The End of Always: A Novel (15 page)

“All of a sudden the nobleman stopped arguing with the old woman. A sly look came over his face and he pointed to the sea beyond the castle and cried out, ‘Look at them! There must be thousands of them at work!’ And he explained that he could see the black dwarves who lived under the hills at the edge of the woods and every day they came down to the sea and caused ships to wreck so they could pilfer the cargo and hide casks of wine and crates of amber and all the best parts of the cargo in their crystal palaces underground. And he could make them do his bidding and they looked to him as their king and they brought him the choicest parts of the loot.

“This story made the old woman angry because the dwarf inside her knew that it was not true. But the dwarf also knew that stories have a way of getting around. If the old nobleman told enough people that he ruled the black dwarves, pretty soon everyone would think that he did. So the dwarf decided to teach the nobleman a lesson.

“‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘How do you make the black dwarves do your bidding?’

“And the nobleman took the bell from his pocket. He explained that when he rang his bell, the dwarf must appear and he must do exactly what the nobleman wanted.

“The old woman took one look at the bell and said, ‘Oh, what a beautiful bell! I have never seen anything like it! Will you sell it?’

“But the nobleman shook his head and said he would not sell it, because there was not another such bell in the entire world. He would not give it up for anything. ‘And what a delightful sound it has,’ he said. ‘Only listen, mother. Is there any weariness in the world, any sorrow at all, which cannot be softened by the sound of this bell?’ And he rang it again.

“The old woman thought the nobleman could not resist money so she flashed a handful of silver dollars in front of him, a great handful, more than the nobleman had ever seen. Still he said the bell was not for sale. So the old woman held her staff out to him and showed him its strange writing. She began to entice him with talk of the secret arts, and all kinds of charms and wonders, and how these would bring him everything he had ever wanted, far more than the bell could bring by itself. Before long, she could see that the nobleman was wavering. He held the bell in the palm of his hand and he looked at the white staff on which she leaned. She kept talking, telling him of the way that the world would be made perfect and everyone would be the same, but he would be wealthy and held in high esteem and he would never be sad or lonely again, and the island on which they lived would be a perfect land in the middle of the ocean, just the way the old songs said it would one day be. A heaven on earth, she promised, all for one and one for all.”

Hattie tipped a cup of water over her head. “He took it?” she said. “Right?”

I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “How could he resist? He thought the old woman was a witch and she was offering him what he had always wanted, which was everything just the way he alone always wanted things to be. Who would not want that? So he took the white staff and gave the old woman the bell and it turned out that the old woman had not lied. The white staff brought him riches. His cows and sheep grew fat and he was soon known as the wealthiest man on the island. Everywhere he went, the people bowed to him. He tried to live a quiet life but he could not understand why the white staff never forced the dwarf to do his bidding. But you know why. As soon as he had his bell back, the black dwarf sewed it back on his cap and disappeared underground. The bell had much more power than the staff.”

When I finished, I tucked Hattie into her bed as if she were still a very little girl, smoothing the quilt and patting her hair. Just as she turned to go to sleep, she told me she loved me.

“I love you, too,” I said. Warmth spread through me. Whatever else might be true, Hattie loved me and the night had chased away all of my worries about Martha and my father. August would soon be on his way back, like someone carried out of the world of dreams.

I closed the door and came back into the kitchen and poured a little more hot water into the tub. I stripped and stepped in and sat with my arms wrapped around my knees. I thought of a black dwarf drilling down into the ground like a snake sliding into its hole. I dipped my hands into the water as if I could raise from the tub the sounds of the river at night, and the soft sounds of the oars as August pulled us toward shore.

In the morning, the trees dripped. I lay awake fully dressed with the blanket pulled up over my clothes as if I were already in exile from a land I did not love, as if a clear road were laid out before me, or a river that would take me to an ocean I had never seen. Then I heard someone’s hand on the glass, tapping lightly. I threw the blanket from the bed and went to the window. August stood in the yard looking up at me and my heart lifted fast when I saw him. He grinned and beckoned and then pointed at the yard behind the house. I smiled and held up one finger. Behind me, Martha stood in the doorway, a small black valise in hand. She lay this on the bed and put her palm flat on my back.

“Let me help you,” she said. She picked up my brush and began to brush my hair while I fastened the last two buttons on my dress. I could not bear to leave August waiting for one more minute in the yard. “Hurry up,” I said.

Martha laid her hand on my back again. “I can pin it if you stand still,” she said. Her voice was sharp but she smiled a little. It seemed that even she could not help but catch some of my excitement.

When my hair was twisted and pinned and my dress fastened, she sat on the edge of the bed. “This is your choice,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And you can make no other?”

“No.”

“Do you really think he said yes?”

“It does not matter.”

“So you will leave your family?”

I did not reply.

“Your responsibilities?” she said. She picked at the sheet and smoothed it and turned it and turned it. “Your duty?”

“What about his duty to us?”

“He does what a father is supposed to do,” she said.

“Martha,” I said. “He hit me. He kicked me.”

“You are not the first. And you will not be the last.”

“But that does not make it right,” I said. “Mother—”

“Shut up about that,” she said. Her voice rose. “Just shut up.”

“It was wrong,” I said.

“It was a terrible accident.”

“It was?”

“Yes,” she said. “It was.”

“Because that is what he told you.”

She made a smothered sound and began to weep. “Because that is the way of the world,” she said. “This is just what happens. You have to accept these things.”

“Do you really think that?”

“Do you really think that it will be different out there?” She waved her hand toward the wall. Her voice was thick, wet. “When you leave here?”

I felt my throat close. “Yes,” I said.

She groaned and mopped her face with her skirt. Then she reached over and unbuckled the peeling clasps on the valise and lifted it so that it spread open on the bed. The cloth on the inside hung in tatters. “Here,” she said. Her eyes were watery and dim. She had given up on me. “You can put your things in here.”

August sat smoking on the back steps. When he saw us, he flicked his cigarette into the wet yard and stood up. Then came the cries of what seemed to be hundreds of distant dogs. I looked up and saw an enormous
V
of geese winging north, each body dark against the wan light. The sound of wind which was not wind but was the sound of their rustling wings as they passed by the hundreds overhead. August took my suitcase and Martha put her arms around me. I leaned stiffly against her thin frame and she told me in a weak voice that she was sure I would be able to come home someday. Hattie came into the mudroom in her nightgown and asked what was going on. I leaned down and gave her a hug. She asked again. “What is going on?” she said. She pushed at the suitcase with her toe. “Are you going somewhere?” Then she leaned against the doorframe and Martha put her arm around her. August picked up my valise and took my hand and we walked out over the wet grass. I lifted the hem of my skirt so it would not drag in the mud and we turned and came along the side of the house. August squeezed my hand and I smiled up at him. I felt the wind rush through me as if it would lift me higher and higher and in that wide-open sky I would fly and never come down. It was almost impossible to believe and yet it was really happening. I had escaped. I was getting away. I was finally going to be free.

Out on the road in the early morning light we surprised a lone deer standing on the crest of earth that rose between the muddy wagon ruts. She stood and stared at us with a blank expression and then leapt away and flipped her white tail as she bounded into the underbrush. The world was filled with the sound of birds.

W
e followed the road along the interurban rails. The river gleamed silver as it snaked below the bluffs. We passed the ice factory where in midwinter men had laid out their iron grids and cut blocks of ice from the river and hoisted the blocks by wagon team onto the banks and from there dragged them to the sawdust rooms of ice cellars, where the blocks would stay whole until June. August took my hand as we came to the apothecary with its awning furled tight as a sail and then to the greengrocer’s, where the canvas was also rolled away and no barrels stood on the sidewalk. All of this was as unfamiliar to me as the shore of a new country. The place I would live with August. The place our lives would begin. Everything seemed strange and new and the world I had always known was now made up of parts that no longer fit together. My heart skipped and I skipped a little, too, just to keep time with it, and August laughed.

The sky grew brighter. The rain had greened the grass overnight and the trees that had been bare the day before were filmed with new leaves. Just past the bank, August turned into a narrow road and we walked past wooden buildings that grew smaller as we moved away from the center of town. Finally he stopped in front of a tearoom and set my valise on the ground.

“Are you hungry?” he said.

I shook my head. I had become too unreal in my escape to feel something as common as hunger. I was unanchored from everything, liberated from my father’s world. I did not want to spoil it with eating.

“Come on,” he said. His eyes sparkled. He took my hand and pushed on the door until it opened. “Just some coffee.”

We were the only ones there. We sat at a table with a blue-and-white-striped cloth under the front window. He ordered coffee and sweet rolls and then stretched his arms over his head and yawned. Then he looked at me and smiled and reached across the table and took my hands in his.

“Okay?” he said.

I grinned. “Okay,” I said, and laughed.

He looked around. “This is nice,” he said. “Right?” When I nodded, he smiled. “This is my plan,” he said. “I have a place for us. And before we go there we will go to the courthouse. It will all be legal.” He gave my hands a little shake and started to laugh. “We will be happy forever,” he said.

The idea flickered through me and grew stronger, like a promise already kept. The woman who ran the tearoom brought two china cups and two saucers and set these down in front of us. She came back with a coffeepot and a pitcher of milk and a bowl of sugar on a tray. She set the tray down between us and poured the coffee and then carried the coffeepot back to the rear of the tearoom, where a large stove was already hot. She stood at a table and pinched yeasted dough from a ball resting in a bowl. She laid the pieces out in front of her and flattened them into rectangles, which she spread with a mixture of cinnamon and sugar. She rolled the sheets into logs and twisted the logs into clover shapes and laid the shapes on a metal sheet. Then she slid the sheet into the oven.

Out in the street, men in work clothes began to pass by. A dark carriage rolled past and then an automobile, its bright windows gleaming in the morning light. In the distance, the sound of the interurban as it began its morning run. August held my hands and gave them a squeeze. Then he dropped them and sat over his steaming coffee and stirred milk into the cup. He held the pitcher out to me.

I spooned sugar into my cup and realized that for the first time in my life I could have as much sugar as I wanted. I tossed in an extra spoonful just because I could. Only someone long imprisoned could find so much joy in such a tiny thing. Then I added milk and stirred the coffee with my spoon. A man in a business suit came in and nodded at us. He took the table next to ours and the woman came over and took his order.

All of a sudden I was starved. When the woman brought our sweet rolls, I gobbled mine as if I had been famished all of my life. August watched me and laughed and ordered two more. Outside, the traffic on the street thickened. Men came along the sidewalk, in work clothes gone gray at the knees, in black suits with pin-striped vests and crisp white shirts, in dungarees and in canvas trousers, wearing shirts without collars and the plaid flannel and dark twill trousers of the Menominee. Men everywhere and the world belonged to them, and always had, and always would, and the very fact of this blinded them to the rest of us.

The clock tower across the square struck once, for seven thirty. Across town my father would have come home. He would be ready to go to bed. He would have let Martha have it when he learned that I had left. A tiny bit of joy rolled away from me when I thought of this. I set my roll on my plate. “August,” I said. He smiled when I said his name. “Tell me what happened last night.”

“Last night?”

“When you went to see my father.” A small knot tightened behind my ribs.

“At the bar, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“It was no problem.” He smiled at me again. “Like I said.”

“But tell me,” I said.

He lifted his cup and finished his coffee and then got the attention of the woman by the stove. He twirled his finger over his cup. She brought the coffeepot and poured. She looked at me and I nodded and she refilled mine. Then August said that he went to the bar directly from my house. He spent a few minutes combing his hair and straightening his clothes before he went in. The people who passed him on the street looked at him strangely, but he did not mind because what were people’s opinions anyway but their own misguided ideas about things? Meaningless. When he walked up to the bar, he thought right away that my father had been waiting for him. He took his apron off and led August into a back room, where there was a padded table and around that four chairs and a mirrored bar that was much smaller than the bar out front but stocked with better brands of liquor. My father held out a chair and told August to have a seat. Then he took two glasses from the bar back and filled them from one of the bottles. He brought these over to the table. He said that he knew this day would come and so he had been looking into things and had learned all about the Bethke family. Had learned all about the Bethke family ways. Knew that the family wasn’t the best but had quickly figured out that they weren’t the worst, either. Maybe not quite like everyone else but not so bad that they could not have a drink and entertain the future. That was what he said. Entertain the future.

August knew that what he meant was a very particular future and he said that this was why he had come to the bar on this rainy night, to have this very conversation. But he refused the drink. Once accepted, it would change things between them and he did not want that change to come before they had conducted their business. And so they had left the glasses untouched while they discussed what was to be done with me. My father pointed out that he had already told me that my days of wandering in the woods were over. August told him he could not agree more. If my father was surprised by this, he didn’t show it. He simply said that he was glad they were in agreement. But August knew that they were not yet in agreement and he said so and my father’s eyes hardened. He tried to stare August down but this was a ridiculous enterprise and had been tried by other men and they too had come to nothing with that approach. So August merely looked back at my father and eventually my father dropped his gaze and returned to the drinks, which he offered again. Still August said no. Still he said they had business to conduct. And my father raised his left eyebrow and asked what that might be.

And my father, much as August expected, did not burst out laughing when August said what he had come for, nor did my father say no. He merely drummed his fingers on the padding on the tabletop and explained that this was a place where men came to play games of chance—poker, mostly—and in this way, the whole room had the feel of a gamble about it, like any place where you could come and roll the dice or try your hand with Lady Luck. That dreams could come true here but they could also die. And he asked August which he preferred. August said that he did not gamble, for that was a fool’s errand, and he preferred things that had a great deal more certainty about them. And my father told him that there was nothing in the world that could assure certainty among men. He smiled in a superior fashion when he said this, and August realized that my father thought he had found the flaw in August’s thinking and things would naturally proceed from there. But that was not the way things were going to be. August told him that in this way of thinking he was very wrong, for there was one thing that would always bind one man to another and this had everything to do with the possession of certain things, and in particular, the possession of something that one man had that the other man wanted. This bond often meant the working out of exchanges. There was always a way to strike a bargain in such cases and this was what he was prepared to do. And he mentioned that perhaps my father had some need of a carpenter around the house.

August smiled when he said this. He explained that he had offered this first because he did not want to play his whole hand with the opening bid. As August expected, my father said that he had no need of someone who would only come and spend half his time sneaking into corners with his daughter. So right away they came to a dead end. August had waited for my father to make a counteroffer but my father had just fiddled with the rim of padding along the table edge and watched August. Again he offered him a drink and even took one of the glasses and moved it closer to August. He appeared to think this was a time of merriment rather than one of great seriousness. But August dismissed the glass. He said that they were like the two men he had described, already tied by something and my father well knew what it was. And my father had done exactly what August expected, which was not to mention my name at all but to go directly to the thing itself. He drummed the tabletop and then he stopped. He said something like, I suppose you mean money, and August nodded, and my father said, You think she is for sale. And this was a surprise because August had not thought that my father would be so blunt about the whole thing. On the other hand, if he wanted to speak plainly, that was fine with August. He shrugged and reached into his coat and laid a black leather p
ocke
tbook on the table. He asked my father what it would take to solve this whole dilemma. And my father looked at August and looked at the wallet and looked at the table and said there was no money in the world that could buy his daughter. That was when August told him that he was not trying to buy his daughter because after all he loved his daughter very much. Instead he was there to make the whole situation easier, to share what he had with a fellow workingman, to make it clear that he wanted what was in each man’s best interest. He did not intend to take anything away without bringing something to the table. That was all. It was not a matter of making a purchase. It was a matter of making something unequal equal, and each should take something that would make his life more pleasant. He would waive all claim to a dowry and he would walk away as soon as my father accepted the situation.

He was not surprised when my father picked up the pocketbook. The clamoring from the bar had gotten louder and he had taken to looking over his shoulder. He knew he had to get back to work. He knew he could not stay away forever. He had to complete the transaction there and then or give it up for another night.

He told August that he wanted to hear of a wedding as soon as possible and that he should take good care of his daughter just as he himself had done for all these years. She was his treasured daughter and he would not stand it if he should hear of some mistreatment. And then they drank their drinks and shook hands and that was it. From the bar, August walked to meet his brother. Alfred told him that he had been to see their cousin as planned, and he did have three rooms to let at the back of his house, and this was where we would make our start.

“And of course, there was one more thing,” August said. “Your father did not wait for the final offer.” He grinned and reached into his coat. He pulled out an old brown leather wallet thick with bills. He dropped this on the table between us. “You see? All this could have been his.” He winked at me.

I do not know what I expected. Perhaps for my father to refuse or to threaten to lock me in my room or to track me down and beat me to a pulp. But I had not expected my father to give in so easily. To take the money and shake August’s hand, as if I were a horse or a head of lettuce.

William Oliver was wrong. The arrangements among men had nothing to do with physical might. Men were not wolves. They were bankers, adding and totaling and betting on margins and cashing in chips and swapping credit slips and taking loans and deeding property to each other. A passage of cash like this was an ordinary day. The man who came out on top was settled by determinations of value. Money was everything. People like me? We were nothing but objects to be passed hand to hand.

August tapped the top of the wallet. “Plenty more where that came from,” he said. He slapped the table once, for emphasis. He was pleased with himself and pleased with the story and he thought that I would be pleased with it, too. Perhaps he imagined that later we’d tell jokes about the way he’d gotten the best of my father and proved that he was the better man.

“You paid for me?” I said. “August?” My voice was so low that even I could barely hear it.

“What?” he said, startled. “No. No! It’s just that I could do it and so I did. I figured your father for exactly the kind of man he is. I greased the skids. I saved us some trouble. I set it up so things would work out fine.” He paused, a stunned expression on his face. Clearly, he had never for a moment considered how I might understand the story he had taken so much pride in telling, and it had never occurred to him that I might understand it this way. And then he drew himself up to cover his hurt but that did not work because I saw through him and I saw that my words had stung him. “I do not know what you think,” he said. “But I do not own you. If you want to go, you can go.” He waved his hand at the street. “There is the door.”