Raising Wrecker

CHAPTER FOURTEEN





Dying felt to Ruth like a physical thing, a tickle in her throat or a ringing in her ears that she couldn’t locate precisely but that wouldn’t go away, either. It wasn’t painful. She was used to pain. Her whole body was going to hell, and it was taking the slow road, making time for scenic detours. Her joints ached, her ankles swelled, and once in a while her bottom leaked without prior notice. Her lungs made room for only half a portion of air with each breath. On some days, the worst days, even her sense of humor seemed under attack. Things weren’t as funny when you saw them through the lens of decrepitude. And once that was gone? What was the point? Better to lie down in the road and let the next speeding truck wonder what made the bump when it took the corner fast. She had given Bow Farm twenty years of her life, and that ought to be enough. Of course, they were bonus years. Twenty years she hadn’t expected to have. And Bow Farm had given her—

Well. It had given her Wrecker.

But the day was fast coming when he would leave, too. The boy was twenty years old—a man, almost—and the world beckoned. He was talking Alaska. He was tossing around the idea of a winter down near Jack, surfing the breaks at Redondo Beach. He had gotten a roof on his new house and was holding off on finishing the inside until he was ready to spring for materials. Wrecker had matured into a man’s body, solid as a stump, with a good mind and a growing command of his emotions. His judgment was ripening, he was capable beyond compare, he had a little money banked from working with Len and a motorcycle he loved with a passion. He rode the Ducati, Ruth could only hope, with more caution than he had the little Enduro that lay wrecked and rusting under a tarp behind the barn. Caution wasn’t his strong suit, Ruth knew, but he made up for it with quick reflexes and a modicum of luck, and she kept the prayers rolling. Once she crossed over, she’d be able to keep a closer eye on him. If it didn’t work that way, she’d be seriously pissed. She’d want to have a word with whoever had set things up.

It was a bittersweet thing, watching Wrecker launch; and it was painful, too, for Ruth, watching Melody seesaw between wanting it for him and dreading it at the same time. Melody was slowly getting the hang of letting go. She had more or less given him free rein to make his own choices, to live as he pleased. She’d never been much good at discipline, anyway. But the idea of him going? Being physically away? Melody couldn’t stand to think of it. She said stupid things and flapped her hands more when the topic came up, and then berated herself afterward for reacting that way. Wrecker took it all with a grain of salt. He was certain he’d be leaving, Ruth suspected, and he seemed to know Deedee would come around. Ruth had to marvel. There was a degree of trust there that looked more like grace than the result of any effort. Not that they hadn’t both had to try hard.

Melody was more sentimental than any of them, Ruth had come to realize. The summer before last, when Willow left, it cut a hole in Melody’s heart that still needed some mending. By the end of the first week there was no trace of Willow but the ruts the moving truck left in the soft dirt of the meadow and the piers and wood floor of the yurt. It was all of them at Bow Farm, and then a week later it was one less. Ruth was surprised to see how Melody pined for her. It had been some years since the two of them had exchanged much more than a civil word, but let Willow leave and all of a sudden the loss registered for Melody, a gaping hole that made her mope around and second guess every decision she made. A whole year passed, a year of no communication. And then Ruth made sure the phone rang while Melody was standing in the farmhouse, and it was Willow, just calling to say hello. As easy as that, they picked up where they had left off. The two of them spent the better part of an afternoon on the telephone, said things they’d never thought to before. Willow was living up near Seattle, Ruth already knew. She’d made contact with her sons and had begun spending regular time with them and their families. Her daughter worked for a high-powered law practice in New York and had let Willow visit once, but it hadn’t gone well. Willow wouldn’t give up trying, she told them. Her kids were everything to her. Ruth didn’t say much to that. Privately, she thought, ha. Everything. And Len?

But Willow was gone from Bow Farm for good, it seemed; and before long Wrecker would slide away into adulthood; and sometime in the not-too-distant future, Ruth knew, she’d be leaving, too. Checking out of this earthly hotel. The process had already started. She was being gently stalked, her attention drawn from the people and places she walked among toward the ones she’d been parted from, so many years before. She felt for Melody. It was a lot of good-byes for a girl who loved family. For all her oddity, Ruth thought, Melody was cut out for motherhood. She loved the bustle, loved living daily in the rough embrace of the people she adored and fought with. It would be hard for her to adjust to living alone.

For herself? Ruth thought: Any day. That buzz, that whisper—it had already begun. And that would be all right. Cremate her, strew her ashes at the beach, and she’d finish the work she’d started all those years ago.

But it wasn’t Ruth who went first. It was Meg.

It wasn’t as though they’d lacked warning. The doctors had expressed their concern. But Len had nursed Meg, and spoiled her, and bullied her into regaining her health. Already she’d outlasted their predictions by twelve good months, so what did the doctors know? Len let himself believe she’d beat the odds. Until the strokes began. Brief ischemic episodes, the doctors called them; unwelcome little visits from an invisible thief who robbed Meg of her meager speech and then stripped from her every shred of capacity and personality. It would be a blessing, Melody thought, if Meg were to pass quietly in her sleep. It seemed that way to Ruth, too, whose prayers asked for a merciful end, and to Wrecker, who didn’t think Len could stand much more.

And yet it came as a shock to them all, the morning Len ran through the woods and across the meadow to find Wrecker. He still had no phone, and the poor man had had to leave his wife’s body cooling in the bed and go for help. To Wrecker, to Ruth and Melody, it was a surprise, and mixed in their sadness was a measure of relief. But to Len, it was a travesty. It was a brutal error and a mark of failure. He had failed—but at what, he couldn’t tell them.

Len crossed again to the home he’d shared for all these years with Meg, and Wrecker gathered them together, Ruth and Melody, and shared the news and split the tasks. Melody took charge of the telephone, notifying neighbors and planning the ceremony. That done, she joined the others and together they moved Meg’s body to the lumber shed, covered her with a flowered sheet, and supported Len back to the cabin. He collapsed on his bed, comatose with grief. Ruth would stay with him, it was decided. Melody would attend to Meg’s body. Wrecker, who could neither console the living nor prepare the dead, offered to dig the hole for Meg to lie in.

“Out back by the edge of the woods,” Len whispered, and Wrecker nodded.

Ruth left Len for a moment and stepped outside with the others. She mopped her face with a handkerchief and blotted the sweat at the base of her neck. It was warm enough to fry an egg on the tin roof of Len’s lumber shed. She took Wrecker’s sleeve. Charlie Burrell had a backhoe he could use, she suggested.

“No,” Wrecker said. He stood tall and wouldn’t be swayed. “I’ll dig it myself.”

“Then dig fast,” Ruth said, and made sure he understood. It was August and Meg was in a hurry to rot. They would have to get her to ground before she liquefied like an old tomato. Wrecker nodded soberly and turned from them. At the edge of the porch he lifted a shovel and they watched him walk away, his shoulders broad and his tread heavy.

“I’ll send Jack to help when he gets here,” Melody called after him. “For all the use he’ll be,” she added, her voice low and ironic.

“Maybe he can make the time pass quicker,” Ruth murmured.

Wrecker turned once and flashed them a smile, and then passed out of sight.

Ruth patted Melody’s hand. “I’d better get inside. Do you know what you’re doing?”

“Figured I’d start with a washcloth and a bowl of warm water, and pray for inspiration.”

Ruthie smiled. “That should do it.” She turned toward the door. “Melody? Light some incense. Meg’s going to get ripe.”

“You did everything you could, Len,” Ruth said. She did not move far from his side for the long day and night and half a day again it took to prepare for Meg’s burial. It was the living who needed the vigil. The dead was lying on cleated planks in the lumber shed, washed by now, and oiled, and wrapped. A neighbor woman had arrived with skill and experience to share with Melody, and together they made sure that Meg would go out in style.

“I know,” Len answered, as he did each time. There wasn’t much more for either of them to say, but Ruth thought it was good to keep Len’s larynx from closing up from lack of use. She prodded him with this every hour or so when they were both awake. He didn’t cry. She suspected he didn’t know how to. Sometimes men lost the knack for it when they moved past boyhood and into the narrowed expectations of their later years. Or maybe Len was just cried out. The Meg he’d lived with for the past eighteen years was a sweet girl, and Ruth would miss her. But the Meg he’d married? She’d been long gone. That was the shame of it, Ruth thought. He’d spent all these years unable to mourn the loss of the woman he loved, and now that he was finally laying her to rest he had nothing but regret to grieve her with.

The goose? She knew how to cry. They let her grief speak for them all. She was an elderly bird and her voice wasn’t nearly as strong as it had been in her youth, but she’d been heartbroken by the loss and was determined to let the world know. She waddled around their frequent haunts, her plaintive honk echoing in the yard and threading through the saplings that had sprung up in Meg’s vegetable garden. Len didn’t think he could live with that, he said. It was the longest sentence he’d strung together since he’d woken to find Meg still beside him.

Len was vertical, now. He’d tired of lying in the bedroom, and now, the second day, they had moved together into the kitchen. Ruth was cutting banana slices into an enormous bowl of Jell-O while she boiled macaroni for a salad. She gazed at him with pity and irritation. “Wait and see if you change your mind,” she said. “We’ll take her if you still want.” She glanced out the window, and sighed. “All right, then. People coming,” she reported. She crossed to him and ran her fingertips along his temples to smooth his errant hair. “You’ll have to speak to them. Are you ready?”

All of Mattole, it seemed, assembled in Len’s yard to honor Meg. The neighbors came with their arms burdened with the food they’d cooked and the flowers they’d picked from their gardens, and they milled through the small cabin and mumbled whatever words they had to offer their sympathy. The women hugged Len and the men clapped him on the shoulder in shared sorrow. Len wasn’t an easy man to comfort, but he showed them his gratitude. He straightened his back and he received them with a somber grace. Late in the afternoon, after Meg had been laid to rest and the food had been eaten and the small talk had been made, they went home and said That poor man, and weren’t sure why.

Ruth kept looking around, but she never came.

Melody had thought that she would. She’d called Willow as soon as she heard the news and the two of them had spoken briefly, just long enough to relay the information and discuss arrangements before she got off the line to make the rest of the calls and go attend to Meg’s body. Willow had said she’d come down to say good-bye to Meg. She said she thought she would. She said she’d think about it and either she’d come or she’d call to say she wouldn’t make it. Ruth frowned. She pinned Melody with a stern gaze and made her promise not to say anything to Len. If she comes, she comes, Ruth said. It wasn’t right to get his hopes up.

So many people did come, finally, that they almost forgot about Willow. Even DF Al showed up, looking older and more handsome after a three-year stint building water systems in Nepal. There’d been a few men in the ten years since Al went on his footloose way, Ruth knew, but she could tell Melody couldn’t escape the feeling it gave her to see him again. He left often but he couldn’t seem to get completely free of the Mattole. Once in a while, Melody had confessed to Ruth, she wondered what it would be like if he changed his mind and gave in to its pull in a permanent way. She might get tired of him, then, she thought. Better they spread things out.

When the time came to bury Meg, the men gathered in the lumber shed and gravely and graciously negotiated their positions. Wrecker and Jack and DF Al and Charlie Burrell’s son Charlie Jr., who’d turned out all right after all, each took hold of a handle. They carried the cleated plank with Meg’s body slowly through the yard, leading a procession of mourners, and wound their way to the edge of the woods. Len walked alongside, his body held as straight as he could muster, which wasn’t very straight at all. When they reached the graveside, the men lowered their burden to the ground.

Len stooped to lay his spread hand gently on the part of the wrapped corpse that had been Meg’s clavicle. He closed his eyes and left his hand there for a good long time, and the others had to struggle with the dampness that sprung to their eyes. And then Jack and DF Al and Charlie Burrell Jr. and Wrecker each took a corner of the blanket Meg rested on, lifted her weight from the plank, walked as carefully as they could to the hole, and eased her softly in.

Ruth worried about Len. He came to dinner at the farmhouse every night because they insisted on it, but he rarely spoke and never smiled. It had been two weeks, already, and he showed no interest in resuming his normal life. He wouldn’t step into the woods, not even with Wrecker; he wouldn’t go to town or read the messages the boy picked up for him at the new general store adjacent to the post office. He cleaned house with a fury. It seemed to Ruth that he was trying to scrub every last evidence of human habitation from the cabin and the outbuildings. She didn’t take it as a good sign. She knew how grief could shove you off your moorings. She was afraid that he would drift so far afield he would lose his way back.

Late August, the light was the rich hue of clover honey, and the green leaves seemed worn out by the long summer’s effort to make sugar. It had not rained in a month. The river was sluggish. Dusk came earlier and there was in the air a suggestion of change, a kind of impatience with the way things were. Ruth could sense it in Wrecker. He was ready to push off. He wouldn’t leave Len in this state, but his body was eager to move.

It was Sunday. Ruth had a chicken dinner simmering on the stove inside, and the four of them sat out on the front porch while she ran the clippers expertly about the bowl of Wrecker’s head. His summer mane fell in golden hanks to the floorboards. Short hair made his face look younger. His blue eyes shone brighter and his ears emerged as the hair fell away. Ruth silenced the clippers and ran her hand over the soft nap. “Ha,” she said, laying her fingers to points on his scalp. “How many scars have you got, now? Nine? Ten?”

“A hundred.” Melody got up from the glider to examine them herself. “Here’s that nasty one from tumbling down the barn ladder,” she said, tapping a point near the crown of his head. “Remember how long it took that gash to heal?” She blew on the nape of his neck to chase away the shorn strands and covered his ears with her palms, gave his head a mock shake. “Hey. How about you stop knocking yourself on the head from now on?”

“Yeah. I’ll just quit cold turkey.”

“I raised a reasonable man.”

“Off the stool,” Ruth demanded. “It’s Len’s turn.”

But Len had his head cocked to listen to a car engine approaching on the drive. “You expecting anybody?”

Melody shrugged. “Jehovah’s Witnesses, maybe.” She reached for the porch broom and started sweeping the golden strands off the floorboards.

“Came by last week,” Ruth said. “They wouldn’t be back this soon. Plus it’s Sunday.” Ruth enjoyed the local missionaries. She served them tea and cinnamon toast and then systematically and tactlessly but with plenty of mitigating humor disabused them of their beliefs.

The car glimmered through the spaces between the trees and then came to a stop atop the hill. It was a late-model sedan, dark colored, not flashy, but with good lines and an understated elegance. “Is that who I think it is?” Melody said, when the driver’s door opened and a woman emerged.

Ruth peered, blinked twice, and then looked at Len.

Len stood stiffly and clutched his hat. He kept his eyes on the visitor. His face grew pale.

Wrecker stood up from the stool. “Since when does Willow drive?” He raised an arm. “Willow!” he shouted. “Damn!”

“Leave the swearing to me, boy,” Ruth growled, and walked to the edge of the porch.

Willow did not rush to close the distance between them. She was dressed as smartly as ever, her hair a silver cap that sat stylishly upon her head, and she moved with the same liquid grace that had always distinguished her stride. She had gained a little weight. It softened the angles of her face and made her look more permanent. She had always been elegant but she seemed to have relaxed into a kind of stately ease. Willow climbed the porch steps and stood before them. “Hello, Len,” she said softly.

What happened next, they each remembered differently. Wrecker said that Len resembled a tree trunk newly severed from its base that teetered and then fell. Melody thought it was a different kind of gravity; that Willow’s presence exerted some kind of pressure on Len that drew him toward her like iron filings to a magnet. Len himself understood that he had no control over what was happening and that any effort he made would only result in his hurting himself or her. And Willow just opened her arms and prepared herself to accept the weight of him as he collapsed toward her.

Miraculously, she kept him from crashing to the floor. Even when Wrecker stepped quickly forward to try to relieve her of Len’s weight, Willow motioned him back. Len still had his feet to hold him up, and she wasn’t willing to be parted from him again.

They stayed bound together like that for a long time, and Wrecker and Melody and Ruth stood quietly by, unwilling to break the spell. They looked at the floorboards and then off in the distance. Melody realized she still held the broom in her hands, and she made an idle effort to sweep the few remaining strands of hair off into the bushes. They could feel how their presence made a kind of protective shield for Willow and Len, and they weren’t going to jinx it by looking at each other or at them. They let the evening air course in and out, through them and among them. And then a squeak sounded atop the hill and the passenger door opened and another figure stepped from the car.

Willow eased slowly out of Len’s embrace. She kept her eyes fastened on his face as he found his balance apart from her. And then she turned from him to face forward, to face the yard and the hill and the car atop it, and leaned her weight back against his body and draped his arms over her shoulders and did not let go of him for one minute. She raised her chin to acknowledge the woman who approached them.

Melody stilled the broom and squinted toward the woman as she made her way carefully aside the ruts and rocks down the incline. There was something vaguely familiar about her. She had short, curly, colorless hair, and a wide, deeply lined face, and a calm expression that suggested a serious nature. She wore a simple cotton blouse that fit loosely on her sturdy frame, and rumpled cotton slacks, and on her feet a pair of what looked like Chinese slippers. No one in the Mattole Valley dressed like that. Her gaze swept over them all as she came to stand at the edge of the porch.

Willow spoke softly. “This is Lisa Fay,” she said. “I’m sorry we’re so late. It took me some time to find her.”

Ruth’s hand flew to her mouth in surprise. Then she extended it and, roughly but congenially, she used her grip to pull the woman up onto the porch.

The woman had her clear gaze fixed on Wrecker. “I’m looking for my son,” she said.

Ruth cleared her throat. “Well,” she said. “You found him.”

Ruth, being Ruth, eventually got the whole story. Or as much of it as each of them was willing to tell. There was the electric moment of meeting when Ruth wasn’t sure if Melody was going to go berserk and shove Lisa Fay off the porch or if Wrecker would become a pillar of salt, standing there as still as he did, or if Willow would ever let go of Len (and she did not, not really, ever again), or if she herself would have some kind of attack and drop dead right there just from all the excitement of the afternoon. Any of those things could have happened, and Ruth had to believe the reason they didn’t was because Lisa Fay stood there so calmly and anchored them all. Her heart must have been beating a stampede, Ruth thought. How she kept it contained was a mystery. Those two years in the ashram helped with that, she found out later. The fifteen years in jail, she told Ruth much later, had not helped with anything. And then she said no more about that.

Lisa Fay didn’t say much at all, actually. Ruth realized she had food on the stove and she herded them all inside, made them sit at the table like civilized human beings and share the chicken and rice. Melody, too, was nearly silent. The color had risen in her cheeks and a combination of fear and desperation flashed first in her eyes, and Ruth watched her carefully, poised to intercede if something like that was necessary. Ruth knew fear. She knew desperation. She watched it subside. Something softer arose. A look of surrender. And then a look of entreaty, followed by a look of relief, a look of investigation and assessment and consideration, a trace of terror and then again a kind of cautious semi-trusting regard, and all the while Lisa Fay waited politely, accepted the food that was offered to her, snuck looks at Wrecker, and did not ever let Melody out of her field of vision.

Len was entirely speechless. He looked like a man from whom an enormous weight had been lifted, and whose body ran the risk of floating off were it not held to ground by the constant contact with the woman at his side. Ruth was pretty sure he would cry, soon. Not at the table, probably. He could probably wait until he was in something closer to privacy. But it was coming.

Willow murmured softly, and Ruth realized that this was the first time in all the years she’d known her that she’d ever seen Willow truly happy.

No one said anything. Even Ruth could not seem to find words to fit the day. They sat at the table and dished the food and gazed at one another in a kind of temporary paralysis.

And then Wrecker started to talk. He just opened his mouth and began. Sweat sprang out on his forehead. He talked so steadily, so long without interruption, and so eloquently—if a twenty-year-old boy-man could be said to be eloquent—that they riveted their attention on him out of amazement and a little alarm. His customary reticence gave way to a flood of words so unstoppable that even his food remained untouched. He talked to them all, about everything. He told stories about Meg and reminisced about the walks they’d taken and the structures they’d built, forts woven from twigs and mud and fortified with tin cans and with mushrooms pilfered from the forest floor that he had to make sure Meg didn’t eat. He talked about the things he loved best about his motorcycle, the intricacies of its shifting mechanism and the speeds it could attain if the road were straight and no one blocked the way. He described reading he’d done on the great forests of Alaska and the presence of muskeg and permafrost; he discussed the species of trees he might expect to encounter and the different practices they used to bring them down, and how cold it got and what people wore and ate to ward it off. Wrecker talked about Jack and why Jack thought this marriage might work even when the others had failed; he chuckled at his own jokes and backed up to correct his information and mused on the implications of the facts he’d gathered and as an aside mentioned that he thought Ruth should get a dog and if she found one like Sitka that was the one to choose. They all stared at him, watching his mouth move and his eyes brighten, his ears and his forehead all naked and exposed by the haircut, his sunburned face a stark contrast, and could not help but realize that his being there—his being, in fact—might serve not to make enemies of them but to bring them together.

Lisa Fay leaned toward Melody. “Does he always talk this much?” she asked softly.

“Almost never,” Melody responded, in a whisper.

Len and Willow shared a quick glance and looked away, blushing. And of course Ruth caught it, because Ruth missed nothing.

There were details to work out. In time, they would work them out. They had each other, and they had him. And though they missed Johnny Appleseed and mourned Meg, and though Wrecker would leave them all soon and only come back to visit, as even the best children do, and though the goose would die not quite as peaceful a death as Meg had (but quickly, and they all hoped painlessly) and the dog Ruth chose would not be quite as profoundly good as Sitka, and though Len would develop arthritis in his hands and have to trade the chain saw for the softer work of starting seedlings to regrow the forest he had cut down, and though DF Al would never stay long, and Yolanda would not be seen again, and Lisa Fay would not regain the years she’d lost to prison, they would know that together, and in spite of themselves, they had done this.

But all that would come later. In the kitchen, sitting at the table with his family, Wrecker’s flow of language gradually slowed. He glanced around at each of them and then down at his plate. Methodically, he cut the meat and lifted the fork to his mouth and chewed. He finished his piece and then he looked up. “I guess I’ll have some more chicken, Ruthie,” he said.

She stood and took the plate he extended. “Anything you want, boy,” she said.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS





This book has been a long time in the making. The story was sparked years back by an unexpected encounter, and the process of writing it became a path toward making peace with that experience. The end result is fiction. Lucky for me, the people who have helped along the way are incontestably, blessedly real.

I offer my deepest thanks to:

• The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, for a grant (and a vote of confidence) early in the book’s creation.

• A Room of Her Own Foundation, for faith and support, in the form of the Gift of Freedom Award, to see it through. When I didn’t know how I would ever finish, you all stepped in and opened a way. Darlene Chandler Bassett, you are a visionary committed to the understanding that no vision is ever realized without a leap of faith and a lot of hard work.

• The friends and colleagues who have read chapters and drafts and revisions and more revisions and still more revisions. Anne Costanza, Veronica Golos, Kim Ponders, most especially Kathy Namba, and others unnamed but no less appreciated—your comments have reached to the heart of the matter and made this a truer, better book.

• Pam Houston and the PAMFAs—year in, year out, you listened, offered insights and encouragement, and fed me the world’s best mashed potatoes.

• Everyone at Bloomsbury, who took a bunch of words and turned them into a thing of beauty. Most of all to the best editor an author could ask for, the tough-minded and tender-hearted Kathy Belden.

• Dan Conaway, my brilliant, generous, savvy, insightful, tenacious agent. Not just for representing the book, but for seeking it out, loving the characters, and challenging me to love them more, too.

• Richard Torres, extraordinary storyteller and one heck of a great father-in-law.

• Silvia Rennie, for friendship, support, and encouragement.

• Michèle Shockey, who first led me to the Lost Coast and who, decades later, listened to what grew from those crazy adventures.

• My mother, Ellen Wood, my father, Norbert Wood, my sisters, Winton, Harper, Elaine, and Uma, and my brother, Peter—for teaching me the meaning of family, and for sticking with me through thick and thin.

• The four small boys who shared our home for a while and our hearts for always; and to their parents. Wherever you are, bless you.

• Tetsuro, Kan, Yohta—this is yours. You put up with it for a long time. I’m so proud of you all.

Thanks most of all to Kathy. Without you, none of this. With you, everything.





A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

Summer Wood is the author of Arroyo. In 2007 she received the Gift of Freedom Award from A Room of Her Own Foundation for her work on Raising Wrecker. She teaches writing at the University of New Mexico’s Taos Summer Writers’ Conference, and in 2009 she directed the first NEA/Taos Big Read. She has lived with her family in Taos for the past twenty years. Find out more at her Web site, www.summerwoodwrites.com.