All Rivers Flow to the Sea (3 page)

“Shhh. Shhhh.”

Tom’s looking at me. I’ve grown up with him. His cousin Joe is Ivy’s boyfriend. I’ve gone to school with Tom from kindergarten on, ridden bikes with him, fished with a string and a safety pin, made plank bridges across Nine Mile Creek, built forts in the haymow. I blow my nose on a piece of notebook paper, which is one of the worst things you can blow your nose on. A dead dried-up leaf is better than a piece of notebook paper. Back to the combination.

11-5-36. Nothing.

11-5-36. Nothing.

Names are being called behind the closed doors of the hall.
Here. Hey. Present. Yo.
Behind the closed door of Wars, Mr. Trehorn might be calling my name:
Rose Latham?

Tracy Benova might be raising her hand, wanting to be first with the news. Tracy Benova, bearer of news.

I saw her. I saw her. I saw her in the hall. She’s here.

She’s not here, though, or she’d be here, right?

I don’t know,
Tracy might be saying, retreating into Tracyworld.
All I know, Mr. Trehorn, is that she slept with Jimmy Wilson up at the gorge.

Was Tracy Benova saying that to Mr. Trehorn? No. They were saying it in the hall, though. Did I care? No. I did not care. Why should I? They had called my sister a human vegetable. They were stupid, stupid people.

Twirl. Twirl. Twirl. Yank.

“Rose.”

Tom Miller’s hand is on my fingers, which are on the combination lock. He pries them off.

“What’s the combination?”

“11-5-36.”

His fingers twirl the knob. My head hurts. History waits with its wars, down the hall in 107. Tom Miller twirls the knob again. Nothing.

BANG!

He slams the lock against the locker.

BANG!

BANG!

CRACK

It springs open. He pulls the lock free of the door and hands it to me: released.

Later, I sit in the green chair by Ivy’s bed. Our neighbor William T. Jones, who lives up the road on top of Jones Hill, sits in the blue chair in the corner behind me. I open up the Pompeii book I checked out in March, when I was planning to do Pompeii for the Destination Imagination project that I’m no longer planning to do.

Let me read to you, Ivy, sister — let me read to you about Pompeii, that lost city.

I lean in close. Hearing is the last to go, is what they say. Somewhere in there, is Ivy listening to me?

“She’s not capable of hearing,” the doctor said. “She’s got no vestibulo-ocular reflex.”

But how does he know? Does he know for absolutely sure? Consider the Higgs boson, which was my Destination Imagination project last year. For twenty years, physicists have searched for it. They believe it to be a vibrating chunk of the unseen vacuum that underlies everything in the universe. Can the Higgs boson be seen? No, it cannot. And yet the physicists believe it exists. If the Higgs boson, then why not Ivy’s hearing, locked away where no one can find it?

“‘On August 24,
AD
79,’” I read, “‘Pompeii looked like any other busy, prosperous city. People walked the streets of their town, trading goods, news, and friendly talk amongst themselves.’”

“What kind of goods were they trading?” William T. says from behind me, from his blue chair in the corner. “Clay vessels full of olive oil? Flagons of wine, whatever a flagon might actually be?”

His big hands play with my mother’s potholders, piled in his lap. He arranges them first in a crisscross pattern, then in a neat stack.

“Potholders, perhaps?”

Every afternoon William T. picks me up after the school bus drops me off at home, and he drives me down here, to the Rosewood Convalescent Home, and after three hours he drives me back to North Sterns. He drops me off at the side door of my house, which is the only door anyone ever uses, including William T. when he comes down the hill to check on us. To make sure that we have enough wood. That we have enough air in our tires. That our furnace isn’t going to blow up on us or poison us with carbon monoxide. That we’ll live to survive another day.

Sometimes his girlfriend, Crystal, comes with him. She brings us muffins that she makes at her diner, or a container filled with tuna salad. Once she brought a strawberry rhubarb pie that William T. ate half of.

Why does William T. check on us? A long time ago, when my father went away to live in New Orleans, my mother stayed in bed. For weeks. And William T. came to check on us then, and he must’ve gotten in the habit, because he’s never stopped checking on us. Even when his son died five years ago, he still checked on us. See? Awful things happen, and the world just keeps on going. I hate that.

“They didn’t have potholders back then, William T.,” I say.

“How the hell did they take their pots out of their ovens, then?”

“That’s a quarter, William T.”

When my mother stayed in bed for that long time and William T. first started coming to check on us, Ivy and I didn’t know him very well.

“Girls, I am a man of curse,” he said the first time he ever swore in front of us, “but I vow to pay you a quarter every time I curse in front of you.”

Damn
is allowed, though. In William T.’s opinion,
damn
doesn’t qualify as a curse.

“Damn,” he says now. “You’re right.”

Weeks ago, my mother got out the old blue metal potholder loom that William T. gave Ivy and me way back then, back when she stayed in bed for that long time. It’s rusty. It doesn’t fit together well. It rocks on the table, a lopsided un-square. She strung a row of multicolored nylon loops from one end to the other and began to weave.

My mother’s hands are always working. If her hands are stilled, another part of her body is in motion. Her foot, tapping against the floor. Her teeth, grinding lightly against each other. Even her stomach muscles twitch, a rhythm of their own, side to side, if the rest of my mother’s body is prevented from movement. Her bones and her muscles show under her skin. She’s a body made to move, made for motion. Stillness? No. Never.

Right this very minute, she’s making more potholders, up in our house in Sterns.

Over. Under. Over, under. Over under. Overunderoverunderoverunder.

And all the while, she’s rocking. Back and forth she rocks, sitting before the card table on her red metal folding chair. She set up the card table a few days after the accident. Once she gets a rhythm going, she increases the speed until she’s going as fast as she can. Until her fingers are flying.

My mother works at the Utica Club Brewery, righting tipped bottles of beer. She darts back and forth, plucking up fallen bottles, getting them ready to be boxed. It’s a rare bottle left fallen by Connie Latham. If you take the Utica Club Brewery tour, you might be able to see her if you look down from the tour walkway, down onto the assembly floor. The thin woman with dark red hair up in a net, wearing transparent latex gloves? The one who drives the rusting red Datsun parked at the far end of the employee parking lot? The one who won’t look up and catch your eye? That’s her. You’ll watch the line of bottles pass before her disorderly and emerge in order. Maybe you’ll wonder about her: How old is she? Is she married? Does she have children?

Forty-three.

No.

Two, daughters both: Rose and Ivy.

Or maybe you’ll look down and see her, and you won’t wonder anything at all about her, about this woman, this Connie Latham, Employee of the Month three years ago in February, this woman righting tipped bottles on the conveyor belt, machinery clanging all about her.

My mother has not been to see Ivy since they moved her here from the hospital.

At home her foot taps out a rhythm to a song I can’t hear, a song inside her head. What if the brewery were to shut down? What would my mother do then? My mother needs motion, constant movement, and she also needs structure, a set rhythm to contain that movement, the way moving water needs the banks of a river in order to keep itself from overflowing and disappearing into the ground.

“Water seeks its own level,” Mr. Carmichael said in science last year. He stood at the map of the world, pointing out threads of blue winding their way through vast fields of green. “Look at them. The Tigris, the Euphrates, the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Yangtze. The world’s great rivers. And every one of them finds its way to the ocean.”

William T. dangles one of my mother’s potholders in the air by its little loop.

“How the hell do you know they didn’t trade potholders back in the days of Vesuvius, Younger?” he says. “Did they just walk around with burned hands all the time?”

Elder and Younger, William T.’s renames for Ivy and me from back in the time when my mother stayed in bed.

“Think of the killing I could’ve made if I lived back then,” he says. “I would have had a potholder stand in the marketplace. I would have been known as King of the Potholders, however you say that in ancient Greek.”

“Latin,” I say. “Pompeii was part of the Roman Empire.”

William T. shakes his head.

“And that right there, Younger,” he says, “is why you are an honor roll
habituée
and I, a mere potholder king.”

“‘Three days after the volcano erupted, all sounds of life had fallen silent, and Pompeii itself had vanished. Almost nothing was seen of Pompeii for more than 1,500 years, and only now, more than 1,900 years later, are we learning more about its last days. During the first eight hours of the eruption of Vesuvius, eight feet of dust and ashes and cinders and rocks fell on Pompeii. Roofs collapsed from the heaps of small rocks. Next, a boiling cloud of steam and mud flowed down the side of Vesuvius and covered the town of Herculaneum.’

“And what can we see today of Pompeii?” I say to Ivy. “Naught but ruins.”

Before the accident, when I was still planning to do Pompeii for my Destination Imagination project, I had planned to write a story about an ordinary Pompeian family on the last day of their lives.

I imagined a Pompeii woman standing before a clay oven where bread was baking. A baby in a rush basket slept in a corner. Sun streamed through a narrow slit window in a thick clay wall. The woman glanced at the baby: yes, still asleep. She could sit and close her eyes for a moment. She had time.

“Damn,” William T. says. The loop has become unknotted and the potholder is coming apart, unweaving itself.

“You little devil of a potholder, you,” he says. “Stay together.”

More loops unweave themselves. The potholder wants to return to its original state: long loops at rest, unstretched, untwisted.

“I command thee, potholder,” William T. says, “to stay together. Look at this thing, Younger. It’s trying to commit potholder hari-kari.”

William T. looks up from the potholder and grins. He has a beautiful grin. Without guile. Without anything other than grin in it.

Angel, the nurse who wears a different angel pin every day, pushes open the door. Her name isn’t really Angel. Her real name, according to the name tag she wears just below her angel pin, is Dorothy Van Gulden. But William T. took one look at her angel pin the first day he met her and renamed her Angel. She picks up Ivy’s chart and gazes at the ventilator screen and makes a few notes. The sound of the ventilator pushing air into my sister’s lungs is the softest sound in the world. Angel puts down the chart and strokes Ivy’s hair. That’s her ritual.

“What’s the bird of the day, William T.?” she says.

That’s another of her rituals. While William T. sits behind me, in the blue chair in the corner, he studies his bird book. William T. uses his Rosewood Convalescent Home free time wisely, improving his knowledge of the birds of North America.

“I’ll give you a hint, Angel,” William T. says. “The bird of the day is a long-winged, very fast-flying relative of the shearwater.”

“Oh dear. I’ve never even heard of a shearwater, so how could I possibly know any of its relatives?”

“Angel. How the hell can you call yourself a birder when you’ve never heard of a shearwater?”

“I don’t,” Angel says. “I’ve never called myself a birder.”

William T. shakes his head.

“Your loss, then. The bird of the day is a relative of the shearwater, and it’s found one hundred to two hundred miles off the California coast. Give me your best guess.”

He waits. That’s part of their ritual. Angel pretends to think hard.

“A chickadee?”

“A
chickadee
? Jesus.”

“Some kind of offshore water bat?”

“
Offshore water bat?
Is there such a thing?”

“Anything’s possible,” Angel says.

“Except for offshore water bats,” William T. says. “Do you give up?”

She nods. Every day, Angel gives up.

“The bird of the day,” William T. says, “is a deep-water petrel.”

She nods appreciatively, just as she does every day, and turns back to Ivy. She rubs Ivy’s feet. She smoothes Ivy’s hair off her forehead. Ivy’s face is beautiful. Perfect. You would never know to look at her how badly hurt the inside of her head is. Angel touches Ivy’s cheek, and then she turns to go. William T. salutes her as if he’s a soldier and she, his commanding officer. That’s the last part of their ritual. She smiles at him.

“At ease, William T.,” Angel says, and the door closes behind her.