Just Beneath My Skin (10 page)

“JAKE,” DAD SAYS. HE'S BLINKING
at me in his robe and bare feet, his hair stuck up and sleep welts running up and down one side of his face. He looks as if he thinks he might still be dreaming. “What are you doing here?”

“I need a place,” I tell him.

“Now? I didn't even know you were in North River.”

“I got in today,” I tell him.

He looks past my shoulder into the driveway. “Where's your car?”

“It's a long story.”

“Come on in.” He yawns.

“Nathan's with me.”

Dad stops yawning. “Where's his mother?”

“Home.”

“Why isn't he with her?”

“'Cause,” I tell him, looking him straight in the eye. “I took him from her.”

He looks down and around, like I might be hiding Nathan under the steps.

“Where is he?”

“He's by the road,” I say. “I wanted to check to see if it was okay first.”

Dad leans his head out of the doorway to look at Nathan, who's standing out under the street light, watching at us. Then Dad pulls back. “Why did you take him?”

“Because,” I say. “She's no good for him.”

“And you are?”

“Better than she is.”

He looks at me in the old way, the way I remember when I lived here and he thought I was doing something wrong or stupid. “It can't be legal,” he says, “to up and take a boy from his mother, no matter how good or bad she is for him. There are laws, Jake. Did you take any of those into account before you hauled off and did this?”

“I thought about 'em,” I say.

“Them, not 'em,” says my father.

“I thought about
them
,” I say. “I told Carla I'd pay her to keep away from Nathan.”

“You
bought
him from her?”

I shrug. “It's like … what do they call that, when you pay the wife to take the kids after a breakup?”

“Child support,” says Dad.

“It's like that,” I say. “Only backwards.”

“That's silly,” says my father. “You and Carla weren't married.”

“It's late. Nathan's cold, and so am I. Can we come in?”

“Where's your jacket?”

“Long —”

“— story,” Dad finishes, shaking his head. “I know. Same as everything with you. The longest story I know, Jacob, is the Bible and there's always been an abiding interest in hearing that.”

I want to ask him what the fucking Bible has to do with anything, me without a jacket and with an eight-year-old standing by himself on the side of the road freezing to death. But if there is one thing you don't question my father on, it's preaching. Not if you want in the man's house, that is. I wait. He looks at me — that same disgusted, tired look again — and then sighs and holds wide the door.

“Come in, then,” he says. “I've got services tomorrow, and this isn't helping any.”

“Nathan!” I shout and wave. “Come on.”

Nathan runs up the driveway and stops when he gets to the steps and the doorway and me. He stands behind me and looks up shyly at his grandfather.

“Nathan,” I say. “Meet Dad. Dad. Meet Nathan.”

I see something pass across the old man's face when he sees Nathan up close for the first time. It's like a shock, or a pain, that flickers there for a second and then just as quick is gone.

I HAVEN'T BEEN IN DAD'S
house for six months, ever since I left for Halifax. I stayed there sometimes when I lived in North River, when Carla didn't want me staying with her and I didn't think I could handle Johnny and Charlie for any amount of time. Nothing is different. The kitchen is the same as it was when my mother died. She complained the cupboards were too high — built for giants, she said — and Dad promised to speak to the church elders about getting them lowered or replaced. But after she died he didn't bother. What was the use? He was tall enough to reach them. But he kept the wooden step stool she used to reach the dishes on higher shelves. It was sitting under the windowsill beside the table. Every time I came in I looked at it. She fell off it once, not long after she started chemo and her hair was falling out and she was really sick but trying to make him lunch anyway. Dad came home at noon from the church rectory and found her lying on the linoleum floor in front of the cupboards, burning up with fever and asleep where she'd fallen. He picked her up and carried her upstairs to bed.

“She's so light,” he told me when I got home from school. “She doesn't weigh anything at all.”

That was the first time I'd seen Dad cry since we found out Mom had cancer.

He looks at me now, looking at the stool. “You hungry?” he asks.

I look at Nathan. Nathan nods. “I'll get us a sandwich or something outta the fridge,” I say.

“Good,” Dad says. “I'm going back to bed. You can sleep in your old room. And Nathan can sleep down here on the daybed.”

The daybed is a small room off the kitchen behind the stove, which my mother used as a pantry. It has an iron cot taking up one side, but my mother called it “the daybed” and so we did too. There's also another room upstairs, but he didn't suggest I put Nathan there. It was my sister Ruth's room, who died when she was three.

“Okay,” I say. “The daybed's good.”

“All right,” he says. “'Night.”

“'Night,” I say.

“'Night,” says Nathan.

Dad looks at him once more, and I see that look pass across his face again. Then he's gone. Nathan and I listen to the creak of him passing up the stairs and crossing the floorboards in the upstairs hallway. When it's quiet I start rooting in the fridge for something to make sandwiches.

“It's a big house, isn't it, Jake?”

“What, this house?”

“Yeah,” says Nathan. “Bigger'n ours, isn't it?”

The parsonage isn't that big — the kitchen, the parlour, my father's study and the tiny room on the lower floor, three bedrooms and a bathroom on the upper. There's half an attic, and a root cellar with a wooden vegetable bin and hot water tank, and that's about it. But compared to what Nathan's used to, I suppose it's big. “Take your jacket off,” I tell him. “It's warm enough without it.”

Nathan does as he is told, and I get out some sliced ham for sandwiches. I make them with butter and mustard on Ben's bread and Nathan asks me a thousand and one questions about the house and my father. “He's real tall, isn't he, Jake? He's got a moustache. Which side of the house is your bedroom on? Did you ever shut out all the lights and play hide and seek? Your father got a dog? Did you think the house could fall into the river, 'cause it's so close, if the water ever gets high?” Do you, do you, do you, did you.

I give Nathan his sandwich and a glass of milk from a pail in the fridge. Nathan doesn't want to drink the milk, because it's yellow. “It's fresh,” I say. “Brian Fancy keeps dairy cows and gives it to Dad every week.”

“You mean it comes from a cow and not from a carton?”

“All milk comes from a cow, Nathan. It's a matter of who gets their hands on it after it comes out and what they do with it.”

“What about sheep? Do sheep have milk?”

“All animals have milk. We just don't drink some of it.”

“Why not?”

“'Cause some of it doesn't taste good.”

“Oh,” says Nathan.

He is full of questions. I'm worn out with them after ten minutes. I tell him to hurry up and finish his sandwich so he can go to bed. He does, but he won't touch the milk. I drink it for him, and take him into the daybed. He sits on the edge of the bed and undresses, still chattering away. I try to answer him the best I can. When he takes his shirt off I see the bruise starting on his ribcage where his mother kicked him.

“That hurt?” I ask.

“A little,” Nathan says.

“Wait here,” I tell him.

I creep upstairs, quiet so I won't wake Dad, and go into the bathroom. I find a tin of Rawleigh's Camphor Balm in the medicine cabinet that looks like it's been there since Jesus was in short pants and go back downstairs with it. Nathan's still sitting in his underwear on the edge of the bed, playing with the beads on the fringe of the lampshade on the table beside the cot. I twist off the cover, bend down, and spread it with two fingers over his bruise.

“It stinks,” says Nathan.

“It'll help,” I say. “You'll see. Now get in bed.”

The cot squeaks as Nathan gets turned around and crawls under the covers. I feel an urge to bend over and kiss him on the cheek, but I don't. Instead I reach out and muss his hair on the pillow.

“'Night, kid,” I say.

“'Night, Jake,” Nathan answers. “I'm real glad you came back for me.”

I stand up and reach out to turn out the lamp. Nathan's staring up at me, trusting me, counting on me. I feel scared then, more scared than when I thought Johnny was gonna kill me in the swamp. I turn out the light quick and leave the room, because I can't take him looking at me like that anymore.

I DREAM WE ARE IN
a rowboat on the river. Jake's dad is standing in the front of the boat, facing the water. He's dressed in his black preacher clothes, reading out loud from his Bible. Jake is rowing in the middle and I am kneeling on the floor in the back facing Jake and scooping out the water with a bailing jar. Water is pouring in through the cracks in the boards.

“It's gonna sink, Jake,” I tell him.

“Doesn't matter,” says Jake. “We'll keep on rowing.”

“We'll keep on praying!” shouts Jake's dad from the front of the boat.

Mom is standing on the shore, with Irene Lang and Wendy McNutt, who is holding baby Lucy in her arms. They are all smiling and waving at us, even Mom. On the other side of the river are Johnny Lang and Charlie Whynot. Johnny Lang is pointing a gun at us, and Charlie is trying to moonwalk along the shore. It starts to thunder, and I wake up in the dark without knowing where I am. Then I remember but my heart is still beating so loud in my ears from my dream I think for sure it will wake up Jake and his dad.

Not Jake's mom though. She is with baby Lucy. The memory of her hangs over Jake's house like white smoke over the fields when they burn off the long grasses in July.

I DREAM I AM BACK
in the woods again, being chased by Johnny. Carla is with me, and she is dragging Nathan behind her by the arm. “I'll say you were at him,” Carla is saying, over and over again. “I'll say you were at him.”

Then Carla turns into my father, and he says to me, “Jake, the longest story I know is the Bible, and we don't even know how it ends yet.”

Then Johnny is right in front of me, like sometimes happens in dreams, and I am staring down the barrel of his gun. “Rejoice and tremble, McNeil,” he tells me, and pulls the trigger.

I wake up in my old room, my heart pounding, the blast of the gun from my dream still echoing in my head. It's dark. A clock ticks from somewhere deep inside the house, and I wonder how Nathan is making out on the daybed. I think of going down to check on him, but I am too warm in my old bed. I must still be half asleep, because I think, “If dying feels like this, then I think I can handle it.”

MY FATHER NAMED MY SISTER
Ruth after the woman from the Bible, just as he named me Jacob, after he who wrestled with the angel. Ruth was two years younger than me and drowned in the river when I was five. I don't remember much about her, other than she had black hair and black eyes and she used to say “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” from Mary Poppins and make everyone laugh. I have a vague memory of my mother lighting sparklers for us one New Year's Eve and Ruth running around in the snow in the side yard after dark with hers screaming “Sparkla! Spakla!” with the glow from it bathing her pudgy little face. I have another of her holding buttercups under all our chins to tell if we “liked buttah.”

And that's all I remember about her, until she died.

She wandered out of the house one April afternoon when my mother was baking bread and fell into the river. They found her hours later, caught up in some dead wood. My mother died right there, my father said once, though it took another six years for the cancer to come and finish the job.

We didn't talk about Ruth when I was growing up. Once, when I was eleven, and my mother was at her sickest and the morphine wasn't doing anything for the pain, she shouted out Ruth's name in the middle of the night. I lay in bed and listened to the river and shivered, though it was summer and the house was hot. It was like something dark with wings flew over the house that night, something cold without a name from one of my father's sermons, and I stayed still in case it decided to turn back and come for me.

The next morning, when my father got me breakfast before he went into his study, I asked him if he'd heard my mother call out Ruth's name.

“You were dreaming,” he said.

But he didn't look at me when he said it, and I knew he'd heard it too. After supper my father brought my mother down to sit outside a half hour before bed. It took them twenty minutes to get down the stairs and outside to the armchair Dad set on the lawn. She stayed in her housecoat the whole time. She was so thin she hardly looked like my mother anymore. She sat and stared at the water with my father beside her in a lawn chair and me on the ground. I knew she was thinking about Ruth. My father brought out the radio and set it up on the lawn and we listened to the gospel station out of Trenton and the river flowed by, as swift and dark as wine.