The End of Always: A Novel (4 page)

A cold draft came in under the eaves. I shivered.

He cleared his throat and then leaned over with his fist to his lips and coughed. When he was done he looked up at me.

“My doctor tells me I need to go west for my health,” he said. He wiped his hand with a handkerchief he withdrew from his pocket. “The cold is no good for me. But here I am.” He put the cloth back in his pocket and lifted the flask in the air. “To the bright and limitless future,” he said. He took a long pull and set the flask on his desk and laid his hand on the table between us.

“I have a need to restore an order to its owner,” he said. “I can’t trust the others. I suspect they would open the parcel and distribute the contents among themselves, all in the name of equality. No man better than the next. I’m sure you are familiar with this dreary rhetoric. It’s ill-informed, to say the least. Of course one man is better than the next. This is what the world is about.” He coughed again and leaned hard over his knees.

When he was finished, he cleared his throat and told me that the package was on the counter by the cash register. “The address is written on the front,” he said. He paused. “You can read? I don’t know how you people raise your children. You could be perfectly illiterate.”

“I can read,” I said fiercely, and stood up. “Do not concern yourself.”

He lifted one eyebrow and stood up, too, smiling. I do not know if he was more amused by my tone of voice or my haste. He hooked his thumbs in his suspenders and contemplated me. “I do not worry, Mary,” he said. “But I do think of you. This is what you must bear in mind.”

It was lunchtime. I picked up the package and followed Ella and Inge and Johanna out into the yard. One by one they fetched their pails from under the steps. They sat on the cold bare ground in the raw light and ate. The daylight moon had swung past its midday high to the leading edge of the western sky. I could see down the alley to the street. It was now a week until Christmas and the town businessmen had strung gold garland on the lampposts to encourage us to shop. As the breeze came up, the garland glinted and fluttered like the ruffle on a dress.

My mother used to boil our clothes in a pot on the top of the stove. She hummed while she worked, an old tune her mother had hummed, and her mother before her, a song she tried to teach my sisters and me as if we were just the next in line. One day she saw me in the doorway and told me to bring the blueing from the mudroom. The shirts in the pot bloomed white almost as soon as the blueing touched the water.

Now we wait, she said. She sat down at the table and I sat down across from her. I thought she would tell me a tale of R
üge
n. But when she began to talk, it was only to tell me a story that she had heard from Mrs. Muehls. A woman named Mrs. Hiram McDonald had become deranged with religious excitement and then had grown afraid of everyone. She thought her husband and his friends were out to get her. Eventually, she attacked her children. She broke all the furniture and windows in the house.

The window over the sink filled with steam. My mother rubbed at a spot on the table with the tip of her finger. She looked out the window. I tried to picture what our house would be like with all the windows and furniture broken. I wondered if the glass would fall inside or out, if it would be hard to tear the legs from the table. I imagined it would be difficult to do these things, to break everything inside a house into pieces.

She rubbed the table again. She looked like someone trying to inscribe a circle with the tip of her finger, like she wanted to mark a place for everyone to see. Then she leaned over her lap in the way one does when one’s belly hurts and inhaled deeply and sobbed one single sob.

I froze.

Of course she gathered herself before she went any further. She straightened and caught her breath. She stood up. She went into the mudroom for the pail. She went down the steps and crossed the yard and levered the handle until the pump came to life. Then she stood in the shadow of the house as if she had forgotten what she had come to do. She let the water gush in a white froth onto the ground.

I watched her. When you are only a child, you do not offer your mother a hand. She always stands beyond you, on the other side of a dividing line that you cannot cross. So I have to confess that I stood there dumb as a post while she wiped her eyes on the back of her sleeve. When the light moved across her face, she looked years younger, as if she was still a girl.

Down by the brewery, two boys used a blue rubber hose to rinse brown bottles in the delivery yard. They stacked the crates of empties by a hatchway. Across the street, the plate glass window of a haberdasher’s shop, straw bowlers arranged like a landscape at the foot of a dummy who sat with a felt fedora on his head. The river out ahead then, in a wide space unmarked by trees.

The road sloped down. I passed the post office with its American flag curled up like a chrysalis, and then I passed the train depot where a man in a wool flannel hat had drawn a map on a piece of newsprint and was showing the map to the stationmaster. The stationmaster kept shaking his head but this had no effect. The man with the map stayed fixed on his subject and his voice carried clear out into the road.

Up ahead, a girl who looked like Hattie stepped along the railroad tracks. She was barefoot. A girl who must have been her older sister walked behind her with her feet swaddled in burlap bags tied off with twine. Every few feet, one or the other bent down and picked up a piece of coal and dropped the coal into her apron. Fires burned in the shanties below the railroad station and columns of blue smoke stood in the air. When I breathed out, I could see my breath as if my very soul kept escaping. I did not mind this at all.

The railroad fell away behind me and then the river was only a smell in the air. The road turned and a tall house came up beside me. It sat apart from its neighbors and at one time must have been white but now was mostly bare wood. A rusty gate stood at the foot of the walkway. The gate was not hinged to the fence but leaned against the pickets like a bicycle someone had forgotten.

I turned the bell and waited. When no one came, I walked up and down on the porch and watched my breath cloud in the cold air. The porch had seen better days, just like the house. It was littered with old webs and brown leaves, and the desiccated carcasses of last summer’s beetles dangled legless from the windowsills. I was just about to turn the bell again when a man in a worn black suit cracked the door. “Full up,” he barked. “Try Mendota.”

I hesitated. I knew what everyone knew about Mendota. It was the name of a town and it was the name of a lake, but whenever anyone said Mendota, the only thing he really meant was the state asylum for the insane. People were said to go inside and be held for life, as if a person were a thing that could be captured and kept, like a mouse in a jar.

I held the package up so he could see it.

“I have a delivery,” I said. My voice cracked a little. “William Oliver sent me.”

The man in the greasy black suit looked at me and he looked at the package. Then he held the door open and I stepped into a dark hallway with dark carpets and dark walls. A staircase disappeared to a second floor. The place reeked of human filth: used chamber pots, unwashed clothes, flop sweat unending. The man acted as if he had not noticed or did not mind. I put my sleeve over my mouth and breathed through the cloth.

“This way,” the man said. He led me past the front parlor, where a short man balanced on a settee, his wooden legs holstered in leather rigging he wore outside of his trousers. A thin woman sat in a chair under the window. She was attached to the chair by a rope that snaked over the upholstery and ended in a knot bound to a ring in the floor. A young boy stood by the window and looked out at the street. He was covered with so much long silky hair that he looked like a dog. An old man was chained by one wrist to a bolt in the wall. When he saw me, he raised his free arm but his arm ended in a flipper, its three fingers curled roots of what fingers ought to be. And then I saw that he was not an old man but a boy. He opened his mouth and all I saw was a black gash.

A tall, thin young man paced the length of the hallway. He wore old-fashioned clothes, a shirt with a broad collar, one point up, one point down, like a crooked wing, trousers that laced with rigging at the waist, a vest that did not fit him. His hair fell over his eyes but he was handsome, with an oval face and large green eyes. He stepped back when I passed as if I had gotten too close to him. Then he strode toward the front door. After that, he came back toward us and stood in the doorway of the kitchen while we conducted our business.

“They come here when they get out of Mendota,” the man in the suit said. “Or they come here instead of going to Mendota. I’m glad to say that we are able to give them a place to stay.”

Long before the lunatics arrived, Indians had lived where Mendota stood. They built magical earthworks in the shape of animals, and the woods grew up around the animal shapes like a queer wild fence. The state had left the old Indian earthworks alone when they built the hospital. I had once seen a picture on a postcard. Two wide towers capped with roofs like hats and a huge cupola shaped like a bell. But in the shade, a heave of earth that might have been the leg of a bear or the long spine of a running deer or some other wild thing that came close to the place where wildness was meant to be vanquished.

I set the package on the table and the man in the suit told me his name was James Pulliam. There commenced a wailing in the front room but he just shrugged. “She cries for her baby but she never had a baby,” he said. “Never mind. We can do nothing for her.”

The room stank of decomposing potatoes and urine, and a canopy of greasy cobwebs swayed in a draft overhead. The boy in the doorway swung his arms and watched us. I caught him looking at me. I smiled at him and he ducked his chin.

James Pulliam reached into his pocket and lifted three bills from his purse and counted them out on the table. “I will oblige you for a receipt,” he said. He stood back and crossed his arms over his chest.

“I do not have anything to write on,” I said.

He sighed and looked around. “Here,” he said. He cut the twine on the package with a pocketknife and opened the brown paper and folded one edge and ran the dull side of the blade along the fold, which he then opened until the crease lay along the table edge and he could tear a piece of paper away. This he folded in half and tore again. He handed the two pieces to me along with a pencil stub he pulled from his waistband. “William Oliver will want a record, too,” he said.

Through the window in the back door, I could see a small room where coats hung on hooks and then through the back door out to the yard. The boy in the doorway took a step toward us.

“I’m busy now,” James Pulliam said, and the boy stopped. James Pulliam watched me lean over the table. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “He’s harmless. He suffers from curiosity.”

“He is all right where he is,” I said. I knew this boy was not like other boys, but I did not think that curiosity could be an illness. His defect must arise from something hidden, a wound or twist so deep that it showed itself only in his lonely smile or in the duck of his chin or in his fearful and hopeful approach or in the way he backed away when bidden. None of these alone would be sufficient to account for his family’s d
espa
ir—something that must have mounted such that they finally caused him to be sent away to live here. But taken together, these things made the boy into someone apart. For a moment I felt a pang for him. He was not covered with hair nor did he need to be tied to a wall. In fact, he did not look so different from the rest of us. But here he was, in a house with a moaning woman and a strung-up dwarf, with a little boy who seemed more fish than child, with a boy more dog than man. Perhaps I felt for him because he showed me the way we measure the quality of difference. It is true that I have been attentive to such arithmetic ever since. None of us is so without flaw that we ourselves might not be accounted for in just the way that someone had accounted for this boy.

Now he stood in the doorway and swung his arms.

“Edwin,” said James Pulliam in a warning voice.

Edwin took three more steps back into the hallway. But I could see him yet, his green eyes, his dark hair, his oval face. He grinned and ducked his head again.

“Three dollars for the two weeks,” I said, writing as I spoke. “This week and next.”

When I was through, James Pulliam followed me to the front door. In the parlor, the woman tied to the chair still mourned the baby she had never had. The boy with hair like a dog rested an accordion on his lap and the bellows huffed and the first notes clanged and then he played with his eyes closed. The man with the wooden legs pushed himself up from his sofa with the palms of his hands and stepped into the center of the room. When the accordion was at full pitch, the man began to dance, or do something that must have been dancing, because it could not have been anything else. I saw him reflected in the hall looking glass, the top of his head bobbing up and down in time to the notes, and the sound of his wooden pegs like the tapping of a coal miner trapped in a mine.

James Pulliam opened the front door and held it for me so I would have to pass beneath his arm. Edwin walked up to me and reached out and touched my sleeve. James Pulliam said, “Edwin,” and Edwin dropped his hand to his side. I stepped onto the porch, where the air was cold and clean and my thoughts ran away.

Edwin watched me as I walked up the road, but when I turned the corner, he dropped out of sight. I could still smell the stench of the place and taste it on my tongue. I held on to a lamppost and leaned over and spat. When I raised my head, I saw a dark bird rising high on the wind and then turning in spirals up beneath the clouds. It might have been a hawk or it might have been a vulture with a plucked head, but I pretended it was an eagle, a bird so majestic that the very idea of it cannot fail to inspire thoughts of what it means to be free.