The Late Child (45 page)

“What'd you think of New York City, girls?—you didn't say,” Sty asked. “Here all of you went to New York and we ain't even had a postcard.”

“They really didn't have time to see much of the city,” Laurie said.

“I didn't know what to make of it, really,” Neddie said.

“I could probably have made something of it if I'd got to the right dance spots,” Pat said. “But of course these stick-in-the-muds wouldn't take me.”

Ethel took a big sponge out of the sink and began to scrub the blackened wall beside the stove. All she accomplished was to move some of the smudge over to a part of the wall that had been cleaner. Nonetheless she kept on sponging vigorously.

“Mom, she's just making it worse,” Eddie observed at once. “Make her stop before the whole wall gets smudgy.

“Maybe she has on the wrong glasses,” he added generously.

“Telling Momma to stop would be like telling a fly to stop buzzing,” Neddie said.

“Eddie, she's my mother, I can't make her stop,” Harmony said.

“What about Billy—has everybody just forgot him?” Pat asked, looking at Harmony. She seemed a little truculent, to Harmony.

“Don't talk nasty about your brother just because he's in jail,” Ethel said, instantly. “All Billy needs is a good woman. He certainly don't need them psychiatrists they keep sending him to.”

“What is she talking about, money?” Sty asked. “That's all she usually talks about. Ethel likes money better than she likes anything else.”

“See how far gone he is, he can't even follow a conversation,” Ethel said. “Talking to him is like talking to a fence post—boring.”

“I'm going to make more pancakes, if no one minds,” Laurie said.

“Nobody minds, but this is not real maple syrup,” Eddie said. “It's good but it's not real maple syrup.

“I think it's
cabbage
syrup,” he said, giggling at his own wit. “I think it was made from big green cabbages.”

“Well, Ed's about through with his vittles, I think we'll gather up the equipment and go see if we can hook a fish or two—if we can't we can just have a conversation somewhere where there ain't no females,” Sty said. “I don't know about Eddie, but I'm about out of the mood for females.”

“If you meet anybody while you're fishing don't let on that Eddie's seen a psychiatrist,” Ethel said. “We got our good name to worry about.” She was still sponging the smoky part of the wall onto the clean part.

“What's that I'm not supposed to tell 'em? Sty inquired.

“Dad, just ignore her, she's crazy,” Neddie said.

“Shut up, don't tell your father to ignore me when I'm giving instructions,” Ethel said. “He better not ignore me—it's never too late for divorce.”

“How many fishermen around Tarwater are going to care whether Eddie's been to a shrink or not, Momma?” Pat said. “Get real.”

“I can't hear a word anybody's saying,” Sty complained.

“Well, I hear their words but I don't like them,” Eddie said. “They're not very nice words.”

“Got any Velveeta cheese?” Sty asked, addressing the question to Ethel. “Eddie and I might fish all day. It would be nice to have some cheese and crackers to nibble on in case the crappie are biting.”

“I can't believe a daughter of mine was foolish enough to take her son to a psychiatrist before he was even six years old. I'd go see my minister about this if he wasn't such a blabbermouth.”

“Momma, I live in Las Vegas, people have a different attitude there,” Harmony said. “I really wish we could change the subject.”

“That minister's from Kansas—they're too talky up in Kansas,” Ethel said. “They oughtn't to let preachers from way up in Kansas preach in Oklahoma.”

Laurie was at the stove, making pancakes. She looked over her shoulder at Harmony and smiled a nice smile. It was a smile to let Harmony know that she sympathized where Ethel was concerned. Probably Laurie's mother wouldn't get off an awkward subject either, once she got on one. When the pancakes were ready Laurie gave some to Harmony, who passed them on to Neddie—she would need to eat if she was going to spread manure.

“My stomach feels funny—maybe it's just from being home,” Harmony remarked.

“Maybe it's because there's an alien in the kitchen,” Eddie said, with a grin. “Mom, would you watch my turtle while I go fishing? He doesn't move very fast. I think he'll be easy to watch.”

He gave her a sticky kiss before going off to wash his hands.

“I'm going to get rid of that filthy turtle,” Ethel said. She came around the table and tried to snatch Eli, but Harmony saved him just in time.

“No, Mom—it's Eddie's pet,” she said. “Didn't you hear me tell him I'd take care of it?”

“We could tell him it escaped—turtles are filthy,” Ethel said. “This is my house. I've never kept a reptile in it and I don't intend to start.”

Harmony felt a little emotional as she watched Eddie and her father get ready to go fishing. It was something her father had been mentioning for years. He seemed to think the prospect of fishing would bring them home.

“We'll just put the turtle in a box, so it won't hurt anything,” she said, to placate her mother.

“It has a name, Eli,” Eddie reminded her as he was leaving.

Later in the day Harmony took a nap, on an old purple Sears and Roebuck couch, on her parents' back porch. Eli the turtle took a nap with her, in a shoebox by her side—Harmony knew her mother would throw Eli out if she could find him, so she hid him under a quilt. The quilt was the same blue Arkansas quilt that had been there in her childhood.

Iggy had gone fishing with Eddie and her father—nobody trusted Ethel in relation to Iggy, either.

Laurie, too, took a nap. She simply went outside and stretched out on the newly mown grass.

“That girl will get chiggers—they'll be up to her undies,” Ethel warned. “If she don't get chiggers she'll get pneumonia—that ground's sopping wet underneath.”

“Momma, you can't see underneath the ground,” Harmony pointed out.

“No, she can't even see the top of the ground, much less the bottom,” Pat said. “If someone offered her a million dollars to find a june bug she couldn't find one in a week, and this place is crawling with june bugs.”

“Shut up and go home!” Ethel said—actually Pat and Neddie were just waiting for Neddie's husband, Dick, to arrive. Harmony tried gamely to stay awake, so she could say hello to Dick, but she didn't make it. It felt so relaxing to lie on the old couch that despite herself, she drifted off. As she was drifting off, she heard her mother complaining to Neddie about Dick's problems with his tractors.

“He oughtn't to be driving tractors at his age, anyway,” her mother said.

“Momma, he's just sixty,” Neddie said. “I'd like to see someone try to stop me from driving my tractor because I'm sixty years old.

“Which I won't be yet for quite a while,” she added quickly.

“Tractors flip over and when they do the driver is always killed, that's a well-known fact,” Ethel said.

“Don't argue with her, she's cracked,” Pat said. “I wish Dick would hurry. I'm in one of those moods where I might become a serial killer, and I might start with my mother.”

Harmony remembered, as she was fading, how happy Eddie had looked when he climbed into the old blue pickup, to go fishing with his grandfather. Except for Gary, Eddie had lived all his life with women: finally, there was a man who was paying some attention to him, and not just a man off the street, either. The man was his grandfather. When Eddie shut the door of the pickup she couldn't even see the top of his head, but she could hear his voice, relaying to his grandfather some fish facts he had learned on the Discovery Channel. It was a good sound to go to sleep with; better, for sure, than her mother's complaining.

When she woke up, Eddie was standing by her, holding three small green fish on a string.

“Mom, these are perch, I caught them!” Eddie said. “I caught them on a hook and Grandpa and I are going to
clean
them. They'll be very clean and then we'll cook them in a pan and eat them.”

“Perch are too bony to eat,” Ethel said, popping back onto the porch. “If you eat them you'll get a bone in your throat and we'll have to run you to the emergency room and they'll take it out with tongs.”

But Eddie had already run off in search of his grandfather, the three perch jiggling on the string.

“Oh, Eddie, I knew you'd be a good fisherman,” Harmony said, though he probably didn't hear her—he was too excited. It was one of those moments when parenting was mixed; it was difficult. Now Eddie was happy in Oklahoma. He was going to want to stay with his grandfather for a while, and learn more about country living, whereas she herself had been thinking about calling Gary and asking him to meet her at the airport in Las Vegas. She was thinking of going right back, and it wasn't because her mother was so critical, either.

One reason she felt comfortable on the porch was that it really wasn't in her mother's house—the porch was just sort of tacked on. She had not even gone upstairs yet, to see the room that had once been hers. The stairs to the second floor were pretty narrow; she felt she might get claustrophobia if she tried to squeeze through. It wasn't just the stairs, though. The whole experience of being home was making her feel that she just wanted to go, even though she knew that to be a good parent she should get a room or something and give Eddie time to soak up some attention from his grandparents.

“Where's Laurie?” she asked—it was almost evening.

“She got up and walked off down the road without a by-your-leave,” Ethel said. “You slept all day. I guess she got bored. Why'd you bring a girl like that all the way to Oklahoma?”

“Momma, she was Pepper's best friend, I wanted to spend some time with her,” Harmony said. “We need to be with one another for a while.”

“Why didn't her husband come?” Ethel asked. “Does he just let her run all over the country like a chicken?”

“Laurie's not married,” Harmony pointed out—of course she had no intention of mentioning that Laurie was gay.

“Then what's she doing wearing a wedding band?” Ethel asked. “The first thing I notice when I meet somebody is whether she's wearing a wedding band.”

Harmony remembered then that Pepper and Laurie had exchanged wedding bands, they were just cheap ones bought on a street corner, Laurie said.

“I think it was just a ring, Momma,” Harmony said; she saw no reason to be more specific.

“Well, it's fishy,” Ethel said. “Just because I've lived in the country all my life don't mean I can't tell when something's fishy.”

Harmony got up and walked off the porch—usually that was the best way to end a conversation with her mother; sometimes it was the only way. Probably her departure for Las Vegas at sixteen had been a way of walking off from the sound of her mother's voice.

The moon was just coming up. It was a big moon, more yellow than it seemed to be in other places. Harmony's plan was to walk down the lane and find Laurie, but then she noticed Laurie over by the barrel where fish got cleaned. She was helping Eddie and Sty clean the fish, so Harmony just waved and walked on down toward the pond. She thought it might be nice to walk a little and watch the moon rise. Already she heard frogs croaking, from the pond, and heard the bullbats call, as they swooshed over her head.

The pond was right beside the road, so close that when her boyfriends brought her home from dates, in high school, they would try to flip beer bottles over the car and into the water. Usually they could get the bottles to fall into the pond. Sometimes the beer bottles didn't sink right away—sometimes they would still be floating the next day. If her father came by the next day and noticed beer bottles floating in the pond, there would usually be a scene. Her father had been strict when he was younger. He didn't want boys who threw beer bottles in the pond to be going out with his daughter.

Harmony decided to climb through the fence and watch the moon rise over the water—she was hoping there wouldn't be snakes watching the moon rise with her. Getting through the barbed-wire fence was a little difficult. She nicked her blouse a time or two, but at least the barbs didn't stick in her butt, as they had from time to time when she was a teenager.

After she made it past the fence, Harmony picked her way through the prickly grass to a stump on the dam, on the east side of the pond. Once a great sycamore tree had stood on the tank dam—Harmony could remember it a little from her early childhood. She could remember the hard little balls the tree made, which had become puffballs once they dried up. But, one day, some vagrants driving along in a car in winter saw the sycamore and stopped and cut it down for firewood. When her father came back from work in the fields that day and saw that the sycamore was gone he was so stunned he couldn't eat supper—his own mother had planted the tree almost seventy-five years
earlier. Ethel said it was the only night of their marriage that Sty had been unable to eat; his shock and grief over the loss of the sycamore became a family legend.

“Even seeing his own son arrested for naughty phone calls didn't affect him as much as the loss of that tree,” Ethel said, many times. She always referred to Billy's calls as naughty. Even after it had happened five or six times, naughty was the strongest word she would use.

Though Harmony didn't really remember the sycamore itself very clearly, she did remember every detail of its destruction by the vagrants. Everyone in the family remembered every detail of its destruction by the vagrants, and remembered, particularly, the effect of the destruction on their father.