Darnay Road (40 page)

“Leave him,” she said.

She was strong. She was certain.

Leave him.

Their father didn’t move and he didn’t
try.

And Easy stepped back. He held onto Cap
who struggled and cried. But Easy was strong and he wouldn’t let Cap go. And
the train came through…their lives.

I
remember Easy then. His hands, almost too big for his sinewy arms, everything
figuring how to grow into everything, and this light in his serious eyes. I
remember the bruises and how he could speak to me, bark at me almost, and I
knew he didn’t mean it, I knew he was good.

“He didn’t make it happen. He let it
happen,” Cap said. “But he told me there’s no difference.”

I understand why he had to go—had to
fight for a better father. I understand the pull of the confessional, the way
he maneuvered us through. He tried to find a way to be worthy. He’d been the
forgiver but not the forgiven. He would not forgive himself.

So I keep loving him. I just keep loving
him. And love covers a multitude of sins.

Vietnam is a war whose success is
measured in body counts. Not land. They count the dead. They say more Cains die
than Abels. I do not know as the stars grow dim on this very fine trip of ours.

I can’t base hope on death.

I can’t.

I sleep. Some. Knock, knock on our
window. It’s morning. It’s the owner of the station. Sorry. We are moving on.
But we need gas and what you got there? Potato chips? Best breakfast I ever
had. Can we use the restroom? Thanks for the key. We pee.

The air, it’s hotter here. I feel its
bake and this is how it shines in a gas station parking lot side of the road.
Oh the light is different here. I know.

“No it’s not,” Cap says.

But it is.

“How long did we sleep?” Cap says.

“As long as a crocodile,” Abigail says
and we laugh.

She holds a cupcake toward me and I take
it and wash it down with orange soda.

We pile in and take off and I look out
the window and this Darnay is threading through hills. Mountains, Cap calls
them.

Mountains. There is a blue, almost
silver. Oh the light is definitely different here.

Darnay Road 66

I ride with my head out the window, the
hot, hot wind in my face, some of my long,
long hair
escaping my braids, the thin band I wear like a squaw holding the errant
strands back. I have waited to breathe here.

The light is not only silver, but gold.
It’s farmland here.

“This is our pasture,” Cap says.

I’m not used to them having anything,
not really, even though I’ve known about this place and how it took Easy from
me most of the days before he went overseas.

But this valley is what they left when
they showed up around Darnay like they’d ridden there on those bikes, those
stripped down frames with the small tires.

Easy and Cap’s grandfather died right
before they shipped Easy to Nam. Easy went home at the behest of a legal letter
and he didn’t tell Cap until after.

When Cap found out he was mad and so was
I but neither of us could hold a grudge on Easy.

“I’m tired of you deciding everything
for me,” Cap said to Easy when he finally showed up at big white with two
stinking days of leave left.

“He left us the farm,” Easy said. That’s
all.

Farming is what Cap wanted to do.

But the grampa didn’t leave it out of
love, there was no love, but revenge on two no-good sons that Easy chased off
the land like a cowboy routing rustlers.

The
sheriff wouldn’t help him evict two good-old-boys but there was a younger
deputy whose brother was in Nam. He helped Easy get the uncles to move off the
property and they did it at night and John Wayne style. That’s all Easy would
say.

But when Easy deployed they came back
like two sneaky low-lives and burned the old farm house to the ground.

“If you survived a spinal injury and
shrapnel in your leg to come home and be shot by your two…hillbilly uncles…,” I
said two days ago over the phone.

He laughed. He laughed at that.

There is a lightness in his laugh. In
his voice. Almost getting killed has saved him, I think. I hope, now that he’s
lived.

He bought a camper and parked it near
the rubble and he started to clear the mess.

“Why ain’t you here?” he said.

“I have to graduate,” I said. That was
the deal I made when I moved myself to public. Granma said I must graduate and
I said if she’d let me move, I would. At the end of freshman year my religion
teacher at Bloody Heart said how troubled I was and she sent me to guidance.
Well I was troubled that people could be so cruel and so petty. I was troubled
that they could file into Mass with such solemn attitudes and harass someone in
their spare time. I outlived that, but when it died down I found I didn’t want
to be there anymore. I outgrew Bloody Heart. I grew away.

“But your prom…,” Sister said in the
last counseling session I had to endure, and this in response to my outpouring
about losing faith not only in the leaders of my country, but in God Himself
for allowing so much pain and suffering.

But your prom…as if some gaudy taffeta
dress and banana curls in my hair could set it all right.

The gap between myself and my religious
instructors was unbreachable.

Stanley was angry—and powerless. It was
the last thing he did for me, making that sacrifice to pay the Sacred Heart
tuition. He didn’t have the nerve to come back to Darnay Road and try, just try
to force me to stay there.

So I got out and followed Cap over to
George Washington. It was easier there. So easy. Not nearly the workload I was
used to, barely any homework. No religious instruction. I flew through classes,
got involved in some anti-war protests, especially after Kent State, and worked
on the school-paper with less censorship, but not more room for important
articles that might make someone think about more than the next game.

But I had Cap to sound off to. He wasn’t
afraid to read or to think. He believed in non-violence, marijuana, communal
living, which is what we had since he’d moved in with me and Granma after Easy
left that first time, then he moved into Aunt May’s after Ricky died. Moved
into Aunt May’s and pretty much into Abigail May’s room though he headquartered
in the small bedroom-slash-sewing room next to Ricky’s old digs for all intents
and purposes.

After Ricky died the rules didn’t
matter. Not the useless ones.

Kindness
prevailed. Helping each other won out. We weren’t worried about a million petty
things. We ate together every night. At Granma’s. Cap taught May and Granma
about rock and roll music. He gushed over their food. He moved their furniture
and helped with anything, anytime. He became the man of two houses.

He made bread.

At the end of my senior year as a
publicker, I went to Bloody Heart’s prom with Cap and Abigail. We dressed like
hippies and we danced like crazies and none of it mattered.

I pull back into the car and we take a
gravel road that winds back to a cove and a burned out shell of a modest house.

Cap whistles and we stop there and I see
the camper sitting to the side under the big trees and I take off running, and
knock and pull the door and the bed there is made neatly and Wonder bread and
peanut butter sit on the table. And in the window, tied to the pull on the
shade by its pink hair, that troll doll I gave him a million years ago and
around its neck, my bracelet.

He’s not here.

I turn to Cap and he and Abigail are
already getting back in the car and I say, “Wait for me,” and I lift my long
skirt and run and get in and Cap drives back to the highway.

“He’ll be along here,” Cap says as we
drive on the road, the last panting tongue of Darnay rolling me there, right to
him.

We don’t go far, there’s a pasture and
deeper in, I see him, small so far and he’s riding on a tractor dragging a claw
through the green shoots. It’s him, his bare shoulders, his back. It’s Easy.

Cap pulls off the side of the road and
honks and I think Abigail is screaming and laughing, but it’s me, it’s all me.

“Go get him Georgia,” Abigail says.

I get the door open and I don’t even
close it. I take a few steps and reach the long rows and he’s seen me.

I have my arms out to balance myself and
my skirt rubs against the green leaves of the plants on either side and he’s
jumping off the machine.

He’s brown, well from Hawaii and a straw
hat and jeans. He gets something off the tractor, a shirt he’s pulling on, and
he pulls off the hat and puts it on the seat and he runs his hands over his
hair a few times and heads for me.

I’m leaping over the rows to get closer
to him, then we’re nearly in the same aisle and I’m nearly running and so is
he.

His smile. His arms wide. The sounds of
coming together, my feet lifted off the ground, his arms so strong around me,
him so strong, not weak, not in any way ruined.

His hand on the back of my head guiding
me to his lips. His dry kiss. His wet kiss. His salty skin. His breath and
voice and words. My name.

His face under my hands. His eyes. His
eyes. His forehead against mine. His heart under my hand.

“Georgia.”

They call from behind us and he looks
up, big grin and a wave, but his hand is quickly back on me. He was wounded and
put on a ship, then flown to Hawaii. I couldn’t see him, touch him.

He
was a hero, just like I knew, in the Cambodian invasion, a deserted camp seven
miles over the border and some file boxes booby-trapped. He threw himself on a
buddy when someone disturbed those boxes in the hopes they held important
files.

Easy
took shrapnel. Two others died. The soldier he protected was fine.

I
know that’s why he put on the shirt. The force was to his back. Shrapnel near
his spine. He was lucky, so lucky, and God does hear prayer.

“Georgia,”
he says. “Ballerina.”

And
I lift my face and kiss him. Easy.

Epilogue:
1973

The
hum of the car, the heat from the summer day and my husband. I sit next to him,
so close like he requires…we require and the wind moves our hair and my belly
pulls this way and that as the baby moves. My eyes are closed, and Easy’s hand
moves over my stomach. How many times my heart has knocked against his, and now
this new one beating in me.

He’s
laughing a little. This is the moving-est baby to ever knit itself together
inside of its mother. I am eight months along and it was hard to leave my
mid-wife but we plan to be back on the farm in time for the birth. Like I could
miss it.

In
the winter of seventy-one Granma and May came to Tennessee on a bus to see me
and Easy married off. My granma said, “Lord have mercy, Easy,” when she saw the
camper we were living in. That was a sore point, us living together before
marriage. They came out quick to set things right. They had a long talk with
Easy and I argued that we were getting married so what did it matter. Well I
thought Granma was going to have a heart attack. But once we went to the
church, even though it wasn’t Catholic, or Lutheran, but just a plain old
church with a preacher who was married and had children like a regular person,
well it was fine then. Granma softened right up and told Easy she had always
loved him like a son and just wanted the best for her two children. Then we
took her to the motel so she could lie down. I worried she’d think her work here
was done. I knew it wasn’t. “I still need you,” I told her, not caring if I had
to keep her on earth with my selfishness. Not caring what I had to use.

“Oh
for goodness sakes you always did give me such a headache,” she said, and she
smiled and I knew she wouldn’t go.

Once
they were rested, Easy showed them where our new house would be. He had it
staked off just for them so they could envision it. They were worried, Granma
was, as the silver bullet, what we called our camper, was all she could really
see. She said she’d feel better when there were four actual walls around us and
a roof over our heads.

But
May said she could see it. She said she knew Easy could do it.

And
a year and a half later we have those walls and that roof. We are living in our
new home built by Easy and before I got like this, by me working right beside
him, and a little bit by Cap even though he and Abigail live together in
Chicago as Abigail prefers the city where she auditions to do her twirl.

We
have also been helped by a man Easy does carpentry with, and by various
neighbors. Occasionally one of Easy’s army buddies will show and he’ll help for
a couple of weeks then take off for a while.
 

It’s
an underground house, fairly large, with three sides tucked into a bank of
earth, only the front is open for viewing. It’s easy to heat from the woodstove
in winter and stays cool in summer. It’s not much more than an open shell at
present, but the plumbing is in, the lighting, so we make due and we’re so
happy.

But
I have to say, I’m a little hungry to see big white and big gray.

Once
we get there, and I think I’ve hit about every disgusting bathroom between here
and home, but once we see that first sign for Darnay Road, the tears well up
and spill from me. Oh I know there are some dark things to remember. I know.
But that’s home, right? It’s not all sunshine. If I keep it up I’ll have to
write this down. I’m already freelancing for the Tennessee Regular.

We
roll past Miss Little’s and I am looking out Easy’s window and holding his arm
so tightly. I see big gray and I look across and there is my big white. Granma is
standing on the porch, and May is just rising from one of the big soft chairs.

The
light here is old time, the light from my whole life. It’s different here,
threaded through the big trees and shaped by the tall houses. And the air, cut
through with close life, and the tracks behind and the secrets brewing on
Scutter. All that mixes with the wind from the river. This recipe that anchors
me somehow.

The
sounds, I did not know there was so much noise until Tennessee and the country
and how still it is there, how I can hear nature shuffle. But here, it’s no big
city but there are children playing on the street and a car going by…and the
two-fifteen will breeze on through.

Aunt
May holds Little Bit. Oh, that porch is not as big as I remember, is it? And
big white, it’s tall, but not like a skyscraper. I’ve seen those now when we
visited Abigail and Cap. There are bigger things.

And
my granma. All the love in me. I am laughing and crying at once. Granma and May
have their arms around me and I hold my dog, and Granma touches my stomach and
we laugh. I am soon in a chair and Easy has his army bag and both of our things
are in there. “Get the honey,” I remind him. I’m keeping bees and I’ve brought
them some comb and two jars of honey each.

Easy
is tall and strong and they are chattering at him and yes he’d take some tea
and well he’s been building a house and yes he’s had plenty of work between
carpentering and our farm.

While
they go on about the honey and Easy brags on me, my hand reaches for Granma’s
magazines stacked on the little metal table next to her chair. They are
well-read as ever. I look over at big gray and just then a group of boys whizz
past and one or two have their gloves hanging from their handlebars and one a
bat tucked under his arm. And I am taken back, back.

I
feel what it was like and I think of them then, all of them, their skinny legs
pumping and beat up tennis shoes strong on the pedals, or dragging on the
ground. I think of them--the ones who have come home—Easy—and the ones who have
gone home—Riley. Oh it wasn’t long ago. It’s still here, in the air, in this
sun.

Easy
says something about Granma’s grass needing cut and they laugh and he pulls a
chair close to me and takes my hand while he talks to them. He is always aware
of me and I of him. It is like that. And my little dog licks my face and
trembles against my arm, especially when the baby kicks and we laugh.

“Is
it good to be home?” Granma says and I smile and nod. I see that year and a
half on her like someone took an eraser and faded her out just a little more.
But my eyes trace her face and it’s enough cause I see love.

“I
love you,” I say, and it’s embarrassing to blurt that, but it’s the truth. I
love them. This.

This
Darnay Road where I bloomed like a flower. Where I came awake and aware. Where
I was loved and I fell in love. This is my endpoint, no matter where I go, how
far, this is where I’ll pull from, these two women who’ve shown me the way, big
white and big gray.

Easy
leans over and kisses my cheek. “Would you like a cherry Bomb-Pop?”

I
realize then, the Mr. Softie truck is right on cue.