The Sisters (38 page)

Grace pointed to the mandrels in plain sight in front of her, explaining these were two of the half dozen she’d made herself with blocks of wood, clamps and old hand drills, or variously sized iron rods heated and bent to form cranking handles. On one, she’d left a fine gold wire partly coiled. Guiding the wire with one hand, Grace turned the crank slowly so the woman could see four new links take shape.
Not so difficult,
she imagined the woman thinking, which was why Grace was glad she’d set up the second mandrel with a finished coil of heavy-gauge bronze. She tapped cutting nicks with her chisel and then showed the woman another bronze coil she’d already nicked and released from the mandrel. Grace stretched the coil slightly open, then snipped off a dozen rings. She offered the snips to the woman, who grasped the tool confidently, but even with the strength of both hands, she had trouble cutting a single link.

Grace took the snips back and quickly cut the rest of the coil. Then she set one ring in the mouth of her pliers and, with a second pair of pliers, showed how to butt the ends together to close the ring. “When I’m doing mail armor,” she said, “I solder them.”

She worked until she had a tiny pile of closed rings, which she then began joining to open rings in a complex variation on a King’s Chain. She could have demonstrated with an easy four-in-one, but she didn’t like these dabblers who called themselves artisans. In a few minutes, she had a slender bronze cocoon, which she laid across her fingertip and held out to the woman. “It’s an awful lot of work for what you get,” the woman said before stepping off to the next booth to try to figure out, Grace supposed, whether there might be a shortcut to making raku pottery.

She wished now she’d brought the hauberk with her. The men especially liked to try on the shirt of mail, but no one ever offered to buy it, and it took up too much display space. It was the jewelry that sold, the jewelry and the mesh evening bags that would make it possible for her and Ken to fix the roof, put tires on the truck, and keep Pilot in grain and hay if the summer turned out to be dry.

Grace opened the box of bronze links she’d cut last night and spread the strip of mail cloth on the table in front of her. She was making the coif with Ken in mind, just as she had made the hauberk and the chausses, hoping he’d finally let her gird him with her armor, but he would refuse even to try the coif on, just as he had the other pieces, and Grace would have to snip apart the finished head covering and make it larger so more average-size men at craft fairs could pretend to be knights for five minutes.

Mail was what she and Ken argued about most. He didn’t mind her making the jewelry, like glistening lace. But the armor—he wouldn’t hear her reasons for that, not that she’d ever managed to express them very well. When she offered him the mail shirt, he burned a hole in her the same as if she’d tried to force an M16 into his arms.

She stumbled to explain. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “Mail tells us who we are. How vulnerable life is. How precious.” But he pushed away from her, not even trying to understand what she meant.

Grace thought of mail like she thought of her POW bracelet, like she thought of wedding rings—her own wedding ring. They weren’t guarantees against the treachery of life; nor were they talismans with the power to prevent any breach. The bracelet, the ring, the mail were only commitments to hope, to what might be—full of longing, with best intentions.

Grace had tried again to tell Ken this morning while he packed his rucksack with water, cheese, and the flatbread she’d made last night. She tried while he saddled up Pilot, tried to tell him all she wanted was to wrap everyone she loved in mail made just for them—Ken, Pilot, the cats, the goats, and Charlemagne, now stretched dozing at her feet, one magnificent ear pricked up to catch any sign of danger. Grace would wrap up Mother, who wouldn’t understand any better than Ken did. And if Grandma were here, Grace would make special mail for her, too—the strongest, with tiny riveted rings, so tightly woven no arrow could pierce.

Millions of years of human life, and still there was no more arduous battle than crossing the border into someone else’s heart. Or to stand aside and wave him across your own. Maybe it wasn’t possible to know another person, not entirely. Maybe it wasn’t possible to do more than show the desire to know, offering some sort of symbol, creating a touchstone.

Or perhaps the struggle was only in her own family. They had all been raised up on secrets—things never expressed but linked through time to all the other members. Though Grace was sure she didn’t know her sister at all—knew her less than anyone else, in spite of the shared events of their childhood—she sometimes wanted to gird Lynn, too, against the tangled secrets and what they had wrought. Grace yearned to believe Lynn was more than she appeared—a woman obsessed with money and public attention—but she suspected that a lot of her sister’s causes were driven by the thrill of being on the local news or the subject of a front-page article. Still, there must be something else, something deeper that had made Lynn give her first dollar to Amnesty International, something besides a photo op that made her raise her first picket sign.

Mother was nearly as much of a stranger, making allusions to dreams she’d once had without ever saying what they were. What was it, Grace longed to know, that made her mother so perpetually unhappy, always looking at the rest of them as if they’d done something to betray her? Ken had that look sometimes, too, oftener every year since she had moved with him to Pilgrim’s End. She didn’t know him, either, after all their years together, but at least she understood, or thought she understood, why she never would.

He’d told her in fragments about Vietnam—the constant feeling of slime and filth from the heat; the way you learned, the very first day, to tense at the snap of a twig or the rustle of grass; the way you had to get close to the men in your unit and then had to forget that closeness in a second if the guy stepped on a mine in front of you. The way, after the explosion, you were ready to burn everything in sight, blow up anybody who got between you and your pain. He’d learned all this, he said, and much more, in less than three weeks in the bush.

Then, on his twentieth day, he was captured by the Vietcong and he began to learn how to be a prisoner of war. The only thing he’d ever told her about those fifty-seven months—1,739 days—was the time when four jailers held one of the other prisoners down on a rough-cut table while another guy with a knife sliced into the prisoner’s belly to extract his appendix. The screaming was something he’d never forget, Ken said, and Grace wondered what worse must have happened to him if this was the thing he could manage to tell.

Of all the people Grace had ever loved, it was Grandma Bertie she’d known best, but that knowing had come so late, in the one lucid day she had before the second stroke. They had all been so hopeful. Grandma had awakened the Friday morning after the first stroke, talking normally and asking for some breakfast. Mother called Lynn, and though she was angry when her elder daughter said she would delay her visit for another day, Mother had felt easy enough to go on to work when Grace said she would stay.

For a long time that day, she and Grandma had talked about nothing, the way people do—the fact that the eggs weren’t hot and needed salt; the way the nurse with the red hair bossed all the others; whether or not the weatherman would be right in his prediction that it would snow overnight. And then Grandma had asked about Ken, and Grace had said, as she had the day before, that she was thinking of leaving him.

“It’s because he won’t marry you,” Grandma said.

“No, that’s not it at all. It’s the other way around. Whenever I say anything about leaving, he tries to talk me into getting married.” Grace could see this upset her grandmother, so she clarified. “I’m not against marriage,” she said. “But he only asks me when he thinks I’m about to walk out. I love him. I do.”

And she did. Grace knew she did. Hard as it was to really recognize what was love and what wasn’t, she knew she loved Ken because any time she tried even to think maybe she didn’t, every hair on her body stood up in protest. She reached out for Bertie’s hand. The grip was strong. “I just feel sad when I’m with him—just a little sad, like you do when it’s rained all day. And then when he goes off into the woods—he stays sometimes for a week, ten days—I feel better. Happier. Even though I miss him.”

She did not tell her grandmother then what remained true even now: that she and Ken still—after twelve, thirteen years together—made love with more intensity than in their first weeks, as if somehow their bodies believed that the only answer to anything lay in the other’s flesh. They clung to each other all night, but in the morning, they untangled their limbs without looking the other in the eye, and if they hadn’t been arguing the day before, they went about their chores, talking quietly, but only when necessary. When they were angry, there was little difference: In the glow of the oil lamp, they still kissed and clawed hungrily, still wound themselves together in the darkness, still separated in the morning, talking a little less than usual, a little more coolly.

There was a brief commotion in the hallway outside Grandma’s room, with men and women rushing past with carts and IV bags, calling out codes. “Somebody’s in trouble,” Grandma said, squeezing Grace’s hand and looking into the hall, where the people had been. She said, “It tore your Grandpa up awful bad when they wouldn’t take him for the war—on account of his leg. I told him he didn’t have any business trying to sign up at his age—I guess he was about forty then, maybe a little older—but he said every man had to do his part. I said to him, ‘What about these children? You mean to tell me you’re going off and leaving me with these children?’ and he said, ‘There’s lots of other men with children going over. For their children.’ When he got back home, after they’d turned him away, I was glad. But I wish now I hadn’t acted so much like I was. It put something up between us that never did pass.”

“But it’s different with Ken, Grandma. He was drafted.”

“Let me finish.” Her grandmother gestured toward the plastic water pitcher on the table beside the bed. Grace poured her a cup. She drank it all and held the cup out for a refill. “There was a boy that lived a few doors down the street,” she said. “He went off to the war like he was going to a party. He came back and wasn’t never the same. Wouldn’t talk to anybody, hardly ever poked his nose outside the house, couldn’t work.”

“But you hear that kind of thing all the time,” Grace said impatiently. Grandma was missing the point about Ken. “It’s how we’ve been taught to think about Vietnam vets—all those reports about the drug abuse, Agent Orange, all those analysts looking for a way to explain why some guy shoots his family, thinking they’re the enemy. Nobody ever talks about the ones who came home just fine, got on with things. There must be thousands of them. Everybody just points backward at an old cliché that doesn’t really mean anything. Of course war changes people—everything does. You can’t blame everything on the war.”

“That’s not what I’m saying, girl.” Grandma drank the rest of her water and settled back against the pillows. “Not what I’m saying.” She closed her eyes, as if trying to see the words ready before her. “Your grandpa, that boy down the road, that gray-headed man of yours, and Jim Butcher, I’m pretty sure—”

“Who? Who’d you say?”

“My stepdaddy.”

Grace struggled to remember if her grandmother had ever mentioned this man.

“My daddy was about to get sent over to France, but then he died of that bad flu that was everywhere. I was too little to remember, but Mama kept the telegram. Seems like she told us just before she married him that he’d been over there, too—Jim Butcher, I mean. In the war.” Bertie shook her head as if to clear it. “I think sometimes about how maybe that was what made him so mean—or maybe just meaner. I don’t know. What I’m saying … it’s not just wars—and maybe not the things that go on, the fighting and such, which I guess is mighty hard to go through. I mean it’s when something happens—like a war, but not only a war, not just that. Something that makes you see that what you thought would happen won’t ever be. Not ever. Something can happen to change your life so sudden, you can’t get over it fast enough. And so you do things you wouldn’t ever have thought of doing. Maybe hurt other people. And that changes things for them, too, all in a line.”

Grace had never heard her grandmother talk like this. She worried that the effort of trying to gather what seemed like meandering thoughts would be too much for her overburdened heart, and Grace eyed the monitors nervously.

“Like me,” Grandma said. “I never got over my sister leaving like she did.”

“Mabel?”

Her grandmother lifted her head from the pillow and looked at Grace, startled. “What do you know about Mabel?”

“Her picture, remember? It fell out of a book we were looking at together. I was just a little girl. It fell out, and when I went to pick it up, you said her name really quick and then made me leave the room. That was the only time.”

Grandma nodded and let her head fall back on the pillow. “I remember now.”

Then, in fits and starts, as if she were pulling out stitches that had grown deeply into the skin, she told Grace a strange story about how she’d been in love with a boy named Wallace, how she and her sister, Mabel, used to plan that one day they’d get away from their stepfather, and how on the day she was happiest—her graduation day—she came home to find the sheriff at the house, cutting her stepfather down from a rope in the barn and telling her that her sister and Wallace had run off together.