Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (39 page)

So Ian asks himself, should he remain on the land? A question for him one last time, though it had not been for Judah, it seems his father’s question nonetheless. Is his mother’s photograph at thirty (yellowing, the birch trees brown, with Ian peeking at the camera from her knee’s protection, her hair unbound and her hands on her hips, elbows out) the emblem he hunted in Sally but had failed to find? Hattie and the villagers have locked him so entirely in place that he fears his own identity is gone.

Everything that’s mystical ends up manipulation; all early authority fades. If man is a political animal, as Ian once believed, then he has been caged. He imagines his mother behind him, and he takes her hand. Her knuckles go white when she squeezes, and he asks her, offering,
What kind of help can I be?
What do you want of me; what can I do, how can I be of best use?

When labor begins, Maggie does not recognize it as labor—only her accustomed tightening previous to sleep. Then the contractions come in earnest: a band of muscle wringing her as if she were the washing squeezed to dry. There are gigantic hands around her, fingers interlaced. She holds her breath, then breathes shallowly. She is unprepared. She has intended somehow, someway, to prepare herself for this. She has bought books about Lamaze, the methodology of painless childbirth, yoga, and breath control. There is a book by a Frenchman who insists that babies come out smiling if they come in darkened rooms, and she agrees with this: being born is enough of a trauma. Therefore she leaves the room lights off. We don’t need hospitals and people shouting and instant vitamin shots; she’s said this to Ian, persuasive, but Ian is not in the house. Hattie is dead in the attic, she fears. Her child will be a stillborn girl, and she will die in the process of birth, and Ian would return to find three generations of Sherbrookes to bury: the women of his line.

Maggie musters self-control. She calls the doctor and he tells her to time the contractions, to tell him how long between contractions and call him back, okay. She hears the noise of his household on the other end; then he hangs up. She understands that her own household produces no similar noise; she stares at the hands of her watch, forgetful of her purpose in such staring. The contractions cease, Ian will be home, she tells herself, before things can get serious; her labor with him took two days. She waits eight minutes, twelve, fifteen, and calls the doctor to confess there’s nothing yet. He tells her therefore not to worry and to try to get some rest. She has a wakeful dream.

Maggie is with Judah on just such an evening, though thirty years before. They are courting, have not yet been married. He shows her how to twist the wires of a barbed-wire fence together so they tighten, using a stick of wood as lever; he is repairing a gate. On the far side cows file past; they have beaten the path brick-hard. The cows have eaten everything but thistle; the pasture is infertile now, he tells her, more a place to exercise than feed. She will be Mrs. Judah Sherbrooke in two weeks. She wonders how the animals decide to cluster to a path, and where they decide to fan out. In certain meadows they walk single file, in sequence; in others they graze without order; this is also true of sheep. She listens for Ian, for Hattie, for the noise of the furnace or toilet or pump. She is alone in the house. She brushes her hair at the dressing-room table, tallying three hundred strokes. Her arms go weary; she rests them on her stomach and pats the jumping, kicking thing inside. Again she has a contraction—thinking herself those wires now, with the twisting child a stick and everything rotated tightly, taut—but cannot remember how long since the last. Time is not sequential, she decides, but circular. The light that dusk, with Judah beside her, had a kind of thickness to it that she supposes was dust.

In this fashion she prepares to pass the night. She is provided for, fenced in; she will let the doctor sleep. With such security about her, Maggie cannot bring herself to dial his number yet again.

On school mornings, Ian remembers, the table offered everything a man and boy and two women could eat. Judah was back from the barns. He’d drawn feed for the cows, if it were winter, and milked them and set them out to pasture in the spring and fall and would come in for breakfast steaming, slapping his hands. But his father would wait to eat breakfast until he, Ian, arrived. There had been orange juice and milk and mugs of coffee that he learned to like. “Time was,” his mother told him, “when you wouldn’t take your bottle unless it had some coffee in it. To color the milk.”

There had been cornbread and blueberry muffins and cheese and every sort of jam; there was bacon or sausage to go with the eggs. The eggs were scrambled one day, fried the next; therefore on three school mornings every week—Monday, Wednesday, Friday—he’d get scrambled eggs. He preferred once-over-lightly to sunny-side up, and always added catsup to the egg mush he made. “Don’t do that,” Hattie said, “it’s not good manners, Ian.”

“I’m not,” he used to answer her. “It’s my fork that’s doing it”—pressing the tines through the yolk.

On Sundays there’d be pan-fried potatoes also, with sometimes a thin slice of steak, and sometimes both bacon and sausage if there were company; the morning sun would shine on the juice so that he’d see the orange pulp and pits and squeezings in his glass. He’d shift the butter so it stood in the path of the sun. That way it would be warm enough to spread without forcing and making his muffin collapse. There had been conversation, but they told him not to talk with his mouth full, and what he remembers is not what they said but only the mumble and hum. There were cooks who came and went. There was always a scraping and clatter and weather forecasts and Hattie asking if he’d done his schoolwork to the teacher’s satisfaction.

“How can he tell?” Judah asked. “It ain’t been graded yet.”

When Ian brings the Packard back, it is full night. He is shivering; the sunset has been wintry. He garages the car, then sets out for the house. He hears Boudreau calling, turns and sees the man emerge stoop-shouldered, bearing something white and limp, coming from the stock pond. Ian does not trust his eyes; he waits. But presently the aspects of this conjoined figure settle and resolve themselves; soon enough he sees the limbs and lank hair of his aunt, and slime across her gown.

Boudreau carries her with little difficulty. He has got her in a fireman’s carry, slung around his neck like a young lamb. The men are constrained; it is not clear who should hold her, for instance, or how to effect the exchange. There is some echo of their morning’s argument, perhaps; they seem to be in opposition as they meet. Boudreau is soaked; he has waded in the pond to fetch her, and his clothes are streaming with the water that her clothes disgorge. “Don’t weigh nothing,” he says. “It’s amazing how little she weighs.”

“I’ll call the doctor.”

“Too late for that . . .”

“No—what I mean is,” Ian says, “for a postmortem. An examination.”

“You do that. But let me tell you, this is death by drowning. Any fool can see as much. And it wasn’t accidental, neither. I got her from the pond.”

“Of course. I didn’t mean . . .”

Hal holds his left hand up, hieratic; the corpse shifts. “She was a long way in.”

They lay her in the carriage by the Packard, on the hard red leather of the open seat. Ian closes her eyes. He had expected the lids to be brittle, resistant, but they slide easily shut. “We’ll need you for a witness,” he says to Boudreau. “I’ll go tell my mother, then go into town.”

“Don’t wake her.”

“Who?”

“Your mother. Let her get some sleep. She hadn’t ought to see this.”

“No.”

“Well.” Boudreau clears his throat. “I’ll get help. You stay here.”

He watches the man amble off. Something in that upright carriage is a puzzle to him still; there’s swagger and humility combined. It’s as if Hal learned a shambling imitation of Judah himself—but forgot to keep his head up when he walked. His shoes make wet, sucking sounds. Hell is full of thirsty devils, Hattie used to say; it’s what they mean by firewater when you’re doomed by drink.

He cannot look at her. He hawks, spits, shuts his eyes. He kneels and puts his ear, Indian fashion, to the gravel drive. He knows there is no sense to this, but holds the position anyhow, needing the sense of solidity it gives him, pressing the earth as though perhaps Sally lay there also. He sees himself as Boudreau might, from the dark windy distance: a grown man on all fours. He pivots on his knees since the entrance drive is circular, and listens in the four directions for some sound. He thinks he hears his mother screaming in the house. There is a beaver bog by Glastonbury, where the flat flap of tails on the pond resounds as does his heart now, thumping. Ian rises and enters the house—its uncontested master who must arrange for burial—taking stairway treads three at a time.

Boudreau is wet, soaked through. He’s shivering so he can’t make it home, or call for the police just yet; he shelters in the hay barn and takes off his coat. Then he pulls his boots off and peels back his socks; his feet are blue. He wheels his arms, then slaps his hands together and slaps his legs and belly until he feels his hands. When he saw Hattie floating like a drowned sheep in the pond, he’d thought to leave his pipe and matchbook on the bank; the matches are still dry enough to take. He lights the kerosene lamp by the door. He pulls a bale free from the stack behind him, sits on it, and smokes. He tamps the pipe and says, “Strange doings, Mr. Sherbrooke,” to test the sound of it.

There’s wind inside the barn. He pulls the door shut. The runners need oiling; they squeak. He sees a stack of feed sacks, takes one, and rubs himself down. He’s taking off his shirt to let it dry out also when he sees what he’s known all along awaits him, his consolation and reward. He trims the wick; the flame is steady now. It’s how you remember a man’s name, he thinks, not knowing you remembered it, but knowing that you knew it anyhow, like when the light strikes slantways on a house so suddenly you recollect that thirty years ago this Christmas you were inside at the drop-leaf table, eating pie. He busies himself, remembering. There was old Jamie Kerr and Lewis back from Arizona—“Airizona,” Lewis called it—where they sent him for his lungs. Judah’d just got married to that amazing girl, so busy courting her he’d not had time to make a proper wedding, or not bothered to, because any time they were upright and in public must have seemed a waste. He himself was down from Maine. Engaged to Amy, hunting work, he’d not known that this town would be their town forever; he can see the rhubarb spilling out over its crust.

Boudreau stops shivering. He relishes the time it takes to sidle past the bottle. He bends and lifts it clear, unscrews the top and sniffs it and swigs, holding his pipe in his left hand now, his right hand in his beard, temptation dangling from his fourth and pinkie fingers like an extra length of flesh. Drinking, he sees the Alagash. There’s wide, fast water where he’d pitch his camp, where he came upon his daughter once asleep without her shirt on, with the fishing rod lashed to a tree. He’d known he’d never see her again when she went off to live with Indians, doing what her postcard said was government work. How come, he’d asked his wife (who’d made no answer, had pretended she was busy with the stove top and scouring pad), how come she could afford to send those turquoise bracelets, tiepins, cuff links, necklaces? On
government pay,
he said, I’d like you to answer me that.

He tips the gin. He whistles, wishes for the thousandth time that Billy had had asthma when they drafted him, not gone, not gotten over what he’d suffered with through all of seventh grade; knows as he always has it’s futile, finished, milk spilled so long ago you can’t even see where it spilled, drinks, thinks the old woman had willed it, heading fifty yards through cattails like a hunter for his blind. Sweet suffering Jesus, he thinks, you were a rare one at your age wanting to learn how to swim.

But sorrow does not die with its occasion. Grief lasts. He is not drunk. There’s not enough to get drunk on, only warm. If he wanted to get drunk he would. He’d walk to Merton’s Hideaway or the Village Arms and tell them a story they’d pay for, tell what’s been happening to Sherbrooke women lately, how one of them drowns and the other fills out like a mainsail; it’s only three fingers of gin. He drinks. His wife will be waiting, incurious, and he’ll let her wait. Harry’s home. He’ll be sitting by the TV, not watching, drawing circles, making triangles inside the circles, then circles inside the triangles again. Loss endures. Hal waves his pipe. There’s room enough, if he’s careful, for both the pipe and bottle in the circle of his mouth, and he spends some minutes shaping things so that they fit. The bottle’s neck is a circle, and he puts the pipestem in; he lies down in the haymow, balancing. He hears the Coleman lamp hum. There’s things to juggle in this world, he tells his old employer, there’s problems like the ones that he and the boy were discussing:
bowling alley, shopping mall
. He’ll fix it in the morning when he’s dry. He has one inch of gin, one inch of tobacco remaining, and must not confuse them; this white wet certainty of comfort is what they want you to swallow. He strikes his final match and settles back.

Labor: she savors the word. It is both curse and blessing, her portion again. It is a rack she’s pinioned on, but willingly. Maggie enters a hall with a great fire burning at the room’s far end. She shuts her eyes and rides with it and will not scream; she screams.

Ian comes to the door. He has something to tell her; she tells him, “Not now. Call the doctor. Please.” He does as she bids him, and dials; the doctor answers on the second ring and says he will arrive. Ian’s hands feel wet with pond slime still; he wipes them on his pants. He touches the bed, and it also is wet. He takes her in his arms.