Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (13 page)

Fern remembered being pregnant, then holding those little imps. In what seemed like a moment, they were climbing trees. James punched someone at school. Cricket asked what dying felt like. Will broke his leg. For a whole year the twins had gotten up for the day at 4:30 in the morning and Fern would have done anything to change the habit but then the phase had ended and Fern had remembered those early hours like a dream—she and her boys on the sofa with tea and a stack of books, the night still dark around them, a fire if it was cold. Fern had lost something every day as a parent.

Maybe, she thought now, her flight would make her children more grateful, slow their growing a little.

Fern lay down on the bed next to the giant and felt the heat of his big body. She was not touching him, and still, the heat. The bed was big enough for both of them but he weighed so much more that she had to work to keep from rolling towards him. The bedspread was scratchy and cheap. The ceiling was stained. She listened to the rats in the wall. The sensation of lying on the same surface as a man who was not her husband was a tingle in Fern’s
feet. She had not done anything wrong, yet she was certainly out beyond the territory of a good wife.

“Where are we going?” she asked, realizing that they might have a destination and not just a point of departure.

“All the way across,” he told her.

—

They gassed up before starting their next day’s journey. He pumped, she paid.

“Where y’all coming from?” asked the woman at the register. The room was filled with smoke. Her eyeshadow matched the coffee stain on her paisley dress. She used the butt of her current cigarette to light the next one.

“East,” said Fern.

“And you’re going west.” That was not a question. You had to be going the opposite way as you were coming from. Only one road, and that’s the direction it went.

“When you get to Clayton,” the woman said, “stop for potpies. They’re better than the ones here, and you won’t want to wait for Stonesville.”

While Mac wet and cleaned the windshield, Fern tied a scarf around her hair and felt like her mother who had had a driving outfit. Evelyn had worn special moccasins and calfskin gloves that Fern had always wanted her mother to touch her with. Fern used to take her mother’s gloved hands and press them to her own cheeks. Her mother’s real heat through another animal’s skin.

Driving again, she told her companion this story. It had been years since she would have bothered Edgar with such a small memory, especially about her mother, whom he did not like. Mac asked the color of the gloves. “Green,” Fern said. “They were very light green. Sort of key lime.”

“That’s a good pie,” he said. “That is one of the best pies.”

They were driving fast and the oaks had softened into maples. It began to smell like manure.

“Apparently we are supposed to stop for potpies in Clayton,” she said.

“That’s a good goal. Let’s make that our goal.”

The earth was flat around them, tamed by prehistoric glaciers. There was land and there was sky, both nearly featureless. Things made by people—houses, barns, roads, crops—were the only features to rise up.

All along the road out of town there were signs congratulating the 1976 high school class on their graduation. The signs were plastic, made to last, and months out of date. As if such an achievement deserved permanent recognition.

Dilapidated houses ran along the edge, tracks and stations, ice cold beer, dirt lots with the swirl of tire tracks, that giveaway sign of teenagers, late at night, building speed, spinning out, hiding in a momentary dust storm of their own making. Fern was sure that there existed here the girl who cut everything at home: coupons, bangs, jean shorts. Her boyfriend would have a good arm and bad skin. Maybe they would even stay together a few years, despite her mother, who had aged poorly, dryly, her hair a crackle of overdyed frizz, her skin undone and beginning to drape. Girls like that loved their mothers and did not think to hide them from their boyfriends. They themselves would look better at fifty, surely. Someone by then would have invented a cream, an elixir. The girls counted on this—basked sunnyside up at the pool with nothing between them and the heat but a slick of baby oil and a cloud of cigarette smoke.

Mac rolled his window down, just to remember real air, and in a second, the whole cab was hot and dusty. “Thanks for
coming along,” he said. “I should have said that already. It’s nice to have company.”

“Would you be doing this if not for me?”

“I’ve got business in California. Someone I need to see.”

“Business business or personal business?”

He seemed reluctant to say. He smoothed his hair, curls that had been gelled downwards. He ran the windshield wipers, flicked the lights on and off, licked his thumb and cleaned a spot off the lacquered wooden steering wheel. “I have a son,” he finally said. “But I haven’t seen him since he was a baby.”

“Does he know you’re coming?”

“Yes. I’m going to pick him up and bring him home. It’s finally my turn.”

Fern pretended that it was reasonable to be driving at high speed away from her family. Motherhood, money, marriage—these were all suspended behind her. And with each mile they crossed they drew closer to the giant’s son. One family stretching apart and one pulling together. Fern was still fooled by her own story of escape.

—

Clayton came along. Fern and Mac were hungry, having waited all afternoon. The sign for the town told them that there were eight hundred souls present, but everything was closed up. The gas station advertised old-fashioned prices and had no pumps. There was a real estate office that looked like it had been closed for years. Sidewalk weeds were thick. The giant pulled into a lot and parked, and their footfalls were the only sound. Fern looked for evidence of a fire, a flood. “Let’s go,” she said.

“We just got here. I want my potpie.”

“There is no potpie. There is nothing.”

The giant had already set off. He made big prints on the dirty sidewalk. In the beauty parlor window, two brown wigs, styled for the previous decade, had wilted and a pair of scissors was set out on the table in preparation for a haircut that might never be. There was a newspaper on the counter, more than a year out of date:
CEASE FIRE: All GIs Out of Viet in 60 Days.

The coffee shop had a few forks out and the ashtrays were all full. The hardware store was still getting ready for another year’s Thanksgiving.

“I’m starving,” the giant said.

Which is when a woman appeared. She might have been eighty or a hundred or she might have been a deadwoman up from below. Everything she wore was brown and she walked with two canes. “Hungry?” she said. “I have potpie. Follow me.”

Fern would have walked the other way, leaving a polite refusal behind her. Mac followed the specter of a woman as easily as if she had been his own mother.

“You’re tall,” she said to him.

“I’m actually a giant,” he said.

“Good for you.”

Her house was purple with purple everything and there was a black motorcycle out front. She sat them at a table and brought, hot out of a gold-colored oven, two deep pies and two forks and an ashtray with a picture of an ace of hearts on the bottom.

“You smoke?” the woman asked.

“Only on special occasions,” Mac told her. She poured a red drink into their lavender glasses, placed a pack of cigarettes on the table and then the woman, who did not say her name and did not ask theirs, began to climb upstairs. The giant dug into his pie. Fern peeled the crust back and looked for obvious signs of mice.

“They were right about Clayton,” Mac said.

“That cashier can’t possibly have meant to send us here.”

“Where else? This is Clayton. This is where the potpie is. You’re not eating yours?”

This felt like a test. You want an adventure, little woman? She was starving and the giant was showing no obvious signs of having been poisoned so she took a bite. It was silken and delicious. She could taste fresh thyme.

The woman did not reemerge. They sat awhile, waiting. Mac called up to her, “Great pie!” and there was no answer. He stood at the bottom of the stairs and tried again, climbed until he had ascended out of Fern’s sight. She heard his footsteps above her. A house this old was not meant to hold a man that size. She heard the creak of doors.

“She’s not here,” he said, coming back down. “I can’t find her anywhere.”

“How can that be? Should we call someone?”

“There’s no one to call.” The empty town, the empty businesses.

Before they left, the giant slopped up the last juice off his plate with his thumb. They found a pencil and a notepad with the logo of a bank and offered their thanks. Fern looked in her wallet and found only a stack of hundred-dollar bills taken from the emergency envelope in the kitchen. She took one out.

“What are you doing?”

“I feel guilty not leaving something.”

He smiled at Fern. If Edgar had been there, Fern knew the two of them would have debated whether the money would have made the woman feel cheap, condescended to, or if it would have struck her as terrifically kind. They would have suffered over it, no matter what their decision. Mac only smiled. “That’s a big tip for someone that might turn out to have been a ghost,” he teased.

No matter how hard Fern slammed, the latch on the door would not hold.

—

They drove on. The road had its own rhythm—meals, filling stations, whatever town came next when they got tired was the town they slept in. It was soothing, the non-event, the repetition, the open space ahead. The hope that her journey would cause Edgar pain made Mac into an accomplice. It made him Fern’s friend.

Mac had little short hairs growing out of his earlobe that Fern had the urge to pluck. She could almost forgive him for not being her brother now. Ben, she thought, who had never had a chance to grow into himself. He had jumped out the window when he was eighteen years old and the doctors had begun their work on him just after. Who knows what kind of adult Ben would have been, who he would have loved. Maybe he would have been like Mac—unusual and happy, comfortable in his own form. She was glad there was such a person. “We have so much time,” Fern said. “Tell me everything, from the beginning.” The country was generous ahead of them—a seemingly endless stretch of land, of space.

“In the beginning,” the giant started, and then paused. “I was born premature, six weeks, and in those days they did not expect the best.”

He told the story of his mother who decided not to send birth announcements until she could send the bad news along with. Her husband had left her when she was six months pregnant so she had already gotten used to being a source of collective sadness and discomfort. Now she would spread a new set of bad news: a baby was born, but. The giant’s own mother had been one of six, only three of whom had made it. People used to be better at death.

Priests and nuns stopped in to dispense a little easy charity,
performed baptisms without celebration. Here, tiny angels, sinless and suffering, just probable days or weeks until they returned to God’s blue kingdom.

But Mac did not die. He began to gain weight—several ounces a day—passing the full-term babies, swelling into clothes for toddlers. When his mother was packing the miniature diaper the boy had worn when he was first born, doll-size, she discovered a note in its white folds.

Dear God,

It’s Father O’Brien. Please, I want to believe in you so terribly. I hope this note finds you soon. Please send a sign.

This was the sign, she thought. My child, grown like a sudden weed, is God’s sign. The giant’s mother spent good money to have the note framed. She hung it above a small bronze cross that her own mother had worn around her delicate neck, the chain much too short for any woman who was eating sufficiently. The note, to her, was proof.

Mac grew. He was mistaken for a six-year-old at three, an adolescent at six.

His mother had vowed to find Father O’Brien and show him the good news. But there were so many, all over Boston, and every Sunday for years, Mac and his mother went on Father O’Brien missions, attending Mass and then approaching the priest after with the framed note. Each time, the man would apologize for not recognizing the note and offer his uneasy congratulations on the healthy boy—they always used the word “healthy” after struggling to describe him.

Leaving, the young giant’s hair smelled of incense. Pigeons bothered the stone steps, their neck feathers puffing and flattening
in the search for food. His mother kicked one hard enough that it flipped over on its side for a moment and struggled its little orange legs before getting right.

“Beggars,” she said. “Beggars are beggars.”

—

Every part of the giant’s story was exotic to Fern. There were people in her world who believed in God—Protestants and Quakers—but they did so quietly. The incense-rich sanctuaries, the spindly woman marching her huge son from church to church as if she could prove, with one oily little piece of paper, the existence of the higher power.

“Did you think you were a miracle?” she asked.

“I just wanted to be a kid. God seemed a little overzealous.”

“And now?”

“And now I think that the genetic lottery is complicated. But I still pray sometimes even though I doubt there’s anyone listening.”

—

The waitress at the next place brought a slice of banana cream and said, “This is the last piece and no one likes an orphan. Can I interest you? No charge.” The pie had fallen in the middle as if in defeat. The giant cut the point off. “Wishing bite,” he said. When they had finished the rest, they came back to this little triangle; each took some onto their fork and hoped, eyes closed, while the custard gave way to their hot mouth.

*   *   *

M
ISS
NOLAN
SAID
, “Journals out,” and all the students reached into their backpacks and waited to be told what to do. Direct instruction was the format of childhood: add or subtract; write
the letter A sixteen times, then write the letter B sixteen times; name three US Presidents; name the order, genus, species. The children waited, pencils ready, for their assignment. Miss Nolan looked at them. “Well,” she said, “start writing.”