The End of Always: A Novel (2 page)

B
y September our small yard had parched and the weedy grass had baked dry. The ground crunched underfoot and sent a haze of dust and grasshoppers and desiccated seeds over us. We spent every day filmed with grime and even the washtub seemed always to have a layer of silt at the bottom. My mother complained that the dust got into the house and she could not keep up with it. For my part, I pictured our house like a veiled thing, secreted and unknown behind its shroud of heat and powdered earth. This thought made my throat close.

At night, when my father went to work, my mother told us stories about the life they had left behind on Rügen. The way she talked made it hard for me to understand why they had left. She said it was a beautiful place. She said it was a magical place. But I guess bad things were always happening there. You could be out alone on a road at night and a horseman could come upon you and that would be the end of you. You were never supposed to stray too far from home.

On that island there were hills shaped like giants and cliffs littered with swallows. Dwarves were as common as squirrels. We were bereft of dwarves in the woods of Wisconsin, so this fact alone was of great interest to my sisters and me. On Rügen, the white dwarves flew around in the shape of little birds or butterflies. The brown dwarves were handsome and wore brown jackets and brown caps and shoes with red laces. Sometimes they would leave gifts for children, but sometimes they would steal children away. The worst of all were the black dwarves, who wore black jackets and had red weeping eyes.

Whenever she told us about them, my mother always leaned forward and whispered loudly that if you did not attend, your life could be ruined forever. Dwarves were dangerous. You had to be careful at all times because you walked among them whether you could see them or not.

If I voiced some skepticism about how invisible dwarves who might also take the shape of insects could ruin your life, my mother seized the moment to assure us that what she said was true. She herself had known someone who had forgotten this one rule and had paid a very high price indeed.

Here is what she told us happened: My mother and father came from a town called Garz, which had been so named because it once guarded the island from the Vandals, who made a happy mission of roving and plundering its eastern shores. When my parents lived there, there was a guard tower and the remnants of a large stone wall that some long-ago architect must have imagined would stave off the hordes. There was also a temple still in place for the worship of an ancient goddess, but everyone had forgotten her in favor of St. Petri, in whose church my parents had married. That was the German influence.

A miller lived in Garz with his beautiful young daughter. Her mother was gone, perhaps drowned in the sea or dead in a field, it did not matter, that was not the point of the story. The point of the story was that the miller knew that anything could happen if his daughter strayed from his sight. There were charms and wonders aplenty on that island. So he kept her by his side. Night and day, they were together, and she was never permitted to go anywhere alone. Whenever she left the house, he had to go with her. If he could not go with her, she could not go.

They lived like this until the girl was fifteen or so. She was restless but there was nothing she could do. But there came a day when the miller was forced to send his daughter on an errand alone. No matter how many times she told the story, my mother did not ever recall what the errand was. Perhaps she did not know. She only remembered that the miller told his daughter to run fast and when she had completed her task to go straight home. He would walk down the road to meet her.

The girl had other ideas. She was young, so she felt brave and free. She finished her errand but then she walked by herself in a stony lane. Above her the open sky. Around her the spreading fields. Ahead of her a road that she had chosen all by herself, far away from her father’s house, as if their paths were meant to diverge from the very beginning and all she had to do was discover this.

She passed a meadow of rippling grass where a boy knelt to tie vines to a frame. The boy looked up as the girl came by. (Here my mother said that the girl could not be blamed for anything that happened because she had no idea that this chance meeting would change everything.) The boy stood and came down the hill and looked the girl in the eye and touched her hand. Of course they fell in love on the spot. After that, they spent all of their time together. They held hands and walked in fields full of flowers or let the waves chase them on the beach under the cliffs. According to my mother, there were beautiful white cliffs on Rügen, and people came from all over to see them.

You might wonder what the miller thought of the girl spending all of her time with this boy. The answer is, he did not know. He was away at work so much that many things escaped his attention. Perhaps this is why it did not take long for the girl to grow bold. One day she decided to go for a walk by herself. She let the door close behind her. She turned the key in the lock. She made her way across the field behind the mill. She slipped into the forest. The pine needles covered her tracks and the sky opened out above the trees and she walked in great purposeful strides, which made her feel strong and powerful.

She did not come back. Her father and the boy she loved looked for her everywhere, but all they found was her absence. It was as if had become a maid of the mist, a sylph now just a sliver of water in a stream that ran away. They could not find her. She was gone.

When five years had passed, the boy went up into the hills. The moon lit the night and he found a hundred brown dwarves dancing in a ring. One dwarf took his cap and tossed it into the air. The boy caught the cap and put it on his head. When he saw what had happened, the dwarf wept and begged the boy to give him his cap, but the boy reminded him that when a dwarf throws his magic cap away, he must serve whoever finds it. The dwarf gnashed his teeth but he knew the boy was right. So he led the boy to a glass door at the top of a mountain and then down a long stairway to a hall so vast that it seemed to be another country below the earth. That was where the boy found the miller’s daughter, surrounded by gold and jewels of every description. She had grown pale and her hair had turned silver, but the boy knew her right away. He held her to him and kissed her and the color came back to her cheeks. He said he was there to save her. He told the dwarf that since the girl had been forced to work for him for five long years, she must be paid. He still had the dwarf’s magic cap, so the dwarf was compelled to do as he was told. And that was how the girl and the boy came to fill their pockets with treasure. They took it with them when they returned to town, where they married and lived, wealthy and happy to the end of their days.

Still it did not rain. I stood under the white sky and clipped shirts by their tails to the clothesline. Hattie stood by the basket and handed the shirts to me one by one. These were followed by the flour sacks my mother used as kitchen towels and then by Hattie’s white stockings, ripped and mended where her braces snagged the threads at her knees. Bees vibrated in the stick pile and Hattie hummed a little song with them, a tune I did not know. From far off, the sound of wagon wheels rumbled along the road that ran in front of our house. The sound got louder as it came closer and then it disappeared. Stillness came over me like the world had stopped. No wind and yet I had the feeling that the grass around us seethed like a sea.

I pinned my clothespin to the line. Hattie walked up to the drive and looked down into the street. Then she came back to me, stepping in her leg braces like a doll with hinged joints. “Marie,” she said, her voice like the voice of someone who is about to fall from a high place. “It’s Mother.”

They carried her around the side of the house and my father opened the door for them and then they carried her inside.

By the time I got there, they had arranged her on her bed. I did not think that bundle of bloody clothes could be the woman who had told me to hang the shirts and help Hattie with her bath. Not with her hair plastered to her head. Not with her face gray as the dusk.

My father stood at the window, his face turned away, his hair separated into greasy strands. Across the room, Martha knelt on the floor by my mother’s head. She glanced up when I came into the doorway.

“Help me,” she said.

There were flour sacks packed over the wound, but these were saturated with blood. Martha pulled them off and dropped them to the floor, where they fell with a wet sound. She tried to unbutton my mother’s dress but my mother cried out.

I leaned against the doorway as if the floor could not hold me up.

“Get the sewing box,” Martha said.

The space before me turned a strange, hazy gray.

“Will you do something right?” Martha shrieked. “Just this once?”

The men who had carried my mother inside stood between the sink and the stove. I could tell they were not going to explain anything. They had already closed ranks, their faces set in the same expression, like a panel of witnesses who have taken a vow of silence.

“What happened?” I hissed. But all they did was shuffle their feet and look everywhere but at me. Behind me, the cicadas buzzed in the trees. Even if it was just their wings that brushed together, they were louder than the men in that room. Our yard was littered with cicada shells, and the town paper printed a story about the molting. The writer wrote about this act as if it was familiar and nearly human and that every seventeen years we, like the cicadas, should expect to leave a part of ourselves behind.

Finally the tallest man cleared his throat and looked at his hands as if he had forgotten he was holding his hat. “It was an accident,” he said.

There were four of them and that was all any of them said. They did not care that I was angry. They did not care that I was scared. They did not even wait for me to ask again. The tallest one just reached over my shoulder and pushed the screen door open and then shoved past me and they all filed out, all except the last one, who was younger than the rest, with dark hair and light eyes. He wore a black shirt and light canvas work pants with dim stripes and a black fedora and brown boots laced up over his ankles. When his eyes met mine, I felt the world empty out of me. He was handsome with the face of a man who has done things, even though he was still just a boy.

“Fräulein,” he said gently. His gaze was bright and piercing and he held his hand out to me, the gesture of a man with something to offer, of a man who knew more than words.

My father came down the hall and walked by without a word and without a glance. He took his hat from its hook in the mudroom and stopped in the doorway and squared the hat on his head. Then the back door slapped behind him. His footsteps on the gravel drive came back to me, and white light came through the window and pressed on the room like the flat of a hand. A sound I did not want to recognize rose, and I listened to that sound even as I told myself not to think about the way my mother lay on her bed or cried out or did not sound like my mother but sounded like a woman calling and calling from a world I did not know and never wished to enter. But when Martha screamed my name again, I picked up the sewing box and turned toward her voice. I had always believed I knew what the word
horror
meant, but on the day those four men carried my mother into our house and left her bleeding on the bed, I found out that I did not. Not really.

People do not believe that a girl’s life can change in an instant, but it happens all the time. Look around. You are surrounded by girls who have just learned that no matter how careful they have been to do exactly as they have been told, never to question, never to show their underthings, never to speak unless spoken to, their lives are not their own.

In the living room, the windows were open but the curtains did not move. Two women passed by in the street, a tall one with a small blue hat on her head, and a shorter one, whose hat was shaped like a holiday platter. Their voices faded as they passed.

“Martha?”

Hattie limped toward me, her face a pale planet in the falling off of day. A faint aroma, like the odor of something decaying, came from her leather straps.

“No,” I said. “Only me.”

“I thought it was Martha.”

She swayed as if she was held up by things beyond herself, a spindly board blown by an invisible wind. The braces were my father’s idea. He decided that Hattie’s legs were bowed and he found a doctor who agreed with him. But Hattie had grown three inches since winter and soon would be as tall as me, and now the braces did not fit properly and she limped when she wore them and walked like anyone else when she did not.

The light in the windows began to fade. A great wave of sadness washed through me and then seeped away.

“I was waiting,” she said.

“I am sorry,” I said.

She took hold of my arm. “Can I go in there?”

I shook my head. I did not want her to see our mother on that bed, waiting for the doctor to come back with the morphine, the tears on her face and the blood on her belly spreading.

“She is my mother, too,” Hattie said.

“I know,” I said. “But it will be best if you leave this to Martha and me.”

She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. “What happened?” she said.

“No one knows,” I said. But of course that was not true. My father knew what had happened. My father knew the whole story.

No one called it murder back then. That word has grave weight but I am willing to say it. Martha does not agree. To this very day, all she will say is this:
the day Mother had her terrible accident.

Hattie picked up an edge of the limp curtain. She wound it around her hand and let it fall. “Is she going to be all right?” she said.

“The doctor is coming back,” I said. There were no words to explain what was about to happen. To see our mother put down like an animal whose time is done. To imagine our mother as one of us right now but in the next minute gone. I could not say any of this out loud.