The Other Shoe (10 page)

There were typed bulletins in the vestibule of the Old Joinery dating from February and June of 1967, and these had been preserved on onionskin, now a urine shade, on black velvet under glass:

Our own Lake Couer d'Alene one of seven most beautiful lakes in the World

No Solicitors

No Warrants
—
this Court does not do business but marriages

Marry in Haste Repent in Leisure

Stay Out of the Dominican Republic

There was a tally sheet of ceremonies performed by Justice Quinlevan each year since 1967, and no one of those years had seen fewer than eight hundred marriages. There were framed and signed portraits of Consuela Quinlevan, taken at intervals of decades, and in each of these she was deep at the same console, consumed in her Wurlitzer's swooping keyboards and pedals and stops. It was Mrs. Quinlevan who came to lead them into the Matrimonial Chamber—she explained that they had to call it that for tax reasons—but they only recognized her as Mrs. Quinlevan when she took her place at the familiar organ, for she had withered very much since the most recent of her photographs. When at last they met him, Justice Quinlevan was scarcely sturdier than his wife. He wore his wife's rouge. Another ancient couple was in attendance, seated along the wall under a placard that read W
ITNESSES
—S
UGGESTED
G
RATUITY
—$10.00
PER SIGNEE
. These were the birdlike Bernardos, she in crinoline, he in gabardine, and they spent their days waiting for moments like these when the betrothed arrived without bridesmaids or groomsmen. The Bernardos for their little fee would form the genuinely pleased and fully legal complement for a wedding party. They rose to do so. Mrs. Quinlevan's hands instantly ceased to tremble as she set them to “The Wedding March,” which she
played, verse and chorus, as if she'd only just perfected it, as if it were not a dirge, as if their progress to the altar was not a matter of a few stunted steps past ranks of empty folding chairs.

Mrs. Bernardo pressed a bouquet of cloth baby's breath into Karen's hands. Justice Quinlevan asked her a question that she could not understand, for he spoke torturously, as through a mouthful of scalding oatmeal. So he asked more simply, “Rheadhy?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, please.”

The justice's tongue, lips, and lungs were all at odds, and he was not only hard to understand but painful to hear and to see speaking. It seemed from the pace of his voice that he'd begun the ceremony, and that he was telling them a story, and Karen worried that when he got to her part, her time to recite, she would misunderstand him and fail to jump in. The justice said the word “obeedienth,” the phrase “heavnen nun nirth,” but finally, when it came to the matter of the rings, he made himself clear enough, and then he prompted them through some minimal vows, and then he invited Henry to “kidth the bohrdh.” It seemed to Karen that the justice and all his staff were addicted to the optimism of this moment; Mr. Bernardo whispered, “Kiss her, sir.” And Henry, regretfully if she was not mistaken, brushed her cheek with his lips. “Conlahnshuhns,” said Justice Quinlevan. “MidsuhnMihz Ehnday Butsuhdt.” Mrs. Quinlevan played them out the door with her powerful rendering of “Tiny Bubbles,” and they didn't go arm in arm as Karen had expected, nor hand in hand; they walked out as they had walked in, side by side, and they could still hear the Wurlitzer skirling when Henry started the truck.

The twenty-fifth of May, she thought. From now on this would be their anniversary.

They went back the long way, the flat route home that leads to the bridge that crosses to Sandpoint, and along the shores of Lake Pend Oreille and through Hope and East Hope and then upriver and back
into Montana, and they rode as if they'd driven this road many times before, as if they'd now said all they could say to each other, and they pretended that the new silence between them was comfortable. Still, this was so very much better than any trip she'd ever made as a Dent. Karen considered that if she had just seen one of the seven most beautiful lakes in the world, and if the scenery was at least equally good all the way home, then she must be a very lucky girl to live in such a lovely, large paradise. A lucky woman. She was entitled to think of herself as a woman now, and she thought that she might as well do that. Being a girl had certainly been no good.

T
HE TRAILER ON
Fitchet Creek had two bedrooms, one of them little more than a closet with no window and a sliding door for its entrance. This was the room Henry assigned himself when Karen moved in. When with crippling diffidence she tried to question the arrangement, he told her, “Women need more space.” He apologized for the fact that in the larger bedroom, her room now, tiers of bookshelves were everywhere, but Karen said that they made it seem homey; they reminded her of a quilt she'd seen hanging in some fussy old woman's sitting room, and, she said, she'd probably have time for quite a bit of reading. He'd been a long while alone here—the books were organized by labeled sections: S
EA
S
TORIES
, S
PY
S
TORIES
, W
ESTERNS
, M
ANUALS
, R
ELIGION
& P
HILOSOPHY
& H
EALTH
. The walls were of a honey-colored veneer, and Henry had contrived to make it smell of vanilla in the room where she was to sleep. She was to lie on and under goose down in her new bed, and so from the very start, he'd already given her an abundance of everything she'd asked of him, but he seemed to want nothing more than her presence in exchange, and so, though life with Henry was a remarkable improvement over anything she'd known before, the old question had yet to be answered. The terms of her marriage left her asking still, “What have I done?”

That she'd become Mrs. Brusett, she soon discovered, was a startling fact in many quarters. Principal Tanner agreed to print her
diploma that way, but he did ask if she'd consider calling in sick or making just any excuse to skip the graduation ceremony. It was her decision, of course, and he couldn't keep her away, but did she think that it would be fair to the other seniors to create all that stir when her new name was announced onstage? Wouldn't that kind of take the wind out of it for the other kids? Mrs. Henry Brusett? Could she imagine him reading that out loud in front of people? Did she want to be such a big distraction or put her new husband through what would have to be a pretty embarrassing evening for him, too?

Karen didn't want any of these things, and so, a week early and with Mr. Tanner's tepid congratulations and his promise that her diploma would be in the mail, she was allowed to be done at school; Mr. Tanner said of her last few days of class, “Why bother?”

Henry had sent her to school that day in his old Triumph, which, as soon as he'd seen her in the driver's seat, he'd pronounced
her
Triumph, “ . . . for what it's worth. It's the TR4, and they're worse than temperamental, but it happens to be runnin' strong right now, and you look good in it, so have a big time.” The car made an outsized rumbling, and it rattled from a history of use on roads for which it was never designed, but as Karen drove out of the school parking lot, summarily dismissed from the last of her old life, her life to date, and chafing a bit at the injustice and the anticlimax of it, it felt fine to shake her hair out and run through the gears, which she was already doing with precision. With the money that had been earmarked for her cap and gown, she stopped at Pearson's Supply and bought three laying hens and a newly weaned kid, a goat with a puppy's disposition, and she had these crated, and she stacked and strapped the crates into the passenger's seat and set off with the top down and her new chickens flying in place beside her. She had in mind an endless summer.

On seeing how her menagerie pleased her, and how perhaps Fitchet Creek had been a little underpopulated while he'd been its sole
tenant, Henry bought her more pullets later that week, and he bought her more goats, and because all these creatures would want feed and make fertilizer, Henry thought a garden should be made, and so early one morning the Brusetts went into a stand of lodgepole together, and by late that evening they'd decked enough poles to raise a deer fence around the new garden and to build some pens and a supplemental roof over the trailer. Henry said that during the previous year or two, a series of heavy snows had gradually crushed the trailer's roof out of shape, and so the ceiling had been leaking, but he hadn't been too bothered by it until now. He said he'd been overlooking a lot of things until she came along. He told her during their day in the lodgepoles he marveled at it, that he felt better than he had in a long, long time, and he kept saying this even as he stopped from time to time to breathe like a woman in labor and as his limp worsened until his simplest locomotion was acrobatic. “Fresh air and exercise,” he told her, “used to be those were the last things I needed to remind myself about.” Uneven ground was hard for him, or any kind of lifting, or to walk very far even on the level, but he said it was a price worth paying to get out sometimes. He said he'd been in real danger of turning useless before she showed up.

When he was feeling right, Henry liked to make things. He had a shop somewhere in the valley, on a piece of land behind the lot where he had lived with his first family. Karen imagined a space full of good light, bins filled with incomprehensible materials and tools. There, Henry could fashion from metal or wood or even from heavy fabric almost anything he thought to make, and whatever he made was for her: the pineapple carved in pine, the miniature windmill he set spinning on a stump, the spice rack. Karen once mentioned in passing her preference for eating and for sometimes sleeping out of doors, and so Henry had built the sleeping porch, built it in sections at his shop and then hauled these up the mountain and attached them to the trailer, to
each other, and all at once one day there was the enclosed porch they'd use in all but the worst weather for their dining room.

Karen guiltily preferred those times when Henry wasn't feeling well because that was their time for talk and for the routines that were theirs, their experiments—serviceberry tea, the works of Charles Dickens, her embroidery. It was the first reliable intimacy she'd ever known. Their tuneless, easy little jokes were mother's milk to her, and in the beginning, and for a long time after that, Henry was horizon enough, and it was just as well because, as they discovered before they'd been together a month, anywhere they might go together as a couple—the grocery store, the post office, ten minutes at a gas pump—these were all to be stations in a hell of swiveling chins, and checked glances, and mean and tawdry giggling. Henry and Karen Brusett caused, especially among women, an unmistakable disgust wherever they went, either that or some weird glee, and Karen wondered if it would have been so if they were not timid, if they'd flaunted their arrangement. When together in any public place, they could not avoid constant, naked staring, and neither of them enjoyed being an abomination, though it was, if anything, better than being mistaken for daughter and father. In time, they began to make most of their trips away from Fitchet Creek alone. Their pleasure in each other was odd, they knew, and must necessarily also be private.

But they did often fish Flathead Lake that first summer. Out on the water they could be two people seen distantly on a boat, of no particular sex, or age, or relationship, and the mackinaw fishing was very good that year in the channel between Wild Horse and Cromwell islands. Also in that season their farmstead burst into production, and they were eating fresh eggs every morning and an eventually obscene abundance of zucchini and the fancy pods from a Chinese pea vine. They built the roof over the trailer and rolled out asphalt roofing over
it, a redundant forest green. Cordwood accumulated on the rise, cabbage grew. Henry, with a new tan over his faded and ancient one, was looking better, too.

“Wouldn't it be great,” she asked one day, “if the ground never froze? That would be a dream of mine.”

“Yeah, but it does,” said Henry, “up here it freezes hard, and long about February, we'll be like twins in somebody's belly. A person's only got so many secrets and tips, you know—you could run out of things to say. There's only so much. You probably better have a hobby.”

“We'll talk,” she said. “We just do, don't you think? Like we're makin' up for lost time?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But there's only so much a person can say.”

He saw the dust on every surface, the rust in every mechanism, and his resignation would at times wear on Karen until she noticed that her husband was too old for her. It was not as though she never noticed.

Hunting alone that fall, she filled both their deer tags. Henry said he was feeling a little used up, feeling like he'd better not try the woods again for a while, and he'd started spending many of his days doing some secretive thing at his shop. So she hunted alone, and she toured the National Bison Range in her Triumph, which she also drove to Missoula one Saturday to hear a droopy, famous folk singer. She drove well into cold weather with the top down, and every mile of it put her that much farther from high school and her time as Miss Dent. They could have their Jesus and their periodic tables—she had Henry and her little income and her luxuries, and so, she supposed, she could let bygones be bygones.