Miller's Valley (12 page)

M
r. Bally came into the diner at least once a week. He was spending a lot of time in the valley. One Saturday he waited until I'd changed out of my uniform and then asked me if I wanted to join him at his table. A busman's holiday, he called it, which I'd never heard before but looked up after. “Can I offer you a soda pop?” he said, when I slid into the booth, looking wary.

“A soda pop?”

“Why is that funny?”

“I'm sorry, but the only person I know who calls Coke soda pop is my aunt Ruth, and that's because she hasn't left the house in thirteen years.”

“She hasn't left the house?”

“It's a long story. I don't really need anything, thank you. I've got to get home.”

“To work on your science project, correct? I'm still not entirely clear on the thrust of your science project.”

“Me neither.”

“But I can tell you're a smart girl or you wouldn't be doing all this research. So you're smart enough to have a handle on what's going on here. Let me just ask you one question: what was the biggest mistake they made in the original Roosevelt Dam project?”

I knew the answer, but I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction. It got so quiet at our table that you could hear the clink of knives and forks all around us. “Adam and Eve on a raft,” Dee called to the grill cook, one of her customers having eggs for early supper.

Finally Mr. Bally said, “You must know there are two ways this can go. There's the easy way, and there's the hard way.”

“The easy way.”

“The homeowners are offered a fair market price for their properties as well as compensated for the cost of relocation.”

“The hard way.”

Mr. Bally leaned back and didn't say anything. He made his fingers into a little steeple. He had a tie clip with the state seal on it, and an old Timex watch, and a wedding band. He looked like he felt sorry for me, which made me angry. Plus I felt like he was using me somehow to get what he wanted. That made me angrier.

“You know what I've noticed about you, Mr. Bally? You have two different voices. You have the voice you're using with me here, and then you have the voice you use when you come out to the valley.” It was true: when he was talking to the men at the diner, or arguing with Donald's grandfather, or talking to Mr. Langer, Mr. Bally used a kind of folksy voice and vocabulary. It seemed practiced, and natural, and I wondered whether it was because that was the voice he'd grown up with and this, here, all business, was the voice he'd grown into.

“So do you, young lady. You just haven't noticed it yet.” He stirred sugar into his coffee. “Someone from the valley who understood the process and the science behind it could be extremely helpful to me and to the state water board in terms of bringing others around to a reasonable point of view. Do you have any thoughts about your plans after graduation?”

“They're holding a spot here for me at the diner,” I said.

“Very funny.”

“Are you offering me a job, Mr. Bally?”

“Would you like one? I know you're planning on college, but we could give you a job for the summer. It would be a lot more interesting than waiting tables. And state employees get a break on tuition at the university.”

“A job flooding my family's farm?”

“That's going to happen one way or another, Miss Miller,” Mr. Bally said. “The easy way or the hard way. Why don't you discuss my offer with your mother?” He put a ten-dollar bill on the table, then put his coffee cup on top of it. “You still didn't answer my question,” he said. “What was the biggest mistake they made in the original dam project? I know you know the answer.”

I sat there saying nothing, watched him pick a mint out of the bowl at the register and walk out the double glass doors. “Too smart for your own good,” Ruth said about me sometimes when she was irritated, and I felt that way then.

There was something I wanted to say to Winston Bally, and the simple fact was I hadn't had the guts. One afternoon near the end of summer I had spent three hours on the banks of the river, waving off the gnats with a hand in front of my face, thinking about what I'd do if I were the engineer, the manager, the person calling the shots on Miller's Valley. The dam was big, bigger than it needed to be. The reservoir was big, too, but not as big as it could be or maybe ought to be. The air was as thick and still as tapioca, and I felt like I might as well be the only person in the world, it was so deserted and silent except for the sound of rushing water and the occasional bullfrog thump. Until I followed Miller's Creek pretty far in and broke through a thick line of trees, there was no sign of anything human or even alive, and then not much of one until I'd hiked so far that I could almost see our place down below. Which was the point, I guess, as far as the government people were concerned, so few people who needed to be moved to do what needed to be done.

I'd gotten to a spot on the creek where I used to build dams myself, as a kid, and I'd stood and stared at it for a long time. As wide as that spot was now, as deep as the water lay, as fast as it ran, there was no way that any kid could build a dam there on their own the way I had when I was younger. Slowly I'd walked back the length of Miller's Creek from that point to the river. It had always been bigger than a creek, but now it was much much bigger. Not from groundwater coming up, but from river water coming in. It was like a knock on the head, realizing that instead of reading books in some state office building I should have been here, that what Winston Bally knew that I didn't wasn't in maps or charts but in the way my feet were sinking deep into ground that used to be dry and now was wet.

Sometimes I wonder whether it would have made any difference if I'd said anything, if I'd leaned across the diner table to Winston Bally and said, “You all rigged it. Years and years ago, maybe before I was even born, you decided you wanted more water and less land. You blocked off the flow of the river out of the dam locks. You block off a little more each year. What we thought was nature letting more and more water take over the valley wasn't nature at all. You all made it happen. It was slick and it was smart, deciding that one way to convince people to leave was to drown them little by little, by inches instead of all at once.”

Maybe I would have added, “You killed Donald's grandmother, too.”

I wonder what he would have said. He would have known that there was nothing in all that microfilm, in any of the documents, that said, If we make the valley wet and then wetter, sooner or later all those dumb farmers will give up and move out. Besides, it was a different time then, when lots of people still believed the government always did the right thing, had our best interests at heart, and so he might have pretended to be shocked and amazed at my suggestion.

But maybe not. We'd developed a strange relationship, me and Mr. Bally. I think he liked the idea of talking things over with someone who'd been born and grown up in Miller's Valley, who loved the place and would mourn it forever but who also knew that its time was past. He got a strange look in his eyes sometimes when he was talking to me, like he got a kick out of what I knew, and how I knew I couldn't do anything about what was coming.

So maybe I would have spit out all those things that I had figured out while slapping the gnats away, and when I was done, my voice choked, my face all balled up in a battle against the tears, he would have leaned toward me and said, again, “I always knew you were the smart one.”

Out in the diner parking lot Mr. Bally pulled down the car visor to shade his eyes. I sat in the booth watching him and said, so low no one could hear me, “The biggest mistake they made in the original dam project is that they didn't flood a large enough area.”

I stood up and handed Dee the ten. “Your table,” I said.

“Hot dog,” she said, shoving the bill into her pocket.

E
ddie came for a visit. My mother took the day off to make dinner: lamb stew, green beans, a cake. He was in the area on business, he said, which is why Debbie wasn't with him. He was wearing a tweed sport jacket and a plaid shirt and looked like someone from a Van Heusen commercial. Eddie was good-looking in a kind of average way, and his personality was not so different. He never got really angry, and he rarely got really excited. Or maybe he did. I didn't really know him very well. By the time I was eight years old he was already gone at college. The difference between fifty and sixty is nothing; the difference between eight and eighteen is more or less a lifetime.

“Mom says you're doing great at the high school,” he said as he dug into his stew. “What are you thinking about after?”

“She's going to college,” my mother said from the stove. “I told you that.” My mother talked to Eddie on the phone every Sunday evening after the rates went down. Every time she got off the phone she said two things: I'm certainly proud of my son, and I don't understand why they haven't started a family.

“I know that. I just meant in terms of a course of study. You can't go wrong with a teaching degree, Mimi. Debbie had more job offers than she knew what to do with. She's working in her father's office because he couldn't get anyone reliable to answer the phones, but she'll go back to teaching school someday.”

“I'm not sure,” I said. I was sure I wasn't going to get an education degree or teach school, but I didn't want to start a fight. Good morning, Miss Miller. I'm sorry I'm late, Miss Miller. I didn't do the homework, Miss Miller. There was just no way. I'd told Steven about Mr. Bally's offer of work, but he just waved it away like a fly at a picnic. “A government job? You're better than that.” Of course I hadn't said anything to my parents. My mother might have thought it was a good idea. My father might have beaten the man until his fists bled, and then where would we be? Four landowners had made deals with the state and four others had put their places on the market to see if someone who'd never heard of the water and the dam would be foolish enough to buy them. They kept lowering their prices but no one bit. In history class our teacher had talked about the domino theory because of Vietnam, which he stopped talking about after just one class, maybe because someone told him about Tommy or because he was afraid of getting in trouble with the principal, who had the tallest flagpole in town on his front lawn. But you could see the domino theory at work in the valley as the sales and the sale signs spread. And I was pretty sure I had seen the domino theory in the woods between our place and the river. A little more water in the reservoir made a little more in Miller's Creek made a little more in the valley. Until soon it was a lot more.

“You could run this place, the way you work around here,” said my father, tapping his fork on the edge of my plate. “I should have known neither of your brothers were going to come around to farming.”

“Can I get a glass of milk, Mom?” Eddie said.

“There's nothing wrong with nursing,” said my mother.

“No question,” said Eddie. “There'll always be jobs for nurses.”

“Everybody wants to eat, but nobody wants to farm,” said my father. “Where the heck do they think beef comes from?”

“Did you see Aunt Ruth?” I asked Eddie.

“If she wants to see him she knows where he is,” my mother said. “She can come down here and sit at the table like the rest of us.”

Eddie looked sideways at me. No wonder he never showed up. He'd arrived in a Toyota and had to spend fifteen minutes standing outside discussing whether it had decent pickup and whether my father had fought the Japs so that they could take over the automobile business from the Americans. Eddie said it was a company car, but my father had been in a touchy mood ever since. I think deep down inside he didn't know exactly how to feel about Eddie. He was proud of how well he'd done, but the way in which he'd done well made my father feel like Eddie was above the life he'd been raised in. I wondered if he'd feel the same about me if I went to college, especially if I didn't become a teacher or a nurse. Sometimes LaRhonda said she was going to get a business degree, but I didn't think she really knew what that meant. Maybe LaRhonda should go to work for Mr. Bally; she'd foreclose on a farm without thinking twice. Her father thought a girl going to college was a waste of time. “Look at this,” Mr. Venti would say, sweeping his arm out over the restaurant the way Ed Sullivan did when he introduced an act. “You'll never want for anything. You'll never even have to cook for your family.”

My mother had cleared the dinner plates—“don't get up”—and was dishing out cake when the back door slammed and Tommy came in. The look on his face, and my mother's face, made me realize right away that he hadn't known anything about dinner and Eddie.

“Well, hell,” he said, slow and low and with an undertone.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” said Eddie, and he stood up and the two of them shook hands, as though they were strangers meeting in an insurance office or something. My mother used to say sometimes that when they were little they were close, but it was hard to believe. Looking at them you couldn't even imagine they were related. One looked like a cop and the other like a criminal.

“What brings you to this neck of the woods?” Tommy said, pulling up a chair while my mother made him a plate.

“Work, believe it or not. We're doing the engineering on a new development off 502.”

“Off 502? None of the construction guys have said anything about that.”

“It's early yet,” said Eddie, and the way he said it made me understand he didn't want Tom to mention it to anyone.

“How many houses?”

“A good many,” said Eddie, shutting the discussion down and chasing cake crumbs with his fork. “What's happening with you, brother?”

Tommy mumbled with his mouth full, “Ah, a little of this, a little of that.” It was small-talk city, but that was the way my brothers liked it, I guess.

“How's your wife doing?”

“She's good. You should come down and visit. She's teaching herself to cook. She's getting pretty good. Mom and Dad drove down and she made them a roast beef dinner.”

I remembered. My mother said Debbie had gotten the wrong cut of meat, made mashed potatoes from a box and gravy from a jar. “The carrots were good,” my father said. “Frozen,” my mother said.

“Maybe I will,” said Tom, in that way you say you're going to do something you're never going to do. He handed his plate back to my mother, who refilled it. Eddie asked for a second piece of cake.

“I want to take you two for a ride,” Eddie said to my parents when he was done with his cake, standing up and taking his jacket off one of the hooks by the back door.

“We safe in that tin can?” my father said.

“Ah, man, don't get him started on Japanese cars,” Tommy said.

“I bet you'd feel the same if people started driving Vietnamese cars,” our father said.

“I don't care who drives what as long as no one is trying to kill me.”

When we were alone I said to Tommy, “You don't look dressed for a wake.”

“Yeah, right?” he said. “You want to make a pot of coffee?” He went upstairs and when he came down he was wearing one of my father's sport shirts, a dark plaid with short sleeves. The fabric pulled across his wide shoulders. I didn't know exactly what Tommy did with himself all day, but he was still in basic-training condition. All the other guys at the VFW had big bellies sloping over their belts. “Baby likes beer,” they would say, rubbing their midsections like a genie would show up and they would get three wishes. The wishes being three more boilermakers lined up on the bar.

Tommy still didn't look like he was going to a wake. No tie, hair curling down around his collar and over his ears, mustache drooping around his mouth. He poured himself some coffee and his hands shook just a bit.

“So you and Stevie,” he said.

“So?”

“I didn't see that coming,” he said.

“Are you okay with it?”

“I mean, yeah. I'm just not sure he's right for you. Don't get sidetracked.”

“From what?”

“Anything. Everything. Be like Ed. Get out of here. Don't get stuck.”

“What about you?”

“Never mind about me, Meems.” He took two sips of coffee and put his cup in the sink. “I'm rolling out,” he said.

A boy three years ahead of me at the high school had joined the Army earlier in the year. He'd been in Vietnam for three weeks when he got killed. Nobody knew exactly how, except that it was a closed-casket wake, and Miller's Valley wasn't a place that was big on closed-casket wakes. He was the second soldier from Miller's Valley to die there. Tom was so far the only one to come back alive.

I did the dishes and thought about whether Tommy was going to make it to McTeague's Funeral Home and figured that he wouldn't. There were two bars between here and there, and a little cinder-block box of a house that one of Tommy's semiregular girlfriends lived in. He'd get sidetracked. He usually did.

I walked back to Ruth's with a slab of cake on a paper plate. I figured my mother would think Tommy had eaten it. Aunt Ruth was watching
The Beverly Hillbillies.

“You know, Buddy Ebsen was a big song and dance man when he was young,” Ruth said, reaching for the cake without taking her eyes from the TV. “He was supposed to play the Tin Man in
The Wizard of Oz,
but he got hives when they put that silver makeup on him.” Aunt Ruth said that every time she was watching
The Beverly Hillbillies,
just like every time she watched
The Andy Griffith Show
she said the little boy was cute and Andy Griffith should have won an Oscar for
A Face in the Crowd,
and every time she watched
The Carol Burnett Show
she said, “Honey, I love her but that woman has no chin at all.” Aunt Ruth subscribed to movie magazines, and nothing ticked her off more than when my father would forget to bring them back to her when they showed up in our mailbox. She had her own mailbox, right on the road next to ours, but the mailman knew better than to put her mail in it.

“This cake is a little dry,” Ruth said.

“Beggars can't be choosers.” As I'd gotten older I'd refused to side with Ruth in her spite war against my mother.

“Just get me some milk before you go home, okay, honey?” she said, which was my cue to stop distracting her from some argument Jethro and Elly May were having on the television.

I was at our kitchen table taking notes for a history paper on the medical techniques developed during the Civil War when I heard a car door slam and my father yelling. When my mother yelled her sentences were sharp and tight, but my father did it seldom and his words got loose-limbed and ran together so he was hard to understand. From inside the barn you could hear the cows mooing loud but low, and that made the whole thing even more confusing, like when the school band tuned up in the practice room.

“Oh, for goodness' sake, you know Eddie never intended any disrespect. The opposite. The exact opposite. You know that boy. You're being ridiculous.”

“I feel goddamned ridiculous, I can tell you that. He's twenty-eight years old and he thinks he knows every damn thing.” I kept my head low over my paper and pretended to be writing something. “To take us out there and start talking about ranch houses and bathrooms with two sinks and attached garages and all that—what the hell was he thinking, that I was going to say, Well, gosh, Edward, sign me right up?”

“He's worried about you. If you've said it once, you've said it a hundred times: running a farm is hard work. And what's wrong with living in a nice new house with wall-to-wall carpeting? You may not want to hear this, but I'd like some wall-to-wall carpeting.”

“Miriam, you want carpeting, I'll have it installed tomorrow. In this house. Which, in case you've also forgot along with that snot-nosed son of yours, was built by my great-great-grandfather. Built good, too, with four-by-fours and plaster over lath, not this sheetrock crap they'll be using for those houses out there. You imagine my customers bringing lawn mowers out there to one of those nasty little nowhere roads to get fixed? Or no, I guess they won't be doing that because, as Edward James Miller says driving around in his Jap car, maybe I might want to retire.”

There was a picture in the book in front of me of a doctor dressed in a kind of cutaway jacket with a white apron over it. He was holding a saw. I just kept staring at the saw. It was bloody and looked dull. My father said a dull saw was worse than no saw at all. My brother must have lost his mind with this idea, or he'd forgotten where and who he came from.

“You made it clear where you stand on that, and on all the rest of it. Just put it to bed.”

“You put it to bed. You were the one standing there in an empty field, looking around and smiling and nodding like some goddamned beauty queen.”

“You've let loose with enough profanity to blow the roof off this place for the next ten years,” my mother said. “Put that to bed, too. Speaking of which, I'm going to bed.”

The door slammed twice, her, him. She didn't even look at me as she stomped up the stairs.

My father sat down hard at the table and glared at me, then down at my book, like he was mad at us both. “What the hell is that?” he said, still kind of yelling.

“Amputation,” I said.

“You want to live in a new house with all the modern conveniences?”

I tried to imagine anyone in my position at that moment who would say anything different, even LaRhonda or Tommy. “No,” I said.

My father walked out the back door and let it slam behind him. “Get back here,” my mother called from their bedroom window, but my father just kept walking down the back path and into the dark.