The Sisters (14 page)

How ever could there have been so many lights in those boxes? Hans had lined the white lights, now glowing like tiny squashed moons, all along the lower edge of the roof, and then he’d run the red and green side by side up the sharp edges, right to the chimney. Her stomach lurched—Hans might have fallen—but the feeling faded instantly into a warm delight, as if the lights were inside her. Hans had saved the blue bulbs to trace the porch roof and posts, making a soft, sleepy, embracing glow. Bertie looked and looked. She wasn’t in her own yard; this wasn’t her house, but some strange, wonderful, glittering place where her big, aproned body burned away, and she, released, drifted into that gleaming color.

“Aren’t you glad Daddy bought so many?”

Bertie stared at Rainey for a moment, struggling to understand who she was and why she was speaking.

“Didn’t he do a good job?” Rainey said, leaving Bertie’s side to hug Hans.

Bertie looked again at the house.

Yes, it was pretty.

She rubbed her arms against the cold. When the light bill came, Hans wouldn’t be so pleased with himself. “Y’all come in for supper now,” she said, heading back toward the house. “I’ve got more to do after I clean everything up.”

*   *   *

After supper, Rainey and Hans worked on the tree, humming along with the radio. When Bertie finished the dishes, she cooked the fudge, beating it with slow, quiet strokes so she could hear
Christmas with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir,
coming into their living room, all the way from Salt Lake City, Utah. She sent Rainey to bed at ten o’clock, and at eleven she turned off the radio and told Hans she would wait up for Alma and Gordon. She ignored the moan he gave when he got up from his chair. His hip ached him most nights, but he was sure to feel the pain of his hours on the roof for the rest of the winter.

Bertie turned on the lamp beside her chair and picked up
Reader’s Digest
, but her eyes were too heavy to follow the words. She would have liked to go on to bed—she had to be up early to put the turkey on—and she would be more comfortable if she changed into her nightgown and housecoat and got her hairnet on, but she’d be embarrassed for Gordon to see her in such a state.

It was selfish of the Crisps to keep the kids out so late, but they were the kind that had to have everything their way, and just so. She worried some that Alma might have a bad time of it, since Gordon was just like them, but Alma had made up her mind to marry into that family, so there wasn’t a thing Bertie could do about it except to go up and help with the baby and, here and there, urge Alma to take up for herself more.

The sound of the key tumbling the lock startled Bertie from a doze, and for a moment, she couldn’t think what was happening. Alma and Gordon were just coming through the door, whispering to each other as they set their suitcases on the floor.

“You ought not to have waited up, Mother,” Alma said.

Bertie stood up and smoothed her dress. “You must have got to Gordon’s parents’ late.”

“No, no,” said Gordon. “We made it by four.” He picked up the suitcases and pushed past Bertie. “Same room?’ He didn’t wait for an answer.

“So,” Bertie said, giving Alma a quick kiss on the cheek—hardly a cheek at all, so dry and taut. “Did you have a nice dinner?”

Alma plucked at the fingers of her gloves, nodding.

“What did you have?”

Alma laid her gloves—such fine leather, they might be silk—beside the radio and loosened her scarf. “Roast duckling with an orange glaze,” she said. “And a little salad.”

“That’s all?”

“It was plenty, Mother, really.”

“You’re not eating enough.” The girl was so thin, a little twist could snap her in two. “Let me get you something,” Bertie said. “Come into the kitchen.”

Alma slipped off her coat and laid it carefully across Hans’s chair. “I’ll drink a cup of tea,” she said, “but I can make it. Why don’t you go to bed?”

“I’ll get the tea,” Bertie said. She picked up Alma’s things to take to the hall closet. “Get your nightgown on and come in when you’re ready.”

The kitchen light blinded her when she flipped it on, and she knocked into a chair that Rainey hadn’t pushed back up to the table. She put the teakettle on the stove and then pressed a finger to the block of fudge. It had set up just right, so she cut along the lines she had marked and settled the pieces into a tin lined with waxed paper—all but four, which she arranged on a plate for Alma.

Alma slipped up behind her and reached into the cabinet for a cup and saucer. “Please, Mother,” she said. “I can do that. I know you’ll be up early.” She hadn’t changed into her nightclothes. Under the bright kitchen light, she looked even thinner. She’d always been too skinny, but since she’d taken up with Gordon, she’d gotten even scrawnier, and the last few times Alma had visited, Bertie noticed she mostly just pushed the food around on her plate.

Bertie blamed Gordon’s mother. That woman was nothing but a bundle of sticks. The time or two Bertie had met her, Mrs. Crisp complained, on the one hand, that she had to send every stitch of clothing she bought to the seamstress, since she could never find anything small enough, and, on the other, she chattered about what hard work it was to keep trim. Bertie had noticed too how Mrs. Crisp soaked up compliments on the fancy meals she fixed but never took a bite of anything. That must be where Alma had gotten it.

Well, she just wouldn’t wait until June to go up. She’d pack some things and go with Alma and Gordon day after tomorrow, when they drove back to Ohio. She could do the cooking and look after Alma. Hans and Rainey would just have to see to themselves.

Bertie followed Alma to the table and set the plate of fudge in front of her. “Did you bring a warm-enough nightgown? I can get you another blanket for the bed.”

“I’ll be fine, Mother.”

“You eat that fudge, now. It’s the kind you like.”

Alma picked up a piece and sucked on the end of it, then put it back on the plate.

“Doesn’t that taste good to you?”

“It’s delicious, Mother. Thank you. I’ve had enough.”

Bertie smacked her hands on the table. “This has got to stop! Now’s not the time to be worrying yourself about getting too fat or listening to any of that nonsense from you know who. The doctor will want you to put on thirty or forty pounds—you just ask him.”

Alma stared into her cup. “He said twenty or twenty-five.”

“Well, then,” Bertie said, nudging the plate of fudge toward Alma. “This will make a good start. And tomorrow, you be sure to fill up your plate and eat everything.”

Alma still didn’t touch the fudge.

“How about some crackers?” Bertie said. “Or a piece of toast?”

Alma took a sip of tea and then pushed the cup away. “Nothing, thank you.”

“Is it the cooking smells that upset your stomach?”

Alma stood up and took her tea to the sink and poured it out. She rinsed the cup and set it on the drainboard.

Bertie stayed at the table. “I’ll go back home with you on Saturday,” she said. “I’ll do the cooking until you feel like you can be in the kitchen without being sick.”

“It’s not necessary, Mother.”

“Alma, you have got to eat. If you won’t see to it, I will. You have to put on weight so the baby’s good and strong.”

Soft, glassy clinks stirred from where Alma was standing, her back to Bertie. She was putting away the supper dishes. When that was done, she wiped the counter and refolded all the kitchen towels on the bars. At last she came back to the table and stood behind the chair, gripping the back. “There is no baby, Mother.”

Bertie felt like all her insides squeezed up and drained right out her feet. For a few seconds, Alma, and even the kitchen itself, drained away, too. Bertie pressed at her throat to stop the words from sliding off with everything else. “When?”

Alma looked at the calendar tacked on the side of the refrigerator. “About three weeks.” Her voice was a little weak perhaps, but steady. How could she be so calm? Bertie wanted to get up, to put her arms around her daughter, but that cool voice froze her in her seat.

“You didn’t call,” Bertie began, and then her throat closed up. She could see herself sitting on Alma’s bed, holding her and rocking her like a child, telling her everything would be all right. She could see it all, even though it had never happened, not ever.

“There was nothing to be done,” Alma said. “Nothing you could do. Mrs. Weigel was very kind.” Mrs. Weigel was the wife of the foot doctor Gordon had gone to Ohio to work with. Not family. “She stayed with me the first afternoon I was back from the hospital, and then she and a couple of women from her church came over the next day to do the cleaning for me and to make dinner for Gordon.”

Bertie stared at Alma, trying to see something of herself, something of Hans, in this composed stranger who stood so straight and spoke so primly. Her head was pounding. Hans would blame her. He would never say it, but he would blame her somehow.

Alma went on as though she were telling a story about nothing worse than dropping a bag of groceries. “And then Mrs. Murchison—you remember Mrs. Murchison, Mother. She drove over from Greenwood and stayed until last Tuesday.” Bertie saw her daughter’s lips quiver. Alma pressed her fingers to her mouth and closed her eyes for a moment before she spoke again. “She and Gordon get on so well. He says he’s never seen the house so clean. And she left me with several recipes for things Gordon especially likes.”

Bertie’s head still throbbed, but her insides had settled back into their usual places. She could see Alma clearly now.

“I know Daddy will be disappointed.” Alma released the chair and took a step back. “Thank you for the tea, Mother,” she said, “I think we’d both best get to bed.” She paused only for a second before turning toward the doorway. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

E
IGHT

The River

April 1954

Juniper, Kentucky

MABEL

N
O ONE KNEW HOW THE
fire had started. At least no one Mabel and Daisy stopped to talk to—a few bent, hollow people they saw picking through the smoldering remains of houses, barns, toolsheds. “It’d be down to the woods somewheres,” one man had told them. He didn’t look up from his work, just kept knocking the soot off one thing and another, sometimes choosing a still-unrecognizable item to drop in a metal bucket beside him. “It’s always the woods.”

A woman in a faded housecoat printed all over with blue hydrangeas—what she’d been wearing when she saw the fire coming over the ridge toward the house four mornings before—offered another theory. “Started at the lumber mill, I’d say. All them saws they got down there’s so old. Old wiring. Just waiting for a fire. And here with this bad drought. You think folks’d be more careful.”

Someone else suggested the fire must have started at the high school, since there was nothing left of it. “Kids, you know. Fooling with chemicals maybe. Too scared to speak up.” One or two others blamed the power company for not tending soon enough to a wire that had come down in the rainless thunderstorm that hit the night before all of Juniper had flung its belongings into anything with wheels—cars, pony carts, wagons—and run for their lives.

Most people agreed with the first man: The fire had likely started deep in the woods that surrounded Juniper and that for generations had kept the sawyers employed—probably a third of the men in the town—but they had different notions about how. Campers from up north who didn’t know about the drought, a lit cigarette tossed from a passing car with paper cups or hamburger wrappings. Or it could be arson, some said—maybe out of pure meanness, maybe for work. One man shook his head when he said to Mabel, “But you wouldn’t know about that, not being from around here.” He shook his head again and returned to his sifting.

Back in the car, Daisy pushed open a wing, then thought better of it when a breeze carried a few cinders through the small window. “Why didn’t you tell him?”

“What for?” Mabel said, hearing an edginess in her voice that took her by surprise. “I don’t know him. Why open up a round of questions about my past with some stranger who’s just lost his?” She could feel Daisy looking at her, feel her daughter’s mind weighing whether to ask another question or let the matter drop.

Daisy took another route. “What did he mean about arson for work?”

“When there’s a bad fire,” Mabel said, “a real wildfire, the Forest Service can’t get people here quick enough, so they count on local men to help, and they pay them something. And then there’s plenty of building work after.”

Daisy stared out the window at ash heap after ash heap. Except for an occasional brick wall still half-standing, or a warped woodstove, it would have been hard to identify the heaps as former houses. “Not much point if somebody did do that,” she said. “It doesn’t look like there’s anything to rebuild. The town’s all but gone.”

Mabel drove on slowly, watching the road for debris, trying to find her feelings about what had become of Juniper. All around, the blackened remains of trees poked up from the ground, giants’ matchsticks, charred, splintered, broken. Daisy noticed them, too. “How is it they can still stand?”