The Talk-Funny Girl (12 page)

I waited for the bus and thought about them. My father spent most of his time in our woods, twelve acres that were thick with old-growth pine, spruce, and the typical mix of northern New England hardwoods. Most days he’d go out in the morning, without a helmet or any kind of eye protection, usually without gloves, and fell a tree. (I remember, as a small small girl, being terrified at hearing the slow passage of the falling tree through the limbs of its neighbors, then the big
crash-boom
when it hit the ground.) He cut the tree into stove-length logs, piled the logs into a wheelbarrow, and ferried them back to the yard. Depending on the size of the tree, and the distance, this could take twenty loads or more and all of a day. When that job was done, he’d split the logs into billets and, sometimes with my help, stack them in one-cord piles,
eight feet long and four feet tall. These piles, more than two dozen of them, sat at various angles around the yard like stacks of oversized coffins awaiting selection by the bereaved. Altogether, there was enough drying firewood near the house for three or four hard winters into the future, but my father kept felling trees, sawing them up in a roar of chips and fumes, hauling in his harvest of logs. I sometimes saw it as an act of love, as if he had a premonition that the Lord would take him from us at some point in the near future, and he wanted to make sure his family didn’t freeze.

When he grew tired of putting up stove wood, or when the precariousness of our money situation came into clear focus for him, my father would set out his traps in the woods, sometimes on land that didn’t belong to us. His late friend Mac Kins had taught him how to boil and paraffin the traps to keep the human scent off them. Setting them could be done only in winter, when the animals’ coats were full and when, as my father said, “they bring off a good price.” Beaver, fox, possum, coyote, otter, woodchuck, mink, fisher cat, weasel—even selling them to a less than fair buyer, these skins brought in significant cash, and, because of that, my father paid as little attention to the dates of the legal trapping season as he did to the
NO TRESPASSING
signs stapled up on trees at the border between our property and our neighbors’. “No one couldn’t say on you what you do and don’t do in the woods,” he told me, more than once. “Dad Paul told.”

He fished, too, but wasn’t good at it. He used a bobbin and a worm in our stream, which had never been stocked and on which most other fishermen might have chosen to use flies and light tackle. On days when he was feeling less angry at people, he might take his cane, fishing pole, and a can of worms, go to the far side of town, and fish from the bridge that crossed the Connecticut. There he had better luck. Sometimes he’d bring home a walleye (“wally” he called them) or a large trout. My mother would cook it up, and we’d have a family feast, with a little talk, some wine for the adults and lemonade for me.

In poor weather—sleet or hard rain—he drove to Weedon’s Bar,
where he nursed a single draft beer for hours and made conversation with an acquaintance or two, people who shared his ideas about the government and the laws. He knew men who belonged to a local militia—the Granitemen, it was called—and he told me that on more than one occasion he’d been asked to join up. But he never did. It required a firearm, for one thing, and for another thing, it was too social an activity for him. Other people involved, meetings, training sessions, talk. Once, in one of his spurts of fatherly affection, he took me to Weedon’s with him. We sat at a table, not the bar, and he let me sip from his glass, and listen in on his conversation, and though I was under the legal drinking age, the owner made no complaint about it. My father wasn’t much for celebrating holidays or birthdays, but on the day before Christmas he’d go into the woods, cut down a balsam fir, and lean it in one corner of the house for a week. When I was younger, in the years before
True Home and Country
, he would occasionally make me a present. One birthday he carved a small bird out of a piece of maple and set it at my place at the table. He didn’t like to be touched or embraced, so I thanked him three times and left it at that. I have the carved bird to this day.

My mother had come from a different background: a family that didn’t know the woods, a house with books and women in it, a father who hadn’t ended up in jail for crimes no one talked about. Unlike her husband, she could read well, and in certain moods she’d read aloud from the tabloids: stories about a mysterious epidemic of black babies being born in China, or a government conspiracy involving nuclear power, or the affairs of one celebrity or another. Someone famous was secretly homosexual. Someone else had a drug habit, or had given a baby away because it was black, or was actually a mass murderer. And so on. These accounts held the force of biblical truth for her and seemed to reinforce her sense of the chaotic nature of the world, as well as her good fortune in having married a man who liked living apart from it. Sometimes my mother would hum pieces of songs from her childhood, tunes with no real beginning or end, just a twirl of melody. She smoked as much as she could afford to, and drank a bottle of cheap
wine when she was lonely, and she met her household responsibilities with some sense of discipline: buying and cooking the food and paying the bills with money orders from the post office. In certain moods, more common as I got older, she’d seem to float out of herself and walk around in a distracted way, mumbling, humming, whispering parts of sentences that made no sense. And she seemed to me to be excited by an odd power: saying and doing things that made her husband want to hit her—though, as far as I could tell, he never did that. In a kind of twisted foreplay, she’d lead him right to the edge of his patience, taunting him, ridiculing him, doing things (dropping cigarette ashes inside the truck when she smoked, boiling the eggs four minutes instead of five) she knew annoyed him, choosing the worst possible moment to remark on the shape of his face, his missing finger, the slant of his ears.

I was a watcher, and I knew all this from years of observation, but what my parents actually thought about most of the time remained a mystery to me. They had a huge fear inside them, Aunt Elaine told me once. They lived as if enemies surrounded them on all sides, and they were terrified of being humiliated—for not being able to pay the property taxes or a doctor’s bill, by seeing a newspaper ad for a vacation they could never afford to take, by their clothes, their speech, the cough and stutter of our truck on the downtown streets. “Your father was brought up to be constantly afraid,” Aunt Elaine told me. “His father—Dad Paul, you knew him before he was sent upstate, didn’t you?—was a very odd man. He had your father with a woman twenty years older than he was and never lived with him until the woman died. He’d visit him at her house once a week, take him out in the yard and teach him to fight. People would drive by and see them wrestling in the dirt. When your father was just a teenager, Dad Paul would take him to visit prostitutes in Montreal. At his job, he’d pump gas and yell at the customers. You’d see him downtown, drunk, pounding on store windows. The whole town was terrified of him.”

I’d been afraid of Dad Paul, too, and was still afraid of my father and mother at certain times. But I had decided during the night that no
amount of fear—not of dousing or boying, or even of facing or hungering—was going to keep me from the church project. Running down inside me, very deep, was a stream of rebelliousness. For the most part, I worked hard to please my parents and to offend God as little as I could. But there were moments when I found myself talking back to my mother and sometimes even my father, when I’d do something I knew they wouldn’t approve of—looking at a magazine in the school library, failing to say my prayers, sneaking a glance at a television set in a store window or at my aunt’s house. I had my protective shell of funny talk and shyness, but underneath that lived a wilder me, a girl who would take punishment, and take it, and take it, but who would never let go of herself all the way, never completely surrender.

I heard the rumble of the school bus engine as it rounded the curve (Waldrup Road was so narrow and rutted and so icy in winter that Joanne the bus driver was not required to use it) and tried to make myself stop thinking about things that had no explanation. Joanne smiled at me when I climbed the steps, as if to signal that yes, spring had, in fact, arrived. On either side of the highway the hillsides were starting to go into bud. That dark, that cold, that ice, that snow piling up to the bottom of my bedroom window by mid-January, those gray skies—it took a few weeks of forsythia blossoms and free-running streams to make the people in our part of the world believe the fist of winter had really gone loose. Joanne was the first person to show a smile in springtime, the first spark of hope. I chewed my last bite of gingerbread and smiled back. The warm morning had brought out the wildness in some of my schoolmates. Walking down the aisle, I saw that my friend Cindy wasn’t on the bus—sick again, or trouble at home again—and that the boys in the back rows were punching and wrestling with each other as if a small war had broken out there. “Hey,” one of them called out, “Margie’s teachin’ Mr. Bronsante’s English class today, ain’t ya, Marge! I don’t can’t say why for!”

“She don’t can’t of say why for!”

“She can’t don’t! No at!”

I took my usual seat midway down the aisle on the right and made a study of the smaller river as we went along our route. Beyond the metal bridge the bus made a loop through what I thought of as the close-together houses and then turned back onto Main Street and rumbled past St. Mark’s.

“Hey, it’s Margie’s office!” the same boy yelled.

“It’s where at she works of now!”

“She don’t can’t say why for!”

The fact that they knew about my new job meant Cindy had already told someone, but that didn’t matter much to me. Cindy wasn’t the kind of person you gave secrets to for holding. And, in any case, I heard the voices at the back of the bus as if from a great distance. Little mice squeaking in the bushes. Just seeing the work site made me happy, just feeling the soreness in my hands and shoulders. I caught sight of Sands as we passed. He was sitting on the rectory steps in the morning sunlight, so still he seemed to be sleeping. I would work twice as hard that day, I told myself, to make up for the fact that I’d missed. If he asked about it, I’d tell him I’d felt sick, that there was no phone in the house, no way to call and tell him. I’d ask him not to fire me off.

It was a testing day at school. With the rest of my class I sat over the state booklet all morning, filling in squares with a number-two pencil. Geometry—which I liked and was good at. Vocabulary. Social studies. Reading comprehension. A fog of anxiety hung over the rows of seats—it meant staying back or not staying back for some of the others—but I had gotten fair grades that year and testing days were the best part of school for me: no answering questions aloud; no chance of a teacher making you stand up and give a presentation. At lunch, Aaron Patanauk sat diagonally across the long table from me, close enough to say something when the other kids had left. “That’s a devil’s church you’re making now, everybody says it. You’re a she-devil.”

Aaron and his family, including his uncle Cary, had gone to Pastor Schect’s church for a time and probably believed things like that, but I knew he was just teasing. “Boys don’t of know,” I said.

“Your boss is a boy, what I could hear.”

“Not the kind as you.”

“That’s right,” Aaron said happily. He took hold of his tray and stood up. “I’m white.”

“And skinny.”

“Not everywheres.”

At the end of the day, with my books and papers stuffed into the pack, I walked from school into town, and when I reached St. Mark’s, Sands was standing there, waiting. Instead of lying I said, “I’m sorry at not being for work. I won’t again.”

“You feeling okay?”

“Okay, sure.”

“It’s not too hard for you.”

“Not ever.”

“All right, I made a couple more dump runs yesterday, so in another few days we can start getting ready for the walls. Get your boots on.”

“I’ll be to paying you for them.”

“I’m not worried.”

“You’re not going to fire me off?”

“Probably not. We’ll see how you work today.”

He smiled, so that I wondered if he could be joking. I changed what was on my feet and started filling the truck bed with the broken mortar and slate and small pieces of stone.

“Whoa,” he said. “Whoa, Laney. You can’t keep up that pace. Take it slow.”

But I worked like a plow horse that afternoon, not stopping to rest until Sands forced me to, packing stones and scrap into the pickup as if my survival in this world depended on it.

Ten

A
nd my life did depend on it, I see that now. The work saved me. Little by little, day by day, I started to know stone, to understand the fault lines along which a piece could be broken with a single hammer strike and the ways two stones could best be fit together in a wall. I learned how to make mortar by adding water to the powdery gray mix that came in eighty-pound bags (Sands had to lift those). I learned to be careful opening the bags with the shovel blade because the dust would burn your eyes, and to clean the shovel, hoe, and wheelbarrow immediately to keep the mortar from hardening there.

Sands showed me these things with a teacher’s patience, and seemed kind enough, but he was a mystery, too. He talked only a little more than my parents. Concentrating on setting a stone in place, or on sawing and nailing pieces of wood to make the frame for the thick lower section of the walls, he seemed to me to be working out some problem in the center of himself, and I suspected it had nothing to do with what he called “the cathedral.” I studied him the way I studied all the people in my life, noticing the changes of his mood, the times when the edge of his patience came into view, even small physical details like the sickle-shaped scar on the top of his right forearm and the small
flourish he made with his hand whenever he set down a tool, as if he was brushing bad air away from it.