“Why not?” said Helen. “Surely he’s up there with the saints.”
“Is Seth up there?” Clara said, surprising herself. She hadn’t meant to speak her question aloud. She had just come to listen, but she hadn’t been able to shut up since coming inside. “Wasn’t he baptized in our church?”
“What do you think?” said Gretel. “A murderer and a suicide? What sort of God would let such evil into his holy presence?”
“The same one who lets evil into our world.”
Gretel’s jaw snapped shut with an audible clacking, like a metal hinge. “You don’t know that family, do you? You don’t know the slightest thing.”
Clara’s voice was small. “I knew
him
,” she said.
“Did you? After living here for one month? I don’t believe any of us knows what others think. Only God can look inside a person’s heart. Do you know what I am thinking right now, dear?”
“Stop this,” Nora tried to interrupt. “I don’t like where this conversation is going.”
“Something wicked,” said Clara, raising her chin and meeting the woman’s gaze.
Gretel’s smile twitched the corners of her mouth; she was enjoying this exchange, Clara realized, probably not
used to people talking back to her. “There’s a difference between thinking and doing,” she said.
“Not much,” said Clara.
“Yes,” insisted Gretel. “Sometimes the difference between thinking and doing is a matter of life or death.”
A
FTER THIS EXCHANGE THE
rest of the conversation blurred for Clara, and she was quiet, her thoughts elsewhere. The German chocolate cake proved to be dry, spackled with a hard coconut frosting. The women gathered up the plates and headed into the kitchen. Doreen and Helen had left already, but Clara lingered, still hoping to redeem herself from her earlier foolishness. She wanted to walk home with Nora. She stayed because she needed a friend, but when she had offered to help with the dishes, Rosa had gently said, “Not in your condition.”
“Condition,” muttered Clara. She hated that word, as though the baby was some type of fungus growing under her armpits. Precious Moments figurines sat on the surfaces of sideboards and buffets lining the walls, each occupying its own lace-fringed doily. The figurines had fat angelic faces and teardrop eyes. Clara found them faintly creepy.
Gretel pushed in a woman in a wheelchair from one of the back rooms and left her there, rejoining the other women in the kitchen without any explanation. The woman was so ancient most of her white hair had fallen out, except in clumps on either side of her head. She slumped in the
wheelchair, lightly snoring, a yarn afghan thrown over knees despite the heat. When Clara stepped back, she jostled the Precious Moments figurines on one of the buffet tables, startling the woman awake. She raised her head, sniffing like a hound, her eyes milky blue. “Hello, Duchess,” she said, when her eyes found Clara.
“It’s Clara, actually,” she said once she got her breath. “I’m the pastor’s wife.”
“I know who you are.” The woman’s mouth was a dark pink cave; her caretaker must have neglected to put in her dentures. “It’s cold in here,” she continued, shivering. “That’s what hell is like, winter without end. Fire eats you up quick, but the cold is a slow kind of burning.”
They had just gotten done talking about eternal life as this woman must have known. Clara heard the others in the kitchen chatting in low voices as they washed and dried Rosa’s good silverware and china. “Why did you call me Duchess?”
“It’s who you are.”
“Oh,” Clara said. “How nice to be a duchess.”
“Don’t put on airs. We took you in as one of our own. Our little displaced person. But you were bad, you and the other one.”
The hair stood up on Clara’s arms. The woman’s whitish-blue eyes had fixed her with a hostile glare. “What did I do?”
“You know what you did.” She waved a speckled hand over her afghan. “Always serving tea and then turning the cup over to read the leaves. Telling us when to plant, if our
husbands had been faithful. You walked with spirits; you lay down in sin.”
Clara froze. If hell was winter without end, it was all she saw in the woman’s eyes, emptiness and violence. But the woman’s voice ebbed with every word. Even her head sagged slightly, as if the story she told were draining her.
“Well, I won’t do it anymore.”
“That’s what you promised.” Her head was like a sunflower, too heavy for the stalk. It sagged toward the blanket. “You promised. But you were a liar. You had to be punished.”
“How?”
When a moment passed without the woman speaking, Clara leaned in close. The old woman smelled of talcum powder and decay, as if pieces of her were already rotting from the inside.
Nora appeared behind her. “I see you’ve met Bynthia.”
Clara stood and looked into Nora’s periwinkle eyes. “I need to get home,” she said, “will you walk with me?”
Once they were outdoors in the heat of Indian summer, the old woman’s words seemed insubstantial. Nora hobbled beside her on her bad hip, gossiping. “Sorry about Gretel. Some days, I feel like I have to wash my mouth out with cider vinegar just to hold my own in a conversation with that woman.”
The Catholic church’s bells rang the hour across the town.
“Bynthia called me Duchess.”
Nora halted.
“You know that name, don’t you?”
“Stop at my house and we’ll talk more there.”
They walked the remaining block in silence before going up the steps to Nora’s porch. Inside the house, Clara smelled soil and the perfume of flowers. Vines from a pothos plant twisted along the arched entryway and climbed over an inset bookcase. An umbrella tree blocked out the light coming in the living room window, and spider ferns dangled from the ceiling. Even the carpet and sofa were a matching pistachio color, the curtains darkly evergreen. Nora told her to make herself at home while she went to fix them each some ice water. A few minutes later she returned, the ice water sloshing because of her ungainly gait as she passed a cold glass to Clara.
Clara set her glass on a coaster. “You were going to tell me about the Duchess.”
Nora sat heavily, grunting as she did so. “First of all, Bynthia is ninety-five years old and she’s lived on the wrong side of the crazy river for the last decade or so. She’s Gretel’s mother. They’re relations of Sheriff Steve Krieger.”
“Then why does that name bother you so much? Why did I remind her of this woman?”
Nora glanced at Clara’s hand. “It’s your left hand, dear. How many women have such a … wound. Some of the old-timers look at you and remember. There’s been talk, but we couldn’t be sure. Who are you, Clara? Who are your people?”
“My people?” Clara settled into the couch’s soft
cushions. “I don’t really know. I was raised alone by my father. He refused to talk about his family or my mother. He would only say that she died in a car accident in the wintertime. He would tell me stories, but they were fairy tales, really. There was always a mountain in them, sometimes wolves and winter storms. That’s all I know, not even my mother’s name. After he died, I couldn’t find my own birth certificate among his records. I don’t know how he registered me for school without it, how he got me my social security number. It’s as if I don’t exist, except through his stories.”
Nora was quiet for a long time. “Why did you come here?”
“My husband was called. The call committee hired him.”
“Yes, I heard. I also heard from Simon Wiley that he was sure your husband was going to turn us down. We were all surprised when he accepted. So I figure you talked him into it.”
“I did. I’ve been looking for records of my mother for a long time.”
“You might just have found her,” Nora said.
A hard knot in the center of her chest tightened her breathing. This was it, the news she had longed for. The air grew light up in her head, and she had to take a drink of water to compose herself. “All my life, I’ve lived with this gap inside me. This empty place. I need to know about her.”
Nora sipped from her glass, then set it down. “Sylvia came here a little after the war, married a schoolteacher
in town. She was an immigrant, but we couldn’t be sure where she was from. She came here under the Displaced Persons Act. She was petite like you, but darker, raven haired. Shortly after the wedding, she leased out a building downtown. Lord knows where she got the money, considering her husband’s salary. Draped the windows with posters of Paris and London. The Duchess’s Beauty Emporium opened a few weeks later.”
“Did you ever go there?”
“Oh, all the young girls did. Sylvia was good with hair. You could bring a picture from a magazine, and she could weave up any bob or beehive you asked for. But that wasn’t the real draw.”
“Bynthia told me about the tea leaves.”
“Yes. She would tell fortunes after serving you tea. She had this thick, dreamy accent. It was all very European, mysterious. She predicted I would meet Charlie at the dance hall over in Henderson, predicted him right down to the color of his eyes.”
“Bynthia made it sound like the town punished her.”
“Punished?” Nora’s expression darkened, her lips thinning. “Nobody punished her.”
“I saw that woman’s eyes. Pure malevolence. Surely, she was guilty of something worse than reading some leaves.”
“Sylvia was a free thinker, if you know what I mean. One of the high school boys came to see her. She was helping him with a correspondence course, near as I remember.
They worked together late at night, and I guess you could say they grew close.”
Clara twisted her hands nervously on her lap. She was trying to take all of this in, not sure what to believe. First, there was the toothless old woman, who had looked like she materialized straight from an episode of late-night cable television,
Fright Show
or something. Now this, her mother’s story. Duchess. A woman Clara’s father had hated so much he erased her from his life.
“We don’t talk about this. Nobody has talked about this in many years. Then you show up. What I’m saying about Sylvia and the boy is that they were caught together. Naked in the back storeroom of the shop. Remember we’re talking about the early 1960s. Hell, if that happened even today there would be trouble. Still, it might have all blown over, but Sylvia pressed for a divorce from the teacher. She said she was in love with the boy.”
“Wait. What happened to her?”
“You mean your mother?”
“If that’s who she was.”
“Your father’s name was Stanley?”
“Yes.”
“He spoke Latin?”
Clara nodded. “He ran a corner grocery store up in Savage for most of the years I was growing up, but we had whole shelves in our apartment stacked with books in Latin. I must have been the only sixth grader in the county who’d read Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
in the original language.”
Nora looked wistful, absently running her hands through her hair. “Sylvia had a nervous breakdown, from what we heard. She had to be institutionalized. Your father moved to the Cities to get away from all this. Start fresh. This Sylvia Meyers was your mother. I’m sure of it. She had the same eyes, dreamy and farseeing. Like she was looking on into a world of spirit none of us could see. Your father and mother were gone as far we knew. Shamed. We thought that was the last of it.”
“She came back, though.”
“For her lover, in December, a few days before Christmas. I think they were trying to run away. They left in a hurry, in the midst of a storm. But the car must have slid off the road into a slough. It turned over at the bottom of the canyon, crushing the roof. Sylvia made it out of the car. She tried to walk back to town, but she never made it here.”
“She had a baby with her.”
“It was Sheriff Steve who found the baby. He took the baby, but he had to leave Sylvia behind. He couldn’t carry both her and the baby through the deep snow.”
Clara’s head was spinning. She sank deeper into the couch, shut her eyes. It was the vision of the woman she had seen, lost in the woods, surrounded by wolves. But there were no wolves in this story. “Why did she take the baby? Why not just leave me if she wanted to run away with this guy?”
“Why do people do anything? Maybe she wanted to hurt your father.”
“I don’t understand why he wouldn’t say anything.”
“What father could bear to tell his daughter such a story? How could he forgive his wife?”
“I’m going to have to say something, aren’t I? Tell them who I am.”
“No. It doesn’t make any difference. You are Clara Warren, the pastor’s wife. You are a schoolteacher. A damn fine one from what I hear. You are an expectant mother. That’s all anyone needs to know. Leave the ugliness in the past.”
Clara sighed. “There must be some kind of article from a newspaper, something to substantiate all this?”
“No. The first newspaper office burned down years ago. Why would seeing something in writing make it more or less true? The only article ever printed didn’t even mention a baby, just the accident and the death of the woman. Sheriff Steve made sure of it. No one knows, really, but a few people like me.”
“And Bynthia.”
“I knew Stanley. If he didn’t tell you, he had reasons for it. He told you enough to bring you here, didn’t he?”
“What did they do with her body?”
“She’s out there, has been this whole time. Sylvia Meyers was buried in the suicide section.”
“The suicide section?”
“Pastor Schoenwald didn’t want her with the saints. She’s right out there at the furthest edge near the woods. Kids still tell stories about her, about the woman in the
woods. It’s said that some nights if you are back there in the trees you’ll hear her calling and calling for her baby.”
Nora put her hand over Clara’s and squeezed. “Now her baby has come home.”
TRAP
G
rizz took the International out in the fields with a haybine and rack running behind it. He was late for this final cutting and in a foul mood, realizing he would likely have to buy hay from the next county over to feed his cattle through winter after the poor harvest. Haying this way took two men, normally, one to catch the bales spitting out the bine and stack them on the hayrack, the other to drive the tractor and scoop up the loose hay into the thresher, running along the even rows. Without Seth, Grizz had to stop every thirty yards or so and hand carry the tumbled bales to the rack and climb up to stack them himself—long, slow, hot work.