“Good,” she said, without taking her eyes off the commercial. It was an advertisement for a doll that performed the bodily functions of a real baby.
I took amphetamines in college but that was nothing like the bug-eyed, empty-bellied rush I felt during those days when I systematically got rid of my farm. Soon after the offer was made, I called Dick Smelts, the local auctioneer. He was the only person in Prairie Center, besides Theresa, who spoke to me that summer. When I told him I wanted to have the sale in three weeks he said, “What’s your hurry? You can’t get it ready that fast.” I said I was sure I could. I’d sell the herd, the tractors, the milking equipment, the hen house, the watering tanks, the baler, the combine, the fencing, the odds and ends. Hordes of people, sensing desperation, would come from miles around for a bargain.
“That’s going to be tight, buddy,” he said.
“Everything’s tight,” I said.
There was only one person who might have understood my action. Theresa would take the sale personally and think I had overreacted.
Rafferty was going to be livid. Dan didn’t seem to care about much of anything. But had Alice been an outsider, I think she would have understood. She was extreme herself. If I’d been in a fiction, the sale would have made sense to her. She must have understood how a thing can be spoiled. If it hadn’t been her property, she would see that my course, ditching the place, was reasonable.
On the Thursday after we had all visited Alice, Emma was sick with a sore throat and a rash. I ended up taking her to a doctor in Blackwell’s satellite clinic down in Silver Lake. She had scarlet fever. Claire was probably next in line. If I had made up the excuse of illness to avoid visiting Alice it would have seemed flimsy, but our reason had the fortitude of truth. I wrote to her immediately, explaining that the girls needed to be isolated for a few days, that I would see her the following week. It was good to have a reprieve. The girls weren’t uncomfortable once they got the antibiotic. They didn’t have to suffer too much to accommodate my need to stay away from the jail.
I would have liked to find a way not to visit the following week also. By that time Mrs. Reesman had made her offer. If I didn’t make the trip, Alice would know that something was awry. By the same token, if I did come she would be shrewd enough to see some change in my face. There was danger, and I guess the risk made me bold. It was a challenge, to keep her from knowing, to be self-possessed and sedate while my heart raged. I felt strapping and loud and fast and to conceal my secret I had to be quiet and slow and careful. I brazenly parked in the jail lot, in a space reserved for a police vehicle. I locked the girls in the car with candy and crafts, leaving a crack in the window for air. Emma had charge of my old-fashioned watch. “Twenty minutes,” I said to her. “When the hand gets to the four. This is the only way. The only way.” They were to stay in the car. They were not to roll down the window. They were to stay and keep still. They had learned that I was hard, that nothing would move me.
I thought Alice might not show up when it was her pod’s appointed time. I waited, watching the other inmates file past. She was the last one in line. She sidled up to her stool, slid on, and then picked up the phone. She didn’t so much as glance at me. Her bruise had turned a pale yellow-green. She was wearing the pink bandanna that made her look bald.
“I’m mad,” she said.
“I know.”
“Nobody tells me anything anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“Theresa hasn’t written to me for weeks. What’s that shit you said about her needing family time?” She hadn’t yet graced me with her all-knowing eyes. “She suddenly stops taking care of Emma and Claire? She said it was so good for them, she went on and on about the healing process. Why do the girls think that they can only go play up there on Sunday afternoons?”
I did not correct her assumption that Theresa was caring for them while I visited the jail. “I think it’s because of Dan,” I said. “He’s suffering over Lizzy.”
She nodded, as if what I had said fully explained Theresa’s change of heart.
“What’s happened to you, Alice?”
“When my hair grows out a little more I’m going to look like Laurie Anderson. I try to imagine, for fun, that I’m on the last frontier, that this is the kind of place you go to prove yourself. There’s got to be a little something here, a lesson, some kernel. At the very least I should feel that I’ve been on some existential Conradian journey into darkness. And you, having to cope with everything, the farm, the girls, the neighbors, while I’m learning some stupid moral—”
“What happened?” I asked again.
“I bumped my head,” she said. “I don’t know. I had a concussion and they even sent me to the hospital for a few days. It was a mess. I was really surprised they didn’t call you, or Rafferty, for that matter.”
“You bumped your head? That’s all?”
She looked up then, as if the question was rude. “Yeah,” she said. She laughed, not as if it were funny. It was derisive, that Ha ha.
“This is getting long, Alice. It’s going on too long.”
When I got back to the car Emma was holding Claire in place in her seat. She had her pinned down. Claire was unable to move or make a sound. She was crying so hard her mouth was wide open all the way down to her uvula.
“She wanted to get out,” Emma shouted. “I told her she couldn’t. She was going to get out.”
I yanked both of them by their collars and pulled them to the sidewalk.
“Where are we going?” Emma cried.
“Walk. Just walk. Walk!”
Emma ran ahead. When she was a safe distance she turned and called, “I don’t ever want to go back home with you!”
“That’s a good attitude,” I said. “You keep that attitude. You’ll need it.”
In the weeks that followed I got up early, as usual. I milked as quickly as I could. The cows were surprised by the way I slapped them around. They turned their heads to look back at me, their eyes wide, as if I was a stranger. I’d go into my study and make my list and then study my list, learn it. I went from one task to the next, no longer thinking about Robbie’s doll, or Alice’s bruise, or Theresa’s sweet voice. Although nothing was further from the truth I told myself that everything was pretty well settled. Right after Mrs. Reesman made her offer, I went to the grocery store outside of Racine and found boxes. I told the girls we were going to pack up everything and then pretend we were hobos, living in freight trains, eating out of tin cans, singing all the day long, sharing one towel, living the carefree traveling life.
“You mean we’ll make fires and roast wild animals and eat them with our bare hands?” Emma asked.
“Something like that.”
“Will Mom come with us?”
“Sure.”
“Yes!” she cried.
Of course the girls had no idea how desultory it would be when the hay wagons were piled high with wash tubs and boxes of nails, old mattresses, picture frames, the broken toys. I walked through the rooms hearing the auctioneer call, “Here’saprettylittlelampshade, takethewholewagonfiftyforadollar, whatthefuck, there’stheladywithsixtydollar—” We would leave with a few suitcases. I would take what I had: two pairs of jeans, three coveralls, a few shirts and sweatshirts, and a brand new suit which would serve us well in court.
There was not as much as I’d thought there’d be to disassembling the
life we’d made. I must have had the idea that the job meant packing up the farm from its inception, over a hundred years before. I guess it seemed to me that I was dismantling the history of the place, taking it apart, year by year. Considering the age of the homestead, there wasn’t actually so much clutter. And we didn’t own much. I realized through the process that we were transients, with our few bags, moving on. We’d always been nothing more than transients stopping by in a tumbledown house.
I didn’t let myself think about what the things up in the attic and in the outbuildings had meant, what their purpose was, who had handled them, who would next own them. I went from shed to shed making piles of trash here and auction goods there. Emma and Claire knew they were to keep close, to stay clear of the pond, and out of my way. They were getting to be resourceful, my girls were. They had thick, black dirt under their fingernails and their hair was matted in the back. They watched TV until it made them sick and tired and then they’d go out in the yard and pull a cat’s tail and kick at each other. When they got that out of their systems they settled down to make collections of stones and seeds, sticks, and bird berries. They’d build up a city, make it perfect, and then fight about it and wreck it. At night we fell dead asleep. In the morning I woke up and again looked at my list. I dug in with such grim determination it might have been mistaken for zeal.
One afternoon near the end of August we drove to Spring Grove, a small town near Racine, a place where no one knew us. I had told the girls that we might stay in an apartment before we began the rambling life. We looked at a spot above a shoe store for one hundred and seventy-five dollars a month. It had a flea-bitten carpet and the stench of a long history of beer drinkers. There was an appealing cottage that would have been fine if it hadn’t been right next to the sewage treatment plant. We went through a duplex, the low-income housing complex, and a group of condominiums along the river. We finally settled on a unit. It wasn’t a home. It wasn’t an apartment. It was a unit. It was a unit in a whole string of units. Together the group of units was called Pheasant Glade. When we walked in the door Emma, who had not said a word since lunch, sang out, “This is a nice one. This would be okay for us.”
Alice used to think that things which weren’t at all amusing were in fact funny. That trait in her over the years had sometimes provoked me
and driven me into a kind of quiet. But I was beginning to understand how something could be so astonishingly black you couldn’t help laughing. Emma’s easy pronouncement that the Pheasant Glade unit would do, after living on four hundred acres, was so far from what was true that it was like slapstick. “I’ll be able to ride my bike down the driveway,” she said. “No gravel.” Claire pointed to the corner where there was a station of metal mailboxes. She called triumphantly, “That is where Mom’s letters will come!”
I wanted to be out before the closing so that when the cash came through we’d already have made the break. We would go get Alice and hole up in Pheasant Glade, waiting for what came next. I had not yet realized how pitiful our house was until I tried to make a last-ditch attempt to care for it as I packed it away. I caulked around the shower and washed the windows. I tried to scrub the rust out of the toilets and the sinks. Sandy and Mrs. Reesman had not looked inside because the place was clearly in need of the wrecking ball. I had not prepared it for a viewing and now, when it was doomed, I wanted to give it a last token of care. We hadn’t ever had time to keep house. We had moved in when Emma was an infant. Alice had gone to school, and found a job, and then had Claire. I worked around the clock. Paint was peeling from the windowsills and the molding. We had never purchased curtains. In the bathroom we had a worn towel that was held up by thumbtacks. We had long ago stopped seeing the rust, the holes in the linoleum, the cracks and water spots in the ceiling. We had grown used to having the spilled milk in the kitchen flow downhill into the bathroom. The house had given us a sense of history and belonging. I had always thought that it was benevolent, sheltering us, exerting a kind of love as we passed through. We had washed the walls when we first moved; that was all we had ever done for it.
I was a meticulous packer for Alice. I put like things with like things. I labeled each box on four sides. Most of the games and toys were missing several pieces. The cane in two of the four chairs my mother had given us had been stood on so much the seats were about to give out. The sifter’s handle was bent, the clocks didn’t work, the wooden blocks were covered with scribbling, the Magic Markers were dried up, the sofa was filthy, the
wing chair was ripped, the stereo was missing half the knobs, the books had been gnawed on, by children, or mice. Our junk didn’t deserve my attention. I packed up the money box I had made out of oak for Emma on her fifth birthday. There was also a cherry-wood bowl I’d made for Claire when she was born. Emma might someday give her money box to her son or daughter. He would have no way of knowing what the box meant to Emma, but he might like it. It was a good box, well made, with compartments in it, for jewels, baseball cards, money, coins, dead animal specimens. It, a wooden box, might be the one good thing to survive me.
I hauled down the trunk from the attic. “We’re taking this,” I said to the girls. “It goes with us.” Inside were the farm relics: the stones, the lace, the books, the photographs.
“That trunk is old and ugly,” Emma said. She had inherited her mother’s habit of quickly judging a thing.
“It’s supposed to be,” I sniped. She recoiled. I didn’t look but I knew she was giving me the evil eye.
I wrote to Alice every day, short notes reiterating my need to have her out of jail. Those letters seemed honest enough. I had told her half-truths along the way. I’d said that I couldn’t find a baby-sitter, that Theresa needed family time. I mentioned that no one in town would serve us, speak to us, consider us among the living. Alice would have to understand that we couldn’t send Emma to Blackwell Elementary for kindergarten. I laid the groundwork. I would tell her about the sale as late as possible, and when I felt like it I’d inform Rafferty.
It took about two weeks for Theresa to come down again. I let myself think about her for short periods of time. I’d give myself an image, or the sound of her voice, and then let it go. I suppose I was fairly sure that she would weaken first. I could think about her, but taking the walk up to Vermont Acres, knocking on the door, was an impossible step. She came one afternoon when I was sitting on the floor looking over my old record albums by the boxed stereo. There was a rustle on the porch. I assumed it was the cats, trying to get in. I was reading the song titles on the
Tea for the Tillerman
album. I was expecting the appraiser from Mrs. Reesman’s bank. Before I could get up to see which it was, Mr. Phelps or Betty the tabby, Theresa appeared in the arch between the kitchen and the living
room. I guess she’d done the wrong thing with her hair because it was bushy. It was big and awful. The girls were behind me, making beds for their dolls out of some of the smaller boxes. I didn’t leap to my feet. I sat holding the album. She didn’t look the way I remembered her.