Refresh, Refresh: Stories (17 page)

So different than what he felt—a pressing heat—even now, gray-headed and dotted with age spots and hunched over with arthritis. “They represent love,” he had told them, while looking at her, as he had for so many years.

This was before a clot came loose and traveled through her veins like a tiny dry wasp whose stinger latched itself to her brain and rendered her dumb, her left side immobile. Before Jacob sold his cottage to help pay for the hospital bills, the lengthy stay at the Mt. Angel Rehabilitation Center, the medicine she required. Before they moved into the farmhouse with Gerald, who told his brother, “Come. Please. That way we can all look after each other.”

The peacock let out a warbling scream—
ee
yaw-
ee
yaw-
ee
yaw—and with one flap of its wings lifted itself into the low branches of an oak tree, some fifteen feet off the ground, the distance his brother had descended.

He didn’t want to think about it. But he couldn’t
not
think about it. The body sprawled out on the ground, the bones broken inside it like the shards of a plate knocked off a table by a careless elbow. The body now drained of blood and filled with formaldehyde, lying on a metal tray in a refrigerated locker. The body, his brother’s.

Gerald searched around inside himself and tried to find some emotion, whether happiness or sadness or guilt, but found only a black space, like a closet with a busted light. He didn’t know what was in it, not for certain.

In the kitchen, his niece, Jackie, molded the crusts of apple pies. He listened to her bang some pots around, hum an old-time polka tune he used to dance to. Used to, he thought. These days everything is
used to.

Now Gerald raised the scope to his eye again and watched the heifer turn around in a circle, lowing in pain. He wondered if his brother had made a similar sound in his final moments.

The heifer slowed in its turning, finally pausing to lower its snout to the pasture. It began to graze, chewing at the browned clover, seemingly unconcerned as two spindly legs sprouted from her backside, groping for purchase. Blood and embryonic fluid leaked down her hindquarters. A contraction made the heifer stiffen her neck and wall her eyes. There was a surge of fluid. Now half a calf hung from its mother, the two of them appearing in profile like some grotesque Siamese twin.

Another minute and the calf slipped out completely, falling to the pasture, a wet and bony heap with a placenta hanging around its neck like a muddy shawl. A shower of blood and excrement followed.

Gerald yelled, “Jackie,” but his voice was weak and the word fluttered down the hall to die. A minute later and he tried again. “Jackie?”

“Yes?”

“She done birthed another one.”

“What?” He heard water running and what sounded like a wooden spoon put down on the counter.

“Why don’t you come in here when I’m talking to you?” Outside the heifer licked the calf and the calf tried to make sense of its muscles, struggling in the grass like a tangled marionette.

He heard heavy footsteps on the linoleum, and then a whispering on the carpet announced her presence. His scope filled up with her checkered apron and he put it down to see her standing before him. She kept her hair short, combed up in a brown poof maintained by a lot of hairspray. “What, Gerald? What’s the fuss?”

He handed her the scope. “Look, that’s what.”

She did—and promptly passed it back. “Another cow. How many hundreds of cows?” She frowned and folded her hands over her poochy belly like some disapproving schoolteacher. “I don’t have time for this. I have to hurry and have the pies ready for the wake.”

“Should we tell Gertie?”

She cocked her head. “Tell her what?”

“About the cow, of course,” he said.

“You’d think you’d have more important things on your mind besides cows.” Her eyes grew moist and her mouth began to quiver and she turned to go, saying over her shoulder, “My father is dead. Your brother. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

She retreated from Gerald, who sat frowning in his chair, listening to the wail of the white peacocks, that wavering cry he had always likened to the sound of suffering women.

The wake was about to begin and the kitchen was full of stout old ladies, all of them with hair like dandelions gone to seed. They hovered over the food they had brought, rearranging it and warming it and sneaking tastes of it. On the counter the percolator hissed and popped with fresh coffee. Next to it the Crock-Pot simmered with pulled pork for sandwiches. There were stacks of whole-wheat buns. Jars of pickles and pickled garlic and pickled beets. Cheese plates. Slices of onion, green pepper, summer sausage. Radishes. Jell-O salad. Silverware clattered as it was arranged into cups like in a cafeteria. On the kitchen table, a legion of pies—apple and pumpkin and blackberry—the blackberry looking a little like congealed blood.

An hour ago Gerald had trucked in a load of aluminum folding chairs from St. Anthony’s and positioned them in the living room. This was where the men sat, waiting for their wives, speaking in low voices about the weather and the alfalfa crop and Jacob. “A hell of a thing,” they said. “Hell of a thing.” They fell silent when Gerald negotiated his way through them, helping Gertie to the couch.

He was wearing a black suit and she was wearing a black dress and they had their arms wrapped tightly around each other. Essentially he carried her. It wasn’t grief that immobilized her, but the stroke. Her face appeared molten on one side, the eye half shuttered, the mouth drooping as if arranged in a permanent scowl. The muscles had gone slack there and all along her left side, her leg a dead branch that dragged behind her.

“Here’s a place,” Gerald said and lowered her onto the couch. “There now. This is just the place.” When he uncoupled his arms from her, he did so slowly, already missing the warmth of her pressed against him.

With her good eye she observed him moistly. “Cookie,” she said. It was all she could say. At first, when she came home from Mt. Angel, everyone thought she meant she wanted a cookie. Jacob would bring back from the grocery store Chips Ahoy, Oreos, Toll House, Mrs. Fields, pressing each variety to her lips only to have her turn her head away like a sullen child. “Cookie,” she would say and he would say, “That’s what I’m trying to give you. A cookie. Don’t you want it?” until he understood this was the only sound her mouth recalled. It meant nothing and it meant everything. “Cookie,” she would say. “Cookie.” And her audience would nod encouragingly as if on the verge of understanding the word and its repetition, like some code that could be translated if only studied long enough.

“Cookie,” she said now to Gerald—in thankfulness or accusation, he didn’t know.

Soon the room filled up with the remainder of the family and friends invited, maybe thirty of them, all of them bowing their heads as Father Armstrong began his prayer.

Gerald didn’t listen to a word the father said. He concentrated instead on Gertie breathing next to him. And the walls, their vine-patterned wallpaper cluttered with clocks and photographs. Most of the people in the color photographs, he noticed, now sat in the room, whereas the grainy black-and-white images mainly contained the dead. His parents, smiling in their Sunday best, probably the same clothes they wore now, buried in the Moccasin Hollow Cemetery, a spattering of tombstones on the outskirts of town, a place where teenagers went to smoke and kiss. The Bobcat would be at work there tomorrow, its shovel peeling back the earth in the shape of a rectangle only a little bigger than a casket.

The prayer finished and Father Armstrong asked if anyone wanted to share anything about Jacob. It was quiet for a time. Then Sam Ritchie raised his hand. The father called on him and he stood up and in his nervousness rubbed his palms together in a way that sounded like sandpaper hissing. He was a big man and the flannel shirt he wore barely surrounded his bulk. “I remember when Jacob and I was kids,” he said and brought his lips together tightly. “When we was kids, we used to go down and catch pollywogs together in Jasmine Crick.” All of a sudden he released a doglike yelp and put his hands to his face and wept into them and everyone concentrated on their shoes, embarrassed to see a large man look so small.

Father Armstrong walked over and patted Sam on the shoulder and Sam said, “I’m okay, I’m okay. Just a second. You’ve just got to give me a second. All right?”

“Of course,” the father said.

All around them the clocks ticked away the seconds it took for Sam to rough the tears from his eyes and take a deep steadying breath. When he finally opened his mouth to say something more, Gertie filled the silence for him. “Cookie,” she said. And then again: “Cookie.”

From her place on the couch she observed them all with her good eye, saying, “Cookie, cookie,” in an even tone—perhaps speaking in a ciphered tongue about her late husband, perhaps speaking nonsense, no one knew for sure. But as she continued to speak they all bowed their heads, pretending her words into a kind of prayer.

Because Gertie could not bathe herself, Jackie would come over every evening to splash soap in the tub and fill it with hot water, as she did now.

A minute ago Gerald stood in the kitchen, holding a jar of pickled beets leftover from the wake, but the roar of the water had drawn him into the hallway. He tiptoed across the hardwood as if it were ice, trying not to let it groan beneath his weight and reveal his presence. He stabbed the beets with a fork and pulled them out of the brine and into his mouth and chewed at them messily and stared at the bathroom door. Jackie had not closed it completely and a crack of yellow light ran along its side. Gerald went to it.

His eyes took a moment to adjust from the dimness to the brightness—and then he saw her, in the tub, Gertie. Her silver hair hung damply around her shoulders and her freckled breasts folded over her belly like lumps of warm clay. The water steamed and white tendrils worked through the air, as if ghosts had invaded the room.

Jackie stood a few feet away, oblivious to him. From the drawer beneath the sink she took a washcloth and kneeled next to the tub to test its temperature before knobbing off the water. Her mouth moved, perhaps lullabying, as she wet the washcloth and wrung it out and began to clean her mother—her face, her arms, her breasts and belly—gently—wiping the folds of skin that appeared as delicate as damp paper.

And all the while Gertie sat there, motionless. His eyes traced the lines of her body, the blankness of her face. She wasn’t wholly there and neither was he, lost somewhere inside the emptiness of his head, a hollow filled with the shadows of yesterday—remembering her almond eyes, the wet budding of her lips, her once-dark hair splayed across a pillow—remembering his brother, too.

There had been a time when they were alive—really
alive
—their teeth white and their skin tan, their arms and legs ropy with muscle. Back then they would rise clearheaded from their beds at 4:30 and throw on their coveralls and happily step out into the moonlit morning, into the pasture, where the cattle lowed. They would whistle and clap their hands and herd the cows into the barn and set up their wooden stools and aluminum buckets. This after dancing until midnight at the grange hall, dancing so hard their feet blistered and their jeans grew dark with sweat.

This was before Jacob left the farm. Before he joined the Merchant Marines and earned his college degree and became a schoolteacher and married Gertie and moved to Eugene—at once thirty minutes and a whole world away.

For the brothers to have been so similar for so many years, sharing the same chores, the same chipped glassware and soiled mud boots—and then for Jacob to turn out so differently, seeking a life separate from Gerald—it felt like a betrayal.

Now the mist from the bathwater crept into the hall. A milky, swirling nothing from which a finger reached out to trace his cheek. At that moment his hand began to tremble so horribly that he lost his purchase on the jar. Against the hardwood it shattered. He startled at the sound and sight of it and lurched backward, reaching for something to steady his balance against—the wall.

Like a shallow-breathing animal he watched as a red line of beet juice bled toward the bathroom door. In the moment before it opened, before Jackie stared at him wonderingly, he felt an overwhelming sadness, like he had lost something—something vital and substantial—his life—his opportunity to do more with it than simply rotate crops and urge milk from a cow’s teat—all the possibilities of what-could-have-been scattering like fragments of glass across the floor, like bones inside his brother’s body, something that could not be reassembled.

He did not love her—not exactly. He was not certain if he was capable of love, as he saw the women and men around him more as accessories, like the Phillips screwdriver he kept in the silverware drawer or the stereo he installed in the cab of the tractor, something to serve or amuse him.
Want
was a more accurate word. He had always wanted her. But she belonged to his brother.

Over the years he had wanted many women and made them his, the first time when he was seventeen. At the county fair, while he was showing cattle, he spotted in the audience a girl wearing a sunflower-patterned sundress. She stood out among all the denim and flannel, a yellow flame that trembled at the corner of his eye as he led his Holstein around the ring to polite applause. Later, he sought her out and found her in the midway, laughing with a group of girls. He pulled her away with small talk and cotton candy. They went for a walk together and he led her behind the barn, away from the crowds. There he lurched forward with the hunger of a starved animal, wrestling her to the dirt with ease. While she kicked her legs and punched her fists helplessly against him, he pushed his way through her dress, her panties, and attached himself to her body. It was the first time he recognized that sex had a life of its own, separate from resolve, independent of a person. Pure reflex. Like breathing. Some unknown chemical or wire within him made it happen. This was why he never felt guilty afterwards. He knew he couldn’t help it.