I’d mentioned to Arnold that I had burned out milking cows, that I couldn’t make enough at it, not with milk price supports what they were. I lied and said I was going to take it easy for a while before I looked for gainful employment. On the final visit he thrust his bony hand into mine and said, with the heartiness and sincerity of a good Eagle Scout, “Well, best of luck to you.”
“Same to you,” I said.
In my negotiations with Mrs. Reesman she had agreed to let me use the chicken shed for storage through Christmas. I hauled some of the furniture that was not going to fit in the apartment down there. We might someday want the old dining-room hutch, the extra bedsteads, the mahogany chest of drawers, and the kitchen table. Although the table was as much a part of the house as the trunk, I knew the Reesmans would sell it, or have the help hack it up for firewood. I could justify taking it along. The fact is I needed it. I thought of it as having an eye. It had seen the Indians up in the township of Winston. It had been witness to
countless disasters and fewer triumphs. Its virtue lay in its inability to speak.
On the morning of the auction, September fifth, we escaped to Spring Grove and set up house in the apartment. There were fair skies across the state. I guess it’s accurate to say that I had been in a frenzy as the sale got closer. I’d packed up in boxes everything we wanted to keep, and organized the rest into categories on the lawn. If it had rained that Saturday it would have been the last bad joke of the summer. Dick Smelts, the auctioneer, had come over twice to help me. I had spoken to very few adults since the end of June. I kept talking to myself, out of habit, even while he was at my side. He looked over our possessions and wrote down figures on his clipboard. He remembered some of the things that were back again on the hay wagons, that had not sold when the former owners had had their auction.
I had gone at my tasks methodically and in high gear during those last weeks. The cows and the girls felt my anxiety. Near the end I did not unwind enough to fall asleep. I trained Emma to answer the phone, to ask, “Who’s calling please?” I told her she was my secretary and I paid her a nickel a day. If it was Rafferty she was to tell him I was out working. I kept going over the auction items in my mind. I lay in bed, picturing our things, one by one, as if before me all night long was a great TV auction. I had little doubt that most of it would sell. Smelts knew of two potential buyers for the herd. Each of the parties had come beforehand to look over my Guernseys. When I went out that last morning to milk I didn’t let myself slow down once. I didn’t walk around the barn, or loiter to admire the weathervane. It was just as well that there hadn’t been enough of a hay crop to fill the silo. I didn’t speak to the cows as I milked. I kept right on going when I was finished, out the barn door, into the house, up the stairs to wake the girls, down the stairs with our bags, standing up to eat breakfast, and out the front door, Hello to Dick as he arrived, into the Ford. We buckled up and drove off.
I think the girls had settled into a perpetual state of shock. They didn’t know what was happening to us. They didn’t know either what question to ask that would make me explain the upheaval. I’d packed their beds the day before, but I didn’t tell them as we drove off that we weren’t coming back to stay. They were often quiet, and I think, scared.
We would go back and forth to the farm over the coming weeks, but we didn’t ever sleep there again.
Everything in our unit in Pheasant Glade—the carpets, the cabinets, the walls, the doors, the bathtub, the toilet, the faucets, the doorbell, the molding, the shades, the light fixtures—everything down to the carpet tacks was brand new. I couldn’t get used to that. The whole townhouse had the fresh toxic smell of new vinyl. The living room had the all-important cathedral ceiling, a stone fireplace with a small glass door and a grating that barely held one log. The floor was covered with blue-and-gray speckled wall-to-wall carpet. The living room opened into a galley kitchen and breakfast nook. The breakfast nook looked out to a wooden deck that had just enough space for a Weber and a porch chair. Upstairs there were two bedrooms, including the master suite with sliding doors and a deck that faced the highway. There was a bath with a whirlpool tub that was just big enough for two very young children. The whole place was deceptive. Here, it seemed to squeak and stink, is the American dream. Except that everything we were supposed to want, everything that looked so good, was too small or too flimsy to use. I realized as I dragged in our few old scratched pieces of furniture, that even the shabby rooms above the shoe store would have been better than the false cheer of Pheasant Glade.
We did have our own garage and a basement with a laundry room. There was no yard beyond the short deck. The girls sat on the driveway and watched me lug in their beds and the chairs from the U-Haul I’d rented. I managed to move the piano single-handedly, with a lot of cursing. Both Claire and Emma seemed to sense right off, in the second viewing, that what they had given up was in no way compensated for by an asphalt driveway and a six-by-eight wooden deck, a whirlpool bath, and shag carpet. I didn’t answer Claire when she asked, “We’re not really going to live here, are we?” One of the tacky cupboards fell off the wall right to the floor. I hadn’t done anything more violent than put a glass on the shelf. As it smashed I wished for Theresa. She would have taken the girls from room to room and made the cheap, ugly things seem interesting. She would have feigned excitement over the public library down the block and the A&W beyond the second line of units. She would have encouraged us to go out for breakfast routinely and feed on egg and bacon
biscuits. I would have very little money by the time we were through. The bulk of my sudden wealth was going to clean up my debt to the bank, as well as purchase Rafferty’s supposed decency and skill. I hadn’t spent enough time to work out all the numbers. We could keep body and soul together for a few months before we scratched our messages on our signs and went out to the highway.
For dinner that first night in Spring Grove we had a ground beef and cheese casserole that Theresa had made. She’d left it on our doorstep in a cooler at the farm sometime after dawn. As we were eating in our new kitchen Emma looked at me and said, “If Mom can’t ever come home, do you think we could live with Theresa? Could she be like a grandma?”
“I want Mama,” Claire protested.
“But I mean, if she couldn’t ever come home, ever, ever, could we go live with Theresa for part of the time, so we could be with a lady?”
My daughters were guileless. Out our window, past the deck, you could rest your gaze on the dumpsters. I’m sure all of us were thinking about what it would be like to come downstairs in the morning in that house in Vermont Acres. We’d come down to the kitchen where there’d be so much love in the air it would be visible—yellow, thick, probably exactly how radon looks.
When Alice came to her visiting station the last Sunday she was in jail she studied me before she picked up the phone. I waited for the conversation to begin with the receiver at my ear. She was wearing the pink bandanna on her head. Her face had grown longer, thinner in jail, her blue eyes larger. I didn’t think I looked any particular way, but after a minute she grabbed the phone and said, “Don’t tell me you sold the farm. Just don’t tell me that. I haven’t had a letter from Theresa in ages, or one from you all week, and it makes me nervous as hell. Rafferty’s even been wondering about you. He says he leaves messages and you don’t call him back. There’s no law that says Emma has to go to kindergarten. We could teach her ourselves. The farm is the first place I ever felt safe and alive, and—oh Christ—real, and at home. Did I ever tell you that?”
“I sold the farm,” I said, as calm as my usual old self. “I’ll tell Rafferty when I’m ready. I thought you would want to know.” She surprised me by crying. “The auction was yesterday,” I continued. “A farmer from
New Derry took the cows. He took the pop-up baler too.” The tears were streaming down her face and splashing on the counter top. I wouldn’t torture her further. No need to mention how little some of our fine equipment had brought. “I sold it, Alice,” I said, “because I want to get you out of here, more than anything.” There were elements of truth there. “I sold it, because our life in Prairie Center is over. We’ll be guilty even if we’re proven innocent. That’s what Rafferty doesn’t understand. As soon as we close we’ll come and get you.”
She got up to tell the guard that she was finished. I swore, watching her go, that I wasn’t going to come to the visiting room one more time. I swore I wasn’t going to leave the girls out in the parking lot again. We’d start up our life fresh, once Alice was out, back along the straight and narrow. If she was proven guilty, we’d try to keep to our rigid path. We’d try to go slowly, creeping, so that after she’d served her term, she’d run only a short distance to catch us.
“Is this what you meant by being a hobo?” Emma asked after a few days in Spring Grove. It was no use drawing the ever-receding future. I didn’t know if our fortunes would improve, if I could find a job, if the trial would come out in our favor. If Alice was acquitted then we would take to the road. We could go to Alaska, South Dakota, Australia. We could move to California where I could set up a Dairy Shrine West, to honor the dairy industry that had helped to drain the Colorado Aquifer of her water.
“It isn’t exactly what I meant, Emma,” I said.
We closed in the late afternoon of the third Friday in September. It seemed fitting that we had to go seventy miles, all the way to Milwaukee, to the twenty-sixth floor of a fancy downtown office building, to give our farm away. The girls had gotten used to tagging along, waiting in reception areas with candy and some new cheap thing, a little doll, a puzzle, beads to thread. They didn’t get too excited over treats anymore. While I was signing the papers in the inner sanctum they got into a brawl in the lobby. I could hear Claire’s bloodcurdling scream down the hall. I excused myself. There was nothing to threaten them with because they’d already lost everything. They also didn’t seem to care if I hurt them. The receptionist saved the day by showing them how her fax machine worked. I
took my leave to finish giving over the farm to Mrs. Reesman. When Sandy shook my hand for the last time, she said, “I sure hope that operation goes according to plan.”
“What operation?” I said.
“Your sister—the bone-marrow treatment.”
“She died,” I said, giving her hand a final squeeze.
Through the summer there had been occasional respites from the heat as well as a few insignificant rainy spells. The night we closed rain poured down and cool air moved in from the east. By Saturday morning the crickets had come back to life to sing their farewell song. Some of the maples had turned color prematurely and were beginning to shed their leaves. Families were raking together and burning trash when we drove to the bank in Spring Grove. Smoke was rolling across the streets. We were going to get our certified check for one hundred thousand dollars and then head for Racine. It was Emma who suggested we find some flowers for Alice, that we decorate the unit. Before the bank opened we went along the road out of town and picked a few straggling clumps of chicory and Queen Anne’s lace.
We harbored our fears as we drove to get her. Emma fretted that the money wouldn’t be enough, that the rules might have changed. Claire wondered if Alice would remember us. Emma called her sister an idiot and insisted that they would never be forgotten. I had plenty of my own worries. I once thought that memory was naturally coupled with understanding—with perspective. I have found that not to be the case. Despite the distance I can’t say now I have a clear sense of what happened last summer. I don’t know, either, if you can compare one thing to another, if a specific thing is actually like any other thing. The summer had been a test of some sort. I suppose it was a test of faith. If that was so I had failed. But I also wasn’t sure that there would have been any way to win, if it would have been better to look with blind eyes, to be faithful to the ideal. It wasn’t apparent that one way was better than the other.
To doubt was not a deadly sin, but it seemed to be as poisonous as any of the seven. Doubt had undermined all that I had taken for granted. I hated the fact that I would never really know what was true. There were reasons not to believe either side. There is no point in fixing the summer
in my mind, settling upon a half-truth to satisfy my need to know. It still seems to me now that it is better to be vigilant, to keep those months fluid, never firming up the story, never calling any one person a defining name. It is better, I think, never to finally decide. In a weak moment I once tried to ask Alice, to tell her that I wasn’t sure. She stopped me. It is probably for the best that I didn’t give voice to my gravest doubt. Because I tell myself that I don’t know and will never know, I can almost fool myself at times. I can almost talk myself into believing that last summer didn’t take place.
We waited in the entry of the jail while Alice was notified. When the guard let her through she rushed at the girls. I gathered up the things that she dropped on the floor. After a few minutes I made them move to the door. I pushed them out of the stuffy entry, out of that place. Alice knelt at the curb and they alternately held close to her and pulled away to stroke her bandanna, her face, her chest. They touched her shyly, as if she was a wounded animal. She didn’t say much. Emma was quiet but Claire fired questions at her one after the next, without waiting for an answer. “Did you miss us? Did you have good food to eat? Was it like a restaurant? Will you have to go back there ever again? Dad got me a Skipper. Why are you wearing that hat?”
After a while I helped her up. It was starting to rain again. She lifted her face to the sky for a minute and opened her mouth. We walked across the parking lot to the street. She carried Claire in her left arm and held Emma by the hand. As we passed the Presbyterian Church the carillons began to chime, a warped rendition of “For the Beauty of the Earth.” Each note was in tune as it was played and then went flat as the next one rang out. There were people in their Sunday best waiting in lines on the steps. Emma announced that it was a wedding. Somehow she knew, without being told. “The bride is going to come so everyone can see her dress,” she said, in awed tones. We kept walking. Emma pulled at Alice’s hand to slow her down. I wanted to leave Racine. I wouldn’t have stopped for anything. When they caught up with me on Grand Street Alice spoke at last. “The bride had some teeth missing,” she said. “Maybe she’ll be covered by her new husband’s dental plan. Maybe she’ll be able to get them fixed.”