The End of Always: A Novel (9 page)

He stroked downstream. We slid past the tall brick machine factory and the town park with its circle of benches and then past the biggest of the springs, where the springhouse was closed up tight for the night but where in the morning people would walk to take the waters for their health or have themselves driven there in wagons and in cars. August pulled the oars into the boat and dropped them into the hull and we floated in silence. He pulled a candle stub from his pocket and lit the wick. He poured some of the wax onto the seat beside him and stood the candle in the wax. The flame flickered and went out. He popped another match against his thumbnail and lit the candle again. I wondered what people along the shore must have thought when they saw us, a boat the same dark color as the night and so invisible and yet a single light moving gently along the surface of the water.

The candle went out again and this time he did not relight it. When we came around a curve, he searched the shoreline. Then he pulled us out of the current to a rocky beach that was more shore than sand, just tall grasses waving and small stones and the dark pines falling away. He threw the anchor into the water and let the boat drag against its weight. He crawled over the bow and tested the line. Then he stepped to the side of the boat and took my hand. I cautiously stepped onto a rock and then another and then down until I stood next to him in the shallows, my boots wet, my stockings wet, my skirt wet almost to the knees.

He had brought us to rest in a tiny cove that seemed carved by some ancient hand from the determined lines of the riverbanks. He told me to wait and then he crossed the beach and stepped through the branches into the woods. I was left by the river in silence, wringing the water from my hem, my shoes soaked and my hair coming unpinned. The wind tossed the branches and tossed the trees where August had disappeared. I could not see him nor could I see the place where it seemed he had stepped off the face of the planet. No light or house or farm or factory nearby, only the dark, moving river and the boat bumping lightly against the gravel.

I stood under the stars and breathed in the watery river air and waited for him to come back. I felt myself all the more alive because I was alone and waiting. I felt myself all the more free because the river breeze lifted my heart and sent it sailing. My father was like bad news from a faraway place and completely missing on this early spring night. When I stood on that beach, it seemed to me that I had never met him and all I knew was the wind and the water and August.

He led me across the grassland to a faint trail that led upward under the trees. We climbed past old limestone shelves that ran with trickles of water and grew dank with moss. We climbed above the shelves to a place where the forest floor softened with fallen pine needles and drifts of leaves, all brown and dry and yet still yielding, August’s hand on mine as the trail rose steeply into the night. At the top, he stood breathing and I stood breathless next to him. We looked back over the way we had come. He put his arm around me and I leaned my head against him. He told me that it was not much farther and it never seemed this far in the daylight. I nodded. Far below, I saw something glint in the grass by the boat. August turned away from me but I hung back. He turned toward me and asked me what was wrong.

“I saw something,” I said.

We stood together and looked over the limestone cliffs to the grassland below the woods.

“Do you see the boat?” I said.

He nodded.

“It’s by the boat.”

He squinted into the darkness.

“I do not see anything,” he said.

“Wait,” I said. And just then in the darkness a small flash of light, like a reflection in a tiny mirror on a bright day.

“I see it,” he said.

We watched but the light did not come again. The grass near the boat rippled and flattened and the wind pushed against us.

“Let’s go,” he said. “It is nothing.”

“August.”

“It is nothing,” he said.

We stood on top of the cliffs and looked down into the river. The grass moved and the boat rested and no light came.

“You see?” he said. “Nothing.”

He pulled me after him and I followed him along the top of the rocks to a place where the trail disappeared and nothing but a great dense wall of brush and undergrowth and tall pines stood before us. And then we stepped into the brush and there was a shed. When August lit a match and put it to another candle stub, I saw that the shed was fitted with a slatted board door that hung by hinges made of strips of raw deer hide. A crude window had been papered over with greasy butcher paper. August let the match burn down and then shook it out and put it in his pocket. He stepped forward with the flame of the candle stub before him and pulled the door open. It scraped dirt and then the inside of the shed bloomed with a dark yellow light.

We sat on a pallet made out of tattered ticking and straw that someone had pushed against the back wall. Nothing before us but the dirt floor and the candle stub standing in a puddle of wax on a tin plate. A pile of leaves blown up into the corner, as if the door had come loose in the fall and stood ajar long enough for some of the forest to come inside. August told me that this was a hunting cabin built by his father and his uncle. They came up here when they did not have work. They used the boat to bring back the deer they had shot. In town, they would hang the carcasses from the limb of a tree behind their house until the deer were drained and done. Then they would skin them and butcher the meat. They would make a fire in the middle of the yard and lay thin slices over the smoke on a chaffer they had taken from an old combine. While the meat smoked, they packaged the roasts in bags made of flour sacks, which they bound with twine and hung from the rafters in the root cellar under the stairs. He said the roasts tasted best right before they turned. He always looked for the pieces that had been brined and hung and dried and had developed a crust of blue mold, like a country ham. That might be six months after the deer was killed, if the root cellar did not get too wet. He stopped.

“I do not know why I talk so much,” he said. “Maybe you make me nervous.” He picked up my hand and held it up in the candlelight. “Poor thing,” he said. “Poor hand.” He ran his thumb over the healed scalds now white in the dark light. He stroked my red and weeping wrists. He flattened my hand between his two palms as if the heat from his hands could heal it. I felt the heat and the pressure and the thick, smooth calluses that crossed his palms.

“When we are married, you will not have to work like this,” he said. “I will take care of you forever.”

He put his arms around me and held me in the flickering light of the candle and then he kissed me. He kissed me until I felt my blood and bones and skin and muscle turn to shivering water and the water that I had become flooded toward him. He kissed me harder and I surged around him, as if I had become a tumult of currents and deep places. I made a sound that I had never heard before and we lay down on the pallet and he moved over me. His face was fierce and tender. His eyes suddenly dark and intent. I felt his hand at my waist, his fingers on the buttons of my blouse, my blouse rising under his hand until he could slip his hand under my chemise. My heart pounded and I closed my eyes and my spine became a tight wire arcing, with my hands on his back.

“August,” I said, and my voice surprised me because it was full of tears and yearning.

“It’s all right,” he said. He kissed my neck. “Let me show you.”

At the first sign of light, we stood and dressed and I turned away from him but he pulled me back to him and said my name. By the time we reached the boat, a steady rain stippled the surface of the river. August took his coat off. He held it over my head, his breath frosty and blue in the early light. I stepped into the boat. He followed me through the shallows, leaning his shoulder into the prow and then hoisting himself over the side. He shivered and sat dripping. He picked up the oars. Then he rowed us against the current back to town. He let the boat rest under the mill bridge so I could climb out in shadow. I found the street and tried to look like I had just come out of my own house and was on my way to work. Like this was any other day. I gave him his coat when we touched shore and he kissed me and I kissed him. The world shuddering with life. I climbed up the bank and stepped out onto the street in my soaked dress and my drenched hair. I pushed my hair back and walked away from him but turned at the last minute to watch him pull the boat away from the shore. A woman in a green dress with a hat pinned to her hair came out of her house and stood on the front porch and watched me as I made my way up the street. She stared at me hard and went back inside. I walked with my unhooked boots and my dragging wet skirt and my dripping and draining hair all the way along the river road and then nine blocks to the laundry. When I came inside, I sat on the wooden floor and fastened my shoes. Then I stood and picked up a basket of dirty clothes. I measured a scoopful of soap flakes. I climbed the ladder next to the nearest vat. I dropped shirts and aprons in, one by one. The air hot and heavy and my clothes soaked and cold, the floor wet where I had dragged my skirt behind me. Inge and Ella and Johanna watched me and said nothing. I bent over the vat and stirred the steaming water. I watched the clothes turn and sink and rise and listened to the sound of the water boiling as if it were the sound of wind in the treetops on a high cliff overlooking a river only I knew about.

I
dreamt of my mother, who came to me as wan as a wraith and bloody still. She sailed cloud-like under the dark trees with her terrible dress and her terrible wound and her terrible secret. She smiled when she saw me but when she could not put her hands on me, her face turned cold. Then she moved away under the trees. I saw that she was not alone but rose and fell in the midst of other shimmering women, pale in their pale gowns, their light faces turned back to me without expression. I tried to follow her over the soft trails and high rocks of the woods, past a stream that ran over a white cliff, past the tall waving grasses of a river. But she grew fainter and fainter until she finally evaporated. I stood alone on a vast plain where a blue lake glittered. Nothing made a sound save for the rising wind.

They left me alone. My wet dress clung to me. My skirt made a broad swathe of water across the floor, dripping and trailing the river behind me, and the rain, and the wild woods. I carefully climbed the ladder to the last vat on the line. The weight of my skirt reminded me of August and I said his name to myself and said it again. I pumped the hand agitator. Inge bent over her washtubs and pretended to sing to herself, but I knew she was watching me, just as I knew Ella was watching me while she cranked canvas trousers through her wringer.

The flat workers came at noon. They hung their coats by the back door and went into the room where the ironing boards waited. Then Inge and Ella and Johanna broke from their work and went down the back steps into the yard. They pulled their lunch pails out from under the stairs and stood by the delivery wagon and ate. The laundry room went silent and sunlight fell in a square on the floor. I sat in the hushed light and leaned my head against the wall and slept.

By three o’clock my dress had dried stiff as a board and smelled sour. Dried mud flaked from the hem as I walked from the vats to my washtub. When Inge could stand it no longer, she told me to come with her. I followed her out onto the back steps. She wielded a clothes brush and went over my skirt until most of the caked mud was gone.

“It is the best I can do,” she said.

“Thank you.” I shook my skirt out and let it fall over my shoes.

She slapped the clothes brush against her hand. “Where have you been?”

“Out.”

“But where?” she persisted. Her voice had an irritating wheedling tone. This did not make me any more predisposed to answer.

Women like Inge ask questions with their faces composed in a studied mix of fake empathy and raw curiosity. They see themselves as acting on behalf of the common good. They generally have high opinions of themselves and their busybody behavior. Invariably, I do not share these. It will not surprise you to learn that I hated Inge’s suspicious face and her cajoling voice. I hated her clothes brush and her assistance. I hated the prying she thought she could pass off as pity.

The deliveryman led the horse by its harness out of the alley and the horse pulled the delivery wagon into the yard. The horse lifted its head when it saw us and rolled its eyes and stepped away. The deliveryman yanked on the harness and slapped the horse hard on the neck and the horse stilled. It stood breathing while the deliveryman unfastened the traces and bundled the reins. He turned the horse and led it back down the alley.

“If you were my daughter, I would skin you alive,” said Inge. Her voice was calm but she tapped the back of the clothes brush against her open palm, as if she hoped my skirt and skin would become one.

“Then it is a good thing I am not your daughter,” I said. For the first time I thought:
I am no one’s daughter. Not anymore. I belong to August and he belongs to me.

She picked at the bristles on the clothes brush and then bent and swiped the brush at the back of my skirt again. She moved as if she was trying very hard to restrain herself. Once someone has said she thinks you ought to be struck, I imagine she will have a hard time refraining from the act.

“You remember Lydia Berger,” she said. She straightened and let her hand fall to her side.

I shook my head.

“Fifteen years old. Lived just north of here.” Inge waved in the general direction of the river. “Lydia wanted to stay out all night and go to a carnival. Of course her father would not permit this. She went anyway. In the morning, he whipped her within an inch of her life. This was the right thing to do, in my opinion. You cannot have a young girl running all over the countryside. A girl has one thing and one thing only and when that is gone, it is gone. There is no getting it back.”

A black cat made its way across the edge of the yard. It passed the double doors over the coal chute and sat in the waning sunlight and washed its front paw. It looked over at us with its paw still in the air and then licked the paw quickly and set the paw on the ground.

“A man, of course that is something different. It is almost expected of him. But a girl cannot afford this. You cannot afford this.” She picked up my hem. “If your mother was here, she would say the same.”

I watched the cat, so perfect in its independence. The only thing to do when someone wishes to lecture you is to offer a look of complete innocence. I knew that she did not know anything. I do not think it was just my natural impertinence that made me wish that she would leave me alone. She did not know anything. She ought to leave me alone.

“Lydia burned her father’s house down,” Inge said. “When the neighbors took her family in, she burned their house down, too. Her mother told her to go and wait at the Wisconsin Lake Ice Company, where the family kept horses in the barn. Lydia did as she was told. Also in the barn were sixty-four tons of hay. Lydia took the horses outside and tied them up. Then she burned the barn down. When the sheriff arrested her, he asked her why she did it. She told him that she wanted to take revenge on her father for whipping her.” Inge pointed the handle of the clothes brush at me. “Of course he had the right. She was his to do with as he pleased. She stays in jail to this day, though. Maybe she did not think that part through so well.”

Someone had tried to hang wash on a line that ran the length of the back porch of the building behind the laundry. A man came out and looked at the laundry. He leaned on a tree branch that had been whittled into a walking stick. He limped over to the wash and touched the sleeve of a shirt. Then he turned and limped back into the apartment. The door closed with a loud bang.

“What happened out there?” Inge said. She tried to make her voice sound sympathetic but I knew she was not sympathetic. To this day, I do not expect to find out that Inge ever showed sympathy to anyone.

I lifted one shoulder and let it drop, as if to say that whatever this was, it was of no concern to anyone. It could not matter and should not matter. I was not ruined. I was alive.

She eyed me. “Maybe he took advantage. If you want to say so, now would be the time.”

“Nothing happened,” I said. I tried to keep my voice even. Nothing was the water. Nothing was the river running through me. Nothing was the dark and endless night.

“People talk,” she said.

“They do not have to,” I said. I met her gaze and she quickly looked away.

The clang of the interurban cut through the air. I thought about the people riding inside, on their way to homes they loved, as if everyone in the world was in love with someone and lived their days with what that felt like.

“We have to run a good place here,” Inge said.

I shrugged again. I started to inch away but Inge put her hand on my arm.

“We could lose our jobs,” she said. “All of us.”

I moved my arm but she reached for it again.

“Do not be so selfish,” she said. “If he loses business, what do you think happens to us? He will not hesitate. He will not keep us without work.”

Later, just as I was leaving, I saw her standing at the front counter, talking with William Oliver. They leaned together while Inge whispered and moved her hands.

I took the river road home. Black leaves against the wet sidewalk. The rutted road ran out before me. A rank smell rose from my dress.

I got to my street just in time to see my father come down our walk. He took his hat from his head and creased the crown and then put the hat back on. His coattails flapped. He swung his arms as he walked. I hung back. Martha stood at the kitchen window and stared out into the yard. She turned when I came in. She took in my awful dress and my wild hair and said nothing. She lifted my supper plate out of the food warmer. She carried the plate to the table. She opened a drawer and found a fork and a knife and a spoon. She set these beside the plate and told me to sit down and eat. A pot of water simmered on the stove.

“Do your dishes when you are through,” she said stiffly. “Do not look to me.”

Outside, a steady rain. I imagined the rain as it streamed over the limestone cliffs and made its way to the river, and then I imagined the shed and the place inside the shed where August and I had lain all night. I thought of him as he stroked us back through the dark river upstream to town. I wrapped my arms around my waist.

My wrecked dress hung on the hook on the back of my bedroom door. My unraveling boots dried by the stove with crumpled newspaper balled up in the toes. I wore a dark skirt and a dark blouse and my mother’s shoes.

Martha leaned over and lifted the latch on the stove door. She let the door swing open. A sudden heat warmed the room and blue flame rolled over the last log.

“I do not know what you expect me to say,” she said. She sat down at the table across from me and swept her hand along its surface and then her hand went still.

“I do not expect you to say anything,” I said. “You do not have to worry about this.”

“You are asking me to lie for you,” she said.

“I am not asking you to do anything.”

“If I know about something and I do not tell him, that omission is the same as a lie.” She ran her palm across the tabletop again.

“Do not be ridiculous,” I said. “Do not take things to extremes. If you do not say anything at all, you have not told a lie.”

“What if he asks me straight?” She dropped her hand into her lap. “What am I supposed to say?”

“Tell the truth,” I said bluntly. But I knew this was easier said than done.

“Marie,” she said.

Rain streamed over the dark kitchen window. The fire popped and faded and the blue flame flattened and died away.

She stood and hiked her sagging skirt and dragged it behind her to the sink, where she brushed her hands over the drain. I thought I could count her ribs under her shirtwaist, as if she had begun to vanish before my eyes. These days, she practically disappeared when she turned sideways. The wind came up and murmured like children crying in the eaves. Then it fell away and she turned to face me, her face as tight and chiseled as the bones in a Halloween mask.

“What do you know about this boy?” she said.

“I know enough.”

“What does that mean?”

I knew August’s mouth on mine, the taste of him, the smell of him, the weight of his body, the shuddering that came when he was through. I knew he made me feel strong and whole, and when I was with him, I knew that I had never before been myself and had only become myself after I met him.

“I know him,” I said. “Believe me.”

“What about his family?” she said. “What do you know about his family?”

He had an accent just like my mother’s. He had two brothers. He had a sister named Olga who worked as a seamstress. “They are just like us,” I said softly.

“How do you know that?”

“I just know,” I said.

She snorted.

“We are just like you and George,” I said.

She stiffened in her chair. “It is not the same at all,” she said.

“It is exactly the same.”

“No,” she said. “It is not.”

I leaned over and lifted the iron poker from the firebox and jabbed at the coals. They brightened and a single yellow flame licked up out of the ash. “I know you meet him in the park,” I said.

She folded her arms over her chest. “That’s right,” she said in a prissy voice. “We meet in the park. But it is not the same. For one thing, we are engaged.”

“Engaged?”

“Yes.”

“Does
he
know that?”

“Who? George?”

“Not George,” I said. “You know I do not mean George.”

She smoothed the front of her apron. “George and I will tell him when the time is right,” she said stiffly.

I leaned forward and poked the anemic fire again. I did not dare put another log on the coals even though the kitchen would soon be dead cold.

“How do you think he will take it?” I said. I stirred the embers. “He told you that George was to stay away.”

“We will tell him when the time is right,” she repeated.

“Just like you will ask him what happened to our mother when the time is right,” I said. I gave her a nasty look.

She held still. I could see that she had not expected me to bring this up. “That’s right,” she said.

I stabbed the coals with the poker until they smoldered, an undulating red that moved as if it breathed.
Ashes to ashes
, I thought.
Dust to dust.

Rain fell in a sudden rushing torrent and then slowed.

“Even if it takes forever,” I said.

“Yes,” she said tightly. She bit her lip.

“Why don’t you just ask him?” I said.

“Why don’t you?” she said, her voice tart. Then she went silent.

The rain beat against the kitchen window.

She wiped her hands on her apron and crossed her arms over her waist. “I hoped I would not have to tell you this,” she said. The skin on her face pulled taut as a drumhead.

“Tell me what?” I thought she was going to tell me something about our mother, some piece of information that she had discovered. I knew she must have wondered. One day, right after the funeral, I caught her going through my mother’s purse, looking at my mother’s comb, her spool of thread, the three Mercury dimes she always carried with her, no matter what. Martha jumped when I came into the room and dropped the dimes on the floor and one rolled under the bed and she had to lie entirely flat and stretch her arm out in front of her in order to reach it. Despite this, we never spoke of what I had seen and I had never seen her do anything like it again. But I knew what she was up to. I knew she was looking for something other than the bald truth to explain the world.