The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay (15 page)

Dad was hurt bad, but he made it. He could hardly walk yet. And he wanted them home, Avis and Idella.

She knew what that meant—his girls, to take care of him. Emma, living over with Aunt Beth and Uncle Paul, was too small. Idella sighed and turned to the window. Clouds were moving in. The whole sky seemed lower. There wasn’t much to see now anyway, just trees. She’d seen enough of them. God help us, Idella thought. Soon enough they’d be home.

 

It was getting toward twilight when the train finally pulled in to the stop near their farm—not even a station, just a place to take on water. Dalton was there, tall and lean as a post, propped up against the wagon, somberly waiting. He was squinting down at the tracks, his hands in his pockets. Even in a busy place, Dalton seemed alone.

Idella and Avis dropped their bags off the train and dragged them away from the tracks. Avis stared up at him, her arms pulled down from the weight of her suitcase. “Aren’t you even going to say hello?”

Dalton looked down and smiled as much as he ever did, that queer little half smile of his. Idella always felt that he was holding back a secret, as if there were something more he wanted to say, but she never dared ask what. Her brother never talked much with anyone, and when he did, it wasn’t to say much of anything.

“Well, if it ain’t Avis-Mavis.” He reached over, tousled her hair, and nodded at Idella. “Better give me those bags.” He hoisted them up into the wagon. “I hope you got your learnin’ good. ’Cause you’re ’bout done with it now, I’d say.”

Idella clamped her mouth tight and stared ahead at the nodding neck of Blackie pulling them home. They rode along in silence. Dalton had not been allowed to go to school in Maine. Dad needed him on the farm to help with the fish and the lobsters. He’d been to the local one-room school some off and on, and he could read well enough and do figures. Idella didn’t know how Dalton felt about his sisters getting to go, because he never expressed an opinion. She clutched at the book she still carried in her hands.

“He’s fiery. Get ready.” Dalton didn’t turn to look at them. “He can’t get up yet for more’n a few minutes. Hates lying there.” He pulled the reins to slow the horse over a muddy patch of road. “Been home four days. Seems longer.”

Idella noted the houses of the few neighbors as they rolled past—Uncle Sam’s, the Doncasters’, the Pettigrews’ in the distance. All the houses were slanted and gray and sparse-looking, sticking up out of the flat land like rotten teeth.

When they turned off the road toward the house, Idella smelled the sea. A deep breath filled her up. She didn’t know she’d missed it. Tippie, the Doncaster dog, came up barking at the back wheels.

The farmhouse was like all the other houses along the road, with two bedrooms upstairs and a spring kitchen attached to the main house. Most had been built by the same men. Dad had built theirs himself, with Uncle Sam’s help, just before Dalton was born. He had put it on the high cliff overlooking the bay that pounded and raged beneath them. Mother had wanted it there.

Idella could hear the restless water while she lay in bed or while she was cooking suppers. The house was exposed and unsheltered, perched so near the cliff. In winter the press of the winds wrapped around its corners and pushed on the walls. Steady streams of cold air whistled under the windowsills, prodding the loose shingles that Dad never got to fixing.

Mother had loved to hear the sound of the water far below, crashing over the rocks. One of the strongest memories Idella had was of standing in the middle of the kitchen during a fierce storm, with her mother crouched at her side. Idella had been afraid. “Listen, Idella, listen. Isn’t that a wonderful thing—to hear the ocean? Can you hear it crashing? And the wind howling and howling. And here we are safe in our own home. Aren’t we lucky!” Idella had not been so sure, even then, but she had tried to smile like her mother. She’d trailed after her the whole afternoon, one fist clutched in the folds of her skirts. Her mother didn’t seem to mind. She’d sigh sometimes and pat Idella’s head, but she never told her to let go.

Dad hated the wind and loved it both. He’d shake his fist and rail against it, and then he’d start talking about his dead wife, saying it was her damn fault for perching them all on the goddamned brink like that and then dying. When he was drunk one time, late on a cold winter night, Idella heard Dad talking as the wind beat mercilessly at the windows. He spoke as if her mother had come back to haunt them. It had scared her. He’d started out loud, raving. Idella had snuck to the top of the stairs to listen, thinking at first that someone else was really down there talking to him. But Dad had ended up quiet, standing in front of a window, his head pressed against the glass. She had gone back to her own bed and cried. She missed her mother, too. Everything had changed when she died, everything.

 

“You’d best go on in. He’ll be waitin’. He raves, then he rests. You’ll see.” Dalton rode the wagon up close to the door, and his two sisters jumped down and got their bags. Then he clucked to Blackie and headed him over to the barn. “I’ll be in for supper.”

“Come on,” Idella said to Avis, who was looking longingly at the open fields, still visible in the soft late light of June. “We better go in.”

“I’m coming.” Avis jabbed her feet into the dirt, making powdery bursts. “I just don’t want to see blood.”

“There won’t be blood. It’s all bandaged. You won’t see a thing. Come on, now.” Idella hoped she was right. She took her thin jacket from her shoulders and wrapped it around the red book she’d carried so carefully. She had an urge to hide the book, to keep it to herself.

She opened the front door and called tentatively. “Dad? You here?”

“Where else would I be?” Dad’s voice came tearing out from his bedroom. “Get in here, you two. Let’s see what Aunt Martha’s done to you. Let’s see how much you’ve grown.”

They set down their bags, Idella placing her covered book on a bench under the windowsill. Then they walked cautiously across the kitchen and pushed back the half-open door to their father’s room. It smelled bad. The chamber pot was on the floor beside the bed. No one had emptied it. Right in the middle of the braided rug, slopped over. Dirty clothes and empty glasses were strewn about the floor. And discarded bandages.

In the middle of the room, lying in a tangle of bedclothes, was Dad, one leg, the good leg, sticking out from the bottom of the bed, hairy and bare. The sheet was stretched across his middle and wrapped up under an armpit. One of the cotton quilts was wadded on the floor. The washbasin lay on the floor beside him, filled with old water. A rusty layer, like fine sand, had settled on the bottom. Old blood.

It was difficult, at first, to focus on him. The evening shadows were like a gray blanket draped over the entire room. Finally Idella’s gaze rested on Dad’s face. He was gaunt and pale. All the color seemed to have gone right out of him—except for his eyes. They were red-rimmed and fiery all around the edges. She could tell that, even in the dim light. His hair had been cut in a strange way, very short, probably by someone at the hospital. He was stubbly and unshaven.

“Damn glad you’re back. I been trapped in this goddamn house like a hornet in a damned jar.” They stood in front of him, Avis strangely shy, hanging behind her bigger sister. He started to rouse himself to a sitting position but was jerked back down as though by an unseen hand. “Son of a bitch.” His face closed up, his eyes squeezed shut, and his breathing became slow and audible.

Idella and Avis stood before him with lowered eyes and clenched fists. Idella had never seen him weakened before or showing pain. It embarrassed her.

Finally he let out a long, slow breath and opened his eyes. “It grabs me still, like a claw.” Idella and Avis nodded. His voice was tired, the blast gone out of it. “It’s healing, mind you. I’ll be on two feet. But it stiffens, see, and there’s goddamned lightning when I try to move it.” He pointed with one hand toward the bandaged mass below his torso. Again the girls stood there nodding. “It come as near to my body as it could, the doctor said, without goin’ in it.” He closed his eyes again. When he opened them, he whispered, “I wanted my girls back. I wanted you with me.” He lay still, spent, and quietly eyed the scrawny creatures before him. He smiled and nodded. “I wanted my girls. . . .” His voice trailed off, and he closed his eyes.

Idella and Avis stood together at the foot of the bed. When a ripple of slow breathing moved down his belly, they realized he had drifted into sleep. “He don’t look right,” Avis whispered.

Idella said nothing. She had never seen his face like this before. His mouth was a little too open. It made her uncomfortable. “Come on,” she whispered. “Let’s leave him be.” She and Avis tiptoed out of the dim bedroom. Idella would have to spend all of the next day making order in the house. It must have been bad even before the accident. Now it was beyond words. But that could all wait till tomorrow.

Mrs. Doncaster had baked a pot of beans and left it for them on the stove. That was a help. Avis was ready to eat the beans cold, but Idella insisted on lighting a fire and heating them through. There was nothing to go with them, but the girls didn’t care. They had to gather dishes from every surface and wash them in cold water before they could even eat off them. When the beans were ready, Idella sent Avis out to the barn to get Dalton. They all three sat around the table, not saying much, till the only sound left was Dalton scraping the spoon across his plate. All Idella could feel was the heaviness of being back, like a weight that made it hard even to breathe.

Suddenly from Dad’s room came a yell. “Where the hell’s my supper? I brought you all the way home by train, goddamn it, and you’re going to sit out there and let me rot lying in here on my backside? I smell beans.”

Dalton abruptly pushed back his chair and stood. “I been taking it from him four days now. I’m ’bout done with it. I got used to bein’ on my own, with him in the hospital, and I won’t be goin’ backwards. He can’t hit me no more. Be sleeping in the barn tonight. Animals is better company than the likes and smell of him.”

Tears started streaming down Idella’s face. She felt all alone in this godforsaken place. She watched as Dalton walked over to the door and opened it, stepping out into the night without even a glance back. Avis sat crumpled in her seat. From the bedroom Dad’s voice grew louder. “Where the hell are you? Della, bring me something to eat!”

Without a word Idella got up and scooped a plate of beans out of the warm pot. Wiping her eyes with her sleeve, she stood for a moment in front of the stove, until she was done with her crying for sure. Then she quietly walked into the bedroom with the plate of beans.

“Give me a hand, goddamn it. Help me sit up.”

She propped his pillow behind him as best she could with one hand and gave him the warm plate with the other.

“Get rid of this mess, will you, Dell?” Dad waved his hand around the room, spilling a spoonful of beans across his blanket as he did it. “Having you back’s goin’ to make things a damn lot easier around here. Your cookin’s a hell of a lot better than mine and Dalton’s, or that goddamned hospital slop they threw at me.”

Idella’s foot touched the cold china washbasin on the floor. She bent down to pick it up and carry it out. It was so full and heavy that some of it spilled over her bare foot, cold and clammy. She stared down at the dark stain the water made on the floor. Enough had spilled to make a stream that followed the slant of the floorboards, heading out toward the kitchen. She looked into the bowl, the brown and bloody water still lapping the edges. It made her dizzy and ill. She could not breathe this stifling air, heavy with the smells of sickness.

“What’re you standing there for?”

Idella lifted her head and walked unsteadily into the kitchen, past Avis, who had kept herself in the shadows as best she could.

“Let me out, Avis,” Idella said, “or I’ll be sick in the middle of the floor.”

Avis ran over and opened the kitchen door. “Where you going, Della?” Idella walked past her without a word, out into the middle of the road that led between the house and barn. She stopped, still holding the basin of dirty water, and took a deep breath. She had to get air into her lungs. Clean air. She could hear the water sluicing between the rocks far below, at the bottom of the cliff. The tide was coming in.

She was flooded with impulses—to walk to the rocky edge and gaze down into the blackness where she knew the water was; to run, escape like a deer, through the field and into the woods.

She dragged her bare feet against the earth, feeling small rocks between her toes, scraping clammy wetness from the tops of her feet. She started circling, slowly, turning in small circles, her head bent back to the sky. Stars and clouds skittered across the moon like smoke. She started to circle faster. The stars blurred into tiny streaks. Idella held the basin away from her, at arm’s length, and started spinning and spinning. Water spewed from the edges of the bowl in a scattering circle. Cold droplets spattered her arm. The ground felt gritty and wonderful. She could see, in a blur, little Avis standing in the kitchen doorway, lit from within, watching.

Idella opened her mouth. It filled with wind. A sound flowed out of her, a soft and steady gust. The water basin’s weight was pulling her now, round and round and round with the sound. Suddenly the words to the poem rose up within her and poured out into the fresh, wonderful air. “‘Life is real! Life is earnest! / And the grave is not its goal.’” She spun over near the edge of the cliff and released the china basin, opening her hands to the black cavern of air. The basin flew from her, a white vessel cast out into the darkness. She spun lightly away on tiptoe. Somewhere, far below, it crashed. Dalton came to the barn door and looked out. Idella saw his lean silhouette, one arm reaching overhead against the doorframe, watching her spin.

She slowed and looked up into the night sky. The sound coming out of her softened to a flutter and became the sound of her breathing. She planted her feet in a broad stance in the shaggy grass. The stars were swirling overhead, dizzy in a bright, bright sky. Idella let her knees buckle. She lowered herself clumsily backward, until she could feel the long, cool field grass down her whole length.