If You Could See Me Now (7 page)

“No,” she said, as if she already knew.

“May I come? Is it too early for a visit?”

“You know farm people, Miles. Even the oldsters get up and doing early in the day.”

I put on a jacket and walked across the dew-sodden lawn to the Volkswagen. Condensation streamed off the windshield. As I swung into the road where I had seen the Tin Woodsman make her curious and emotionless departure from the boy who could only be Zack, I heard my grandmother's voice, speaking quite clearly some words she had uttered in my dream.
Why did you have to come back?
It was as though she were seated beside me. I could even smell her familiar odor of woodsmoke. I pulled off to the side of the road and wiped my face with my hands. I wouldn't have known how to answer her.

The trees which began toward the end of the rutted road to Rinn's house, just where the valley begins to climb up into the hills, had grown taller and thicker. The pale early sunlight came slanting down, spangling the corrugated trunks and the spongy, overgrown earth. A little further along the narrow road, some of the rags of light struck the side of Rinn's chicken coop, the top of which was fully illuminated by sunlight. It was a big barnlike structure, long and high as a two-story house, painted red; little comic-strip windows like missing pieces of a
jigsaw puzzle arbitrarily dotted the side facing me. Further up the rise stood her house, which had once been of white boards but now badly needed paint. The three-room structure looked as though a cobweb had settled over it. The trees had marched right into her tiny area of lawn, and big thick branches wove together over her roof. As I got out of the car, Rinn appeared on her little porch; a moment later she opened the screen door and came outside. She was wearing an ancient blue print dress, calf-high rubber boots and an old khaki army jacket with what seemed to be hundreds of pockets.

“Welcome, Miles,” she said, with that Norwegian lilt in her voice. Her face was more wrinkled than ever, but it was luminous. One of her eyes was covered with a film like milk. “Well. You haven't been here since you were a boy, and now you're a man. A nice tall man. You look like a Norwegian.”

“I should,” I said, “with you in my family.” I bent to kiss her, but she held out her hand, and I took it. She wore knitted fingerless gloves, and her hand felt like loose bones wrapped in cloth. “You look wonderful,” I said.

“Oh, goodness. I have coffee on the stove, if you're a coffee drinker.”

Inside her tiny, overheated kitchen she thrust sticks of wood down into the heart of her stove until the iron pot bubbled. Coffee came out in a thin black stream. “You're not always up so early,” she said. “Are you troubled?”

“I don't really know. I'm having trouble getting started on my work.”

“It isn't your work though, is it, Miles?”

“I don't know.”

“Men should be workers. My young man was a worker.” Her good eye, almost as pale as Alison's and a thousand times more informed, examined me over her cup. “Duane is a good worker.”

“What do you know about his daughter?” I was interested in her opinion.

“She was misnamed. Duane should have named her Jessie, after my sister. That would have been right, to name her after his mother. The girl needs to be guided. She's high-strung.” Rinn peeled a cloth off a plate loaded with round flat discs of a breadlike substance I knew well. “But she is much nicer than she wants you to think.”

“You mean you still make
lefsa
?” I said, laughing, delighted. It was one of the great treats of the valley.

“
Lefsa
and
sonnbockles
. Of course I make them. I can still use a rolling pin. I make them whenever I can see well enough.”

I spread thick butter on a piece and rolled it up into a long cigar shape. It was still like eating bread prepared by angels.

“Are you going to be alone this summer?”

“I'm alone now.”

“It's better to be alone. Better for you.” She meant me specifically, not mankind in general.

“Well, I haven't had much luck in my relationships.”

“Luck,”
she snorted, and hunched further over the table. “Miles, do not court misery.”

“Misery?” I was genuinely startled. “It's not that bad.”

“Miles, there is great trouble here now. In the valley. You have heard the news. Do not associate yourself with it. You must be alone and apart, doing your work. You are an outsider, Miles, a natural outsider, and people will resent your being near. People know about you. You have been touched with trouble in the past, and you must avoid it now. Jessie is afraid that you will be touched by it.”

“Huh?” It was with talk like this that she had terrified the wits out of me when I was a child.

“You are innocent,” she said—the same words my grandmother
had used, in my dream. “But you know what I am talking about.”

“Don't worry. No matter how provocative they get, little girls don't tempt me. But I don't get what you mean by innocent.”

“I mean that you expect too much,” she said. “I think I am confusing you. Do you wish more to eat or do you care to help me gather my eggs?”

I remembered her comments about work, and stood. I followed her outside and through the trees down the slope to the henhouse. “Go in quietly,” she said. “These birds can be excited easily, and they might suffocate each other in panic.”

Very gently, she opened the door of the tall red structure. A terrible stench came to me first, like ashes and dung and blood, and then my eyes adjusted to the dark and I saw hens sitting on their nests, in tiers and rows like books on a bookshelf. The scene was a parody of my Long Island lecture halls. We stepped inside. A few birds squawked. I was standing in a mess of dirt, sawdust, feathers, a pervasive white substance and eggshells. The smell hung acrid and powerful in the air.

“Watch how I do,” Rinn said. “I can't see in this light, but I know where they all are.” She approached the nearest nest and inserted her hand between the bird and the straw without at all stirring the hen. It blinked, and continued to stare wildly out from either side of its head. Her hand reappeared with two eggs, and a second later, with another. A few feathers were glued to them with a gray-white fluid. “You start at that end, Miles,” she said, pointing. “There's a basket on the floor.”

She covered her half before I had coaxed a dozen eggs out of half as many unhappy hens. Duane's thick bandage made for clumsy work. Then I went up a ladder where the air was even denser and stole more eggs from increasingly agitated birds;
one of the last ones pecked me in the hand while I held her three warm products. It was like being stabbed with a spoon.

Finally we were done, and stood outside in the rapidly warming air beneath the looming trees. I inhaled several deep, cleansing breaths. At my side, Rinn said, “Thank you for helping me. You might make a worker some day, Miles.”

I looked down at the thin hunched figure in the outlandish clothes. “Did you mean to tell me that you talk to my grandmother? To Jessie?”

She smiled, making her face look Chinese. “I meant that she talks to me. Isn't that what I said?” But before I could respond, she said, “She is watching you, Miles. Jessie always loved you. She wants to protect you.”

“I guess I'm flattered. Maybe—” I was going to say, maybe that's why I dreamed about her, but I was hesitant to describe that dream to Rinn. She would have made too much of it.

“Yes?” The old woman was looking alerted to a current inaudible to me. “Yes? Did you say more? Often I don't hear properly.”

“Why did you think I would get involved with Alison Updahl? That was a little far-fetched even for me, don't you think?”

Her face shut like a clamp, losing all its luminosity. “I meant Alison Greening. Your cousin, Miles. Your cousin Alison.”

“But—” I was going to say
But I love her
, but shock choked off the startled admission.

“Excuse me. I can no longer hear.” She began to move away from me, and then stopped to look back. I thought the milky eye was turned toward me. She appeared to be angry and impatient, but inside all those wrinkles she may just have been tired. “You are always welcome here, Miles.” Then she carried her basket and mine back up to the little house darkened by
trees. I was already past the church on the way home when I remembered that I had intended to buy a dozen eggs from her.

I parked the car in the gritty driveway and went along the porch and through the front room to the narrow staircase. The house still felt damp and cold, though the temperature was now in the upper seventies. Upstairs I sat at my desk and tried to think. D. H. Lawrence seemed even more foreign than he had the previous day. Auntie Rinn's final words about my cousin both thrilled and upset me. To hear another person allude to Alison Greening was like hearing someone else recount your dreams as his own. I riffled the pages of
The White Peacock
, far too nervous to write. Mention of her name had set me on edge. I had used her name as a weapon against Duane, and Rinn had used the same trick on me.

From downstairs I heard a sudden noise: a door slamming, a book dropped? It was followed by a noise of shod feet hushing across the floor. Alison Updahl, I was sure, come around to flirt while expounding her boyfriend's crazy philosophy. I agreed with Rinn, Alison was a far more agreeable person than she wished anyone to know, but at that moment I could not bear to think of anyone casually usurping my territory.

I thrust my chair away from the desk and went thundering down the narrow steps. I burst into the living room. No one was there. Then I heard a rattling noise from the kitchen, and imagined her noisily exploring the cupboards. “Come on, get out of there,” I called. “You tell me when you want to come over, and maybe I'll invite you. I'm trying to get some work done.”

The clattering ceased. “Get out of that kitchen right now,” I ordered, striding across the room toward the door.

A large pale flustered-looking woman appeared before me, wiping her hands on a towel. The gesture made her large loose
upper arms wobble. Horror showed on her face, and in her eyes, magnified behind thick glasses.

“Oh my God,” I blurted. “Who are you?”

Her mouth worked.

“Oh my God. I'm sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

“I'm—”

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Please sit down.”

“I'm Mrs. Sunderson. I thought it would be all right. I came in to do work, the door was open…You're—you're Eve's boy?” She backed away from me, and almost fell as she stepped backward over the step down into the kitchen.

“Won't you please sit down? I'm honestly sorry, I didn't mean to—” She was still retreating from me, holding the dishtowel like a shield. Her eyes goggled, the effect made even worse by her glasses.

“You want cleaning? You want me to clean? Duane said last week I should come today. I didn't know if I should, what with, I mean since we, since this terrible…but Red said I should, take my mind off, he said.”

“Yes, yes. I do want you to come. Please forgive me. I thought it was someone else. Please sit for a moment.”

She sat heavily in one of the chairs at the table. Her face was going red in blotches.

“You're very welcome here,” I weakly said. “I trust you understand what I want you to do?”

She nodded, her eyes oily and glazed behind the big lenses.

“I want you to come early enough to make breakfast for me, wash all the dishes, and keep the house clean. At one I'll want lunch. Is that what you agreed to do? Also, please don't bother about the room I'm working in. I want that room undisturbed.”

“The room…?”

“Up there.” I pointed. “I'll be up and working most mornings
when you arrive, so just call me when you have breakfast ready. Have you ever done any work like this before?”

Resentment showed in the puffy face for a moment. “I kept house for my husband and son for forty years.”

“Of course. I should have thought. I'm sorry.”

“Duane explained about the car? That I can't drive? You will have to do the shopping.”

“Yes, okay. I'll go out this afternoon. I want to see Arden again, anyhow.”

She continued to stare dumbly at me. I realized that I was treating her like a servant, but could not stop. Embarrassment and a fictitious dignity made me stiff. If she had been the Woodsman, I could have apologized.

“I said five dollars a week?”

“Don't be silly. You deserve seven. I might as well give you the first week's wages in advance.” I counted seven dollar bills out onto the table before her. She stared resentfully at the little pile of bills.

“I said five.”

“Call the extra two dollars hardship allowance. Now you don't have to worry about making breakfast this morning since I got up early and made my own, but I'd like lunch somewhere around one. After washing the lunch dishes, you'll be free to leave, if the downstairs rooms look clean enough to you. All right? I really am sorry about that shouting. It was a case of mistaken identity.”

“Uh,” she said. “I said five.”

“I don't want to exploit you, Mrs. Sunderson. For the sake of my conscience, please take the extra two.”

“A picture is missing. From the front parlor.”

“I took it upstairs. Well, if you will get on with your work, I'll get on with mine.”

PORTION OF STATEMENT BY TUTA SUNDERSON:

July 18

People who act like that aren't right in the head. He was like a crazy man, and then he tried to buy me back with an extra two dollars. Well, we don't work that way up here, do we? Red said I shouldn't go back to that crazy man, but I went right on going back, and that was how I learned so much about his ways.

I wish Jerome was alive yet so he could give him what-for. Jerome wouldn't have stood for that man's way of talking nor his ways of being neither.

Just ask yourself this—who was he expecting, anyhow? And who came?