Ghosting (8 page)

Lyda wished she had a picture of Bethel’s face the day he found her holding the toddler—stricken, she said; sincere confusion scattering his eyes. As though he could not understand how his son had not grown a tat since he left. Then Fleece ran in through the back door (Fleece ran everywhere then, never walked, his feet scamper-wild from the day he discovered them) and the argument began. She thought, He thinks it’s no different than if he stepped out moments ago, like my life could be stuffed in a footlocker for him to pull out whenever he wants.

She dared her husband to explain her wrong. Five years without word—it wasn’t like she moved to Whore Holler after he left (though she could have, she reminded him, for all he left her with; no one who knew her story would have blamed her). Lyda had been a teenage mother trying to do right, one who went to church on Sundays like any girl trying to do right would. Despite the nature of her effort she still met Mack Prather there, at First Pirtle Baptist. Now he was a man everybody liked, once they noticed him; quiet at first, he didn’t jump into conversation but stood ready with a grin and some funny comment to prove he had been listening close. He was not rascal-handsome like Bethel but he wasn’t ugly, either, though his thin hair, a dun brown like crispy leaves, was already moving to a combover at twenty-four. His eyes were nothing to cry over and his jaw was soft, but he did like to talk once he felt comfortable, and more importantly he liked to listen to Lyda talk. They first started talking and listening to one another at an after-service brunch, he made her laugh on a day she was feeling blue, they were looking over the table spread with bacon and eggs and Mack said from just behind her shoulder,
Well I see the chicken made a contribution, but it looks like the pig gave us his full commitment.
Then he tumbled her coffee while reaching for cream.

Bethel had been gone two years by then and she was lonely. She wasn’t looking to park her shoes under anyone’s bed; she was trying to be good. Sex had got her into this tough spot and she wanted a future with fewer spots as tough as this. But it helped to have a man around the house whether one lay with him or not. Mack could frame a door; he connected PVC pipe from the house to the county water system instead of the lake’s, which did not use filters and made the sink smell dingy. He played ball with Fleece as well, setting him up with the basketball goal where the hill flattened out near the road until some laker boys stole it away or threw it into the lake, they never knew which.

Mack called himself a developer but that was only ambition talking. Truth was he did construction, a carpenter willing to take on more than he could handle, certain he stood only a loan or two away from drastic and enviable success. Sometimes he helped Lyda by picking up Fleece from her parents’ house before she finished her shift at the clinic. Sometimes he picked her up, too. Her mother Eudora was a practical woman and did not blame her girl when she finally landed in bed with Mack after so long with a wandered-away husband—no, Eudora got upset only when Lyda got knocked up again so quickly. Eudora did not take gossip unless it covered somebody else’s family, and Lyda getting pregnant with her husband gone gave everyone at First Pirtle Baptist much to chew on happy. Her own mama asking if she didn’t know how to keep from getting pregnant! Lyda told her it was a little late to discuss it now.

Mack, sweet, welcomed the news. He told her: We roll with what comes. They did not talk about what they might do if Bethel returned. Lyda tried hard to believe he was gone forever. As her belly grew she admonished herself to stop looking out the front of the house for any unwanted sign of him. Superstitiously she wondered if by ceasing to keep an eye out she was somehow encouraging Bethel to show up. Mack told her she was too young for such old-woman silliness; maybe she lied about her age? She slapped his shoulder. They never had one sign of his coming back, no hint of any homecoming until Bethel was already home.

He arrived to find Lyda as he had left her: alone, carrying a toddler at her shoulder. The front door stood open to invite the breeze. She had finished setting the washed breakfast dishes on the dry rack. Bethel walked in without a hello standing in the doorway as he waited for her to notice him. When she did, his eyes were on the baby—and then Fleece ran in through the back door, calling her to come see a kill he’d made with his bare hand. He stilled at the sight of Bethel, too. Didn’t know who the man could be.

Bethel,
Lyda said.

Well Lyda Skaggs,
Bethel said. He tossed his small bindle bag and cardboard suitcase onto the couch.

He said he could not accept such outright betrayal. He had come
all this way
, he said, through near-starvation and miles on his feet, only to find himself obliged to kill the bastard who give her that baby? Lyda assured him he didn’t have to kill anyone, Mack was already dead.
I’ll kill his brother then,
Bethel said. But the hard smile on his creased face suggested maybe he wouldn’t if she told him he did not have to.

With Cole on the way Mack had redoubled his efforts to realize his ambitions and gone in with his younger brother Ronnie on a rental property in downtown Montreux, a shotgun that required renovations before listing. They ripped out soiled carpets and refinished the floors, only to have a rainstorm reveal the roof needed repair. Ronnie held the ladder while Mack climbed with a bucket of tar pitch and neither noticed the worn lining on the wire connecting the house to powerlines overhead. A small misstep with the bucket, and the ladder shifted; Ronnie flew back against the house next door where the wind blew out of him. By the time he recovered and reached to where Mack had fallen, his brother’s skin looked like an overripe plum.

The insurance went to his brother. Ronnie did not particularly care for Lyda; he had no trouble (he made clear) telling her as much, but he promised to do right by his brother’s child. And eventually he did; he did try. Years later when a twelve-going-on-thirteen James
Cole got himself arrested (chasing after Fleece in his way), Ronnie discovered Lyda harrowing deep into her own pitched spiral, and his own wife agreed they were honor-bound to get young impressionable Cole off the lake. Lyda thought they did try to do right; they all did. But they succeeded only in making the boy a stranger to both houses.

Morning blues the cheap thin valance in Cole’s bedroom window. By habit he stays still as long as he can, refusing even the smallest move despite knowing he’s not asleep anymore. It’s dawn early, he can tell by the modesty in the twitters and calls of the birds outside, like they’re struggling to wake up after a rough night. Cole remains in the cool cotton safety of the bed, eyes and ears open in a room still cloudy from his cloudy dreams. Over long minutes he watches the outlines of his few pieces of furniture begin to form in the steepening light—a dresser with one drawer missing, a footlocker stood on end—bringing with their growing shadows a strange dread. Sleep: so far and hard to come from, a good place.

He listens to the house. Lyda’s one to always have her ear to the rails; she knows what train is coming in and whether it’s on time.

He listens to the house, his ear exploring the short hallway past Lyda’s room and into the kitchen (the refrigerator humming), through the kitchen and into the living room. There the TV sits silent. He backtracks to her bedroom and listens for any sound in the sheets, a rustle, snore, or sigh, or even the murmured complaint he often catches through the wall separating their heads, Lyda ready to set straight some imagined or remembered companion even in her dreams. Nothing there.

On his feet then for a sweatshirt from the drawer, he peeks out the window. She still drives the old Country Sedan, proudly displaying its
historic plates even as rust claims the fenders, duct-taped cardboard replaces one rear window, and the suspension angles high on one side. She doesn’t have money for a newer car and insists she doesn’t need one, the Country starts every time she turns the key and she hardly drives anywhere anyways. The Country sits parked behind his truck in the driveway. He sock-foots through the house and does not see her as he rinses his mouth in the bathroom sink—not bothering to brush his teeth, he’ll be gulping gas-mart coffee and cake in a few minutes—and runs icy tap water over his hands and through his short hair and into his eyes.

On the concrete porch with boots in hand Cole’s spacey fatigue carries him through morning ritual. It’s Saturday, he has horses to feed and turn out at the Spackler farm, and then he’ll work a handful of hours in the city with Uncle Ron-Ron’s crew. He sets to lacing the leather boots, malleable cowhide and once his father’s, boots Fleece wore briefly before bequeathing them to Cole once box-toes came into fashion and his brother splurged on a beautiful black pair from Johnston & Murphy. Cole resoled his father’s boots with tire-tread rubber and by now the leather has conformed to his feet, sinking outward for the bulge of his ankle bones and following the outward spread to his calves, not quite erasing the material’s memory of his father’s form, undecided between the two. There are moments when he believes he cannot love anything as much as these boots—moments such as this one, alone, on the front porch of his mother’s house, starting another day.

It is winter-morning cold but not so cold he needs to complain about it.

He feels her standing behind him; she must have slunk into his wake when he wasn’t paying attention. He feels her staring into the back of his head, into his shoulders tight beneath the hooded gray sweatshirt still smelling of the dryer sheet, a scent he likes.

He double-knots the laces of his left boot and asks what’s on her mind.

“You know my burden, pup,” she says, her voice worn. She clears her throat. “Your big brother. You and your big brother.” Her tone implies exasperation and lassitude, as though she could have launched into a list of numerous instances in which Fleece and Cole
have disappointed her, perhaps even hurt her deeply, but there are so many known between the three of them already she saw no point in listing them yet again.

“What about us?”

“You only come back for yourself? I mean who’s looking out for who here?” The wire mesh of the screen door sings a faint song against her scratching nails. “I raised you boys better than to have to wonder. Blood is blood. You got to have each other’s back.”

“I never had to have Fleece’s back. He didn’t need me to. I was just a kid.”

“You would have if he asked. How I raised you both.”

Cole ties the right boot in the same double-knot; he needs to get on the road. He plants both feet square together and looks over them, at how small they seem compared to the rest of his body. Just like his father, Lyda used to say.

“Not sure how you’d say you raised us, Ma.”

He sits facing away from the house, appearing to anyone who happened to notice as a strange young man debating aloud to himself. The hinges on the screen squeal and as the door smacks back into its frame his mother’s bare foot taps his hip for Cole to scoot over, the dark burgundy polish on her big toe chipped white along the inside edge. He makes room.

“Now I tried my best, hon. You’ll see, you ever get a child in this world. Only so much you can do, they end up how they end up anyways.”

It’s not a conversation he wants to have—or, it’s a conversation he would like to have some other time, the opportunity for such conversations being a great reason for his return to the lake—but not now, not with the fatigue of four hours of sleep, no soda in his belly, a day of work he dislikes ahead of him. Cole stands and jangles his keys from a pocket and looks down at his mother on the step, her choppy, saloned hair exposing a little gray at the roots.

“Guess I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Tell me you got your brother’s back.”

“Is he asking?”

“He’s not here to ask. I am. I’m your mother and I am asking you. Make it right.”

“Jesus, make
what
right?”