Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (27 page)

Cricket, surprising herself, backed up, picked up a big rock and threw it through the window. Her brothers looked at her in shock and reverence. They would never not love her, no matter what she did for the rest of her life. This was why she was their leader. In the long second that followed, the man looked up and the kids ducked down, and then they ran as fast as a herd of deer,
ducking and dodging and taking cover. Maybe he had seen them, their backs, just a flash. Maybe they would be caught and dragged to the police. Regret arrived reflexively, then subsided.

In the park, the three hid behind an ancient maple. A small dog pooped in the dead grass and its owner looked the other way. No one seemed to be hunting them. What was actually in front of them were well-kept Victorian houses, rutless sidewalks, streets with yellow dividing lines. What they saw: elk, buffalo, a ring of mountains dark as a bruise, snow already dusting their tops. They could smell their campfire, they could smell the bears that lived nearby, their oily hides. The wish was to run, fast and unyielding, and they climbed out of the tree and took off, crossing their city as outsiders until their lungs burst and their eyes watered and they collapsed in their own backyard, a heap. Other days had mattered, other days had been good, but these three children were in no way untrue, this day. They were absolutely themselves.

They ventured back inside and gathered more supplies. A pot, more beans, bread and butter. Butter, they knew, was probably not a Plains Indian truth, but they liked it and also they felt they should learn to be resourceful, use what they could find. If the Plains Indians had come upon butter, however that might have happened, the children were sure they would not have left it to rot.

The night was harder than the day, but the children stayed warm with nearness. The children lay on their mats in the teepee and Cricket gathered her brothers close and told them one of Miss Nolan’s stories, finding that she could put on the teacher’s voice, replicate her cadence and her language as if the story held some of the woman itself.

“Some Indians,” she started, “believed that the mountains where they lived were the center of the earth. It was an island and they were floating on it, suspended by four cords from the sky.
Before there was an earth, everyone lived in the sky and it was crowded. One day, a beetle dove down into the water, and he burrowed into the mud and lifted an island up on his back. The beating of a buzzard’s wings made the mountains and valleys, and the plants and animals came down from the sky. A man hunted and skinned the animals and washed them in the river. A boy-child sprang from the bloody river, and the man brought him back to the woman who had always wanted a son even though that idea hadn’t existed until right that minute. The boy was wild and they could not tame him. His hair was snaky and tangled and he wanted to eat only raw meat and never to wash. He ran off for days at a time and his parents did not know where he was. He could climb trees like a bear, and he could burrow like a rabbit. His parents were so proud of him, and they missed him when he was gone, but they did not try to change him because they were wise and knew that loving this boy meant being hurt by him. Two more boys soon joined the first.

“One day, the brothers watched as their mother rubbed her belly and corn spilled out into a basket, and then she rubbed her armpits and beans poured forth. The boys snickered and snorted and turned away. A mother shouldn’t keep having a body after her children are born. The boys began to sharpen their sticks, because this was a witch, and it was their duty to do away with her. She knew it, the mother, before she even saw them making spears. Her skin knew it. When your child is going to kill you, the blood in your body has a different feel.

“When the troop came at her in the early morning with their spear-points, she looked at their eyes, which were the color of turquoise because they were made of that stone, that’s where the stone comes from, and the mother said, ‘After you’re done, drag my body in eight circles around the house. Where my blood spills,
corn and beans will grow.’ Even then she wanted to take care of them. Even then, she was a mother.

“The boys took the woman by the hand and walked her outside where the day was white with sun. They laid her down, made a small pillow for her head from corn husks, and she was proud of them and thankful. They raised their stakes gleefully. They believed in the rightness of their motions. They had never felt more loved, and they never would. They felt the resistance of their mother’s body under the sharp wood, and they pressed against it. It was hot and the blood was free and thick.

“It was hard work, killing the only woman in the world with pine spears, and it only got hotter as they worked. By the time she was gone and the boys put their spears down, they could not believe how quiet it was, they could not believe how quickly the flies came. They were too tired to drag the body of their mother around the house in eight circles and went around only twice. They found shade and they lay in it, spread out so as not to touch each other, so as not to get into the heat of another brother, and they slept for three days straight.”

Her brothers fell asleep to this story, but Cricket was sleepless. She knew they had not killed their parents—a thing like that is something you don’t have a question about. Being abandoned felt like being abandoned. It was plain and sad and she would almost rather have been at fault.

—

In the morning there was a dead fawn in the backyard.

The animal had cooled and looked sleepish and peaceful. She showed no visible wounds, and the children felt that they would have been able to tell if she had died afraid. Fear was a mark you did not lose.

“Sweet fawn, poor fawn,” they chanted. All of them had thought about dying in the days since they had been abandoned. There was no one to protect them from any of the many dangers of the world: poison, robbers, floods, hurricanes, famines, disease. This small animal felt like a sign of what was to come. The fawn might have lived a few days alone in the wooded corners of the city, finding food and shelter. It might have been her will that went first, or perhaps she had simply grown too hungry. Maybe she had watched the children and decided to trust them but came a few feet short of their tent. Cricket wished she had not slept so soundly. She should have heard the fawn and coaxed it close with sugar water. She would have nursed it back to health.

The children kept waiting for the fawn’s mother to appear at the fenceline. Mothers, in general, seemed to be scarce.

Cricket thought of her homework assignment about the buffalo. She thought of all the things a resourceful person could make out of a dead animal. She looked at the hooves and tried to see small cups. She looked at the two stubs of horns, still fuzzy, and tried to see something that could be carved into jewelry. She wanted to bring these things to Miss Nolan. Cricket went inside and found a sharp knife. She knelt beside the spotted fawn and willed her hand to make a cut at the spine’s ridge. It was harder than she would have thought and there was blood right away. The boys were shocked into stillness. The fawn jerked under Cricket’s knife and the skin separated as she went, but when she tried to peel it from the body, Will threw up and Cricket was grateful for a reason to stop. She wished she could uncut the cut. Now the fawn was dead and undone too.

“We at least have to thank her for her service,” she said. “We at least have to bury her.”

Cricket carried the body to the edge of the yard and settled it
in the ferns. While Cricket took her clothes off and washed the blood from her own skin, which she could not help but imagine now as a sliceable surface, the boys ran madly around the yard picking flowers. They invoked whatever gods and saints and angels they could remember from their lessons. Michael, Jesus, Christopher, Moses, Odin, Poseidon. They chanted while they put their good, young bodies to work. They added dirt until the fawn was a hill and then decorated the hill with flowers.

“The soil here will be very rich,” Cricket said. She was still naked and the boys decided to take their clothes off too. The ceremony immediately felt more important.

“We should grow corn and beans,” said Will, thinking of Cricket’s story. Inside they ravaged the cabinets, hunting for plantables. The children had no time for neatness. This was a ceremony. Nothing was more important than this. They found popcorn in one jar and Will poured it into the waiting hands of his sister like it was precious gold. All over the floor, beads of corn tinked and escaped under the lip of the sink, behind the chairs, beneath the table. The children walked outside with their cupped hands, slowly, slowly, transporting a little bit of life out to the dead. They poured the seeds over the fawn and pressed them into her soil.

“Grow,” they said. “Grow, grow.”

*   *   *

W
HEN
EDGAR
AWOKE
ON
DECK
he reached for his glasses, but they were not on his chest where he had put them. He sat up. His glasses were not anywhere around him. He looked at the ocean and knew. He imagined his glasses slipping silently into the sea. “Shit,” he said. “Shit, shit.” The world, without his bottle-thick
lenses, was all smudge and smear. Glory woke up and looked at him. “Morning, handsome,” she said.

“I lost my glasses,” he told her.

“Do you have a spare pair?”

Edgar had never lost his glasses. The only time they were not on his face they were on the bedside table, safe. Edgar shook his head.

He got up, not wanting to admit how compromised he was. He cooked oatmeal but his eyes made things harder. He had to put his face directly over the drawer to find a big spoon. His feet were hungry for the old paths of his familiar house.

Glory sat down at the table, the slip of a silk robe hardly bothering to cover her.

She had plenty of pretty, even if Edgar could hardly see it. He was ashamed to tell her how blind he was. As if this woman would have to watch him turn decrepit and old right now, today. Their trip was a moment plucked out of real life, a moment in which two young-enough bodies tried to pretend that the future and the past did not exist, that there was nothing else but pleasure on the surface of the earth. Edgar did not speak during breakfast. Glory was a blur of skin, hair, the dark holes of eyes. Finally he said, “I really can’t see.”

“Shitty,” she said. “Do you want to smoke?” she said, taking a little green bud out of her metal cigarette case.

It was not the first thought, but it was not the last either, the thought that God had done this, taken the world away as punishment. Edgar did not say this out loud in case Glory was already thinking it. She worried something around her neck, the vague shape of her hand at her collarbone. He leaned close to see it: a gold cross on a chain. It was as if it had grown on Glory’s skin, seeded by uncertainty.

“Have you always had that?” Edgar asked.

“It was a gift from my husband or my father, I can’t remember which,” she said.

Men, landbound and restless for her return. Edgar wished it would go away again, leave them symbol-less and quiet.

“You don’t
believe
, do you?”

“It’s just jewelry,” she said, lighting a match.

Edgar did not want Glory so close to him. She smelled like dried sweat and her breath was smoke-stale. “Maybe I should take a nap,” he told her. He went below and curled in his bunk, which smelled of wet wool. It was dark and warm and too small and he tried to sleep but couldn’t. Edgar picked at a knot in the wood.

Fern came into his head. Her fingers, which had cooled him out of so many fevers. She who knew to bring hot lemon-water first, then cold juice, then a pot of boiling water with torn mint leaves and a towel for him to drape over his head to catch the steam. She who brought saltwater to gargle, lozenges to suck, pillows with fresh cases. She whom he had loved hardest when things were worst and when they were best.

Once, when Cricket was sick with a cough, Fern had gone into her room to help her back to sleep and come back to bed weeping. Edgar had panicked, sure that something was very wrong with his daughter.

“She’s okay,” Fern had said. “She’s going to be okay.” Somewhere in Africa people were dying of an incurable contagious disease and Fern admitted to Edgar that she had understood, holding her feverish girl in her arms, that she would take care of her daughter even if it meant that she herself would get sick and die. “And there’s no question. Just none,” she had said.

Edgar had not known if he would sacrifice himself. He felt terrible that he might hope to live beyond. He also thought that
before the children were born Fern would have crawled in beside a sick Edgar and held a frozen washcloth on his forehead, prepared to die a few days after he did. Edgar remembered getting sick when the boys were two, a bad flu, and Fern had stood at the doorway, blown him a kiss. She had no longer been able to afford to infect herself. She had paid for every comfort—cold watermelon, cashmere socks, good books—and had delivered them on a tray, then scrubbed her hands and arms up to the elbow. Every part of her had been in his room except her body.

And his own mother? He tried to remember being cared for by her, but Mary took care of details and not people. For a party, she would sacrifice her own health and sanity. For sickness, she sent a nurse.

When Edgar’s cousin had died of a stroke at twenty-eight, Mary never once went to the hospital, but she did seek out every friend he had ever made, every girl he had ever kissed, every teacher and coach, and when they all gathered for the funeral she had filled the room with fifty bouquets of white roses, platters and platters of roast turkey, pastas, sweating piles of vegetables, little mushroom pastries that waiters passed incessantly around, forcing everyone to take another and another. There were mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese and a cream soup that was pale, mint green and went entirely uneaten. There were vegetable salads and fruit salads and seven different kinds of bread and pats of cold butter molded to look like daisies.