Authors: Annie Proulx
Postcards (11 page)
‘I can hardly remember what he looks like. Tall. “Use Wildroot Cream Oil Charlie” on his hair. Curly hair. He gave me piggyback rides when I was little. Remember when he gave me the blue doll dishes for my birthday?’
‘Them doll dishes was from him and Dub both.’
The west wall of Nipples’ barn was dotted with thousands of flies and thousands more spun in circles and dipped down to the manure pile. The house stood to the southeast where it caught the winter sun in morning and stood in the barn’s shadow in summer afternoons. As they came up the steps they could see through the screening Mrs. Nipple standing on the porch, rocking on her heels and crying into a dish towel. Her geranium collection, in empty lard tins and rusted-through enamel kettles, lined the edge of the porch. The radio, smashed on the ground, trailed its traitorous cord.
‘We come to help you look,’ said Jewell, opening the screen door. The waxed linoleum gleamed like water. ‘Mernelle thought the dog might come in handy.’ The dog looked a fool, clawed at his fleas.
‘Ronnie’s gone up to Davis’s to call up on their phone for some help. Doris is lookin’ in the barn again. First place we looked, but she says he loves the cows so much she thought that’s where he’d be. He couldn’t of got too far on them little legs of his. It was only a few minutes since we see him, and we was listenin’ to the news about the War bein’ over and everybody screamin’ in New York, just standin’ around the radio when Doris says all of a sudden, “Where’s Rollo?” ’(Mrs. Nipple couldn’t help telling it like a story.) ‘Well, her and me starts to lookin’ upstairs, downstairs, in the pantry, down cellar, Ronnie still listenin’ to the radio, then Doris sees the porch door is open and we look out there, then look in the barn. By this time Doris is real upset and she makes Ronnie go up to your place and the Davis’s. It’s been way over a hour now, and not a thread
of that baby! I said to Ronnie, “The time we’re losin’ because of not havin’ no telephone. I want that telephone put in.”’
Mrs. Nipple found Rollo’s sweater for the dog to smell. He took it in his mouth and shook it as though it were a game until Mernelle got it away and led him outside, holding the rope and saying ‘Where is he? Find the baby! Where is he? Fetch the baby!’ The dog trotted around the corner of the house and lifted his leg to water down the stones edging Mrs. Nipple’s flower beds.
‘Get going,’ said Mernelle, but the dog sat down and stared at her with stupid eyes. ‘Find that baby or I’ll grind you up,’ she hissed. The dog wagged his tail tentatively and looked in her face. ‘You dumb puke,’ she said and tied him to the porch steps rail. The dog thrust his nose under the steps and snuffled as though at rare perfume. Mernelle went down to the barn.
Doris was up in the hayloft saying, ‘Rollo, Mummie wants you sweetheart,’ though Mernelle didn’t see how any baby could climb the slick, worn rungs of that steep ladder. She looked in all the dim cow stalls, seeing where Doris had scraped at the matted hay, under the table in the milk room, in the old harness room and the cobwebbed horse stalls with the names WAXY and PRINCE carved on the posts. Doris’s footsteps overhead knocked from corners to shallow cupboards to the chute where the hay came down. Her black frenzy filled the barn. Mernelle went outside and looked in the manure pile. Rollo might have fallen into the mire and drowned in cow shit. She’d heard of it. Jewell knew of somebody it had happened to. She braced to see the blue, lolling head, the smeared arms. But there were only hens. From the manure pile she could see her mother and Mrs. Nipple in the uncut orchard, wading through the grass calling, ‘Rollo, Rollo,’ their voices heavy and sad.
When Ronnie’s car, packed with men in work clothes, drove into the yard Doris ran out, crying, to tell them the baby was still lost. The men talked in low voices. After a while they spread out and began walking through the mown hayfield, heading up toward the spring in the woods, the spring just open water, ten feet across, white sand at the bottom bubbling with the icy water that pulsed up from underground. Doris, knowing suddenly about the water, ran after them.
Jewell and Mrs. Nipple came up from the trampled orchard, and Mernelle followed them into the summer kitchen with its screened windows and kerosene stove off the end of the porch. Their arms were streaked with welts from the saw-edged grass. Mrs. Nipple pumped them each a glass of water. A few drops fell in the iron sink, rubbed to a gloss with a few drops of kerosene on Mrs. Nipple’s cleaning rag.
‘I dunno,’ she said, looking out the window at Doris running behind the men, tripping and going down on her knee, scrabbling up on her feet again and floundering on. And Ronnie, turning to point angrily at her, shouting at her to keep away. As if knowledge was more dreadful. ‘How could he get that far away in just a few minutes?’ A thin keening sound came from the water pump.
‘Sometimes the little ones can surprise you,’ said Jewell. ‘I can recall Dub gettin’ down to the road while I was gathering eggs and he wasn’t old enough to even walk. Crawled all the way, a whole mile. He’s kept it up, too.’ The pump wailed with an eerie shriek.
‘What in the world is that,’ said Mrs. Nipple, letting water tip out of her glass.
‘Sounds like your pump, some kind of pump trouble.’
‘That pump’s never made such a sound in its life,’ said Mrs. Nipple. ‘That’s the baby, and he’s down under the summer kitchen. Rollo, ROLLO,’ she bellowed into the pump mouth. And was answered by a gobbling howl. Jewell sent Mernelle to run up and tell Doris and the men that they could hear the baby under the summer kitchen floor near the water pipe, but how should they get at him, tear up the floor? Mrs. Nipple was crouching under the sink calling encouragement and prying at the boards with a kitchen knife. She got up and stepped around to the pump end of the rink where the water pipe rose from below, where the boards under the curling linoleum were as soft as cheese. The pump handle’s dull red curve was stamped
LITTLE GIANT
.
Jewell, watching Mernelle sprint up the hill toward the spring with a child’s demonic strength, heard a thick crumpling sound and looked around. Mrs. Nipple was half gone, one leg sunk to the hip in the rotten floor, the other bent like a grasshopper’s, the muscles folded
tight. She hung onto the edge of the sink with one hand, the other clenching the knife. Frightful shrieks came from below.
‘Pull me up, I’m standin’ on him!’ shouted Mrs. Nipple, but before Jewell could reach her, Mrs. Nipple, the pump and the sink descended on Rollo.
‘The little son of a bitch is bruised up pretty bad but he’ll make it,’ said Dub at the supper table. ‘You’d think he’d of been squashed flat with that load comin’ down on him, but it seems like everything fell slow, settled, instead of fell, and the old lady sort of squatted as she landed, so he come out of it pretty good. The old lady’s worse off than him. She got rusty nails in her like a pincushion. They tried to keep her in the hospital for a day or two, but she wouldn’t have it.’
‘When I think how all that rot was layin’ there under that proud housekeepin’,’ said Jewell. ‘There’s a lesson in it.’ Her glasses, lenses spotted and dull, lay on the table. She rubbed at the bridge of her nose where the flesh-colored rests had pinched two red ovals.
‘How’d he get under there, anyway?’ asked Mernelle, remembering the crying and keening, Mrs. Nipple lying in the back of Ronnie’s car with her bloody knees showing at the window, the baby howling in the front seat in Doris’s lap and Ronnie shouting, ‘Get out of the way’ as he skidded down the lane.
‘Crawled under. They figure he went in under the porch steps, farther in under the porch to a narrow place where he couldn’t get turned around, so, since nobody never learned him to crawl backwards, he had to keep goin’ and the last stop on the line was the water pipe under the summer kitchen. Just remember Mernelle, always learn your babies to crawl backwards.’
‘Don’t talk so smart about babies and crawlin’. I remember when you crawled all the way on down to the road through the mud, over a mile, and too dumb to come back,’ said Jewell.
‘No,’ said Dub. Too dumb to keep goin’.’
RONNIE, RED-EYED FROM the funeral, leaned over and put the china dog in the center of the table as in a place of honor. The port-wine mark that stained his chin was deep in color, as though he’d rested it in a dish of crushed blackberries.
‘When she see she was goin’,’ he said to Mernelle, mumbling through swollen lips, ‘she said she wanted you to have this. Said that your dog was on the right track sniffin’ at the porch steps. It might of all turned out different if somebody had paid attention to that dog, she said.’ He pushed the dog again with his forefinger, then turned and went out to his car.
Loyal’s alarm clock on the windowsill clacked. They all looked
at the china dog. Its vapid face and impossible pink gloss accused. Mrs. Nipple, silently declaring, if only you had noticed what the dog was trying to show I’d be alive today and not buried in a closed casket because of blood poisoning that turned my face black.
‘I doubt that dog was sniffin’ anything but where some other dog pissed,’ said Mink. He patted Mernelle’s hand twice, the first time she could remember an affectionate gesture from him since the time she was coming down with mumps and was too dizzy and feverish to walk and he carried her up the stairs to her bed. Jewell shoved the dog behind some empty jars in the pantry.
In the afternoon Mernelle walked over toward the Nipples’ place. There was a field at the lower part of their farm where the old house had stood before it burned down. A few coreopsis had escaped from the flower garden and spread unchecked for thirty years until they covered three or four acres of poor land. Mrs. Nipple called it tickweed.
They were in bloom now, a billowing ocean of yellow panicles. Mernelle waded into the swashing field, a trail of bent stalks behind her. She stood nearly in the center, thinking of herself as a dot in the quivering yellow landscape, thinking of Mrs. Nipple who would never again ride past the tickweed, never again sit in the passenger seat next to Ronnie saying, ‘That’s a harndsome sight.’
Mernelle looked at the sky, a cloudless blue. She stared, and the blueness shook with purple dots. She could hear a vast, slow breathing. The sky.
‘Mrs. Nipple is an angel,’ she said. She imagined a diaphanous sparkling angel rising from Mrs. Nipple’s black underground corpse, but couldn’t hold the image, and thought instead of the body dissolving into the earth, thought of the earth crawling with invisible hungry mites that devoured rotting bits, that cleaned the bones of dead animals, sucked the fire from consumed logs and the dew from the grass, all the effluvium of plants and animals, rock and rain. Where does it go, she thought, all those rivers of menstrual blood and the blood of wounds and injuries from the beginning of the world, imagining a
deep, stiff lake of coagulated blood. To be killed by nail scratches! She ran at the coreopsis, tearing at their heads. She trampled the elusive, bending stems, broke and flung them, the roots sprayed soil. The maimed plants fell silently and merged again with the swaying mass.
FROM A LONG WAY OFF Loyal thought of Billy, her stinging hail of kisses, her little shoes with the bows, her pointed fingernails and elbows, the knees coming up every time he tried to slide his hand down her belly to her fork, the way his cracked fingers snagged the rayon.
‘No you don’t. I’m not getting caught. I’m getting out of here and I’m going to be somebody. I’m not going to end up on your goddamn farm pouring slops to the pigs and looking a hundred years old before I’m forty with a big belly every year and kids all over the place. I’ll go just so far with you, and then, if you want what I got, you come the rest of the way with me. Loyal, there’s so much money
out there you can’t believe it. The money’s just pouring down, all you have to do is stand in the right place with your hands out. And this ain’t the right place, buster.’
But for all the hard knees and elbows Billy gave off heat like a smoking griddle. The orange hair crackled with the warmth of her electricity when he smoothed it; her hands were always hot, even in winter, and when she wet her lips with her pointed tongue the slippery gleam shot straight down the chute of desire to his groin. She could have been the best in the world if she hadn’t fought so hard against it.