Lake People (6 page)
Authors: Abi Maxwell
But thank goodness for the turkeys. First that small family and now they had joined forces. Seven adults and twenty-three children, thirty turkeys in all! Daily they came into the field to sun themselves. “I could not go to the store,” Sophie had heard herself tell Otto one day. It was the first sentence she had spoken to him since they had handed the baby over. “I could not go out,
it would disturb the turkeys.” The moment she said it she wished she had kept it to herself. Not to punish Otto; Sophie wasn’t the sort for that. This silence she now existed in had just washed over her. Maybe, she thought now, it was to punish herself. She had done wrong and so she would be silent. She would just go along, care for the turkeys. Do turkeys eat apples? There were four apple trees out there in the field and each year since her marriage Sophie had made enough applesauce to last through winter, but this year look at all those fallen apples. They were rotting out there among the leaves, which Malcolm had not raked because he had decided that he liked the look of it as it was, and Sophie had known just what he meant.
Stand up. Do something with yourself. Sophie went out and placed apple after fallen apple into the wheelbarrow. She dumped them all near the stone wall, at the edge of the trees, an offering for the turkeys. When that was done morning had passed, and she reached up to pick her first apple. She bit in and that was joy, simple and quick. Sophie picked all the apples off the trees that day, and when she brought them inside she smothered the couch with them. Now she would make her applesauce; she would fill the house with that smell that told her sons that this was a place to come in and sit down and be home. Her son, she meant. Just the one.
By the time Sophie had boiled down a batch of apples and cranked it through the food mill, there were footsteps outside and then the clank of the mail slot. Oh heavens, not another. Sophie lifted the pot and walked from the stove to the living room and saw that letter gleaming there on the floor. She released her grip and the pot clanged against the wooden floor and the sauce pooled at her feet. She walked upstairs without picking up the letter, and when Malcolm came home he found a trail of pink, and in that trail a letter from sweet Jennifer.
Malcolm stood in his driveway, watching the lake and dreaming of a life lived out on that wild island. He had never been there. But he could go! He could pack his things and steal that beautiful baby and he could paddle the three miles out to Bear Island and live there, as his ancestors had done. Hunt deer and build a house and use cattails to keep his fishing holes open through winter.
“Malcolm!” he heard. “Malcolm!” It was Mrs. Randolph. She wanted him to come to her porch. He had never been invited there before and though it was not something his father would have allowed, Malcolm marched her way.
“Sit,” Mrs. Randolph ordered.
Oh, it did smell wonderful out here. That cold air and that wood smoke, those gone-by leaves. He could see why she would spend all her time outside. And maybe he could stay with her. For just last week when Malcolm had entered his own home he had heard his mother say to Aunt Signe that when Malcolm was out of the house her Karl was every bit as present as living Malcolm was. So he would stay away. That was a small thing that hurt terribly but still a small thing he could give his mother.
Malcolm kept his hands in his pockets and looked on at Mrs. Randolph, rocking in her chair. She wasn’t old, not from up close. No older than his own mother. She wore jeans and a man’s flannel shirt, a man’s pair of slippers. Her hair was parted bluntly down the middle and her skin was dark and rough. Malcolm sat below her, on the peeling steps, and she said nothing and he said nothing for a long while. Then the floorboards creaked from inside the house, and the screen door slowly opened. It was her youngest son, who held the door open with his foot while he reached to hand a mug of coffee to his mother.
“And I didn’t even ask!” she hollered to him. It wasn’t but another moment before the floorboards creaked once more and her son reappeared. This time he handed a cup of coffee down to Malcolm, and then disappeared inside.
“I had a brother died, too,” Mrs. Randolph said as Malcolm took his first sip. His tongue burned and heat spread throughout his chest. He had never had coffee like this before, thick and silty.
“Jesse Hill,” she continued. “Did you know I’m a Hill by birth? Must be some Hills in your class. Nathan? Tammy? Jesse died out in the lake. It ain’t easy all I’m saying.”
“No,” Malcolm said.
“So there it is. Now we knows something about each other.” A cough came out of her from the depths and sent her body into three solid convulsions.
Malcolm said, when she was finished, “Yes.”
“So what you going to do about Karl’s child?”
“Sorry?”
“You heard me.”
Malcolm reached to place the half-finished mug of coffee on the edge of the porch but missed. It dropped to the ground and spilled. He picked it up but misplaced it again, and it fell once more.
“Leave it,” Mrs. Randolph finally said.
He did, and down the hill toward the lake he ran.
Dear Malcolm
,
In school they teach you to say Or-e-gone, but out here I learned fast they say Or-e-gen. How are things at home? Do you know how long this country stretches flat? One day you will take a train across and you will see what I mean. I am in the mountains now. I have taken a job on a farm and I have my own apartment. It’s really a
room and a loft to sleep in, attached to the landladies’ house. They’re lovers. My place has a small table and two wicker-backed chairs and a woodstove and a stove to cook on. The whole place is old and wooden. It reminds me of your home and your mother. How is your mother?
We take care of goats here. Usually they have their babies in the spring but this year the ladies say something is off, and everything is late. They say they cannot understand it. Anyway, when a mother is ready to have her baby we have to lock her up in her own pen so that the other goats don’t get a chance to hog all her food. The baby goats are so wonderful, Malcolm. I hold my finger out and they grab right on and suck. Their little mouths and their little legs make me feel so happy. We have to take them from their mothers. Did you know that’s how it works? It’s so that we can steal the mother’s milk and drink it ourselves and sell it. The first goat I had to steal was Buttercup, and I cried when I did it. She’s the runt of a litter. I want to take her up to my apartment and raise her myself
.
The landladies had me for goat stew last night. I did not want to eat it. My legs shook under the table. In the night I woke up screaming, sure that a large windowpane was breaking upon my head. I will not eat goat again
.
Do you remember how I used to go to church with you? Will you please speak to me about religion? I don’t know how to say anything about your brother. I loved him, too, and I hope your family is okay
.
Love, Jennifer
“Well, isn’t that something.” It was the sort of thing his father would say. Malcolm tapped the letter against his thigh and then moved to place it in his breast pocket, only to realize that he did not have such a pocket. “Well,” he said again. The telephone rang and he knew his mother would not answer it because daily
she moved further and further from this world that Malcolm occupied.
It was his father on the line, wanting Malcolm to prepare a Thanksgiving dinner. Of course there would be no one to invite, not so close to the holiday. No one but Aunt Signe, whom Malcolm really ought to call for help, but did not, for he had been taught to not be a burden.
Dear Malcolm
,
The windows of the place where I live look out to a big meadow. That’s what they call it out here, they call a field a meadow. When I first came here the meadow was covered in yellow. Buttercups, those were the flowers. You know them. We have them in Kettleborough, too. When I saw the meadow like that, all yellow, my first thought was that a painter had swept his paintbrush across it. This morning when I woke up I looked out the window to see that it had all gone purple. Like the painter came in the night to repaint the meadow. I asked the landladies about the flowers, but now I can’t remember their name. They say that this year, like everything else, the flowers are so late, but that before the snow falls the meadow will be repainted blue
.
It is a high elevation here. The weather is not like other places. The apricot tree outside my window bloomed in pink blossoms that fell down like rain when the wind blew, but now the blossoms are coated with ice. Buttercup, the goat I told you about, would not take to the bottle. Now I have vowed to never drink goat milk. Had we not been so selfish with her mother’s milk, Buttercup would have survived. Last night it froze, and Buttercup’s life ended
.
If you can, please tell your mother I love her
.
Love, Jennifer
Malcolm
,
There are dogs here that are big and fluffy. They are not allowed inside the house. Instead their job is to sleep all day and then circle the property at night to guard the livestock. They bark through the whole night, but it does not bother me. Do you know how it is to sleep close to our lake, and listen to the waves against the shore? It feels like that. But last night I woke up to the most terrible sounds. At first I thought it was my own screaming. But when I sat up I knew that the sounds were of something dying. And then I fell right back to sleep. Isn’t that strange? I keep thinking of it. I sat up, I knew that something was dying, and I lay back down. It’s cold here at night, and I keep afire in the woodstove. All the heat drifts to the loft, and I get so hot
.
When I woke up I remembered what I had heard and I looked out the window. In the meadow there was one of the dogs. She stayed there all day. Sleeping by her kill, the landladies told me. A deer had crossed into the meadow and headed for the barn, and that dog had killed her
.
I think of death a lot here. In the barn I have to open the hatch on the second floor to throw hay down to the goats, and I always imagine myself falling through the hatch and breaking my neck. There are two sows here that are huge and pregnant, and when I climb into their pen with the pitchfork to muck it out, I see myself tackled and eaten. It could happen easily enough
.
The truth is that I keep hoping for a letter from you. You can give my address to your mother if you want. You can show her the letters if you want. Forgive me for my mistakes
.
Love, Jennifer
The first freeze of the year had come a few weeks ago, and now, in the evening sunlight, the moss on the rocks sparkled with a wet cold. Malcolm walked slowly through the cemetery
before heading to the grocery store. Karl’s ashes, Malcolm knew, were still in a box in his mother’s bedroom. The name was typed and pasted to the top of the box:
KARL OTTO WICKHOLM
. Upon this box Sophie kept a pile of fresh laundry, a way to spare her husband. Malcolm hadn’t said anything, but he wanted a stone put here, in the Kettleborough graveyard, for his brother. In fact, he pretended that one old grave that no longer showed a name or a date was his brother’s. That stone had been placed flatly into the ground, and its edges were now soft and deep in the moss and grass. Malcolm had taken to speaking to it. “At school they feel bad for me but they are afraid to talk to me,” he said. “I would say they like me a little more but a little less since you died.” And once, quietly, “Mother seems to have gone a bit mad.” Today Malcolm told Karl of the letters from Jennifer, all of which his mother had now given him. But Malcolm didn’t say what he really wanted to say:
Tell me now that you left this earth before your baby was deposited into the boathouse. Tell me that had you lived, she would not have been in a canoe on the cold fall water
. Malcolm didn’t say that. But he wouldn’t write back to Jennifer, either. What she had done, no. Malcolm would have no part of her.
From the edge of the woods he tore off three branches that had given birth to bright red berries. He surrounded them with gone-by golden ferns, a sort of bouquet, and he placed it atop the grave.
Passing Clara and Paul’s, Malcolm decided to stop in and see if they didn’t need anything. From the front step he could hear the baby wailing. He knocked and knocked and when no one came he opened the door and stuck his head in.
Paul held screaming Alice in his arms. Malcolm had never heard her cry so hard.
“It’s not a good time for a visit,” Paul told him, but Malcolm didn’t budge. “Malcolm,” Paul snapped. “Shut the door and be gone.”
Where was Clara? “Higher,” Malcolm said through Alice’s wails.
“Excuse me?”
Malcolm pushed the door wider and walked right in, his arms held out for the baby. Paul backed up and told him again to leave, but Malcolm kept reaching for the child, and when Alice’s cries got so loud and so fierce that Malcolm worried she would choke, finally he shouted, “For God’s sake, lift her higher over your shoulder!”