The End of Always: A Novel (8 page)

“I am going to give your sister a skating lesson,” said August. He smiled at Hattie. “You come, too.”

“I’ll watch,” said Hattie. She turned toward me. “And then we need to go.” She did not try to conceal her concern.

“I know,” I said. “I promise to be quick.”

It was late afternoon when Hattie and I made our way home, over the bridge and past the burned-out shell of a farmhouse, where I could smell the blackened wood under the cavernous cold air. When we got closer to town, we passed a box of a building where two young men in rough coats and caps squatted beside a galvanized steel tank and used a black rubber hose to decant a colorless liquid into a washtub. They watched us as we came by and one of them stood up and leaned against the wall and after a minute lit a cigarette and stared after us as we made our way away from him.

The road curved toward the river and the water lay before us for a time, glinting with a leaden sheen like an object gone dull in the fireplace’s ash. We passed the park in front of the biggest springhouse, and the path to the front steps was broken by footsteps that turned into black holes in the snow. A man and woman walked together, her hand clasped in his and her dark green skirt dragging behind her and her hem blackened with a fan of water, like she had been walking for a while and the snow on her skirt had had a chance to melt in the sun. Even from the street, I could see that it was Martha. Even at a glance, I could tell that it was George. They did not see us. They just walked away from the road with their heads bent together and crossed into the blue shadow next to the springhouse. The park road rose along a shallow slope and then turned at the top of the hill. They followed the path and passed back into the fading light and started up the rise.

“Martha,” I muttered. “You are such a liar.”

Hattie turned around to face me. “Did you say something?”

I shook my head. “Go on,” I said. “Never mind.”

When we got home, I put the sack with the skates in it on a shelf in the mudroom. Hattie hung our coats on their hooks. My father sat at the kitchen table, the newspaper open over his lap, a bottle beside him on the table. He turned toward us when we came in. “Did you see this?” he said.

“We’re cold,” I said. “Can’t you let us warm up first?”

I had not thought before I spoke. I had simply spoken. I had merely said the words.

He let his paper fall loosely to his knees. He squinted at me.

“You watch your step, girl,” he said. There was no mistaking the edge in his voice.

It hardly mattered. August told me that he looked for me on every street in town. He walked up and down the main roads. He searched for me along the sidewalks in front of the drugstore, the bank, the police station. He never forgot the look in my eyes when he saw me standing in the yard. One day he thought he saw me when he was riding in the front car of the interurban. He put his hand flat on the glass, just in case it was me.

When he took me out on the ice I felt his thigh on mine. I would have done anything to make sure he kept touching me like that. He did not cross our arms in front of us like two people on a promenade. He put his arm around my waist. He showed me how to skate, stroke by stroke, until I pushed off when he pushed off, and let myself glide when he did. We picked up speed around the field, and he leaned into me to show me how to take the corners, each stroke warm and hard and alive.

In the trees behind the church, a flock of starlings gathered in the branches. When the wind picked up, Hattie waved to me from the snowy slope and a cloud passed in front of the sun. The birds lifted from the trees. I felt August beside me, his body, his heat, the absolute truth of his heart.

Now I turned my back on my father, on his hard voice, on his hard eyes. I could not believe I had said what I had said. Still, the fact of the matter was that I had talked back to him and I had not died. The fact of the matter was that I was entirely alive.

W
hen my mother was a girl, she waited for the equinox, when it was said that eggs would balance unbroken on their broad ends and animals would talk. But she had never been able to stay up late enough to hear her mother’s chickens tell stories in the dirt lot next to my grandfather’s house. Spring came with planting and she mostly remembered walking behind my grandfather as he dug the holes for potatoes. She dropped an eye into each hole and then covered the eye with dirt.

I suppose this is why she grew potatoes in our yard. Don’t we always do what we’ve always done? It seems our habits are set in this regard in our own long-ago times, before we have even become aware that our behaviors are being fixed in place.

I stood over the rusty barrel and let the contents of my dustpan fall in a gritty cloud. When I turned to go back inside, August stood before me, a match flickering in his cupped hands. The cupped match went out and he popped another against his thumbnail and the flame flared and lit his face.

“Marie,” he whispered.

He seemed to hold the yellow flame in his fingers. I looked back over my shoulder. Martha was a shadow who moved around in the kitchen light.

“You should not come here,” I said, but I said this very softly. I did not want him to leave.

“I had to see you,” he said. His breath came in misty waves and rose in clouds and disappeared.

I could hear him breathing. Our neighbor next door stepped onto her back steps and held the screen door open. Her dog ran out to the fence and lifted its leg on a post. She pretended to watch him, but I knew she had her eye on my garden, where I stood with August Bethke. After a minute, she whistled to her dog and the dog ran inside and she followed it and closed the door. August let the match in his hands go out.

He wore a long woolen coat that came down past his knees and a soft hat. He reached over and brushed my hair from my eyes. Then he took my hand.

The frozen night road was dark and cool and the fields fell away on either side and the woods lay before us in a great black shape. The lights of town glittered like the lights of a ship rising and falling far away on the sea and then dropped behind us. We left the world of fields and houses and walked with the woods crowding up beside the road until we came to a break in the trees where the parted way seemed as a split in the world, darkness on each side but the trail and the sky beyond glowing with the first light of moonrise. August tightened his grip and helped me step up onto a fall of logs. He held a branch back until I had passed. He stood in his boots in the shallow torrents of a stream and held my hand while I stepped from rock to rock. He lifted me over a stretch of wet earth.

He came for me again and again, even though I told him it was not safe. But the truth was simple. I did not want him to stay away. One night he took me to a low cave in the bluffs. He lit a fire and then took a burning stick and held it up to the walls, where thin charcoal outlines of pregnant deer and huge birds with broad wings and narrow men drawing bows at the deer had been left by some long-lost Indians when they were in charge of this land. The little figures were scorched and plain, stick figures with large bows, bulbous deer looking back over their shoulders. The men had square heads and large astonished eyes.

Another night we came to the top of a rise. August led me by the hand into the center of the clearing. He took his long coat off and spread it on the dead grass like a blanket. He lay down next to me and held my hand. He told me that he intended to build a good house for himself. He told me about the work he did with his father. He could not wait for me to meet his sister. He planned to make a trip in summer to a place up north where there were said to be a thousand lakes for fishing.

The sky brightened and darkened, just the way in sunlight a cloud casts a shadow, and then an evenly curved arc of blue-green light extended from horizon to horizon and to the very top of an endless curve of sky. It rippled like a curtain under a breeze, as if a whirlwind had come from the north with a fire folded in on itself and a strange brightness all about it. The world seemed infinite then and all because August was with me.

I shivered.

“You are cold,” August said. He rubbed my arms and smiled and tickled me and pulled at my hand and I fell down with my head against his shoulder. He put his arm around me. “I need to warm you up,” he said.

The metal smell had gone from the air. Spring would come and then summer and then it would be a year since the doctor had come and scolded my mother about Alvin, who had died anyway. And three weeks after that, it would be a year since my father had come behind the men who carried my mother into our house and laid her in her blackening dress on the bed. A year since my father held the door for those men, one of whom was August, who lay next to me now.

I propped myself on my elbow and asked him if he remembered. He sat up and pulled a long piece of sweet grass from the ground and sat chewing it thoughtfully. The sky flickered above us in undulating bands of green and blue.

He said he remembered the day. He remembered carrying her. But he did not remember anything else. He did not remember how she came to be there. He was sorry but he did not know what had happened.

“Why do you want to take his side?” I said.

“Whose side?” He seemed confused. He pitched his piece of grass into the night and turned to me and hugged me closer.

“My father’s side.”

“I am not taking your father’s side,” he said. He put his face in my hair. “I do not know your father’s side.”

“Then why will you not tell me?”

He sighed and nuzzled my hair again, and I went stiff with something I could not fail to identify as irritation.

“I cannot tell you because I do not know,” he said then. “I was driving a load of lumber. A man stepped into the street and waved me down. That was your father. That was the first time I ever laid eyes on your father. He said he wanted to put a woman in the back. She was bleeding. So we took her. He sat in back with her. He was talking to her but I could not hear a word he said. We drove to your house. We carried her inside. He never said what happened. He told us there was an accident. That was all he ever said. I do not know anything else. I swear to you. I would tell you if I knew.”

I listened to August breathe for a minute and then I stood up. I could see a yellow glimmer in the woods far off to the south, where someone must have had a house, a shed, a barn. Someplace they had made for themselves. Someplace where they intended to be safe. Maybe they had come across an ocean to put their house in that very spot. The grass rustled behind me and I heard August get to his feet. He shook his coat out and came to stand behind me. He put his coat over my shoulders. He turned me to face him and he put his arms around me as if he would warm me to my core. He told me he loved me. He told me he would always love me. He told me he would keep me safe. I leaned into him, into the warmth of him, into the scratchy comfort of his wool coat. He reached down and took my hands in his. Then he gripped them so tightly that the bones moved beneath the skin and I nearly cried out, and then I did cry out. He smiled a little and said that I must like that and then I grew angry and leaned into him harder and into the bottomless pain that felt so familiar and so much a part of me that I knew he truly loved me.

If I smiled to myself at the laundry and Inge and Johanna and Ella watched me with open curiosity as I turned to my work, I did not care. I climbed the ladder and stirred the vat. I dipped the pole and swung steaming sheets into my basket. I scrubbed the sheets until my hands bled. I saw William Oliver. But I was in the laundry room with Inge and Johanna and Ella and all he could do was come and stand next to me and examine my work. When he gave up and walked away, I smiled and shook my head and sometimes laughed. One day when I did this, he turned in the doorway and fixed me with his stare, one eyebrow raised. I ignored him. But he stayed in that doorway for a long time.

If I stood on the back steps and watched the deliveryman load the brown paper parcels into the wagon while the western horizon turned rosy with the light at the end of the day, it was only to see that night was coming. August was coming. I felt an ache in my chest like a string wound taut and taut until it is so tight and wired that it cannot slacken except if it is plucked by the right hand or else snapped in two in the waiting.

A slice of blue moonlight lay across the bottom of the garden and the wires for my mother’s bean plants carved a thin shadow across the back fence. Everywhere the night, still, cold. I worked my broom under the kitchen table. Reached down and fished a button out of the dust. Martha hummed while she washed the supper dishes.
Wait till the sun shines, Nellie.
My mother’s clock ticked in the front room. Hattie went up the stairs and after a minute, I heard her braces fall to the floor.

Something tapped on the glass over the kitchen sink and Martha bent over the dishpan to peer out the window. She was wearing an old skirt that had belonged to my mother. I do not know when we started to go into her room, when we started to take her things and wrap them around ourselves, but we had. We did not talk about it. We just did it. Hattie wore my mother’s old blue coat. Martha had her skirt. I wore her shoes. The day I took them, I told myself I was just borrowing them, that it was foolish to let a perfectly good pair of shoes go to waste, but I found a reason to wear them every day.

I could see August through the window, his shoulder and a wedge of his arm. Then he stepped away and the window went blank and glassy. I made one last pass with the broom and carried it along with the dustpan to the mudroom, where I set the dustpan on the floor. I lifted my coat from the nail by the door. Martha stepped into the doorway.

“Who is that?” she asked.

“It is nobody,” I said. “Do not think about it.”

She looked at the coat in my hands. “Where are you going?”

August tapped on the glass again.

Martha reached out and touched my sleeve. I could see that she meant to calm herself, as if self-control was something she had practiced so long and so hard that she fell into it the way another woman might fall into a bath. But she was not entirely successful. “I hope you know what you are doing,” she said. Her voice went up a little in pitch when she spoke and that was the giveaway.

“You do not need to worry,” I said.

She rolled her lips together as if considering what she might say, but she could say nothing that would matter. I was not to be stopped.

“You make that hard,” she said at last.

“Pretend you do not even know.”

“But I do know,” she said. “I do not know everything but I do know something.”

“Pretend you do not,” I said again. And all the while I was thinking: Pretend you never saw him. Pretend I go out to fly through the night. Pretend I haunt the woods by myself. Pretend I am just wild. Pretend you do not know me.

She watched me button the last button on my coat. Behind her, August stepped off the porch and stood in the yard with his back to us. “What if I tried to stop you?” she said.

“You can try,” I said. “But I am going.” In my mind, I was already gone. I was already running through the darkness holding August Bethke’s hand. I was already kissing him beneath some tree only he knew about.

“Do you know what will happen if you get caught?”

“I won’t get caught,” I said. Confident as death.

The house creaked like a ship coming undone from its moorings.

“At least tell me who he is,” Martha said.

“A boy,” I said.
My boy
, I thought.
My August.

“I can see that,” she said in a cutting voice.

I smiled. “A carpenter.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What is his name?”

“August,” I said.

“August who?”

“Bethke,” I said. I pronounced it the way August did so it sounded like Bait-ka.

“Bait-ka,” she said slowly. She stood in the doorway and turned the name over in her mouth, but this time said August Bethke and pronounced the last name the way Americans would say it, so it sounded like Beth-key. She repeated the last name again with a puzzled look on her face.

I reached for the doorknob but she suddenly took hold of me and tried to pull me back into the kitchen. “Stop,” she said, her voice urgent and fierce. “Please stop. Do not go with that boy.”

I pried her fingers from my arm. “Cut it out, Martha,” I said. “I am going.” I heard footsteps on the porch steps. August tapped on the glass again and said my name and I turned toward his voice.

“Please,” she said.

“You cannot stop me,” I said. “Do not even try.”

We walked out into the night. August took my hand and I felt the great shock of him jolt my bones. When I turned to look back, Martha stood on the porch and watched us, her thin frame tall and narrow against the dim clapboard of the house, deep shadow falling between us, my mother’s skirt blowing around her knees.

Down by the river, August led me over a gravelly beach to a small wooden boat. In the daytime these shores were bright with dry yellow reeds, and red-winged blackbirds trilled in the tall grass. At night under the moon the river shallows were gray and foamy and the marsh grasses crackled and settled and no birds flew. The river glinted silver. August pulled the boat into shore and once I stepped in, he waded into the river to lift the anchor. Then he hoisted himself over the side and dropped into the hull. He took up the oars. With even strokes he pulled us out to where the current caught us. His dark hair fell into his eyes and he pushed it back and he reached over and put his hand on my skirt. In one quick gesture, he ran his hand up my inner thigh. He let his hand rest there. I felt nothing but the thrill of that gesture and the weight of his palm. When he smiled and lifted his hand and leaned back and put his hand back on the oars, I could still feel the heaviness of his hand on me and the weight of its promise. The boat creaked beneath us.