All Over Creation (32 page)

He ordered the huevos and coffee and picked up a copy of the local paper that was lying by the register. Potato farmers were being sued by a local Indian tribe demanding compensation for groundwater contamination from agricultural runoff. Shoshone, he remembered. He ripped out the article. He'd been pressing Cynaco to support InterTribal Agricultural Councils. Maybe he could even get a Shoshone spokesperson to endorse the NuLife—fewer pesticides mean clean water for our people, that sort of thing. Wisdom. Heritage. Indians always made for positive imaging.

He tossed the paper aside as the waitress approached his table. The eggs looked good, but he needed more coffee creamers. When he looked up to call the girl back, he saw the two come in.

They were not from Liberty Falls. He could see that from the reaction of the locals, who had been talking and now stopped and stared.

At first he couldn't tell exactly what they were. Young and disheveled, but beyond that? They wore their badly fitting clothes the way that only teenagers could, with a seeming disdain for superficial appearances. Their pale faces were androgynous, sullen and bruised, the kind you see advertising underwear on billboards in the city.

They had come in to use the bathroom, and when the smaller one came back without the jacket covering her overalls, he saw that she was a girl, pregnant, and starting to show. She looked a bit unsteady. The other one, clearly a boy, made her sit down on a stool. She leaned her forehead against his stomach and hooked her fingers in the waistband of his jeans. She rested there for a while, fiddling with the buttons on his fly, while he kneaded her shoulders. It was quite a sexy little picture. As he watched them, Elliot felt a peculiar stabbing sensation, located in his solar plexus, which he identified as regret. It took him by surprise. At first he mistook it for the normal regret any man would feel at the sight of a beautiful babe with another guy. But these two were just kids, and this particular regret went deeper, triggered by that burgeoning lump in her belly. He stared at it. He'd seen lots of pregnant women. Most of his friends in the city had had pregnant wives at one point or another. What was it about this girl, here in Liberty Falls?

There. He felt it again. A fluttering sensation in his chest. Not quite a pain. Was it his heart? He started to panic.

Just then the boy looked in Elliot's direction, and, catching him gawking at his girlfriend's stomach, he stiffened. To Elliot's surprise, instead of rising to the challenge and staring the boy down, he found himself dropping his gaze to the plate of huevos in front of him, which were swimming in a puddle of puce-colored beans. The grated cheese had hardened on top like a melted plastic lid. He frowned. The fluttering subsided. He wasn't used to rolling over like this, so he looked back up again, ready to assert himself unblinkingly, but the two were already standing, the boy sheltering the girl with his arm as he ushered her out the door.

Elliot gave up on breakfast. He took a last sip of coffee, then went to the cash register to pay. He looked out the window at the two kids cutting across the parking lot. From the back, at a distance, they looked familiar.

“What's their story?” he asked the waitress. “They don't look like they're from around here.”

The waitress took his twenty and punched the keys on the ancient cash register. The drawer made a dinging sound when it slid open. He accepted his change and handed her a five-dollar tip for a four-dollar meal.

She slipped it in her pocket. “Heard someone talking about a gang of hippies staying out at someone's farm.”

“Oh, yeah?” He sorted slowly through his bills. “You get a lot of people like that passing through?”

“Nah. Not so many. Just the ones who come in the summer for the recreational activities.”

Elliot could not remember any recreational activities. The girl eyed his wallet. “The reservoir,” she added. “They go there for water sports and stuff.”

Elliot took out another five-dollar bill. “Do you know where these hippies are staying?”

“Nah.” She shook her head and started wiping down the Formica as Elliot replaced the bill in his wallet.

The local woman at the counter spoke up. “Heard that Fuller girl's been harboring them down at her daddy's place.”

“Really?” Elliot said.

The old man added, “They was at the potato plant a couple of weeks ago, handing out papers. Funny-looking lot.”

“You don't say?” Elliot was moving in slow motion now, buying time.

“They were over at the school, too,” the woman said. “Trying to brain-wash the kids.”

Elliot put on his jacket and carefully zipped it up. He tucked in his scarf.

“It's a free country,” the old man asserted, but his words sounded remote. Elliot drew the keys out of his pocket and studied them. You would not want this man defending your freedoms.

The woman snorted. “Peddling drugs, if you ask me. It's just like her to waltz back into town and let her friends live like animals out there on her daddy's farm.”

“Who's that?” Elliot asked, as casually as he could, but the old man was already talking and didn't hear him.

“That's Fuller's business. It's got nothing to do with the rest of us.”

The woman sniffed. “It most surely does if they're endangering our kids and our community.”

The old man took a long, defeated sip of Coke through a straw, ending the conversation. There was no way to pursue the subject, Elliot thought, without sounding persistent, but at least he had a last name. Then the old man shook his head.

“It's a shame,” he said. “Lloyd Fuller was always a strange one, but it's a damn shame he ain't got no one except that daughter to depend on. She's a bad seed if there ever was one.”

The woman nodded. The two of them fell silent. Ice rattled at the bottom of the old man's glass.

Elliot leaned forward. His heart was pounding hard now, sending blood into his ears, and again he had the dreamlike feeling of falling. He pressed his fingertips hard against the edge of the counter to steady himself.

“You okay?” the waitress asked.

“I'm fine,” Elliot said. “You don't happen to have a phone book, do you?”

The first time Charmey showed up on her doorstep Cass hadn't known what to think. She had taken Poo for the afternoon, and they'd just gotten back from town when the doorbell rang. She swung the baby up off the kitchen floor and went to answer it.

“I saw your car.” The girl spoke with a French accent, slightly out of breath. “I have the lunch for him.” She offered up a paper sack. “Steamed tofu and vegetables and banana muffins. Whole wheat. The food she gives him is for
sheet.
”

She was dressed in a baggy pair of overalls, wrapped in layers of sweaters and badly knitted things. She looked up from the stoop, and her face was shining. The flicker of recognition in her eye gave Cass the happy sense of visibility she often felt with Poo. She saw herself from the girl's perspective, hip cocked, baby lodged upon it, hazy behind the screen door. She smiled and nudged open the door, holding out her hand for the bag.

“It is mostly organic,” the girl said. “As much as I find. Here, I will help you.”

She walked past Cass into the kitchen, and by the time Cass had caught up, the girl was emptying the tofu into a small bowl. She looked over at the container of processed pineapple cottage cheese that Yummy had packed for Poo and made a face. “She knows it is
sheet.
For the grown-up, perhaps it is not so bad, but for
le petit! Ooh la la!
You are a farmer, no? So then you know, too.
La dioxine, les hormones.
Especially in the dairy, no? Poisoning into his little body, just as he makes all the cells of his brain.”

She reached for Poo, and Cass relinquished him, though she couldn't say exactly why. The girl shrugged off a layer of her knitted coverings, and Cass could see how delicate she was. She was about four or five months pregnant, which somehow gave her the authority to settle Poo in a chair and oversee the shuttling of tofu cubes and carrots from the bowl to his mouth. Cass hung back and watched. The girl was good. She held Poo's attention, keeping him focused on the task, catching a chunk of flying zucchini or providing a bite of banana muffin when he got bored. When he finished, she wiped his face and fingers with a damp towel and handed him back.

“Voilà,”
she said. “
Pardon.
I am Charmey.”

“I'm Cass.”

Charmey nodded as though she already knew this, knew Cass's name, knew all about her. When their eyes met over the baby's head, Cass caught another look of recognition in the girl's eyes, but this time it was mixed with such sadness that Cass felt hollowed—wordless, childless—and then the look was gone. Maybe she'd imagined it, because Charmey was wrapping herself up again as though nothing had happened, tucking the fabric firmly about her rounding belly as she moved toward the door. She gave Cass a friendly smile and tickled Poo in the soft folds under his chin.

“À bientôt!”
She turned and lumbered off down the drive.

Charmey dropped by again soon after that. They sat at Cass's kitchen table and drank herbal infusions, while Poo crawled around on the floor at their feet playing with ants. Outside, the spring wind was still gusting hard, keeping the farmers out of their fields and holding up the start of planting. Cass thought the girl's idea to do home birthing in the trailer was the most dangerous thing she'd ever heard. “It's not even a home, it's a Winnebago,” she said. “You've got to have proper medical care.”

But the girl was adamant. “Oh, no, no!” she said. “We do not believe in hospitals or the paternalistic power structures of Western medicine. Lilith and I will do the birthing together. Like the pioneer women on the Oregon Trail. We are studying how on the Internet.”

Cass reached down and hauled Poo onto her lap. She took the ant he offered her and crushed it between her fingers.

The next time Charmey brought maternity magazines that she'd borrowed from the public library, and they looked at them together. Charmey made fun of the fashions and the recipes while Cass pored over each page, hungry for every word and glossy image. Cass rarely let herself go this far. At the Stop-N-Save she occasionally flipped through the maternity magazines like a furtive adolescent with a
Playboy
before returning them to the rack. Only once, years before, had she bought one. She had been on her way home from the obstetrician's after getting a positive test and had stopped off to pick up a carton of ice cream to celebrate. The cover featured a story about “Celebrity Moms,” but she'd bought the magazine for an article called “Things You Should Know When You're Pregnant Over 35.” The miscarriage happened that night, while she was reading the magazine in the bathtub. Will had rushed her to the hospital, but there was no help for it. When they came home later, she'd found the magazine on the bathroom floor in a puddle of water.

But this time everything felt so different. Before, it had just been her and Will. Momoko and Lloyd lived down the road, but they were old and ebbing. Now, with Yummy and the kids, and Poo and pregnant Charmey and the rest of the Seeds, the Fullers' place was churning with a life force that eddied and caught Cass up in its currents. She missed a first period. And then another, and for the first time in so long Cass found herself facing down her own desire, throwing open her arms to welcome it in all its wildness. Desire was vital, she reasoned now. Wild desire, and ferocity of faith.

Still, she decided she would wait to tell anyone until she'd gotten a positive test. Until life was safely moored inside her, with enough momentum and substance to sustain itself beyond her fears and superstitions. At nap time she curled her body around sleeping Poo and let herself daydream. The first person she would tell would be Yummy—after Will, of course. She extended her finger and gently touched the baby's nose, his chin, his cheek. She felt a rush of courage. She could hardly wait.

 

 

She woke from her nap when Poo started pawing at her shoulder, surprised to see that it was nearly four o'clock. She got the baby dressed and gave him some milk, then put him in his stroller and headed next door. The stroller bounced over the rough dirt road, and the wind was blowing up the sand from the adjacent fields. She leaned down and draped a blanket over the stroller to keep the grit out of Poo's face, but he started to protest. He squinted into the wind. Dirt didn't bother him. He liked the wind. He liked to see where he was going.

On the way up the drive she saw Ocean and Phoenix, wind whipped and all bundled. They were racing back from the greenhouse. Breathless, they ran up next to her.