Lydia (23 page)

“Five years.” I searched the brasserie walls for a calendar, but there was none. “A couple months ago.”

She stared at me with pity in those big eyes. Normally, I don’t want pity from others. Being so full of it for myself, it seemed anti-cowboy to accept it from a female. But right then, I was more than open to pity from that girl.

She said, “This Agatha must be stupid. Only a selfish slattern would send that letter to a man in the middle of a battlefield.”

Affecting a tragic demeanor, I downed more marc. I wasn’t sure what
slattern
meant, and it intrigued me to wonder where this young Indian girl would have picked it up. “Agatha was selfish, all right, as the next girl, but she wasn’t stupid. It was my own fault what she did, for patronizing the crazy whore in the sheep wagon.”

Evangeline carefully, delicately, placed her fork across the top of the little china plate her eggs had come on. She folded her hands, one across the other, on the tablecloth. She looked from her hands to me. “How do you think the prostitute felt?”

That stopped me short. I’d spent my energy working out how I felt and how Agatha might feel. I never considered Swamp Fox.

“I was one of dozens,” I said. “I doubt if she felt an iota when it came to me.”

The room was falling into a clockwise spin. I concentrated on Evangeline’s eyes at the hub of the turning wheel. Her eyes stayed upright and even, not rotating like the ceiling or the walls. If she’d blinked, I would have been sick.

She said, “All women feel. Even those who give their bodies for money.”

“Yes, well, I spoiled my future prospects over that diseased degenerate. I can’t claim to care much what became of her. She caused me no end of pain, and it’s my wish that she died and went to hell.”

Evangeline grew calm. Her fingers stopped moving. Her eyes closed. It was as if her body folded in on itself. Nothing but a tiny pulse in the throat showed she was alive. The old Flatheads and the Navajo stopped chewing to look at her, no doubt wondering what was up. They knew her and I didn’t, so they may have seen her turn placid before. I had no idea what to think, except I needed her eyes open to keep me from whirling off in the air.

Then her eyes opened, gazing into mine. She said, “I’m thinking you deserve Agatha.”

I leaped to my feet and sent my chair smashing to the floor. I wasn’t so drunken not to catch her meaning. She’d shown nothing but scorn for Agatha before, and now saying I deserved Agatha, meant Evangeline felt the same scorn for me. I’d opened my deepest secrets to this girl, and she’d responded with an insult. What did it matter to her that I thought more of me than the whore that brought my ruin? I was the put-upon, tragic figure in my story. Who was this girl to say I deserved Agatha?

“I’m buying food for you and your starving tribe. You got no call to—”

Here, I leaned forward to get close to her face, only I kept going, leaning on through the plates and silver and the table itself. There was a terrible crash.

***

One of three things happened next: I either knocked myself out or I passed out or I blacked out. I never was told which. I suppose it doesn’t matter, except the first two are bad and the last is awful. In any event, I cannot record the immediate aftermath.

***

I came to my wits on a cot under a blanket, but not between sheets, in one of the wall tents I mentioned earlier. Right off, I noticed my nakedness followed by the discovery of my clothes in a folded pile on a chair by the door. Evangeline sat at a low table before a mirror, brushing her hair and humming what I took as a show tune—“Swanee,” maybe, but she was so quiet, it was hard to tell. She’d changed out of her Indian princess costume into a pair of breeches and a white blouse. Her long dark brown hair was the most beautiful sight I’d seen since before the war.

She saw me gazing at her in the mirror, and she smiled at me, which came as a surprise. I remembered all that had preceded my dive through the table. My behavior hadn’t been what any woman would consider endearing.

She said, “You soiled your clothing. Flower and Moccasin Woman washed them for you.”

I didn’t say much, just wondering who had undressed me naked. I figured Flower and Moccasin Woman as the Flathead sisters. Didn’t take a genius to make that leap.

I sat up on the cot, pulling the blanket with me to hide my bare chest. “Evangeline,” I said. “I guess I’m in love with you.”

She stopped brushing. “I know.”

“How would you know such a thing?”

Her eyes met mine by way of the mirror. She seemed calm, serious, and interested all at the same time. “You were in my heart.”

You would cause less of an impression by whacking me with a sledgehammer than Evangeline caused with that statement. “Is having a person in your heart some sort of Crow spirit thing?” I asked.

She gave that shrug I described earlier, the sign you’d ask a question she wasn’t interested in answering. Seventy-some odd years have gone by, but I can close my eyes and see Evangeline’s shrug. I think that gesture was what made me fall in love with her.

“We should get married right away,” I said.

She stared, big-eyed, the picture of a detached woman.

I glanced at my clothes. This would have been the moment to drop on one knee, but somehow, considering my state, that didn’t seem proper.

“What I meant to say is, will you marry me, Evangeline? We can make a fine life together.”

Evangeline resumed brushing her hair. That wasn’t what I had in mind. I’d hoped she might dance into my arms, but I suppose I’d given her something to think about, and brushing was more conducive to thought than jumping in bed with me.

She said, “Why right away?”

“I haven’t had much luck with long engagements.”

“What does that matter now?”

“I’ve come to believe when it’s time to move, people should move, and it’s time for you and me to move.”

She placed the brush on the table, took one last appraisal of herself in the mirror, then swiveled around to face me head on. “I have two conditions.”

I could scarcely believe her words. My luck had gone from empty to overflowing in a single gasp. “Does that mean you’re saying
Yes
?”

“Only if you meet my conditions.”

“I’ll meet them. Whatever they are, you can count on Oly Pedersen. You are the sun in my sky.”

She smiled again. Those smiles of Evangeline’s were rare, but I already looked forward to them. “First,” she said, “you must stop drinking alcohol. I will not be the wife of a drunken fool.”

“Done. I was fixing to stop that anyway. With or without you, my time as a sot is over.”

“Second,” she said. “I want to go home. I will be your bride if you promise to take me to Wyoming.”

That one made me drop my blanket. I’d planned to live the rest of my days and die in Paris, France. At the very least, Europe. The American West had been one long humiliation, and I’d sworn to God Himself never to return. The notion of going back to that land and way of life brought on nausea, not to mention the spinning whirlies.

Evangeline waited while I worked out the various elements of the proposition. She was patient, I had to give her that. Agatha would have sat still for all of three seconds, then cut me dead for my lack of resolve. Evangeline seemed to understand how I had to weigh doing what I wanted most against doing what I wanted least.

Through all the confusion of thoughts flying this way and that, I did find one truth: I had to stop comparing Evangeline to Agatha.

“Will you stay with me, once I take you there?” I asked.

“I will be your wife until you no longer want me or I am dead,” Evangeline said. She did that thing with her hands again, I’d seen earlier in the brasserie, where she retreated into herself and found a quiet place where no one could touch her. Right then, I saw I could marry this girl, and I could love her while she loved me; I could spend my remaining years with her—Evangeline was my fate—but I could never know her.

I said, “Okay, then. Let’s go home.”

Shannon paced. She drank green tea, then she drank chocolate schnapps, because that was all she could find under Lydia’s sink. She washed her hair, and after that, she turned off the bathroom light and bathed in the dark, which didn’t calm her anxiety one bit.

She saw the men from her past, in the dark. Ten men in ten years—not so out of line for a single woman on the loose, but Shannon had been deeply involved with each of them. Engaged to four. Cohabitating with seven. The beginnings had been self-consuming passion, and the endings horrific. Six months after love at practically first sight, she would realize she didn’t feel the way people are supposed to feel, and she’d break for the door. I’d rather her be that way than to try and make it work for years after hope was lost like so many couples.

Yet, in spite of the importance and drama, in the black of Lydia’s bathroom, Shannon could not lift one man, in her memory, over the pack. She could recall traits and physical quirks—the beautiful one, the basketball freak, the poet, the rich, the poor, the obsessed with Duran Duran—but emotionally, the men in her past were interchangeable.

Perhaps, she would have been more at ease that night if Lydia hadn’t come home from prison and thrown out her TV. Or if she’d had something better to drink than chocolate schnapps. The truth is Shannon was not adept at being alone. Comfortable solitude is a skill that must be learned. It doesn’t come easily for some people.

My theory, as Shannon’s father, is that this inability to sit still by herself at night was the reason for the boyfriend parade. Even though she would never say it out loud, least of all to me, Shannon was one of those Southern girls who think a compromise of a mate is better than no mate. You get the best you can at the time, because being alone is proof of failure.

Or maybe I’m way the hell and back off base. How many men know what their daughters think of the other men in their lives?

Whatever the reason, Friday night before Memorial Day, the day Lydia ripped into Shannon and left town, Shannon found herself with no TV and no one to talk to, and she didn’t like it.

She walked outside barefoot, wearing a cotton nightgown, and stared at the sky. The moon was past full, on its way to waning. She saw about three times more stars than she’d seen when she went outside at night in North Carolina. She thought she heard a coyote howling at the moon, but then she decided it was the neighbors arguing over money.

Roger’s hulk of a truck was parked in the yard, where he’d left it after he came into town to pick up Lydia. He’d given Shannon the keys.

“She’s hard to shift gears on, and the brakes are freaky, but you’re welcome to give her a try,”
Roger said. “
Can’t have you stuck with no wheels.”

Which was nice of him to say, and she might have given it a try, if there were anywhere to go in the middle of the night in GroVont, Wyoming. The stores were closed, and she didn’t know anyone well enough to drop in after midnight. She could run into Jackson, to the Cowboy Bar, only that felt like taking advantage of Roger’s goodwill. Besides, she’d have to hurry to make last call, and the men you meet walking sober into last call weren’t the sort who would help Shannon feel better.

What she felt most like doing right then was howling at the moon. She probably should have, because howling helps, but she didn’t. Instead she walked back into the kitchen and rummaged through the drawers for a sheet of legal pad paper and a giveaway pen from Haven House. She drew a line down the middle of the page and, at the top of the page, wrote
Reasons Life Is Good
to the left of the line and
Reasons Life Stinks
, to the right.

Then she sat on a straight-back chair at the kitchen table, clicking the pen in and out and staring at the page for three hours. Shannon was stuck in place, frozen by her options. A couple of times she almost wrote on one side of the page or the other, but in the end, she couldn’t motivate herself to move.

By now, it was four in the morning, and she had to whiz. I could have told her, had I but been there to help: whenever life grinds you to a halt, wait awhile, and you’ll have to use the bathroom, and that will get you moving again. That’s how I deal with depression.

So Shannon made a wad out of the paper and threw it toward the trash can. She walked down the hallway past Lydia’s bedroom and into the bathroom, where she lifted her nightgown, dropped her panties, sat on the toilet, and wept.

***

I’ve seen Shannon’s mother cry on the toilet too, and a number of pregnant girls. Women must feel safe with crying on the can, as if they’re multitasking fluid disposal. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a man sob while sitting on a commode, but then, after careful thought, I’m not certain I’ve ever seen a man other than me sitting on a commode.

After she’d cried herself out, Shannon sat slumped forward, elbows propped on thighs, staring at her crumpled panties on the floor, waiting for morning. She’d left the bathroom door ajar, so there was enough light diffusing in from the hallway that she could make out eyeball whorls in the pine slats. By not quite focusing, she recognized owl eyes—the right one slightly lazy—in the wood. Or fox eyes. Some type of animal eyes. Another slat had a wing-of-moth effect.

Coming to a halt while sitting on the can more or less negates my prescription for dealing with depression by killing time till you have to go. You’re already there. Where before, when she was stuck in the kitchen, her brain had been racing this way and that, as if it was avoiding a fire, now her head felt emptied. She felt emptied. Life had not only come down to no reason to get out of bed, now there was no reason to get off the pot.

The toilet freeze didn’t last as long as the kitchen table freeze had lasted. The sun came up. Shannon noticed that, without her being aware of the change, the bathroom had taken on a warm glow. Hair on Lydia’s brush was visible, over by the sink. And the drawing Esther had made of a stegosaurus eating nachos on the wall.

Shannon thought of her half sister Esther and said aloud, “This will not do.”

***

The truck gears were manageable, barely, if your father taught you the lost art of double-clutching. The brakes weren’t. Shannon left town in a Don’t-care-if-I-live-or-die mood, but the first careen around a blind corner over a drop-off down a cliff into the river unmasked her true feelings about dying today. She didn’t want to.

So Shannon wrestled the stick into first and proceeded to creep up the mountain road. Spring run-off was pretty much at its peak. The river was a churning brown, waving the willows like the wind was blowing when it wasn’t. The aspen were leafed out on the edge of GroVont, but still budding in the canyon. She passed three dead porcupines on the shoulder, a sure sign of coming summer.

Shannon eased past her mother Maurey’s TM Ranch, because she knew if she stopped, they would put her to work, what with it being dawn and all. Instead she drove clear up to Madonnaville, where she expected to wake me up. Shannon wasn’t looking for work; she needed comfort and direction. My specialties.

***

Instead of asleep, where I should have been, Shannon found me standing on the Madonnaville van’s front bumper, my head deep under the hood, trying to force a metric socket onto a non-metric nut.

“Why aren’t you in bed at this time of morning?” Shannon asked as she approached. “I was counting on bringing you breakfast on a tray.”

“God, that sounds wonderful. Give me ten minutes to get inside and back between the sheets.”

“Too late.” Shannon stepped up beside me on the bumper. “Wouldn’t count if I did it now.”

The wrench slipped, barking my knuckles, which is about what you’d expect with me and tools. “I can’t believe Roger abandoned us just when we needed him most.”

“There’s never a time you don’t need Roger most.” Shannon peered under the hood. The van was a big, old Suburban. The engine looked like the city of Oz, seen from afar. “What is that thing there?”

“Air cleaner, and don’t touch it. You look too nice to get greasy.” Shannon did look nice too. Shannon always looks nice. Her hair was clean. She wore this blouse with a new moon curved neckline and a hint of puff in the sleeves. I couldn’t see her lower half, but the part I could see was an inspiration.

She said, “You have to take that thing off to work on the other thing.”

“The carburetor.”

“Yeah.”

I decided to give it a five-minute break. I backed out from under the hood, stepped to the ground, and wiped my hands on a dish towel. Shannon followed. Sure enough, her lower half was as nice as the top—old Wranglers and red cowboy boots. As a fashion rule, Shannon wore sandals at this time of year, so that meant she’d put some thought into her look before coming up the river.

“You didn’t drive Roger’s death trap out here, did you?”

The answer was obvious, what with Roger’s truck parked in the Home turnaround between the van and a Lincoln Town Car with rental plates. Instead she said, “You haven’t answered my question.”

I walked around to the driver’s side, popped the door open, and reached in for my Minit Stop coffee mug. “I need to deliver a baby. The new parents are chomping at the bit down at the Best Western in Jackson, and I’m afraid if I don’t show up on time, they’ll come charging out here. I could take Gilia’s Subaru, only I hate leaving her and Baby Esther with no way out.”

“Champing at the bit.”

“Are you sure?”

“Not chomping.”

I considered challenging her, because
champing
made no sense, but it wouldn’t matter if I was right or wrong. I’ve yet to win an argument with a female. “The birth mom’s leaving this morning. Normally, she’d be long gone by now, but there were complications from a torn labia.”

“That hurts to think about.”

“And her parents were in Trinidad and Tobago till yesterday. Eden Rae delivered early, and they weren’t of a mind to rush back and resume parenting. She’s a bit of a handful.”

“Hence the pregnancy.”

“Hence.” I nodded toward the Town Car. “Her father flew in this morning, real early.”

Shannon took the cup from my hand. It was the kind with a top with two holes, one for drinking and one for air. She rotated the cup around till the other hole, the one I hadn’t been using, faced her, and then she drank my coffee. She’s like that.

She said, “I thought birth moms and adoptive moms met these days. The buddy method.”

“Not this birth mom. Eden Rae’s a bit frank for comfort.”

“
Frank
is an odd word.”

“There’s no telling what’s going to come out of her mouth.”

Shannon’s attention drifted away in other directions. She was facing the sun, with her chin slightly upturned to catch the morning rays. She looked so much like Maurey had at thirteen, when I loved and lost her, that my eyes flushed and I couldn’t speak. For something to do, I tried taking advantage of her distraction to gently retrieve my coffee.

Shannon jerked the mug away. She said, “I am in crisis.”

I’d known as much. That’s why I stopped going on about Eden Rae, to let Shannon have the silence it takes to broach a subject that matters, as opposed to the trifles we talk about most of the time. I may be oblivious, but I’m also her father. I knew she hadn’t put on boots and risked crashing into the river to find me for a chitchat.

“What crisis is that?” I asked.

She turned her face to me, searching for any hint of patronization. “I knew something was wrong before,” she said. “Then yesterday Lydia told me life is short and I’m wasting mine. Pretty soon I’ll be old and then I’ll be dead and they can write a big
So What?
on my tombstone.”

Nobody can tolerate thinking of their child as dead, even from old age. I offered up denial. “Lydia tells me the same thing all the time. Weekly. You can’t let my mother’s criticism control your mood. You’ll go nuts.”

“But this time Lydia is right.”

“That’s not good.”

“It’s awful.”

Shannon went back to seemingly studying clouds over east, toward Bacon Ridge. Her eyes had the shine of heightened emotion that can make a woman so beautiful yet so frightening. “I want my existence to mean something,” she said.

“Your life means something if someone loves you and you love someone. We’ve got each other covered on the
meaning
issue.”

“I need more than that.” She blinked several times in succession. “I want passion. I want to wake up caring what happens today. Lydia thinks I should get a hobby. Or take a lover.”

“I’d prefer the hobby option. You don’t want the thing that matters enough for you to go on to be something you can lose.”

“I’ve had lovers. They don’t matter.”

“Have you had a serious hobby?”

Her face flashed anger. “Are you kidding? I’d rather be miserable than think the world revolves around whatever I knit. Or collect. Or whatever.”

“In a depressed pinch, I fall back on family.”

Shannon hit the coffee. It was Kenya AA. Good coffee if you need to absorb complex concepts.

“Family isn’t enough,” she said. “You and Mom matter to me, but I don’t see basing my future actions on making you guys proud. I need more.”

I almost said,
You’ll find the answer
, as an autoresponse, but luckily I caught myself. In these blessed talks where your child lets down the defenses and tells you how she feels, it’s crucial to avoid easy lies. Only a moron parent says,
Everything is going to be okay. You’ll figure it out, honey. Buck up and smile
. Things don’t always turn out okay, you can’t always figure it out, and sometimes smiling makes you come off as a clown. Kids know that. From preschool graduation on, a kid knows,
Everything will turn out for the best
is a crock.

Instead I said, “Maybe you could write a book. That helps me. It doesn’t take cooperation from anyone outside yourself, and if you’re terrible at it, you won’t know for years. The trouble with knitting is if you stink, you find out right away.”

Shannon laughed, which is about the most you can hope for when giving advice to your child.