Mother Lode (39 page)

Helena put her hand on his arm as they
watched the creatures squirm in the jar. ”Everything changes,” she
mused.

Chapter 29

He wanted to leave the house for good that
night, but he had promised to take Izzy to the circus. The next
afternoon they joined the throngs entering the big tent outside the
village. Her joy at seeing the thrilling feats of the performers
made up for missing the parade. But though he loved to see her
happy, it tore him apart; he knew he must leave her if he were ever
to shake off his mother’s grasp.

He left the house that night with a few of
his belongings and moved in with Phillip and his mother. He would
bide his time for three more weeks until his birthday, at which
time he’d collect his inheritance and leave for Ann Arbor. At least
he no longer had the burden of supporting his mother, nor felt any
filial duty to her at all.

Away from Ma, he had a lot of time to think.
Perhaps there’d been a kind of victory that night in Eliza’s room,
after all. He’d finally conquered the perversity that had been his
nemesis. A sense of freedom descended on him.

He felt sad when he thought of Kaarina. He
too, had been deceitful. What if she’d known his feelings for his
mother? What if she knew him as he actually was? He didn’t feel
clean enough to be with her, to accept her love. Besides, he was
too young to contemplate any serious romance. With Kaarina it could
be nothing else. He should go to her, explain why he had to end the
relationship.

Two weeks went by, then one morning when he
finished work, she was waiting outside for him. She looked
uncomfortable, but still she attempted a smile.

“What are you doing here, Kaarina?”

Why did it come out like that? How hard it
must have been for her to come. He should be trying to put her at
ease; instead he was being brusque with her.

“I came to see you. Is something wrong?”

“I’ll take you home.”

They walked in silence while he tried to
think of how he could tell her.

Finally, he said, “I should have come to
you. I’m sorry you had to be the one—”

“It’s all right.”

He knew she was watching him, but he didn’t
dare look at her. If he did, all his resolve would melt.

“I’m going back to the University as soon as
I get my inheritance.” There was no easy way to say the rest.
“Kaarina, we’re both too young to be married, and I don’t want to
make promises I can’t keep.”

“I thought it must be something like
that.”

He heard a catch in her voice. Every fiber
in his being wanted to turn and take her in his arms. Instead, he
shoved his hands in his pockets.

“I would have come to tell you before I
left, to say good-bye. But it’s as well you came to me.”

Yes, I want to get this over with.

He left her at her gate, telling her maybe
one day he’d look her up.

He walked away wondering if anything he’d
said was true. Would he look her up? Would he have even been man
enough to go to her to break it off if she hadn’t come first? He
felt the cad, that she’d had to come to him to get an answer.

September came and went, and with it his
hopes of getting into the fall semester at the University. But he
still planned to leave for Ann Arbor after his birthday in
October.

He dreaded seeing his mother, but feared if
he said nothing, she would be unprepared to give him his
inheritance on his birthday. He hadn’t been to the house since the
night of that terrible scene in Eliza’s room. Two weeks before his
birthday, he climbed the hill with trepidation.

He found her in the swing on the veranda,
eating a cluster of grapes. The vines covered the trellises, and
the autumn rains had brought the Concords to their full
ripeness.

He stood several feet from her. “Where’s
Eliza?”

“With the Stockwell child.”

He flicked a mosquito off of his arm.

Her smile was contemptuous. “You still can’t
kill them, can you?”

“Who are the Stockwells?”

“The family that bought the Kukkonen’s place
last year.”

Well, at least Eliza was allowed
friends.

“She goes there almost every day. At least
for the time being.”

“I’ve come to tell you that I’m leaving
right after my birthday. I’m going back to the University as soon
as I get my inheritance.” He resisted an impulse to brush away the
pesky mosquito trying to land on her face.

She listened to the drone of the insects.
“You know, they never bother me. I rather like the sound they make.
Don’t they just pinch the music out of the night?”

She sucked the grape from its skin, savoring
the sweetness of its flesh, discarding the bitter skin. She plucked
another cluster, holding it out to him. “They’re more succulent
than ever this year.”

“No. This is not a social visit. It’s an
announcement. I’m going back to school.”

She laid the grapes in her lap and sat up
straight. Jorie watched her mouth move tenuously, carefully
choosing her approach.

“Please don’t leave me now, Jorie. You can’t
leave your mother up here in this God-forsaken place, without a man
to look after her.”

She was still doing it!

“You have Mr. Markel.”

“But I don’t! He’s taken up with another
widow. Like a vulture, he circles and waits, picks us off at
funerals, when we’re most vulnerable!”

“I thought he wanted to marry you.”

“I suppose he got tired of waiting.”

“Well, I’m sorry. I’m going back to
school.”

He saw her face harden. A ghoulish smile
curled one corner of her mouth. The sunlight filtered through the
vine leaves, and for the first time he noticed the lines around her
mouth. She picked up the grapes and pinched another from its
skin.

“The University of Michigan wants its
students to be of upstanding character.” His heart froze. Was she
saying what he thought she was?

“To be plain with you, I
am prepared to write them detailing the state of your mind, Jorie.
You are mentally unstable, and you will never be admitted. The
sheriff can back me up. He was here, you’ll recall, the night you
broke down the door down from
the
inside
.”

She spat the skin out on
the ground, and drew another grape from its shell. “We know about
your fiasco climbing the shafthouse! The night watchman saw you,
and the sheriff has that on record too. I was compelled to report
the bruises you left on my arms the night you went crazy with
jealousy over my seeing Mr. Markel.
And
that in my child’s room you
stripped me of all covering, and forced upon me shameful behavior
no mother should endure.”

His gaze shifted to the vines behind her. He
knew from swinging on them as a boy how strong they were. In his
mind he could see them winding around her neck, ensnaring her in
their trap, squeezing and silencing every venomous syllable.

Instead he willed himself to walk away.

Up in the hills he flung himself on the
ground, grasping the protruding toes of the beech tree. Howling his
rage and despair, he released his energy to the earth, the great
mother, who could absorb all his sorrows.

He didn’t know which was
worse — his dreams of education turning to ashes, or the extent of
his mother’s betrayal. Yes, he did know. It was the collapse of all
he’d placed his faith in — his
madonna
.

In the following days he became calm enough
to sort things out. He realized he could probably go to some other
college; she couldn’t write to them all. But somehow the dream had
died, along with something inside. He just wanted to get away. If
he could hold on until his birthday.

The national park system interested him as
much as anything. He’d take his inheritance, if she hadn’t found a
way to queer that too, and go out west. Maybe he could even work
with John Muir.

In the early evening he found her in the
garden gathering the last of the tomatoes before the frost.

“Ma, my birthday’s next Thursday. I want you
to have the papers ready, or whatever you have to do, so I can go
to the bank. Then I’ll be leaving.”

She turned to him with a little smile.
“Perhaps it is time you understood the terms of your father’s
will.”

“Are you going to tell me he didn’t leave me
anything?”

“Oh, no. He did. But
you’re making a hasty assumption about
when
you may receive this
money.”

I knew there’d be something.

“The terms of your
father’s will state that you shall receive a sum ‘upon attaining
the age of eighteen,
or at such time that
your trustee believes you to have obtained sufficient maturity to
manage your inheritance.
’ I believe those
are the exact words.”

“Who is my trustee?”

“Why, your mother, of course.”

Everything was spinning in front of him,
including the shovel that lay between them. Then he deliberately
went numb, for if he didn’t, he knew he would strike her.

He walked to the lake, skipped pebbles
across the still water, each one disturbing the surface and that
which lived below.

He realized he would never get his
inheritance. She had always held the high cards, and today she’d
played her ace.

He traced over and over
the steps she’d taken to ensure his servitude. Ever since he’d been
small, training him to be her devoted slave, asking him to
sacrifice friends, keeping him so isolated he had none but her as
ally and mentor. And when he was fourteen making herself seductive
with her nude painting scheme. Posing for him.
But not directly in front of you, Dear— that wouldn’t be
right!

He thought of all the tricks and lies she’d
employed to keep him home from college. Why? Why was she, whom he
had venerated, determined to undermine, sabotage all his dreams?
What had he done to cause betrayal of this magnitude? She had even
managed to contaminate the first innocent and pure love he had for
someone else.

The truth was that
according to the wording of the will, not only could she withhold
his inheritance as long as she liked, but she could have given it
to him
before
he
was eighteen, if she’d a mind to. There was no financial reason to
take him out of school.

But if she thought she could keep him now by
withholding the money, she was wrong. He would just leave town. She
couldn’t prevent that.

He’d promised to stay on the job until the
end of the month to cover two stories coming up. Then he would take
the train to Chicago and from there west. Until that time, he would
stay at Phillip’s.

She had done her dirty work. There was
nothing more she could do to stand in his way.

PART III

On his second night in the county jail,
noise from down the hall roused Jorie from a restless sleep. Foul
language and shouting followed. Under sheriff Lockheed was bringing
in a prisoner. The turnkey, Hensen, jumped up to help.

Jorie could hear the men wrestling with the
prisoner.

“Shit! I didn’t do nothing.’”

“Sleep it off, Jimbo.”

“What’s the charge?”

“Drunk and disorderly, vagrancy.”

“Fuck! Nothin’ happened. Just a good
sportin’ fight.”

“Get your sorry ass in there before I charge
you with somethin’ serious.”

When they had him secured, Hensen stuck his
nose between Jorie’s bars. “Looks like you’re going to have company
tonight. One of the Groden gang. Nasty lot, that. Good luck
sleepin’.”

For the next hour Jorie lay on his cot
listening to the crescendo of epithets and other sounds coming from
the next cell. At times the kicks on the wall caused plaster to
fall off the lath on Jorie’s side. Finally, his neighbor passed out
in a drunken stupor; soon after Jorie fell into a fitful sleep.

In the morning the prisoner in the next cell
was raising a ruckus to get out. When Sheriff Foster arrived, he
informed him he was going to be a guest of the county for the rest
of the day. Earl wasn't in any mood for the brawling Groden
brothers and their lumberjack rabble-rousers. Riding into town,
busting up bars and tearing up the place, their cleated boots had
left several faces in Copperdom permanently pocked, and more than
one young lady a soiled dove. “Butt-cuts of original sin,” he
called them.

“And when you do get out, you’re leaving
town, and taking your whole quintet with you. You got that?”

“Shit! What if I don’t?”

“A matured and finished sinner, such as
yourself, should know the answer to that.”

Earl opened Jorie’s cell. “You ready to talk
yet, kid?”

Jorie tried to organize his thoughts.

“Your boss called, said you’d turned in your
resignation a month before—before your mother died. Said you were
planning to leave town in a few weeks. What do you have to say
about that?”

Earl Foster waited for an explanation. All
he got was a puzzled frown.

“Look, I’m running out of patience. You’re
either being a real smart-ass, or you’ve gone loony. Whatever it
is, I haven’t got all month to figure it out. What happened that
day in the storm?”

“I don’t know.”

Earl raised his voice. “You talk now, boy,
or you’ll talk in court! One way or another!”

Earl Foster counted to ten, turned on his
heel and left.

In the afternoon Helena came to see him.
During her stay a steady stream of tears coursed down her face.

"I never thought I’d be visiting you in a
place like this, lad. I don’t believe a word of it. As if it
weren’t bad enough, you losin’ your ma, now they’re saying—”

She pulled out a man’s handkerchief and blew
loudly into it. When she had sufficiently composed herself, she
said, "What do you make of it, Jorie? How could they even
think—”