Refresh, Refresh: Stories (18 page)

This same scene played out in closets, stairwells, bathrooms. Once a backyard. A living room. The bed of a truck. Sometimes it was premeditated, other times it simply happened. He spotted a woman on her knees, with a trowel, clawing through the dirt of her garden. Or he passed a woman in the supermarket whose flowery perfume overwhelmed him. It could be the swell of a breast or the blueness of an eye. He would follow them until the moment presented itself.

And though he would begin—when he found himself a crushing weight between their thighs—with a rapid jerking, he would soon slow his thrusts, creating a slow push and pull, a slow burn, wanting to feel every fraction of every second, the heat that gripped him moistly and ultimately choked from him a sudden swelling gush that left the bottom of his stomach feeling punctured, an empty space of air. And then he would hear, for the first time, the sobbing of the creature beneath him. Their body split in half by the impact of him.

It had been a long time since the last one. But he remembered. He remembered all of them. He carried around their memories like precious stones clicking softly in his pocket, something to finger now and then.

Except her. He could only watch and imagine her above and below and beside him.

Sometimes, after he finished his chores and ate his supper and the sky darkened with evening, Gerald would drive to the outskirts of Eugene, where his brother and Gertie lived. Their home crouched in the middle of an oak forest. He would park on a nearby haul road and hike through the woods, picking his way through a blackberry bramble, stepping carefully over mossy logs with slugs jewelling their surface. And then he would smell woodsmoke and maybe something cooking and in the distance he would spot a brightness that grew more and more distinct, floating out of the night, the orange square of a window.

When he reached the place where the woods stopped and the mowed grass began, he would hunker down behind a stump, its rich damp wood giving off a smell not unlike a woman, a whiff from between her legs. From here he would stare at that window as you would stare at a fire, mesmerized by its ragged orange color, the way its heat plays across your skin.

To bring her closer, he would carry his rifle with him and position it on the stump, staring through its scope, waiting for her figure to pass before the window or settle into the couch in the living room. The scope of the rifle would fill with the image of her, sometimes showing all her teeth in a smile, sometimes pursing her lips in anger, sometimes wrinkling her forehead or biting her thumbnail or bringing a mug of tea—two-handed—to her mouth. Staring down the length of a rifle, he imagined his body a bullet that would crash through the glass and enter her.

At times like these his breath and his pulse would quicken and in his mind sound together like waves crashing closer and closer to a sand castle abandoned on a beach.

Something he experienced again now, so many years later, when standing outside her bedroom, his fingers tracing the wood grain of the door, finally settling on the knob, turning it. The hinges made a noise like a dying bird when he pushed his way into the darkness of the room. A blue rectangle of moonlight fell from the window and onto her bed.

At that moment he noticed her eye. She had these big blue eyes with plenty of white in them, and though one of them drooped closed, the other shone in the moonlight, watching him. “Cookie,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Cookie.”

He slowly moved across the room and slowly sat at the edge of the bed he and his brother had carted into the house three months ago. He ran a hand along the quilt and fingered a loose bit of string. Then he lay back, settling his weight into the mattress, and when he did he noticed beneath him the hollows and dips, shaped over the years by Jacob. Now he’s got a new place to rest, Gerald thought, imagining a coffin’s satin upholstery, the contours his brother’s body would mold within it. At that moment he felt closer to his brother than he had in a long time, as if they had become, even if only for an instant, the same person.

He felt his hand move away from him, crawling across the mattress like a pale spider and seizing her fingers and weaving them together with his own. She gave him a squeeze that could have meant
hello
or
please, no
. He rolled on his side and raised himself up on his elbow so that his face hung over hers. He had for so long imagined them together, and now here she was—so close her breath played across his face—but he could only breathe in as she breathed out, filling his lungs with the heat of her.

Seventy-five years old and he still milked his own cows and planted and harvested his own fields, his only help a hired man named Tom Mullet. This morning, after the scraping and spraying that followed the first milking, Gerald stood in the open doorway of the barn and watched Tom negotiate the four-wheeler through a huddle of cattle, on his way to the far side of the pasture, where a barbed-wire fence needed mending.

Above Gerald, in the hayloft, the peacocks cooed, their soft gossip reminding him of how Jackie sounded on the telephone all day, these past few days, telling the same story over and over as she accepted condolences and explained that Gerald would prefer not to speak with anyone presently. He cocked his head and listened to them a time before trying to mimic their sounds, but it was more of a groan that escaped his lips and upon its utterance the peacocks went quiet.

He would have to go inside soon, to shower and shave and dress for the funeral mass. But first he would feed the penned calves. With their gray tongues they licked the grain from his shaking fingers and left behind a film of spit. When he finished with them, he latched the gate to their pen and sealed the grain bucket and sat down on it. The calves stuck their mallet-shaped heads through the bars and bit down on his coveralls, tugging at him, still hungry.

“You cows,” he said, “are a bunch of damned pigs.”

His words, once spoken, sounded distant from him, as if they belonged to someone else. And he realized he was straddling two worlds—as he often did these days—breathing the air of the past and present at once as his mind fogged over with memory:

It had been a long day. He and Jacob had milked and lugged wood for the woodstove and pitched hay out of the loft and scrubbed the cellar walls and applied to them a fresh coat of whitewash. In all of this time they paused only to eat a few ham biscuits and drink a jug of water from the cold pantry. Now it was four o’clock and nearly time to milk again and their mother wanted them to slaughter a hog for Christmas supper the following day.

They chased after it, both of them laughing, slipping in the snow, with the hog trotting just ahead of them. Jacob finally tackled it, struggling as it tried to bite and hoof him, while Gerald stood nearby with a sledgehammer raised above his head. “Steady, Jacob,” he said. Down came the hammer and the hog lay still with a dent behind its ear.

With a carving knife they opened up its throat and the blood spread lavishly in the snow. Gerald remembered it looking as though it would taste good. They folded their arms and waited for the animal to bleed out. After a minute Jacob got bored and packed a snowball out of red slush. He tossed it in the air and caught it, then cocked his arm back and slung it at Gerald. It hit him in the face.

Immediately he felt a terrible anger rising in him. Some of it came from exhaustion and some of it came from the snowball, but most of it concerned the announcement Jacob had made the day before—about his plans to leave the farm. The courage that took, the freedom that came with it, made Gerald clench his teeth so tightly his jaw popped. When he wiped away the snow, it left his hands red, as if the blood had come in anger to the surface of his skin.

So he charged and tackled his brother to the ground and they fought—they
needed
to fight—punching each other all over, everywhere but the face, and when they grew tired they lay in the snow, resting, their breath escaping their mouths in gray clouds that mingled together.

Then they gutted the hog in silence. Gerald remembered the terrible reek of their butchering—so different than that pleasant odor of things newborn, of baby calves, their smell somewhere between warm milk and chicken soup.

The memory belonged to both of them, but now only Gerald remained to remember it, sitting alone in the barn, his right hand trembling like the leg of a dreaming dog.

A crow perched on top of the bell tower at St. Anthony’s. It flew off, when Gerald pulled up, as if to tell someone he had arrived. The parking lot was full of Chevy trucks and Buick sedans and Gerald found a place among them and made his way along the sidewalk and into the foyer, where a crowd of men in black suits and women in black dresses drank coffee from Styrofoam cups and ate powdered doughnuts off napkins. When he shouldered his way past them, they smiled tight-lipped smiles, nodding, reaching out to touch him reassuringly on the back.

With no more thought than he put into washing his hands he reached for the holy water and traced a large cross from forehead to breast and from shoulder to shoulder before entering the main chapel. Here the air smelled heavily of dust and aftershave and carpet glue, with a hint of something sweeter, the pollen of the flowers crowding the stage. Two stained-glass windows framed the alter, swarming with a colored light that revealed the long-headed hollow-eyed Christ that bloodily presided over a closed coffin, glossy and white, almost translucent, like a pane of soap about to be blown into a bubble, the bursting of which would unveil his brother, floating and turning in the air.

Gerald made his way down the aisle and knelt with some difficulty next to the front pew, again making the sign of the cross, this time muttering, “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” He took hold of the pew and his old joints popped when he hauled himself up and took his place next to Gertie, who wore a black shawl and sat crookedly, leaning against her daughter Jackie as if for support. If he had not known her fatigue—the familiar slope of her shoulders, her eyes shut and her mouth a black O—he might for a second have thought her dead.

Gerald didn’t turn around to look, but he could hear the church filling up, as the air filled with the shuffling of sleeves and tissues, the creaking of pews, the low murmur of voices, the occasional cough and sniffle. He counted the flower arrangements—twenty-seven in total—and felt a mild irritation—all this pointless decoration for the dead reminding him of the white peacocks, somehow.

Eventually Father Armstrong took his place at the pulpit and gave the introductory rites in a solemn voice. This was followed by the Prayer of Confession. And then the organ shouted the refrain from “Amazing Grace” and everyone stood and sang at first falteringly and then with greater confidence as their throats warmed up. Everyone except Gerald, who moved his mouth but made no noise.

After the Liturgy of the Eucharist and the Prayer of Intercession, the ushers passed out small white candles with cardboard shields around their middle. Father Armstrong took a candle from the candelabra and walked down the aisle, lighting the wicks of those closest to him, asking everyone to share their flame with their neighbor. Before long, fire glowed from every corner of the church and Father Armstrong ascended the alter once again.

When he began the invocation—“Holy God, holy strong One, holy immortal One, have mercy on us”—the congregation raised their candles to their foreheads and then lowered them to their stomachs and then extended them back and forth across their chests. In her right hand, her good hand, Gertie gripped a candle of her own and perhaps consciously—or perhaps not—she too traced the pattern of the cross and in doing so ran the flame across her shawl.

Just before she howled in pain, she struck Gerald as so beautiful, her face taking on a look of rapture as fire rose around it in an orange halo.

At the Aurora Sinai Medical Center, Gerald sat in the corner of the room, watching her sleep. Her face, enfolded in bandages, moved every now and then, contorting itself secretly beneath its wrappings. A black gap indicated where her mouth was, but otherwise her features were unavailable to him.

A few minutes before, Jackie and her husband Bill had been there. Neither could stop moving, sitting down and then standing up a moment later, rubbing their hands together and breathing deeply.

“You should have known not to light her candle,” Jackie said to Gerald at one point.

“What are you yelling at him for?” her husband said. “It’s no more his fault than yours or mine or anybody else’s.”

Her expression softened and a few tears raced down her cheeks. “I know, I know,” she said. “You think I don’t know? I’m upset. Aren’t I allowed to be upset? I mean, considering?”

Gerald watched her pace back and forth and thought, I held you when you were wet and purple and screaming, only a few hours old. I could have dropped you then and silenced you.

She stopped in her manic pacing and looked at him. “What did you say?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said, not knowing how much he had said aloud. “I’m just an old man mumbling.”

She brought her hand to her forehead, as if checking her temperature. “God, I don’t know how much more of this I can take.” She raised her face to the ceiling and raised, too, the volume of her voice. “There’s only so much a person can take!”

For another minute they all watched Gertie, her chest rising and falling beneath a white sheet. Then Gerald told them to go get a cup of coffee, a breath of fresh air. He told them he would look after her. “You’ll feel better,” he said.

“Maybe that would be nice,” Jackie said. “A nice cup of coffee.”

“Go,” he said, and they left him there.

He waited a minute and then rose from his chair and approached her, bending over the bed, over the guardrail, to kiss her. His mouth opened and briefly covered her own. Her head twitched at his touch.

In that moment, when their lips came together, his mind went elsewhere as he remembered her as she was, the glimmers of another time. She was running out of the ocean, her heavy breasts swaying inside her bathing suit. She was laying down a picnic blanket in the park and weighing down its corners with rocks so it wouldn’t flap in the wind. She was skating toward him on a frozen pond. Snow fell and the motion of it made the sky seem as if it were lowering, pressing down on her with its immense gray weight. On all of these occasions he knew his brother had been there, too, but in his mind he had excised the memory of him as if with a pair of scissors.