The End of Always: A Novel (3 page)

“And then she will be set right?”

“He has something he needs to do,” I said. I touched her shoulder, her hair. “I am sorry,” I said. “Hattie. I thought—”

She bent away from my touch. “Stop it,” she said.

We stood in the last light from the windows. My mother’s wedding portrait hung on the wall behind Hattie. No older than me when this picture was made, and then carried in the hold of a ship from a place she would never see again to a place she had never seen before. In between, days on the ocean, the world rising and falling. How terrified she must have been. How much trust she must have placed in my father.

When the sun was down, I heard the doctor’s cart roll to a stop out front. Behind me, a faint aroma, the metallic tang of blood as Martha tried to wash the flour sacks. From very far away, the clang of the interurban. I pictured its sparks showering down like blue fireflies.

W
hen the days finally cooled, dusk came before the end of the day in the woods around town. Some days I escaped my father’s house and walked in that early darkness, black branches rustling above and the air coming cold and moss already rich and damp on the north sides of the evergreens. I stepped over chuckling streams and ducked under branches and held them so they would not whipsaw back and hit me in the face. When the moon rose, it hung dull and yellow in the dark blue sky and I whispered little poems and songs to myself like one grown wild with spells and incantations. Walk into the sun, I murmured, my whole, my heart. Walk with me into the far away. Burn down my life and be my love forever.

Then a wind came up overnight and knocked branches down, and where the branches had remained intact, the lesser pieces of the trees had fallen instead. Martha said these could be used as kindling if we only troubled ourselves to pick them up. I sat on the back steps with my elbows on my knees while she zigzagged under the trees, bending and straightening, dropping sticks into a sack she made by pinching the folds of her skirt together. In the growing darkness she looked the way my mother would have looked had she been the one to gather and reap. I felt something catch in my throat. Then Martha started across the grass toward me and was just Martha again, thin as a stripped stick. But she looked pretty in the near dark with her hair falling in pieces over her neck.

“Help me,” she called. She shook the bag she had made of her skirt as if this would convince me.

The man who lived behind us stepped out onto his porch and dumped a bucket of kitchen scraps into a bowl. He whistled for his dog and stood back and watched Martha with her sticks and sack while the dog ate. His wife’s white sheets were still pinned to the line but wilted as no ghost would be.

The screen door rasped. My father passed me on the steps, his axe in hand. He stood the axe on its poll and let it balance while he peeled his shirt over his head. When he set the first log on the chopping block and centered the splitter, the black blade caught the light and I wondered if this was the last thing my mother saw, this or something similar, another cutting edge or perhaps a knife or a sharpened shovel or the out-flung hook that she would suddenly realize was the scythe that swept the tall grass, as though she herself was a stalk that needed to be trimmed and tamed.

I closed my eyes and pressed my chin harder into the heels of my hands.

The sound of the interurban came over the yard and then faded away. Waukesha used to be like this all the time, wheels grinding, trucks rattling, engines rumbling, everything around us in inescapable forward motion. The future seemed to be right at hand, measurable hour by hour, and I thought surely we would be flattened, for no one could withstand that much progress. But the year my mother died, times turned hard. You could not open a newspaper without reading about another failed bank, another shuttered mine, another machine shop gone quit. The newspaper said that seventeen banks had collapsed in Milwaukee alone between August and the first of November.

I tried to picture this the way that you might picture a house of cards coming down, but I was not successful. I had been to Milwaukee several times. Most recently, my mother took my sisters and me there to see her brother. Carl took us to an opera house with painted cherubs on the ceiling and blue velvet seats where a small orchestra played music. From what I knew, Milwaukee was standing just fine.

My father grunted every time his blade struck wood. Someone rustled in the grass close by and I opened my eyes. Martha shook her skirt over the kindling box and let the sticks fall. She sat down next to me.

“It will go faster if you help,” she said.

The lights of town came on. Some of our neighbors had their windows open and dishes clattered in their kitchens.

“Where is Hattie?” I replied.

“I did not ask Hattie,” she said. “I asked you.”

I reached over and brushed bits of leaves and twigs from her skirt. She caught my hand by the wrist and pushed me away. But I leaned my shoulder against hers and rested there for a moment and she did not draw back.

“Martha,” I whispered.

She twisted to face me. “What.”

My father’s house behind us. My father in the yard in front of us.

“What are we going to do?” I said.

“I do not know,” she said. “Stop asking me.”

“We have to do something,” I said.

The breeze blew and acorns rattled on the roof of the house and dropped into the grass with a sound like hard rain.

Martha sighed. Then she said, “You can sit out here all night if that is what you want. I am going inside.”

But I shifted and let my head rest once more against her shoulder. I reached up and twirled a piece of her hair through my fingers. She stiffened.

“Martha,” I said again.

She put her arm around me. “She is gone,” she said. “Nothing we do can bring her back.”

“You do not care,” I said.

She dropped her arm to her side and pushed my hand from her hair. “Close the subject,” she said. “Promise me?” When I did not reply, she put her hands on her knees and stood up.

I held her skirt. “Martha,” I said.

She pulled away. “Stop it,” she said. “I said no.”

The screen door smacked behind her. After that, the window filled with the kitchen’s faint glow.

My father set another log on the tree stump and tested the weight of the axe. Then he hoisted the haft with both hands until the axe was high over his head, where I watched it gleam again in the late light.

When he was finished, he pushed past me into the mudroom and hung the axe on its hook. He came back down the steps and went to the pump, where he washed with a great deal of snorting and shivering. Then he bent down and retrieved his shirt from the grass and put the shirt on and stood buttoning it in front of me. He reached into his pocket and pulled out an envelope.

“I need you to take this to Otto Muehls,” he said. “Tonight.”

I stood and brushed the seat of my skirt. The envelope was damp and the writing on the front had blurred from being in his pocket while he cut wood, but I could see the address. I could count the coins through the paper. Two nickels and a dime.

Otto Muehls kept traps and went into the woods and then hung the carcasses of the animals he snared from the limbs of the trees out behind the chicken pen. Perhaps he meant to remind the poultry of the order of things. One day he showed me a trap he used to catch raccoons, the horseshoe shape of the jaw, the teeth he sharpened with a file, the short cable that held the spring in place. He told me to touch it, go on, it could not hurt me. But when I moved toward it, it hammered shut and nearly took my hand. He pretended to be shocked but I knew he meant to trick me.

We bought our eggs from Otto Muehls’s wife, who tended the chickens in the pen. The eggs were pale blue and green and sometimes pale yellow, like the inside of a lemon rind. My mother said the pale yellow eggs were the best, but I could not tell the difference. To me, an egg was an egg. Something could not be other than it was.

My father watched me. “I would go myself,” he said, “but it is late and I do not feel up to it. You can go in my stead.”

I did not say anything.

“You can go in my stead,” he repeated, his voice rising. “Do not stand there agape. Get on your way.”

When I was halfway to the street, I heard his voice behind me. “Do not dawdle,” he said. His voice had its familiar edge. “Mind you come straight home.”

I took the river road where I could look back at the twinkling lights of Waukesha and out at the patchwork of farmland and then at the forests, where I liked to think that a few of the Menominee still lived in their ancient bark houses, cradling their babies on backboards, as if the wild limned the borders of the things that were most familiar. Beyond them, the dark-moving water of rivers and lakes, the dark trees, a dark land that turned colder to the north.

Just up ahead, a whitish stone glittered in the roadway, the point shaped like an arrowhead, the vein of quartz a river that cut and faded. I leaned down and picked it up. When I was little, I kept a box filled with leaves and sticks and acorn caps under my bed. I picked up stones as white as a dead woman’s eyes. These were my treasures even if they were not the currency of the land. I walked everywhere, and everywhere I saw things that could be gathered and sometimes these things were not stones or sticks but pictures that stayed with me. Once, down by the river, I saw a woman no older than Martha walking barefoot, her skirt hanging in shreds around her bare calves. Some mornings, an old woman came to our back door and asked for food. She carried her boots in an ashen bag slung bandolier style across her chest. Another woman was hit by a train as she gathered berries by the railroad tracks. They said she lived in an empty house, for she had burned all of her furniture for heat.

The prospect of any woman wandering the land does not sit well with me. I can be much agitated by the idea. But in those days, that kind of rootless drifting was exactly what happened when a woman did not have money and did not have the protection of a man. Either of these things alone could devastate. Together they were fatal. My mother always fed any woman who came to our door, even when we barely had enough to feed ourselves. She made sure my father did not see. But she always had something on hand, even if it was no more than a piece of bread spread with a spoonful of lard.

The lights were out at the Muehlses’ house. When I walked up the steps and looked in the front window, all I saw was my own face floating before me. I considered knocking but I knew that the only person who would come to the door would be Mr. Muehls. He’d be in his nightshirt, his spindly legs white and hairy below the hem of his shift, with his rifle cocked and ready. That he would shoot into the yard just to have his fun was something I would not put past him.

I stuffed the envelope between the edge of the door and the doorframe and walked quickly back to the road.

Across the water the shore was dark. I kept on until I came to the bridge by the mill, where I leaned on the rail and the reeds hissed and the wind picked up and a log as rounded and stiff as a body slid through the current. Something dark bent against the wind. A tree, perhaps, or maybe a single lady slipper, its stem bulging like the goiter on an old woman’s throat, or even a fern as long as a broom, its roots no bigger than my foot.

And then a match flared. Down in the darkness, someone cupped the tiny light. He turned his face up to me and I could see his dark hair and his light eyes, the dark brim of his hat. I thought he had disappeared with the men who had carried my mother but he had not. He was on the river with me in the night. In just that instant, the match went out. But he lit another and looked up at me again. I looked back, breathing. When the match light went out again and did not return, I realized he might be making his way along the dark shore. He could rise from the dry weeds and I would take the sound of his movements to be the sound of the wind, the scraping of an earnest branch. I turned and walked away from the bridge as fast as I could, along the river road where waves slapped the grassy shallows, past the houses where contented people slept, running just a little when my own house came into view, as if I already heard the sound of footsteps behind me.

T
he next day my father took the train to Price County. This was the sixth time since July that he had taken the train to Price County, but just like the other times, he kept the nature of his interests in Price County to himself. I don’t believe it would have occurred to him to tell us what he was up to. As far as he was concerned, his business was no business of ours.

He was gone for five days. When he returned, he told me he’d decided I would go out to work. He knew that banks were failing and families were starving, but jobs still remained for a girl like me, silly jobs, jobs that did not take much sense, jobs that no man would be expected to take. He was so eager to tell me this that he did not even take off his hat before he sat me down to give me the news.

We were alone in the kitchen. I did not reply. I knew my father could do as he pleased. And the idea that I would go out to work seemed to make him happy, as if his heart had lifted with the perfect solution to a long-simmering problem. He beamed and slapped the tabletop and finally took his hat off and poured himself a drink. He said that I was lucky that I would not have to work half as hard as a man but I would still earn money. Workingmen were the ones who had it bad. Workingmen were the ones who felt the heel of the boss man’s boot.

Then he said that he would take the money I earned and use it to benefit me and my sisters. In that way, I would contribute to the well-being of the family, which was the least I could do, since he put a roof over my head and clothes on my back.

That night, he asked around at the bar and right away, a man stepped up and said he knew of a job that would be perfect for me. I suppose they made arrangements there and then. I never knew the specifics. All I knew was that within two days of my father’s return, I started work at William Oliver’s commercial laundry on Seventh Street, a place I had never heard of or seen until I walked through the door, a place my mother would never have permitted me to work if she had still been alive, a place that was downtown and as far away from anything I had ever known as it could possibly be.

Three large vats stood on stoves that rested on brick platforms against the rear wall of a large room, and four of us worked at washtubs on a table that stood in the middle of the room. Big windows looked out over the dirt yard and a door led from the main washroom to the front of the shop, where William Oliver handed over parcels and took money. All day long we scrubbed napkins and tablecloths and towels and sheets and underpants and shirts and collars and stockings on washboards and squeezed our pieces out through wringers we turned with cranks.

I had a spot near the end of the table and Ella worked next to me. She had been at the laundry for so long that her arms had taken on a shiny and smooth look, long glistening patches of scalded skin now white as waxed paper. She tied her hair on the top of her head with a piece of string the color of ash and wore shoes that she made from pieces of cardboard jammed into an old pair of men’s leather slippers. You could foretell her entire future when she slapped toward you across the floor.

Johanna worked across from me. She had the demeanor of a beaten dog and dark marks circled her forearms and a purple and yellow mark on her cheek renewed itself week by week. She would not look William Oliver in the eye when he came to inspect our work.

Inge worked next to Johanna. She had come over when she was twelve, which meant she had landed in Waukesha in 1867, when things were still wild, she told us, and savage Indians killed women in the streets. If you went outside, you had to go in a pack or risk vanishing altogether. “You cannot imagine the terror we felt,” she said, but she did not sound terrified. Then she said that in all the years that followed, she had not seen anything to impress her with the idea that Waukesha had endured improvement save for the simple fact that the women of the town were now safe.

In a small room off to the left, there was a stove with plates to heat the irons, and two mangles and three ironing boards and a large table with a wooden jig that permitted clean shirts to be folded without flaw after they were pressed. A spool of brown paper hung from the wall and all you had to do to package an order was roll the paper out on the table, cut the paper with a razor blade that was kept there on a string for that very purpose, fold the paper around the laundry, and tie the package with a piece of twine. The flat workers kept to this room and I never got to know any of them. I do know there was one who did nothing but turn fresh laundry into brown paper parcels from morning until night.

There is no diversion in laundry work. There is the weight of the water and the weight of the basket and the weight of the soap and the weight of the hand agitator and the weight of the wet wash and the weight of the wash on the lines and then the weight of the water again, a long slow cycle that runs again and again across the length of the day. But laundry work fails to distract. It cannot take the place of the things a girl thinks.

I hunched over my washtub. I did not care to handle stockings that strangers had worn nor did I care to touch their undergarments, but this was my work and my father had arranged it and there was an end to it. Every day was the same: I walked into town and then up the alley and after that into the yard behind the laundry, where I set my lunch pail under the steps. I took my washboard from its place on the shelf. I levered burning wash into my basket. I dumped that wash into my tub where the water was scalding hot and picked at the boiling cloth until I could take hold of a shirt collar, a hem, a cuff, and rub it up and down on the board. I dipped bibs and aprons in the rinse water and turned these through a wringer and blistered my hand on the crank. The soap stung every inch of skin gone raw and burned the places the water had burned already, but Ella told me not to worry. After a while, she said, the burns would scar over and would not hurt anymore. But if you have ever washed clothes in this way, you will not soon forget the experience.

Paint peeled in long curling strips from the walls and the windows steamed and the light in the yard turned hazy, but I could still see a piece of the sky. There I looked while the others talked about the girl who had hung herself after her brother did something to her in the barn and about the servant girl who had just come over from Germany and jumped down a well when she found out she was pregnant. I watched clouds roll in and fade away and then I watched the sky brighten and darken. I tried to think of what the forest would be like, its trees whispering songs and the limestone jutting up from the path under the hemlocks where I had walked untamed, beyond the reach of town. But the trees and wind and birds, the rocks and streams and woods, were now so far away I might as well have seen them on a postcard and just imagined what it was like to walk there, the way you do when you see a distant place on a travel poster.

I trawled my wash water for another long black stocking and used it to dab at my washboard.

“If you do a bunch at a time, it will go faster,” Ella said. She pointed at my single stocking.

I swirled the stocking through the rinse water and then cranked it through the wringer.

“Suit yourself,” Ella said. “But he won’t like it.”

I ran two stockings through my wringer and dropped them in the basket at my feet. Ella hauled a towel from her tub and fed the towel through the rollers of her wringer. Water ran in rivulets over her slippers but she did not seem to mind. She turned the crank and asked if anyone had heard of the girl who had run away from her father’s house and married her own true love, which seemed like the thing that most girls would want to do. Nothing like marrying the boy you were put on this earth to marry, and we should all expect that this would happen because the good Lord had His ways. But on the day after her wedding night, this girl learned that her own true love was already married to a woman who lived in Chippewa Falls. That wife drove a horse and cart all the way to Milwaukee to fetch her husband. When she found him, she did not care what kind of ruckus she made at the hotel or in front of his new bride. It was an unholy scene, end to end. After that, the girl was disgraced. Her own mother would not let her come home.

Then Johanna said that that was nothing. She herself once knew a girl who was made a promise but the promise was not kept. That girl was later found incoherent and wandering the streets of Watertown. No respectable family would have anything to do with her. She was forced to marry a man who did not care for her and showed this to her daily.

I took a deep breath and dipped my hands into the wash water and rubbed the stockings against my board and dropped them in the rinse water. I did this again and again, until pain stabbed my thumb and I stepped back and looked down at the cut, where blood ran in a straight line to my palm. I sucked my thumb and looked at it again and then sucked it again. The taste of blood on my tongue was meaty and familiar, salty as tears.

Just before lunchtime, William Oliver came into the laundry room and stood with his hands in his pockets. He was not yet old but he was no longer young. He kept his dark hair long and had a short beard that came to a point. He looked like the devil pictured in my father’s atlas. That devil also had a pointed beard and floated in a balloon over a caption that provided advice in Latin, his band of winged consorts in flight behind him.

William Oliver walked to the stoves and took two steps up onto the ladder and looked into the boiling water. Then he jumped down and walked back to the shelf where he kept the record of the supplies we used. He counted my entries twice and then set the paper back on the shelf. I could feel him walking up behind me.

“Mary,” he said.

The first day we met he said that I reminded him of his aunt Mary, who grew to a fine old age despite having gone blind in one eye and deaf in both ears. Aunt Mary had to use a trumpet and yell “What?” whenever anyone spoke. But then he said I was nothing at all like her because Aunt Mary had never married, even though she was a woman of upstanding character and let everyone around her know it. Anyone could see that living as a spinster on the beneficence of my relatives was not to be my fate.
Fate.
That was the word he used, as if that was the word for my future and he had something to do with it.

Now he leaned close and looked over my shoulder into my washtub. I believe he must have had sausage for breakfast, for his breath reeked of onion. He said my name again. Then he said he had a special task for me and I must come with him to his office. I looked around but the others were bent over their tubs and acted as if they had not heard anything at all. So I followed him around the side of the building and up the alley between the laundry and the lawyer’s office next door and through the front door underneath the bell that rang whenever a customer came in. Then William Oliver opened a wooden door behind which stood a flight of dirty stairs. In the room at the top, his suit coat hung from a curved hook on a tarnished brass stand, his hat on top of the stand.

“Sit down,” he said, and pointed to the chair that faced his desk. The desk was a door laid over two sawhorses.

I hesitated.

“You have nothing to fear,” he said. He turned and stood with his back to me and studied the street below. I listened to the sound of a wagon and team as it moved by the building, the rattling of the harness and the grinding of the wheels. I sat.

There were papers laid out across the desk and a ledger book with a green paper cover and a tin can out of which stuck two yellow pencil stubs. A loud sound came from the street, and William Oliver stepped back from the window. But still he looked out at the sky.

“I was born and raised in Tennessee,” he said. He spoke like someone speaking to a friend, but I was not his friend, and I did not like being alone with him in his room. “I got some money when my daddy died and I came north,” he said. “It’s an old story. My eldest brother got the land. I got something to tide me over. I carried the New Testament, John Bunyan’s
The Pilgrim’s Progress
, and
Huck Finn
with me. Before he died, my daddy said that each of these would offer advice for the road ahead. He has not been wrong.” He turned to consider me. “Your father is raising you right?” he said. “Some sort of social training? Some expectation that you will rise?”

I did not reply.

He came toward me and sat down across from me and twisted in his chair and reached for a metal flask that stood behind him on a shelf. “I don’t suppose you’ll take a drink.”

I shook my head.

“Of course not,” he said. “But you won’t mind if I do.”

“Mr. Oliver.”

“William,” he said. He poured two fingers of whiskey into the flask’s cap and raised the cap to his lips and drank its contents in a single swallow. Then he lifted the cap and gestured at me. “I know your father,” he said. “I have met his wife. The beautiful Elise.” He looked at the cap and then lifted the flask, poured, and drank again.

“My mother is dead,” I said in a flat voice.
My mother is dead
, I thought.
She is dead.

“I know,” he said. “Such a sad day. Such sorrow across the land. But I guess it was bound to happen.” He leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head.

The way he spoke of my mother made her seem like someone who did not belong to me. “I do not know what you mean,” I said.

He eyed me. “I find that surprising.” He dropped his hands to the table. “I believe if you give it some thought, you’ll find that you know exactly what I mean.” He raised the flask and jiggled it. Then he set the flask down and rocked gently in his chair.

“Mr. Oliver.”

“William.”

“William,” I said.

He watched me.

My hands shook and I took a shallow breath. “Did you want something?” I said softly.

He twirled the cap from the flask. “Now that is a very philosophical question. Let me ask you. Are you a philosopher?”

I shook my head.

“Are you sure? In my experience, questions of desire, of longing, are almost always philosophical questions. What one can have and cannot have. What one will be and cannot be. What one wants and why. All questions for the universe. And that is the realm of the philosopher.”