“That’s exactly what they were designed for!” the woman said.
That policeman didn’t understand. He had never fallen asleep with the bulk of a raccoon in his bed. That humped heat off the humped back. The chatter. The weight of animals. Their tails. She wanted her own tail, she dreamt of it, and when she woke in her bed tailless she felt amputated, as though something that was by rights hers had been taken away. At least she could live with the tails of others. Sometimes there were two raccoons in the bed, and one spring a set of kits. If animals weren’t meant to live in houses, how come they learned to open the refrigerator, work the kitchen faucets? She wasn’t a bad-looking woman, said the neighbors. She could marry, have children. As though the dreams of other people were hers! As though what people found attractive was likewise attractive to a raccoon. She preferred animals. She dreamt, like animals did, of chasing things, and undeserved beatings.
At the end of her life—she was not old, she was never meant to be—she found an animal on the edge of the fens, a sweet-faced wild cat, big as a German shepherd—or was it a wild dog? No, not wild, the animal had an air of domesticity. It must have been forsaken by another human. It came snuffling up, it reminded her of the possum she’d taken in ten years before, whom she in her head called Sugar, though she never said names aloud. Perhaps she was discovering a new species. It had human eyes, hunched therianthropic posture like a little accountant, a black damp nose. She had dreamt of owning a nose like that, too, a cold wet animal schnoz that telegraphed love and health. An understanding passed between the woman and the creature. She turned. It followed.
Two weeks later she was found on her kitchen floor. Kicked to death. Throat torn out. Whatever had done the job broke down the kitchen door from the inside and was never caught.
“We warned her,” the police told the newspaper.
Cracker Graham had read this story as a young woman and took it to heart. When the authorities come to your house and say, No more, take it seriously. Listen to your neighbors, your relatives. Even so she respected the torn-apart woman. To have something you were willing not only to die for but also to be killed by. She imagined the woman on her kitchen floor, already knocked down and bleeding, offering her throat, thinking, Ah, you see, my townspeople? I am not dying alone.
Cracker decided to take Arch in.
The Old Woman of the Rooftop
The marriage was not dead; the marriage had been buried alive. Look at it in its coffin. Stare and you can see it breathing. What’s worse than giving up on something or somebody you only think is dead?
The bed was new. The drinking glasses were new, bought at the grocery story. The cats had died and not been replaced: Cracker was done (she thought, she thought) taking care of living things. The marriage was neither old nor new. They were not teenagers, they were middle-aged, and therefore grateful. Arch had forgotten the particular swing of Cracker’s limbs, the laugh that could sound dirty or childish. Cracker had forgotten the pleasure of telling somebody else to do things she did not want to do herself. There were no children in the house, only a hard-of-hearing old woman. They did not have to whisper.
Mostly Cracker had left things alone in the house, but she had let things build up. In the kitchen there were too many little tables and carts—a cart for spices, a cart for measuring cups and spoons—because every drawer was filled with a different category of detritus: menus and rubber bands in one, broken spatulas in another, baby clutter in a third. Arch imagined turning the whole house over and giving it a shake to see what fell from its pockets.
Whenever he suggested getting rid of anything, Cracker said, “No, I like that. Leave it be.”
Leave it be meant Margaret, too. They forgot they’d thought they might put her in a nursing home.
“I’ll clear out some of the stuff in my mother’s room,” Arch said.
“That you’re welcome to. I’ll take her to the alley, get her out of your way. Who knows what you’ll find?”
“The Truitt Gold,” said Arch.
“Yeah, right,” said Cracker. “Please, try and find the Truitt Gold.”
In the closet, in the nightstands, beneath the bed: years of presents. Margaret had put them there, all those tokens of good intentions. Enormous loafs of soap wrapped in patterned paper, little shell-shaped guest soaps, bath oil in bottles, bath oils in little plastic capsules that were meant to melt away in water, everything lavender, hyacinth, violet. They must have thought she was very filthy indeed. Evidence of both love and disappointment. What would you like for your birthday, Grandma? Oh, nothing, she would say. Or, I’ll love anything you give me. A lie. Since childhood she’d only ever wanted one thing: a box filled with a substance she couldn’t imagine that would change her life.
Now Arch found it all, boxes and tubs of soap and bath oil, drifts of embroidered handkerchiefs. She never used anything and she never threw anything away. He could not tell what it all meant. Why had she kept it? Sentiment or reproach? He filled a plastic garbage bag, then another.
Beneath the foot of the bed was a suitcase filled with old family papers. A sheaf of old tax returns over some rubber-banded letters from his father, still in their envelopes. His handwriting was terrible. Arch drew one out. My dearest pink and cream girleen, it began, and wincing, he put it back in the envelope to read later, or to hand down to the girls. Brenda loved that sort of thing. He imagined calling her at college on Sunday and telling her. Beneath the letters was an ancient document that said on the outside of the fold, LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT.
Old, New, Last Will and. It looked that ancient and consequential. Like anyone pinched for money, Arch Truitt had dreamt of inheritance from somebody he’d never heard of, wouldn’t mourn. And why not? There were sawed-off limbs in every direction on the family tree. A rich relative wasn’t out of the question: a Truitt they’d never heard of, Margaret’s birth family, even a Sprague who’d run out of descendants.
He unfolded the paper and read it.
I leave my worldly possessions to my husband, Dr. Leviticus Sprague, with one exception. Truitt’s Alleys and all contents I leave to Joe Wear, as promised so long ago. I am Bertha Truitt, age fifty-seven, April 7, 1918.
He ran to the Bowlaway.
Here you go, Mother,” said Cracker. They set her by one of the unused lanes—Tuesday mornings they gave senior citizens a discount, it was a quiet time—and handed her hot coffee from the vending machine that also dispensed chicken soup and cocoa. The light from the fluorescent bulbs showed all the fingerprints on her eyeglasses. She looked daft. She was daft. The line of gray in her hair was nearly around her temples now.
“Ma,” said Arch. “How did you end up owning the alley.”
“The family business,” said Margaret, fiddling with her paper cup. “I should say it ought to come to me. And to you.”
“But—how did Papa come to own it?”
“He inherited it from his mother.”
It was hard to know how to accuse your mother of grand theft. (Was it grand theft? He wasn’t sure what made a theft grand in the eyes of the law.) Arch took a sip of his own coffee. It tasted—like all the drinks in the machine—faintly of chicken soup. Why would a human being want such a thing? He was filled with anger toward the disgusting coffee and the ridiculous machine that had made it. He tried, “Was there a will?”
“I’m sure.”
“But did you see it?”
She shook her head and laughed. “I’m under interrogation!” she said, then, “what kind of place is this anyhow?”
Cracker put her hand on Margaret’s shoulder. “We’re not interrogating.”
“See there,” said Margaret. “It’s yours now. I give it to you!”