Deliver Us from Evie (3 page)

Evie and my mother stayed in the kitchen having a nightcap after my father went to bed. I was right around the corner, watching TV.

“I’d rather be here, anyway,” Evie said. “I think I was just saying all that because that’s Patty’s world: boarding school, college—she’ll probably pledge a sorority like Anna Banana.”

“I was a sorority girl too, don’t forget. And my sorority was one of the big three, unlike Bella Hanna’s.” My mother was slurring a little. She wasn’t used to drinking liquor. She said, “If you’d gone to Missouri, you’d automatically be a Pi Phi, Evie. You’d be a legacy.”

“Yeah, well, they’d be tickled to see me clumping up their front sidewalk, wouldn’t they?” said Evie.

“Evie, honey, you could be every bit as pretty as any one of those Pi Phis … if you’d just let me help you with your clothes, if you’d just change your hair,
style
it—you could still wear it short. You could—”

Evie cut her off. “I’m the way I am.”

“Honey, you look so tough when you smoke that way. If you
have
to smoke, hold the cigarette between your fingers.”

There was probably a Camel cigarette dangling from her lips. Evie usually smoked no hands. No one else in our family smoked.

“Some people like me the way I am,” Evie said.

“But you don’t like
him
,” said Mom.

“I’m not talking about Cord Whittle!”

After Mom went up to bed, I asked Evie why she called Patsy Duff “Patty.”

“I like Patty better,” she said. Then she said she’d written something new, and did I want to hear it?

It was called “Asian Journey.”

So what if we’ve never traveled together
,

Your blond hair blown by some runway wind
,

My hand under your arm as another excuse to touch you in public
,

To touch you anywhere.

Your eyes reflecting my smile
,
my dead serious expression
,
our amazement at everything in China.

So what if we’ve never been anywhere together
,

Just seen each other once or twice
,

Just talked together on the telephone.

“What’s it mean?” I said. “You’ve never been to China.”

“That’s the point. It’s all in the imagination.”

“Is it supposed to be about Patsy Duff?”

“It’s all in the imagination,” said Evie. “It’s not about anyone.”

I figured she was bombed or she wouldn’t have read it to me.

But maybe something was going on with her that was just bursting to come out.

N
EAR CHRISTMAS WE ALWAYS
got a bunch of calendars sent to us. They came from the bank, the mortician, real estate firms, feed companies—I found about five of them in the mailbox one December afternoon after I got off the school bus.

I flipped through the mail going up our driveway; the calendars were most of it, a few bills, and a postcard I thought might be from Doug.

It said:

Here for the weekend with Margaret Leighton
,
whose father owns this place.

Wish you were her.

P.

P.S. See you soon
!

It took me a few seconds to realize it wasn’t from my brother. It was addressed to Evie. On the front was a picture of a Mississippi steamboat that was really a restaurant called Leighton’s, in St. Louis.

It also took me a while to register the fact it didn’t say
Wish you were here
but
Wish you were her.

I thought about it while I let myself into the house and shouted out to Mom I was home. She was in the kitchen, where she always was when I got home from school. I stuck the postcard in my English lit book and left it on the stairs with my gym bag.

“Looks like snow outside,” Mom said.

“About time, isn’t it?” I dropped the bills and the calendars on the kitchen table, and she sat down and riffled through everything.

I poured myself some milk and took some cookies from the jar.

“We’re having company for dinner,” she said.

“How come?”

“I asked Cord Whittle over.”

“How
come
?”

“Well, he might be interested in helping out with the Atlee place.”

“That’s way next spring.”

“And it’s Friday. I have a lamb roast in. Anyone you’d like to invite over?”

“She’s in Miami,” I said. “Since when do we have dinner parties on Friday night?”

“I’m celebrating,” Mom said. “I got Evie to go to Garden Hairstyles for a cut.”

“How did you do that?”

“I won a bet!” Mom laughed. “Remember she bet me that sinkhole out in the far pasture was safe? She bet me whatever I wanted her to do for me that I couldn’t push a hoe down it, and I bet her a week’s washing chores I could. Then we forgot about it…. Melvin’s back foot went through it this morning.”

“What’s Cord Whittle got to do with it?”

“Nothing.”

“Does Evie know he’s invited?”

My mother shrugged. “Evie doesn’t have to know every little thing I plan.”

“Stop trying to fix them up, Mom,” I said.

“Cord’s willing.”

“You know darn well Evie’s not.”

“Last year this time I knew darn well the Atlees farmed next door to us, and now …” Mom raised her eyebrow and gave me a look.

I went up to change before I headed down to the barn to feed the hogs.

I stopped off in Evie’s room to leave the postcard on her desk.

Usually we left all the mail on the kitchen table, but I didn’t feel like doing that. I wasn’t sure if I was sparing Mom or Evie.

Both, probably.

“D
ON’T COMB IT BACK,
Evie!” my mother said. “It’s
supposed
to fall foward.”

“It tickles my forehead.”

“Your forehead will get used to it.”

“I like it, Evie,” Dad said. “No fooling.” I liked her new hairstyle too, but it was Dad’s saying he liked it that made Evie stick her comb in the back pocket of her jeans and give up trying to slick the cut back the way she always wore it.

“Before Cord gets here,” said Mom, “run upstairs and put on my white turtleneck sweater. I ironed it for you and hung it in the bathroom.”

“How long am I supposed to pay off this bet?” Evie asked. “I got the haircut, now you’re dragging Cord Whittle over here, and next you’re telling me what to wear.”

“Nobody has to drag Cord over here,” said my mother, who was putting candlesticks on the table, on top of the white tablecloth. We were using our good china, too.

“He’s coming of his own ac
cord
,” Dad said, chuckling at his own joke.

Evie was taking it all in stride, which surprised me some until she followed me upstairs just before I went in to take a shower.

“Did you get the mail, Parr?”

“Don’t I always?”

“Did anyone see that postcard besides you?”

“How do you know I saw it?”

“Because you don’t usually give me room service.”

“Nobody else saw it,” I said.

She grinned at me. “Lucky thing you’re a snoop.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Lucky thing.”

She said, “Thanks, Parr. Hand me Mom’s sweater before you get it wet.”

It was the postcard that had put her in the good mood.

By the time Cord arrived, it was starting to snow lightly. He had a dusting of it on his brown hair when he came inside. He smelled of after-shave, and his hazel eyes were dancing around, as though he imagined it was Evie’s idea he’d eat dinner with us.

Under his parka he had on a tan corduroy jacket and a white shirt and bolo tie with a silver clasp. Brown trousers and boots.

He was a good-looking guy. He’d put on some weight. All the dropout farmers did after a while. He had a bottle of preserves his mother’d put up that he gave to Mom, and he had a small stack of old
National Geographics
for Dad. My father loved looking through travel magazines. The only thing he watched on TV besides sports and the farm reports was PBS specials about places like Africa and Australia. Nobody in our family had ever been outside the United States.

Evie came downstairs in her jeans and Mom’s sweater, sporting her new haircut, and Cord said, “Your hair’s changed.”

“Nothing else has, though,” Evie said. I suppose that was her way of warning him not to get his hopes up.

Mom lighted the candles, and we all sat down to eat Elijah, who’d been our last lamb. He’d been in the freezer since summer, when even Evie’d protested his necessary murder. Elijah, we all swore, could smile and was more like a household pet than something you end up eating with mint jelly.

I was always bored out of my gourd with what Cord and Evie talked about. My mother was off somewhere in her head, and I was chewing away on Elijah and telling myself this was more proof I wasn’t cut out for farming, because farming was really a lot about killing, even when you kept the livestock to a minimum—you still had to slaughter some poor thing or send it out to someone else to slit its throat.

I’d tune in and out of the conversation.

Cord would be saying he’d spent the whole afternoon adjusting the idle and the transmission on his IH, while Evie’d agree they were all troublesome, she’d only have a Deere.

“Evie can fix anything, though,” my father’d pipe up.

“Not this sucker, not even Evie.”

“Wanna bet?” from Evie.

Then the three of them began talking about putting in some other kind of crop on the Atlee acreage, and Evie made her usual complaint about how ugly soybeans always looked. She preferred corn. She’d even heard you could make good money growing flowers.

“I’d like to look into what the Rayborn Company’s selling, Douglas,” said Cord through a mouthful of mashed potatoes.

“You don’t want layers, do you? They live out their lives in stacked cages, three or four to a cage. I sell the equipment, but that’s not my kind of farming.”

“Your kind’s too much at the whim of Mother Nature.”

“Any kind is at her whim in the long run.”

“Livestock’s not. You ought to double the size of your hog operation, maybe do more breeding, too. Isn’t Doug studying animal science over at the university?”

Evie said she favored more hogs too, but we’d need more farrowing crates and ventilation equipment, on and on, until finally Mom and I were clearing and the apple pie was warming in the oven.

I was helping Mom with the dishes after and Dad was in reading one of the
National Geographics.
Evie and Cord were sitting at the kitchen table talking.

Mom whispered to me, “You go up to your room, Parr. Daddy and I are going to go over the accounts in the office.”

I knew she was planning to leave the living room empty for Cord and Evie.

When she’d finished stacking the last plate, she said, “Whew! Evie! The smoke from your cigarettes is too heavy in here.”

Evie said, “I’m going upstairs, anyway.”

“You don’t have to go upstairs,” Mom said. “Just move into the parlor.”

“You smoke like a chimney,” Cord said. “You come on into the parlor with me and I’ll tell you how I kicked the habit…. You know who was in Smokenders with me? Buck Duff! He was a three-pack-a-day man. How many packs do you smoke, Evie?”

“I got Buck Duff beat.”

“Evie!” my mother said. “You don’t smoke more than three packs a day!”

“Just kidding,” Evie said. “Buck Duff ought to send his wife to Drinkenders.”

“She tried Alcoholics Anonymous, I heard,” said Cord.

“If it’s ‘anonymous,’ how’d you hear it?”

“Word gets around, Evie.”

“Is that why we never see much of her? She drinks?” Mom asked.

“Like a fish,” Evie said.

“She’s a real nice lady, though,” said Cord.

“Halloween night she disappeared,” said Mom.

“Up to her room,” Evie said. “With a vodka bottle.”

“He’s a hard man to live with, I bet,” said Cord.

“For example?” said Evie.

My mother said, “Now why are we gossiping about the Duffs? You two go in the other room.”

I could hear Evie persisting, “For example?” as they pushed back their chairs and went into the other room.

I couldn’t hear Cord’s answer.

Once my mother got Dad to put down the
National Geographic
, her plan to get Evie and Cord off alone was ruined by Dad’s never-ending curiosity about the weather.

He went right to the window when he got out of his chair, gave a look, and said, “You better get going, Cord. Snow’s coming down hard.”

Immediately Evie walked back into the kitchen and took his parka down from the hook.

“Here’s your hat what’s your hurry?” Cord said in a miffed tone. “I’ve got the Jeep. I’m not going to get snowbound.”

But Evie was holding the coat up for him to put his arms into. She said, “What would be the difference if a skunk died on the road or Mr. Duff did?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

“There’d be skid marks by the skunk,” Evie said.

And my dad howled.

Evie could always break him up.

“I
DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY
Patsy Duff would invite you to a concert in St. Louis!” my mother said.

“Maybe she wants to thank me for giving her that interview,” Evie said. “She got an A plus on it.”

The three of us were having breakfast. Dad had already gone into Duffton, where he was seeing Mr. Duff about a loan. He wasn’t going to sell Rayborn products now. Since the Atlee deal he was talking more hogs, breeding, all the things Cord and he had discussed a week ago.

You’d never know Evie’s hair had been styled. It was slicked back the old way again. She was chainsmoking over her coffee and reassuring Mom she’d still make it to St. Luke’s on Christmas Eve. The concert was the twenty-third.

It promised to be a strange Christmas, anyway. Doug was going to Vermont with Bella Hanna, whom we all called Anna Banana now, thanks to Evie.

Christmas was Mom’s favorite holiday, and she counted on the five of us doing the same thing every year: mass on Christmas Eve, then home to trim the tree. Up early Christmas morning for gift giving and breakfast cooked by Dad, the only meal he ever made. Doug and I helped him. After, Evie cleared the table and did the dishes.