She was my age or younger, somewhere in her twenties, and Becca, as she herself had told Diana, was only twenty-two. Gerda's sons had both married young, just as she had. I wondered how Cindy summoned her weary patience. I wondered how it would feel to have assembled human beings out of your own cells. The way Becca swung the car seat it could have held the groceries. Eddie would have liked that. It wasn't as if no one had ever made the decision to have kids before. You should just do it. Get on with it, without worrying about the giant entry port you had just carved into yourself and a succession of others, for all the possible griefs.

When I looked into the car seat a blue stare leapt out like a shock from a carpet. “Well!” I said. “Who are you?”

“This is Justin,” said Becca solemnly, like a child introducing a doll that you will have to pretend is real. “Justin, this is your aunt-to-be. She can hold you if she wants to, after you eat.” As I bent over him the blue eyes narrowed, went out of focus, caressed me powerfully when they refocused, fixing me in some world without excuses or even reasons for what anybody might do. Shall I hold you? I asked the eyes, because it seemed the power was his, he could just as easily pull me into the car seat with him.

Diana came over and looked in. She pulled back in the same dizzy way. “Wow. How old?” she said.

“Four months,” said Becca. “Exactly a year and a half ago I gave up smoking so we could have him.”

“Worth it, I bet,” Diana said.

“It was worth everything you have in this world,” Becca said with a dead calm as if she were reading from a brochure. “Turn around,” she read on. She meant Glen; he turned and she pulled a folded rubber pad out of his hip pocket, and sighing briskly, spread it on the pine needles. Glen hoisted the baby over onto the pad, knelt, and unsnapped him. A sharp sweet stench went up. After a bit Glen said, “This is cornstarch I'm powdering with,” like a cook on TV. “The talcum they used on us, on our generation, was a poison. Went straight to the lung.”

I had a vision of legions of us moving slowly, powdered white, poisoned. “And then they wouldn't let us have cigarettes in middle school,” Becca mused, with the first sign that she could smile.

“Damn!” said Diana.

Glen said, “Becca, that is not a joke.” She had her shirt open, showing a butterfly tattoo above the nursing bra, and she was reaching for the baby but Glen held him back from her for a minute before handing him over. Becca began to nurse him in silence, as if language were being pulled out of her. Glen absorbed a tabulating look from Diana, and sat down.

Suddenly I felt, on us all, the eye of the father. The dead man. Bob. What if Bob could see this scene, with his sons, his grand-children. What were they doing here? What if he could see what was going to happen. That in the morning someone who had lived a life in which she had loved him enough to die for him was going to stand under the trees and get married. So that love—had it not been a singular thing after all? Was it, with the unthinking power it had let loose, somehow repeatable?

After a while the baby let go and started in with a noise, a tone like a distant vacuum cleaner. “He'll make that sound,” Becca said, resuming her recitation. At that, Glen's jaw muscles relaxed and they gave each other that look that has to do with a baby and
some secret pageant of which it is the cause and the effect. Soon the little boys were running back and forth making competing piles of the broomlets the wind had sheared off the ponderosas.

“You know, Gerda is a wonderful woman,” Cindy said to me, quietly.

The older one, Robbie, stopped with his handfuls of pine needles. “Gerda is Grandma,” he warned me solemnly. “She killed a bear.”

“You'll see. We all love her to pieces. But you know, Jenny, I hope I can say this to you, she has had a lot happen to her. The guys too. I hope the past won't come up. I hope we won't get into that.”

“I don't think we will. I'll be careful. I know what you mean.” I had just met Cindy; I didn't think I could ask her if her mother-in-law was crazy.

“And so when is your Aunt Karen going to get here?” Of course while Gerda was closing up the life she had begun in Indianapolis near Bobby and Cindy, instead of the one in Seattle she had been planning to leave behind before she met our father, Karen had gotten to know Cindy. On the phone. “Yeah,” Cindy said, “if she couldn't get Gerda she'd call me. One afternoon we talked for an hour. She's something, isn't she. I just love her.” I could imagine Cindy's afternoon on the phone with Karen. “And I can't wait to meet your daddy. I know he's such a gentleman.”

I had one of those realizations you get when somebody makes a comment in passing, that our father was, indeed, a gentleman. When an owner brought in a matted old beast on its last legs, I know my father had comfort to lend, sometimes for an hour or more, waiting for the person to be ready before giving any sign that the agreed-upon syringe of release and departure lay on a tray in the next room. “He wouldn't have wanted a life where he couldn't run.” “This was a cat that couldn't have been subjected to daily needles.” And so . . . did that mean he understood
someone who had killed an animal? Or not killed it, but fought it with the intent to kill? And did he ask himself these questions, or did he just finally meet somebody after all these years? And who was this woman? Did they all in fact love her, as Cindy said? Or was there something about her blemished, touched with animal breath? I knew about that. Bears ate carrion, their lips slopped, baring the gum, their tongues lolled. They were not proud, lofty animals. The males would kill and eat a cub. “And I love your sister,” Cindy added. “Aren't these cabins sweet?”

The cabins were knotty pine, with a sink in the bedroom and a row of faded books on the dresser. Every cabin had its books, and behind Mr. Burney's chair in the den were shelves of them, dim and formal, representing some farther-back life than the paperbacks in the parlor for the guests. A tall pump organ with fern stands on either side of it spoke of that life, into which Mr. Burney seemed to have stumbled from a later time but still not the present.

The cabins had tin showers and wall hooks instead of closets, but in the main house there were tied-back curtains and doilies under the lamps and chocolates on the pillow. “Who would have their honeymoon in a bed and breakfast?” Diana had whispered loudly on the stairs. “I mean, young couples.”

 

AS THE AFTERNOON wore on, Mr. Burney grew more unsteady on his feet. He had lugged out a cooler of beer, and flung a tablecloth over a stump for the wine bottles. Shelley helped him with a case of soda water and I went in to get the glasses, while he veered off to the swing, where Diana was pushing the little boys and listening to their fathers. Mr. Burney stood by for a while, rocking with the pines, and then he stomped over and yanked the cooler open. “Folks, what are you waiting for? Let's get started here.” He made his way back to the swing, and with a formal
concentration opened two bottles and presented one to Diana. Glen was explaining something to her, counting his points on his fingers, and without taking her eyes off his face she accepted the beer with a little wave. Mr. Burney raised his splint. “Hear, hear! Drink up! To matrimony!”

Then we all got off the stumps and joined in, except Becca. “She's nursing,” Glen reminded Mr. Burney. “Anything she drinks, he drinks.”

“Hey, look who we've got here!” cried Burney. And there they were, coming out of the woods, our father and Gerda.

I saw them swinging hands. Then she fell behind him, coming down the log steps at the trailhead. I could see a head of white hair and a hot pink shirt. We all got up off our tree stumps and cheered as they came shyly across the pine needles.