The Writing on the Wall A Novel

Three



VERA stayed in touching distance as she read. Move close to the wall and the words blurred. Move back and they became squiggles. By the time she finished she was running her finger under each line like a first-grader, tracing out the story all the way to its end. Her arm ached from doing this, her back hurt from standing, and she felt chilled in a way even a July night couldn’t touch.

But this was nothing compared to how the last word affected her. The last word detached itself from the wall, took on shape, form, and substance, to the point she had the sensation she wasn’t reading it but accepting it in her hand. It was a better trick than any poltergeist could manage, any goblin—it was a real hand that had come out to take hers, warm, girlish, pleading. Sensing this, she grabbed hard, closed her fist around the word trying as best she could to summon all her courage and send it back ninety years.

go

She grimaced, she concentrated so hard. And almost immediately, as if a century was nothing, she felt a matching pressure back. A message—but could she read it? None of the meanings she came up with described the sensation adequately. Sisterhood, but that seemed too girly-girly and easy. Kinship? That was closer. Solidarity? An old-fashioned word she had never quite understood, but she understood now and she closed her eyes to it, clenched her hand so tight she felt dizzy and had to reach out to the wall again, this time to keep from falling.

It didn’t last long, the hand sensation. The word released her, flattened itself back to its place there on the bottom right corner. A punctured g, a deflated o. She left the lantern on the ladder, kicked through torn wallpaper toward the door, stumbled down the darkened hall through the kitchen out to the yard. The word had released her from its grip but not its meaning. Go it said. Go!

She started for the car, remembered the key was upstairs in her purse. And even if she had the keys there was no way to out-drive what she was feeling. Instead, she pushed her way through the gate and began walking north along the road’s weedy shoulder. The ground was wet, swamp plants and nettles swung heavily at her legs, but she kept going, concentrating on each step so as not to slip. The fireflies were finished now, there were no chartreuse motes, but the crickets had started up. Their sound wasn’t the pleasant one crickets were supposed to make, but something so harsh and percussive she covered her ears.

She walked until the house was well behind her, turned to get her bearings on its light, then kept on until she came to the neighbor’s house, the one she often stared at on her breaks, where Asa Hogg had lived, the Civil War veteran. And no one since, judging by the look of it. If Jeannie’s house resembled a haunted house in a bad Hollywood film, then this one looked plucked from a fairytale, where the forest clasped everything in its enchanted embrace. The moon’s brightness exaggerated the effect. Vines not only covered the siding and roof, they seemed to be the only thing keeping them from collapsing. A birch tree grew through the broken boards of the porch and lichen covered its shingles in silvery fur. Saplings stooped and twisted to get inside—one branch grew into one window and looped back out the next. The forest wasn’t just hiding the house but eating it, gulp by greedy gulp.

She swung her hands at the vines until she opened a path to the nearest window, found a stick, made a swirling motion to clear away the broken teeth of glass. But when she peered in she could see nothing, and it took her several seconds to realize that this was because there was nothing inside to see. Where the floor had been was only the bitter damp smell of dirt; where the walls had been was nothing but ugly little dunes of plaster. There was no furniture, no sign of habitation. Time’s nibbles had swallowed the house whole.

She was pushing her way back through the vines when a car drove past on the road. This happened nine or ten times a day, but never once at night—the traffic in 1920 must surely have been heavier. Its headlights sliced across the house but missed her legs. She had a glimpse of the driver’s silhouette and he seemed to have a girl’s head leaning against his shoulder like in the old days when that’s what girlfriends did. The car slowed down near Jeannie’s house—were they looking for a place to be alone? The light, small as it was, must have scared them off, because whoever was driving floored it now and the red taillights shrank into insignificance and disappeared.

Jeannie’s house? No, Beth’s house. Beth’s house. Beth’s.

She had never really considered it from the distance before, not at night. The kerosene lamp she had left in the parlor threw rays out the window that resembled a campfire’s, fan-shaped and yellow. In the blackness, it was a brave and defiant sight, like someone was puffing on embers to keep them alive. Higher, with a crisper light, she could make out Scorpius and the swarming white band of the Milky Way. And it seemed the same even there—that a spirit was puffing and blowing to keep them alight.

There was nothing to explore in Asa Hogg’s house, no stories or secret messages. She walked back to the road, then stood there hesitating. Go. The imperative had taken her what—half a mile? She wondered how far it had taken Beth, that word added so defiantly on the end. Had she made it to the city? Had it been everything she dreamed of or did forces conspire to drive her right back?

She might have fled there herself, had she gotten in the car. Had she gotten in the car she would have driven all night to Boston’s airport and not come back. She was disappointed at the slowness of things, there was no use pretending otherwise. The job was barely half finished, there were two rooms left that had to be stripped even before she started on the papering, while that other job, the healing business, had hardly progressed at all. She wanted walls that were impassive so as to become impassive herself—but why had she ever imagined walls were impassive?

She thought of it again—the tactile sensation of grasping Beth’s hand. Comfort had been exchanged, in the deepest way possible, and it hadn’t just flowed from her hand back through time, it had flowed the other way, she had gained solace from listening to Beth’s voice. It was far more comfort than she had been able to send or receive through Cassie’s hand. In the stockade, in the miserably small room where they were allowed to visit after her court martial, they had been separated by a wire mesh screen that kept them from touching. The thirty minutes allotted them was over, Vera was nowhere near dealing yet with the shock and incomprehension that came with their talk, and yet, by instinct, needing it badly, she reached her hand out to touch Cassie’s before getting up to leave.

She was letting her hair grow long again—never had it looked so shiny and beautiful.

She remembered thinking that, of all possible things, and then a second later, worrying that maybe Cassie would turn and walk away with no gesture whatsoever. Then very slowly she did move her hand—low to the mesh where Vera’s hand already waited. They hadn’t touched. They hadn’t touched the way she touched Beth because a quarter inch of wire mesh in an army stockade is thicker, more impermeable than a hundred years’ worth of time.

But she was a liar, to remember it that way. When it came to touching, the truths a mother and daughter can exchange through their hands, she had been glad that the mesh was there.

She could lie to herself. She could fool herself, too. For when she woke up next morning it was with the fixed intention of stripping the sewing room wallpaper without paying any attention whatsoever to the writing underneath. Beth’s story still held her. The emotion could only lessen gradually, it didn’t need to be forced away by someone new.

Her resolution lasted about as long as it took to peel off the first strip. The new woman’s voice was simply too loud and insistent to ignore. I can’t tell a story like she can. Plain enough. But how was she going to tell it then?

The handwriting was sloppy, bold and fast, like the letters were racing each other, tripping over themselves, staggering back up again, making their erratic way to the finish line there in the corner. Whoever wrote it had a fondness for cheap ballpoints and liked different colors—by the end of the first paragraph she had already used blue, black, green and red. The lines sloped down, then rose back the other way like a crude drawing of waves. When she became passionate or angry she pressed too hard, pockmarking the plaster or even gouging it; the walls in the sewing room were in much worse shape than in the parlor.

Was that the reason she had chosen such thick wallpaper? Not just because she liked knotty pine? Not just because she was brassy and original and didn’t give a damn, but to cover up the damage? Someone using a chisel couldn’t have scarred the plaster much worse.

There were other reasons to start reading. The unknown woman had done Vera a huge favor by stripping off the first three layers, a job she would have found impossible on her own. This was a debt and a real one. Then, too, she was almost certainly the only other person to have read Beth’s story, which formed a bond that couldn’t be ignored.

She went back to the same method she had used with Beth, stripping bare the entire wall before allowing herself to read. With Beth, she had the sensation of words pressing outward on the paper and helping, but this woman’s words were gummier, they didn’t want to let go of the paper that covered them, so she had to work twice as hard.

She was halfway through the first wall, on the point of taking her morning coffee break, when something surprising happened—surprising only in the fact it hadn’t occurred sooner. It came from the radio, Jeannie’s boom box, which had been her trusted companion all through work. The station played the same lulling French music as always, soothing precisely because she didn’t understand a word, but then suddenly between songs the announcer said something she understood all too well.

“Iraq,” he said, rolling the r. There were more words she couldn’t understand, then two she could: “mort” and “soixantequinze.”

She felt betrayed, that was the strange thing. Mad at the radio, mad at Canada, mad at Quebec. She trusted them to stay neutral, and now here they were, deliberately targeting her, jabbing her with a needle, making fun of her—her desire for numbness, her vanity in thinking it was the easiest emotion in the world to achieve.

She turned it off, took it out to the hall, banished it from her hearing. She worked in silence, except for the steady scrapes and whispers made by the putty knife’s blade. Too quiet, she thought at first. But then she had the first wall cleared, she was stepping back to read what was written there, and all became noisy very fast.

I can’t tell a story like she can. Can’t make you cry like she can wouldn’t care to wouldn’t know how. Oh plenty of tears alright a lifetime’s worth like everybody but most came on one terrible afternoon and that’s buried in the past now a lot thicker than these walls. Funny Dottie Peach who’s always ready with a wisecrack even a crude one even a mean one if somebody gets on my bad side and someday if I’m not careful it’s going to be Crazy Dottie Peach who can’t tell a story straight can’t even start at the beginning. But if what goes round comes round what does it matter where on the circle you start?

I can’t tell a story like Beth can. I was born she says I was married she says I fell in love with another man. Joke’s on her he doesn’t like girls. Damn her! I HATED it that she made me cry. I thought she was going to run off with him isn’t that what you thought yourself? All that tragedy and why? He liked men. Okay so it’s deeper than that deep like the river those Nazi bastards drowned him in while my story isn’t deep at all but more like a muddy puddle and telling it is like stirring with a stick until the mud belches out words.

Can’t tell a story like she can. The orphan business for starters. I wish I HAD been an orphan. I remember reading Hansel and Gretel when I was little wishing I had their evil stepmother for my mother it would be such an improvement over who I did have. Slapping me around when she was drunk and worse than that from the man claiming to be my dad. He got a bright idea when we bombed Nagasaki. He was working building ships on the coast and he decided the future was in building atomic bombers on the other coast and so we piled into our Chevy and headed West. After about six hours we stopped here in the middle of nowhere. They said let’s take a pee break but when I came back outside from the diner they were gone in a cloud of dust and I never saw either one of them again.

I was sixteen. I went back in the diner and asked for a job. I was Dorothea when I went in and Dottie by the time I tied the apron on since no one ever waitressed named Dorothea. My first customer sat hunched over the counter leering at me through the ketchup. Big man a lot older than me driving a logging truck idling outside.

“What’ll you have?” I said all nervous and shy it being my first time.

“Steak?”

“Sure.”

I wrote it down on my pad.

“Eggs?”

“You bet.”

I wrote it down on my pad.

“F*ck?”

He said it loud making sure all the men in the place heard. What I should have done was take the coffee pot and pour some on his crotch. What I did do was stare right back at him and make my voice go flirty.

“I’d love to grandpa, but I’m menstruating.”

The men in the booths howled and right there and then I got the reputation as being funny and tough and an egghead since I don’t think any of them had ever heard that word out loud before. One of the youngest sitting sideways in the corner by the jukebox was dressed in uniform since he’d just been discharged. “He’s Perry Peach,” the other waitress giggled and I couldn’t help be interested in a name like that. Not just Perry but Perry PEACH. He looked like Dana Andrews who was my favorite movie star with medals on his chest Silver Stars and the same waitress told me he’d come back from the Pacific with skulls as souvenirs. Once I got to know him he was always talking about Japs which was the worst thing he could say about somebody that he or she was a Jap. On our wedding night I flat out asked him about the skulls and he said sure he had them only he didn’t want to frighten me so before the wedding he took them down to the river patted them on top for good luck and chucked them in.

I wasn’t very pretty then but most men didn’t lift their eyes much higher than my chest. I know Perry never did. He took a job with the highway crew which was considered practically an executive position up here ever since the Depression. It was enough to marry on and he didn’t expect me to work. Bullshit on what I remember thinking. When you leave me what will I do starve? It’s strange but I thought in those terms right from the start. He was the kind of man who’s hot to trot before the wedding and Mr. Dullsville after. It was only a question of whether he would cheat on me and run off or whether I would cheat on him and run off and whether he would come after me and shoot me like he had all his Japs.

There was a community college starting up and they had a course for nursing aides. The classes were held in an old high school they were renovating and though I didn’t know it at the time it was the school where Beth had gone on her milk train every morning. I got the best grades in class and one of my teachers said why stop at aide so I went back and got my RN. I guess I’m the nurse type alright. I don’t care much about strong people but weak ones break my heart.

So I walked the same halls that Beth walked maybe sat in the same desk. I even found a book of hers here in an upstairs closet called “Tennyson’s Gareth and Lancelot and Elaine and the Passing of Arthur Idylls of the King” with her name written in front. That was in 1958 when we first moved in and I didn’t think anything of it but chucked it in the trash. I was following her footsteps before I knew she even existed and when I started reading her story felt I understood her right away. Did she write the truth on the walls to get them arrested? You probably wonder about that too. Or did she write it down because she would have burst if she hadn’t written it down????? Joke’s on her either way because the next person who lived here papered right over HER wallpaper without stripping it off and the lazy bitch who lived here after that papered over THAT paper and it wasn’t until I started stripping the layers just before Andy escaped home that anyone read it which means not until 1969 and now of course you’ve read it too so we’re twins.

That was some summer that 69 summer. August especially. They had just made me assistant head nurse in cardiology but I told them I needed two weeks off first to take care of my garden and put up some wallpaper and celebrate my 41st birthday. The wallpaper was still the same drab stuff that was here when we bought the house from lazy Sally Bruckner and her even lazier husband. It holds the walls together I used to joke and I was always too busy bringing up the boys to bother about it one way or the other but now I could. I bought new paper at Real Value the best I could afford. Premium Pine one pattern was called and the other was Queen of Sheba. Brown would make the walls look warm on the cold side of the house and white would make the walls look cool on the warm side of the house and other than that I didn’t give it much thought.

As for my garden it was dying right under my eyes. It hadn’t rained since May and the weatherman claimed it was hotter here than in Texas and every day I had to go outside and pull up another wilted flower or turn under another dead plant. The afternoon of my birthday I stood in what was left of my zinnia bed feeling more blue than I usually allow myself. I remember thinking something that hit me pretty hard though I tried making a joke of it. “I’m an abandoned woman,” I told myself. “Dorothea Elizabeth Peach that’s what you are, an ABANDONED WOMAN.” Abandoned just like when my parents dumped me here and drove west into the sunset.

I always knew Perry would run out on me so that was no surprise. We had some good years together but that was when the boys were little and after that it was just him moving mechanically in the dark and me on my back trying to remember what it had once been like and between his hunching and heaving and my remembering and sobbing we sometimes managed to find love again but in the end it wasn’t worth much just a note on the door one Christmas saying “Back later” which I knew meant “Back never.”

The great love of his life was Danny and when Danny died there was nothing left to keep him here. Andy he never cared much for and didn’t pay him much attention which was how everybody treated Andy myself included. But Danny! They were best pals from the time he was three months old and even when he was a toddler he wouldn’t do anything unless Daddy did it too. Hunting fishing camping. I was all in favor of it and he was such a good student in school top of his class right through high school and his hair was the reddest anyone ever saw and he acted in plays and could do a hundred push-ups without puffing. Then his junior year he and Perry started watching Westerns together on TV and somehow that led them to getting involved with a “fast draw” club which was where you wore a six-gun on your hip like a cowboy and faced down someone else wearing their own revolver and saw who could yank their gun out of the holster first.

Danny was good at this like he was good at everything. Fast lickety-split fast. He wanted to add some tricks and learn how to twirl the pistol around on his finger but somehow the gun got loaded and somehow went off in his face and the next thing I know the phone is ringing in the hall and Tom Bottle our constable is screeching up out front to fetch me and we drive crazy fast to the gymnasium and what followed after were the worst hours of my life. I didn’t know before that that I had a soul. All that fancy talk about souls and I used to listen skeptically because I never felt I had one but seeing Danny lying on the gym floor with his face covered by a cowboy bandanna taught me about souls and what it taught me was that souls exist alright but only to torture us.

That left Andy and then Andy left too. Drafted. There were hardly any young men left around here so who else could the draft board take? He once told me he wanted to be an astronaut but other than that he had no plans. He graduated high school on a Friday and Sunday he was on a train heading south to Fort Polk in Louisiana which the soldiers called Fort Puke. They had a mock Vietnamese village there called Tiger Land where troops got training before shipping out and the nearest town to the base was called Leesville which the soldiers called Diseaseville he wrote in his first letter home.

Andy was always in Danny’s shadow and this made him quiet but he never gave anyone trouble but always went along with anyone and anything so following orders in the military wasn’t going to be any problem just more of what he’s good at. If teachers wanted him to study he studied and if friends wanted him to goof off and smoke dope he goofed off and smoked dope and if I wanted help raking the garden he was out there raking. But the funny thing is he never does any of those things with any kind of excitement or enthusiasm or interest he just puts his head down and does them and that is pretty much his entire philosophy of life. “She’s a girl who can’t say no,” they say and they never apply it to a boy but they could apply it to Andy because whatever the situation is he always goes along.

So that was how things stood on my birthday. Only eight weeks ago but it seems eight years. “Don’t torture yourself!” I remember thinking. I said it several times over as I walked past my wilted zinnias dusty petunias dead dahlias trying to make it my motto. DON’T TORTURE YOURSELF!!! And the truth is except for the pain over Danny which I know is permanent I didn’t feel as lonely and abandoned as you might think. My dead flowers bothered me. The heat bothered me. And very faint and almost forgotten that other kind of heat the kind that comes with needing a man.

Okay so I’m crying on your shoulder. Let me cry. I needed a friend and still do for that matter. There’s Mrs. LaBombard up the road and the nurses at work but not many besides that. YOU NEED ANOTHER FRIEND! I told myself and no sooner had I wished it than it happened.

She was delivered by bus that was the strange thing. Buses never go by here except when there’s construction out of the highway and they use our road as a detour. A big Greyhound so silver and shiny it seemed to push away the heat stopping right by my house which surprised me considerably. The brakes squealed the door swung open and in the whoosh of cool air emerged a girl of about eighteen or nineteen. She turned around to take the knapsack the driver handed out to her which was the Boy Scout kind crammed so full it was impossible to understand why it didn’t burst.

I knew from that first glimpse of her she was the prettiest girl who ever stepped foot in our town. She was barely five feet high and seemed even shorter because of the dress she wore which was soft and summery and clung to her in a way that was Kewpie doll perfect. Her hair was long down past her waist and straight as you can imagine not a curl in sight being the color you would get if you mixed buttercups with silk. Her face was round and full almost Russian I thought with eyes so big it was like she carried her own mirrors. Not mirrors she could stare into like so many vain girls but mirrors you could stare into yourself lit up by her warmth. She had that way about her. Freckles clustered around her nose just the right number and old-fashioned Valentine-shaped lips.

“Can I ask you a question?” she said in the softest voice imaginable. She set her knapsack down on the grass.

“You just did.”

She turned and pointed. “How come those dark splashes appear over the hills and go away and come back again? Some look like maps and others look like butterflies. I watched them all the way along the highway. I never took my eyes off them.”

It was a silly question a lot of her questions were silly and yet she always asked them with so much curiosity they didn’t seem silly after all.

“Shadows from clouds,” I said. “The hills are down here, the clouds are up there, and the sun is even higher so when they blow apart that’s what happens.”

She took that in very gravely hugged herself almost shivered. “It’s the most beautiful sight I ever saw.”

Probably nobody in three hundred years had stared at these hills without either hating them for blocking their way or appraising their potential to generate money. After all these centuries they had their first lover.

“Dottie Peach,” I said sticking out my hand.

She smiled at the Peach part then hesitated. “My name is August,” she said at last. “August,” and she nodded emphatically up and down.

“Augusta?” I said.

“August.”

Don’t ask me how but I knew right away she had just invented it on the spot. New name new place new life. She put her hand on my shoulder for balance stooped down took off her city shoes and threw them as far as she could into the meadow so she was barefoot. She had taken the bus from New York she explained and now if I could help her with directions and maybe fill her canteen she would be on her way.

She had a map the kind the gas stations issue and she kneeled down to spread it open across her knapsack. “I need to find the Wooden Shoe,” she said which was funny because the last place that would be plotted on any map was the Wooden Shoe.

I knew as much about the Wooden Shoe as anybody in town which means not a lot. Most people call it a camp because of the young people living there or because they use an abandoned logging camp as their headquarters. It’s a huge piece of land they’re squatting on maybe three thousand acres butting up against the border though it’s all cut down and burned over and not much use to anybody. Dr. Goring went up there to stitch somebody’s ankle after they’d nearly cut it off with an axe and he came back with some pretty strange tales. “It’s a commune,” he said making a face. “They wear beads. They eat straw. They’re digging a moat.” He swore he’d never go back up there again because they tried paying him in piglets.

The Wooden Shoe comes from a carved Dutch shoe hanging as a sign on the only road in. Now that people knew it was a commune and not some kind of fruity summer camp they became more suspicious since commune sounds like communist. The young people come into town to buy supplies and they look harmless enough dressed like pranksters and jesters with bows and ribbons and floppy hats. They operate a flatbed truck that barely bangs along and you can see it coming miles away with the exhaust it spews but it’s decorated with the craziest brightest paint job you can imagine. “Psychedelic,” Dr. Goring called it and we all thought that was a funny word that fit perfectly.

The being scared of them part started when Sheriff Bottle went up there on a tip and vowed never to return. “They don’t pay me enough to deal with that shit!” he said and it was clear he was talking about drugs and guns and smuggling. It was hard to picture since the kids came to town so friendly and polite. The one thing people notice is that they’re especially nice to old folks really courting them wooing them learning everything from them they possibly can. All the old-timers nobody cared about anymore were suddenly getting lots of attention and all the forgotten skills like sheep shearing and barn raising and cider making these Wooden Shoe kids were trying to learn because they HAD to learn if they were going to survive their first winter. NEVER TRUST ANYONE UNDER SEVENTY is their motto and they mean it.

They’re all supposed to be equal up there brothers and sisters but you know as well as I do that never works out. Their leader the one they look to for every decision is a young man named Isaac Rosen who’s about Andy’s age but looks much older. You hear stories about Rosen most of which are probably made up but even so. There’s one about his getting into a dispute with a Canadian smuggler over a busted drug deal and strangling him nearly dead and another’s about getting in a fight with a black bear that tried breaking into their potato cellar and strangling it all the way dead. People say he’s not only ruthless but smart and even has informers working for him in the Border Patrol and state police.

I’ve only seen him once or twice. He’s rail thin razor thin thin as barbed wire or a very tough weed. His beard is the fuzzy kind they all wear only blonder and his mustache is like a whisper of contempt added across his lips. His eyes are the angriest I’ve ever seen on a man and I’ve seen plenty of angry eyes. A Civil War soldier is what he looks like one who fought on the losing side and doesn’t intend to let that happen again.

Hunters in town went up there looking for deer and were met by Rosen and two of his disciples toting shotguns and steered right back out again. One of the hunters Ethan Whitcher had been going up there all his life so he tried to reason with them and what he got for an answer soon made its way around town. “We’re an independent nation,” Rosen told him. “You go back to America before we blow you all to hell.”

This is where August this delicate barefoot doe-like girl wanted to go once she got off that bus. “Well, it’s a long walk,” I told her. “A good five or six miles until you come to the shoe. Let me give you a ride.”

She didn’t want a ride she wanted to walk which was important to her that she travel that last stretch on her own. She grabbed her pack and swung it around until most of the weight fell on her hip so it was like a baby she carried though a pretty hefty one. She walked past the house got caught up in the heat shimmering off the pavement and just before she dissolved completely I could make out the wavy remnants of her wafting toward the hills.

A week went by. It was still too hot to work on stripping the wallpaper but I went into town and bought some scrapers so I’d be ready once the heat broke. When I came home the mail had just been delivered with a letter from Andy which was a rare enough event. Things were still fine at Fort Puke. His company had finished basic now and were undergoing advanced infantry training attacking Tiger Land learning what it was like to fight in Vietnam. He volunteered for lots of jobs he said. Potato peeling ditch digging mosquito control. He couldn’t stand it standing in ranks being asked for volunteers and no one raising his hand so he’d raise his. It just shot up he couldn’t help it. Their instructor was named Sergeant Cobb who was tough but fair and you wouldn’t want to get on his bad side but he had taken a fatherly interest in Andy so all in all things were fine. In their free time he was watching TV mostly so I didn’t have to worry about him getting sick in Diseaseville.

No sooner had I finished reading this than I heard a soft whisking noise on the screen like a kitten scratching to get in. August! She had a happy smile on her face and was dressed in canvas overalls that made it seem like she had been working pretty hard though I noticed she had embroidered the floppy bottoms and tied on little bells.

“Come on in!” I said.

I asked if she was hungry and she said no but when I put out a plate of brownies she gobbled them up pretty fast then asked if I had any Coke. Maybe they didn’t have enough food up there yet since growing season wasn’t over or maybe she was used to so much sugar in the suburbs she needed to be weaned from it gradually.

During her walk she had woven a necklace of black-eyed Susans which she hung around my neck. We sat on the porch and I listened while she talked. It was mostly about her home down in New Jersey and how much she hated it though she spoke very soft. Everybody always so competitive so obsessed with money and status going to cocktail parties and bragging about what cars they drove voting Republican building ticky-tacky houses not caring about anything except the stock market meanwhile living the most destructive least sustainable way of living ever invented. She rattled off her list then did something I thought was cute. She waved her hand toward the south and mouthed “Bye-bye” to it like a little girl.

I don’t have a girl of my own to tell stories to or hear stories from so maybe that’s what made her visits special. We never had those wars mothers and daughters go through when the mother wants the daughter to be like her and the daughter doesn’t want to do that so there’s war.

She said things were getting easier at the Shoe as they began forgetting the selfish every man for himself dog eat dog rat race world they had been brought up in. There was an aura of peace they could sense hovering right above them which was as real as the sunshine and the only way to let it descend was to create harmony among themselves and the only way to create harmony was to work and work digging the moat that was going to protect them from the outside world which was the term they gave to the independence they strove so hard to build except on Mondays which Rosen had decided were going to be devoted to meditation.

“Rosen, huh?” I grunted. “Sounds like he’s the big cheese up there. Where’s he hail from?”

“California. The desert part.”

“Yeah? Well, does he ever talk about himself being the Messiah?”

She laughed with that. She thought my questions were hysterical.

“He has a new name,” she told me. “We call him Granite now.”

“Granite? Hard granite stone?”

She nodded. “Yes, only harder.”

It was clear she admired him. He often hiked into Canada leading strangers who mostly kept their faces hidden and when he came back it was with more weed than they could possible smoke and this special kind of Canadian oatmeal everybody devoured. And there was good news now. Lilac her best friend the nicest girl the one everybody loved was pregnant and the baby could come at any time.

“Our baby,” August called it. Everybody in the Shoe that’s what they called it. Ours.

She drank two more Cokes before she left and I sent her away with some Oreos to munch on her long walk back. Next Thursday when she came I made sure I had chips and brownies and cupcakes and all the secret things she craved. A very sweet girl!!!

I told her that if they were going around gathering wisdom from the old folks then they better make sure to visit Mrs. LaBombard up the road. That’s the old Hogg house which the LaBombards had bought after they left Quebec during the Depression and the reason they left Quebec was because Edgard LaBombard was an atheist and communist and every other radical thing you can be up there and since the Catholic church was in charge of relief he either had to bring his family across the line or starve.

He died a long time ago but Therese LaBombard is pushing a hundred. “I came to America in Nineteen Tirty-Tree with my thirteen children and voted for Roosevelt tree times,” she likes to say and if you smile at what she does to English she’ll switch right over to French.

She’s the best cook I know especially with potatoes and game which is why I told August to look her up. “Extended” they say about recipes up here and no one can extend a recipe like Therese can. Nowadays they call french fries with gravy “poutines” but she sneers at that and makes poutines the old way boiling potatoes in cheesecloth and drenching them in maple syrup. Tourtier and chicken tricot and a hundred dishes made from turnips. There’s always something baking at Therese LaBombard’s!

Much later after everything that happened happened and things grew quiet again and I finally got the wallpaper stripped off I went over to her place with a question.

“My house, Therese.”

We were rocking on her porch but now she stopped and squinted at me over the black plastic glasses that were always sliding down her nose.

“Oui?”

“The Bruckners owned it before us.”

She made a face. “Lazy people. Ate from cans.”

“And before them?”

“Howards. Here when we moved in. Nineteen Tirty-tree.”

“Before them?”

I could see her thinking looking out toward the hills. She wasn’t used to being asked something about the past she couldn’t answer.

“Don’t know,” she said with a despairing shrug.

“A family named Steen? The rich people in town? A young woman named Beth? Any of those ring a bell?”

Therese wasn’t a quitter not when it involved figuring out connections so I believe my questions tortured her considerably. I felt guilty for asking but there was no other person in town who might remember.

When she shook her head I tried a different tack. “Did you ever hear stories about a teacher who was drowned in the river?”

“A teacher? In the river?” She clasped her hands to her cheeks. “Mon Dieu!”

“Thank you, Therese. Merci beaucoup. And don’t forget about those young people I mentioned. You teach them about turnips and they’ll be grateful.”

I’m skipping you around now and we need to move summer back the other way to eight days after August’s second visit. The heat broke that afternoon. A thunderstorm boomed down from Canada and within the space of ten minutes the temperature dropped twenty degrees. It got dark as early as it does in winter so by five I could hardly grope my way over to switch on the lights. There was a bang on the door that made me jump and then whoever it was ran around to the back and started hammering there even louder.

It was August plus a girl with frizzy hair and terrible acne and a skinny young man wearing a green poncho and hip boots. August’s face was too open and soft to express alarm but there was definitely anxiety there and her hair was flattened to her cheeks from the rain. “We need your help,” she said reaching for my arm. It was because I’m a nurse and they didn’t know anybody else who would come.

They had brought the truck down and the rain made its psychedelic paint even more psychedelic like it was sloshing crazily back and forth along the sides. I grabbed my boots and they hoisted me up on back. The ride into the hills was the wildest I’ve ever been on since on their way down to fetch me they had blown out two tires and the young man named Gabriel drove on the rims. Add to that the rain wind thunder and having to swerve around downed trees and ducking under branches so as not to get swept off and the two girls clutching at me and vampire bats yo-yoing up and down making the girls scream and all in all it was a trip to remember.

It took an hour to get to the Shoe sign which the wind had snapped so the toe stuck in the mud. The rain wasn’t quite as bad here and there was enough light in the sky to see the land was all blasted and ruined with nothing but jagged tree stumps and huge piles of slash. Geezus I said to myself. What A-bomb fell here? A tractor was mired off to the side of the road near a trench wide enough to make me wonder whether they were digging a moat after all. There were pennants or banners stretched across the trees and then when we got to the main building there was a flag with vertical bands I had my suspicions might be Vietnam’s and I don’t mean the South part either.

August tugged me toward the door but first I told Gabriel to get some tires on the truck and get them on quick in case we had to go fetch a doctor. I knew now it was Lilac I had been called for because there’s a smell that comes during childbirth that maybe only a mother can catch or a nurse but it’s got urine in it and blood and sweat and something sweeter that’s hard to describe but was waiting for me the moment I went in.

This had once been a logging camp and you could still see scars on the floor from hobnailed boots. The homemade table and chairs had been shoved against the wall to make room for a bed lit by kerosene lamps hanging down from the rafters. Lilac lay on a mattress where the beams converged and judging by the way she rolled and heaved she was well along. She was a little slip of a girl who seemed even smaller with the enormous thing that was trying to happen just down from her middle. I went right over and knelt by the table and told her my name and said I was there to help things along and she nodded in gratitude though I don’t think she was aware of much now except the force that had hold of her which had to be bewildering compared to what puny forces she could muster against it. She took my hand and pressed it hard to her breast then moved it to her mouth found a finger and started desperately sucking. For comfort I suppose. I let her suck all she wanted.

We weren’t exactly alone with this. The other commune members squatted on their heels against the wall watching so it was like summer camp after all and this was an initiation ceremony they were required to attend. My first instinct was to shoo them all away but then I realized Lilac was drawing strength from having them near. “Our baby” August called it and maybe they were helping by just being there tightening their pelvises in sympathy the girls or feeling their penises shrivel in guilt the boys. There was one big girl with thick pigtails who looked serene as a Viking princess and I delegated her to keep mopping Lilac’s brow while I concentrated on what was happening lower down.

What was happening lower down looked normal enough to me though naturally it scared them especially with her moans which were awfully LOUD. I didn’t think we’d need to send to town for my doctor friend but could see it through ourselves. It wasn’t even a nurse they especially needed. What they needed and needed badly was an adult.

Two adults. For standing against the wall rocking slowly back and forth on heels was Rosen or Granite or whatever he wanted to be called. A lot of men intimidate you with their size and brawn but he was one of those rarer ones who impress you by their thinness like they’re showing you they don’t need much from life and because they don’t need much from life they’re a hell of a lot tougher than you are. He had on ragged work pants a red flannel shirt taut suspenders and looked like he had stepped into that room from 1885. He stroked his blonde beard while he rocked but never smiled never came close to smiling. Granite is a good name for him since his skin is steel gray with albino veins and you know if you touched him touched him anywhere nothing would flinch.

He was the one I glanced at whenever I needed something. Towels hot water compresses rubbing alcohol swabs. I only had to nod and he knew instinctively what I wanted and went to fetch it. I liked him for that hard as he was. And for all the talk about it being “our” baby I knew from the intent way he stared that the baby was his.

Lilac’s labor lasted most of the night but there were no surprises other than how a little thing like her could howl so loud and so long. I didn’t need to do much until the baby began crowning than I started in massaging since I wanted it to be positioned just right. Maybe that helped because toward the end Lilac became much quieter. The last hour was rough even so. I’m just as glad a doctor wasn’t there because he would have gotten impatient and reached for the forceps but I waited and in the end hardly needed to do anything but tie off the cord. The Viking girl turned out to be named Kit and she did a good job cleaning the baby and wrapping him and handing him to Lilac who once her exhaustion wore off and her disbelief smiled so beautifully it made me sob.

“What’s his name?” I said slipping open the blanket enough to admire him.

“Luddy,” she said.

I didn’t get it.

“Muddy?”

“Luddy.”

“Cuddy?”

“Luddy.”

“Perfect name,” I said. I never heard of it before.

I’m making myself out to sound like an expert but that was the first birth I’d ever been at where I wasn’t the one doing the pushing and moaning. I was never frightened though and that’s because I drew strength from the eager hopeful way those young people stared. I don’t know if any of them is an artist but you could paint a pretty good picture if you’d been watching that night. The rain streaming down the windows and the kerosene lamp beaming off the pink hill of Lilac’s belly and luna moths beating their wings against the screens trying to get in and the warmth of the wood-stove on our backs and the girls twirling their necklaces like rosary beads and the boys smoking weed and Granite over there in his corner holding us all together by the fearless way he stared. I looked over once and saw twin gold dots toward the bottom of the window felt it was raccoons come to watch or porcupines or bobcats and sensed at their back the wild forest land that surrounded us lonely beyond lonely forgotten beyond forgotten hardly even part of America at all and yet right there in the center pressing it back bawling its head off this gift of new life.

It was dawn the sun was burning the dew off the windows before I felt sure enough about things to leave. Granite walked me out to the truck and before we got there he grabbed one of his men by the shoulders and pointed to the old stable they used as their barn.

I was way ahead of him.

“Nope, I don’t want any piglets,” I said. “This was for free.”

That seemed to annoy him. He didn’t like being beholden to anybody. It would be better if I liked pigs.

“Nope,” I said again. “Don’t want any lambs either or honey or berries or dope. Had some fun here, thanks go to you.”

August rode back with me on the truck and when we got to my house she didn’t want to let me go.

“Out with it,” I said. I could see those soft round eyes holding something in.

“Why does it have to be torture?”

I said what any woman would say.

“Because it always is, always has been, always will be.”

This didn’t seem to satisfy her and I know it didn’t satisfy me and probably sounds easy and smug to you. But I guess that’s what they wanted me to say why I was brought up there what my role in all this was. To tell them the miracle we witnessed wasn’t so special after all but the most natural thing in the world.

The words looked tattooed, she had pressed so hard on the skin of plaster. Every fifth or sixth sentence ended with gouges instead of periods and Vera finally understood these were places where the points of her pens must have snapped, just like the lead of pencils. What kind of woman writes so hard the pen breaks? What kind of woman would use three colors of ink and change colors, it sometimes seemed, almost every word? And how many cartons of pens must she have bought, to be so extravagant?

At first the writing extended all the way across the wall, but she must have realized she would never fit in everything she had to say, because she suddenly switched to relatively neat and ordered paragraphs similar to Beth’s. Maybe it was the strain of this that made the pens snap—she didn’t like margins, borders, indents, rules.

Reading Beth, Vera’s head had remained steady and intent, a platform for her attention to rest on, but reading Dottie, trying to follow her swoops and splashes, her head kept swaying, so the words seemed to come through the muscles of her neck. The childbirth business came that way—by the time she finished reading she was massaging her shoulders trying to press out the kinks. Having Cassie had been ridiculously easy, to the point she was even somewhat disappointed that she hadn’t had the chance to prove her determination and courage.

“Don’t you worry about that,” the maternity nurse told her. “The ones that cause no trouble now torture you plenty later.”

Torture. Maybe it was a nurse word. Dottie had used it four times and each time it was as if she had reached her hand out from the wall and slapped Vera across the face. She had probably jotted it down without a moment’s thought, hyperbole but who cared, never worrying about how someone might react, that unknown someone who forty years later would be reading what she wrote.

Badly—how else could she react? Extravagantly. Wildly. She could have cursed reading the word the first time and she could have shouted the second time and the third time she could have screamed and even that wouldn’t have been commensurate with what she felt. The word had slapped her, then fallen off the plaster right smack into her lap, with those spiky t’s and sordid r’s and the dirty vowels that served as their glue.

She went out to the kitchen and fixed herself supper to get away from it. She swept the wallpaper scraps off the floor and burned them outside to get away from it. She stood naked under the hose. But her little cleansing ceremonies didn’t work, nothing worked, and so she went the other way, deliberately thought of the word constantly, saying it over and over to herself until it was nonsense.

Torture. Torture. Torture. Torture. That old childhood trick, like deliberately spinning yourself around and around on the grass until you got dizzy. Torture. Torture. Torture. Torture. Torture.

That was better, it was beginning to blur now—she turned the sewing room lamp off and went upstairs to the bedroom. Torture. Torture. Torture. Torture. Torture. Torture. Torture. She said it so many times it became automatic, her imagination kept it up in her sleep. Torture became torch-her became tore-her became toss-her became touch-her—and touch-her had never hurt anyone. When she woke up in the morning, went downstairs, ate breakfast, picked up her tools and began stripping, determined to finish the room in one final go, the word hardly meant anything, Dottie could use it all she wanted, it was nothing but a blur of ugly syllables that hardly tortured her at all.

Two days later I discovered Beth’s writing with the very first strip I peeled off the wall in the TV room which I guess had been her parlor but we had put the TV in there when we first bought the house and it’s been there ever since up on a shelf along with all my women’s magazines and Danny’s first buck or at least its antlers. There was a foldout couch I kept meaning to replace and a coffee table with a checkerboard built into the top where Danny always used to beat Andy and Andy never seemed to mind. Since becoming an abandoned woman I didn’t see any reason to keep it tidy so it was the room that needed working on the most.

I wasn’t as surprised by the writing as you might think. Ever since we moved here I had sensed somebody else in the house like a restless presence that couldn’t rest. Ghosts you’re thinking and you’re probably laughing. But I never thought ghosts I thought well some poor soul once lived here who had a hard time and the echo of that is still bouncing off the walls. Peeling back that first strip you know what I thought? THERE YOU ARE!!! Just like in hide and go seek. Even then I was slow on the uptake. I thought it was a recipe she had jotted down on the wall while she was papering or a calculation about how many rolls she needed or some simple sort of reminder.

If I stripped off more paper I would have discovered what it really hid but just then I heard a noise outside like a giant blender crushing ice. I felt like I’d been caught doing something secret so I reached up as high as I could and tucked the edge of that first strip back under the molding and patted it down so the writing was hidden again and only then went outside.

A big Greyhound bus was pulling over to the side of the road ANOTHER BUS so it seemed like my place had suddenly become Grand Central Station. The driver climbed down muttering to himself and right behind him of all people came Andy! “Lend a hand?” the driver asked and Andy nodded. He gave me a little wave and followed the driver around to the back of the bus and the next thing I knew the two of them were under there hammering away at a pipe that had bounced loose on one of our potholes. When they scooted back out again Andy’s uniform was covered in mustard-colored grease which made him look like a hot dog after crawling through a bun. The driver climbed inside then threw a duffel bag down to him and snapped off a salute.

“Enjoy your leave, soldier! When you get over there give ’em hell for me!”

That eased the shock since at least I knew now it was leave that had brought him home. He hadn’t said anything in his last letter but he was never one to say. He leaned over and kissed me on the forehead like he’d only been gone a few hours and followed me over to the porch. I think he would have continued right straight to the TV room but I wasn’t going to let him do that at least not right away.

“Home sweet home,” I said sort of prompting him.

He looked around and nodded. “Home sweet home.”

“So, you got a leave?”

“Yeah.”

“Regular?”

“Embarkation.”

“You’re going?”

“Nam.”

“How long is your leave?”

“Thursday.”

“And you ship out?”

“Monday.”

“I thought it might be Germany.”

“Nope.”

That’s pretty much how our conversation went the two of us circling around each other on the porch like Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston me jabbing him ducking.

“Well come on in, come on in! Take your shirt or tunic or whatever it’s called off and I’ll put it in the wash.”

You need to be careful with Andy since if you tell him something he’ll do it. Right there on the porch he started stripping off his uniform! That made me laugh. Same old Andy! But the truth is he looked different than when he left not skinny and hard like you would think after basic training but thicker and puffier especially around the middle. His hair was pushed straight back in a crew cut and his acne was just as tomato red as ever and his eyes still had that meekness that used to irritate his dad and the dimple under his lip still reminded me of Kirk Douglas but what surprised me most was that over his belt hung the beginning of a paunch. I couldn’t help sticking out my hand and patting it as sort of a question.

“Good chow,” he said. “The cooks are pals of mine and I can never say no when they offer me seconds.”

That’s all I could get out of him about army life. He went up to his room and when he came back he had on the white t-shirt and khaki work pants that had always been his favorite clothes. I asked if he was thirsty but he said not particularly and went right over to the TV room and plopped himself down on the couch. One of his favorite shows was on which turned out to be a soap opera and he told me who all the characters were and what rotten things they were doing to each other. Just by luck I had chicken cutlets in the ice box which had always been his favorite and I fixed them with red potatoes and corn on the cob and maple biscuits and brought it to him on his old Donald Duck tray and when he saw what it was I got the first real smile I’d seen yet.

I sat down on our beanbag chair so he was in between me and the TV screen and though I pretended to watch it what I mostly did was watch him. Part of what I felt was what any mom would feel if her boy was going off to war proud and apprehensive but after that it got more complicated. Vietnam sat off in this numb zone that had something to do with television and something to do with politics and since I never had time for either of those things it could have been Mars they were talking about. No one in town had ever been sent there. It would have worried me more if he had been going to Germany to face all those Russian missiles and tanks.

Loving Danny losing Danny had worn me out I’m not ashamed to admit that. Both before and after his brother’s death Andy was just THERE he wasn’t the kind of boy you worried about and so it was hard to worry about him now. He had his arm hooked over the back of the couch to keep from sliding off onto the carpet but he kept inching lower and lower anyway and it was pretty funny how limp he became how slack. I thought to myself well that’s Andy for better or worse. That’s Andy and he’s all I have left in the world and I love him more than I ever thought.

“This next one’s my favorite,” he said and just like that he was sitting ramrod straight on the couch. “Is it nine yet?”

He didn’t look like he could bear waiting. He patted the couch made a space for me and once the program came on talked a mile a minute telling me what it was about.

“The Man from Uncle,” he said. “They’re good guys and what’s funny is one of them is a Russian and yet they work together stamping out world crime. See? There he is! Ilya Kuriagin. Uncle is the agency they work for. Here’s the other one, Napoleon Solo. They’re getting their assignment, hold on to your hat!”

He was still watching TV when I went to bed and he may have been there all night because when I got up in the morning he was back on the couch though now he wore a black t-shirt not a white one. If that’s how he wanted to relax during his leave it was fine by me though later in the morning I asked him to help me gather blueberries and of course he hopped right up. He was good at picking he could hold cupfuls in his hands but I was pretty good myself so we soon started a competition to see who could fill their bucket up first.

He took a shower after that went back to the TV. About four I heard somebody at the front door. August! I hadn’t seen her since Lilac’s baby and as we stood on the porch she filled me in on the news. They had cleared brush for a field. Their berries were spectacular. There was a new calf. Luddy was adorable. Granite had come back from Canada with the sweetest weed yet.

“That’s wonderful,” I told her. “But you must be tired from your walk. Come inside with me there’s a little surprise.”

I led her down the hall to the TV room but all there was of Andy was an empty depression in the couch. “Wait here,” I told her and went out to the kitchen then up to his room but there was no sign of him. That confused me but since I hadn’t told August about him yet I took her back outside. I’d been meaning to introduce her to Therese LaBombard and I figured now was as good a time as any and when I walked her up there the two of them immediately hit it off. August had learned French at private school and Therese spoke Quebecois but they managed to understand each other all right and Mrs. L. gave her a blueberry ketchup recipe that had been in her family for years.

I walked August a little way in toward the hills and stood watching until she was out of sight. When I went back into the TV room Andy sat slumped on the couch.

“Where’d you disappear to?” I said. I figured he was shy with so pretty a girl.

“I didn’t disappear anywhere, Mom. I’ve been right here all afternoon.”

That was a lie but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why he would bother. But that was the last day of my vacation and I didn’t want to ruin it by arguing. I made meatloaf for dinner and we watched TV for a while and then I asked him to go for a walk with me to watch the sunset and he gave me a nice hug before I went up to bed.

“I’m really glad to have you here,” I told him.

“Me, too,” he said softly. “Really happy.”

I always leave for work before the sun comes up but I left a note saying that maybe later we could go for a swim in the stream or drive into town for ice cream. At the hospital things were crazy busy mostly the usual confusion that comes when you’ve been gone on vacation but then a patient coded in the afternoon and no one could get an IV started on this retired railroad man and his family got hysterical and Tina Holbrook came up to our floor and started yelling at me for messing up her overtime schedule. As if that wasn’t enough one of our orderlies Tom Titus who had spent the last eight years leering at me every time I came in range slunk up to me by the desk as I was getting ready to go home.

“You’re gorgeous,” he said which was his usual opening line.

“Not now, Tom.”

“F*ck you then.” He pointed toward the lounge at the end of the hall. “This bald farty guy wants to talk to you.”

The good thing was that Tom put me in a bad mood. I walked down the hall determined not to take shit from anyone. The bald guy resembled a gangster with a forehead of cement and jowls that looked stuffed with fishing sinkers so I wasn’t surprised when he waved a card in my face and announced he was a cop.

“Federal Bureau of Investigation,” he said with a smirk.

He had a Boston accent and his cheek was scarred with a birthmark that looked like a slab of bubble gum plastered across the side of his nose. FBI? I felt like saying. You look like the kind of crook the FBI is supposed to hunt down. But I didn’t say that.

“Bullshit,” I said.

He seemed used to that.

“When’s the last time you saw your son?” he demanded.

“Danny? 1964. He shot himself playing cowboy.”

The agent looked down at his clipboard.

“Andrew Peach.”

I’d held on to my attitude until then which was all about laughing him off but the moment he said Andy’s name everything changed so fast it was like one of our nurses had given me a hypodermic that pumped wariness and caution right straight into my heart.

“Three months ago when he left for basic. Why? There’s nothing wrong with him is there officer?”

The agent moved his tongue around so it was like he was licking the bubble gum from inside.

“He went on embarkation leave three weeks ago and hasn’t reported back since. His unit shipped out last Tuesday for Vietnam. It was AWOL before that but now it’s desertion.”

“Missed the plane? He can catch another one, you must have plenty.”

“Desertion means fifteen years in the stockade. Aiding and abetting him means five years in a federal penitentiary, a $25,000 fine, plus we take your house. I’ll ask you again, Mrs. Peach. Have you seen your son or do you know where he might be hiding?” “You must be mistaken, officer. Andy loves the army, he was looking forward to going overseas. He’s the easiest boy in the world to get along with.”

“You haven’t seen him? Haven’t gotten a phone call? Gotten a letter?”

“I have no idea where he is.”

“I hope that’s veracious. My men are searching your house this very minute.”

My heart jumped with that and I made a fluttering gesture with my hand like Scarlett O’Hara about to faint. The agent decided he had me just where he wanted. He warned me again about the penalties for desertion then went on to say that if Andy turned himself in or reported to Fort Polk all would be forgiven but he only had twenty-four hours and past that anything might happen since there was a war on even though plenty of people pretended there wasn’t. He finished by giving me his business card telling me he’d be in touch and then as he grabbed his fedora he asked a final question that seemed the most random and pointless of all.

“How far is Canada from here, Mrs. Peach?”

“Ten miles. You going sightseeing?”

He grimaced enough that his jowls jiggled but he didn’t answer me or at least not directly.

“Canucks,” he said. “F*cking animals.”

The drive home was torture. I was sure some mistake had been made though I couldn’t understand what the mistake was or how I could fix it and this drove me crazy plus I expected to see Andy being led from the house in chains. It’s normally a twenty-minute drive but I did it in ten. Too fast too obvious so I slowed down and drove past the house to make sure I wasn’t being followed. Things seemed peaceful enough and when I got to the porch and heard the TV blaring I wanted to cry in relief.

Andy sat slumped on the couch staring at one of his soap operas and didn’t realize I was there until I stepped in front of the screen and turned it off.

“Hey,” he said in gentle protest.

I didn’t waste any time.

“When did they come?”

He looked sleepy like I had interrupted his nap and rubbed his eyes like the sandman had him.

“Hour ago.”

“Where did you hide?”

“Never had to. They didn’t come here. They drove up the road to Mrs. LaBombard’s. Three cars full. I heard her shouting and that’s how I knew they were there.”

“They went to the wrong house?”

“I’ll say. She was shouting at them in French and waving a broom around. They didn’t look happy and so they drove off.”

I can’t tell you how calmly he said this like all the excitement had nothing to do with him.

“Explain,” I said sitting down on the couch next to him.

Home three days and already the brushy tips of his crewcut were beginning to soften and curl over and he sat there trying to stroke them flat. He had some nasal problems when he was little which makes it seem like he sighs whenever he takes a deep breath and that’s what I got now one of his deepest most reluctant sighs.

“We were due to ship out from San Diego and they said if we wanted to spend our five days of embarkation leave there it was okay we could join the unit at the air base once our time was up.”

He folded his hands together and smiled.

“That’s it?”

“Well, a bunch of us thought that would be fun so we went to the Greyhound station.”

“And?”

“We had to wait at the lunch counter for the next bus west. I got talking to this discharged private who had just gotten back from Nam. He was going home to Nashville and he was complaining about how long a trip it was and it was boring without anybody to talk to and if I had nothing better to do why didn’t I come along with him and when we got there he could show me the sights.”

“So instead of San Diego you went to Nashville?”

“Didn’t want to hurt his feelings. He had hundreds of stories about things he’d seen while he was fighting over there. You know. Not so nice things. But when we stopped in Little Rock he got talking to this hooker and didn’t get back on the bus so I changed my ticket and headed for Knoxville instead.”

“Knoxville? Why Knoxville?”

Andy shrugged. “Always liked the sound of it.” He rapped hishand against the wall. “Knock knock who’s there?”

“You stayed?”

“Couple of days.”

“Doing?”

“Thinking about things.”

“What things?”

“Met this girl and she was going to Atlanta and she asked me to go along and I said sure why not. I was AWOL by then anyway. It was pretty hot in Atlanta and I couldn’t get cool no matter what I did and her boyfriend showed up so that’s when I began thinking about heading home.”

“That doesn’t explain anything, Andy.” I leaned toward him made sure he looked right into my eyes so his attention wouldn’t wander to the blank TV screen. “The FBI man said you’re not just AWOL you’re deserting. You missed the plane to Vietnam. He said that’s serious, you could go to prison. That’s why I’m telling you that doesn’t explain anything, what you just said.”

He mumbled something.

“What?”

“I didn’t really feel like it.”

“Feel like what?”

“Going over there.”

“To Vietnam?”

He put his hand on his chin used it to lever his head up and down in a heavy nod.

“You didn’t feel like it?”

“Nah, not really.”

“That’s why you didn’t go?”

“Don’t really want to.”

Already I was lost.

“Don’t want to what?”

“Go over there.”

“Because?”

“I’m not in the mood.”

“Not in the mood?”

“Yeah, you know.”

“The mood?”

“To kill anyone.”

It staggered me not so much what he said but the lazy way he said it. By now I was agitated enough for both of us but I tried keeping my voice calm.

“Look, Andy. This G-man was pretty reasonable. You can go back he said, no questions asked. You can get on a plane and join up with your unit and all will be forgiven.”

He shrugged. “I’m not really in the mood.”

“You trained with these boys, they’re counting on you. Didn’t you train with them?”

“Tigerland. I did Tigerland with them.”

“You don’t want to put that experience to work, all that teamwork?”

It didn’t sound like me talking it sounded like the FBI bastard talking through me but what else could I do? He didn’t answer right away seemed to think about it but then ended up saying exactly the same thing.

“Don’t really feel like it.”

I tried again this time desperately.

“Your father served in the Pacific. Your grandfather built destroyers. They answered their country’s call.”

Andy smiled.

Something occurred to me. “It wasn’t any peace marchers talking to you messing up your head was it?”

“You mean draft dodgers?” He turned his finger up. “We hate them.”

“But you believe in peace?”

He struggled with that for a minute or two.

“Nah, not particularly. It’s just that I’m not in the mood.”

I’m not sure how long I tried reasoning with him but it was dark by the time I quit. I tried scaring him about what would happen if he didn’t go tried convincing him he owed it to his buddies brought out every argument I could think of and we always circled back to the same point.

“No,” I said putting up my hand. “I know what you’re going to say. But don’t you think your mood could change?”

Instead of answering he went over to the TV squatted found the knob turned it on.

That left me with only one thing to say.

“It’s just macaroni and cheese tonight, is that okay?”

“Thanks, Mom. You bet. You’re the greatest.”

I walked around the house before bed convinced there was a G-man lurking behind every bush. To calm myself down I tried remembering how Andy was as a little boy but that was difficult because the peculiar thing about Andy is that memories don’t stick to him. I have a thousand memories of Danny all I have to do is close my eyes and they flood back. With Andy it’s harder they seem to burrow shyly into the past and you really have to tug to bring them out.

But one finally came. He was five or six. Danny’s father had taken him off on a hunting trip so it was just Andy and me in the house. He had a terrible accident only boys can have zipping his jeans up on the loose skin of his penis so he cried and cried and cried. I got things straightened away but then much later when I was sewing I heard his voice calling soft and despairingly from his room.

“Mommy? Am I going to die?”

That was my Andy memory and it broke the logjam so in the course of the night I found dozens of others I thought were lost. When I finally did fall asleep something happened that had nothing to do with thinking. I went to bed fretting and woke up absolutely convinced what I had to do.

Hide him. I had to hide him. I lost my first son and there’s nothing worse a mother can say and my instincts were shriveled up for a long time after that but the pressure over Andy was good for them they had healed during the night or started to heal. I needed to trust how I felt needed to make sure the bastards wouldn’t get him and if they did it would be over my dead body and so sure was I of this so certain that it didn’t seem like an exaggeration but the literal truth.

OVER MY DEAD BODY I told myself. It was amazing how calm this made me feel.

Something else was working on me. I’d messed up the marriage business and been a failure with Danny and never accomplished very much outside work but here life was offering me one more test and I couldn’t fail again.

“So,” I said when he came downstairs for breakfast. “Still don’t feel like killing anybody?”

He stirred his eggs around with his fork. “Not really in the mood.”

“Then finish eating and follow me.”

His bedroom has a closet under the eaves which runs all the way along the top floor of the house so it must be thirty feet long. Only the first six feet looks like a closet but if you push aside the rack of clothes and box of shoes it keeps going like a tunnel. Danny and Andy loved hiding in there as kids. The slanting wall of the closet stops a foot short of the outside wall of the house. There’s a gap and if you push the insulation aside and crawl through you come out onto the rafters over the mudroom.

“Get some plywood from the barn,” I told Andy. “We’ll make a platform just big enough for you to stretch out on.”

He hadn’t been so enthusiastic about anything since he’d been home and before the morning was over we had the hiding place swept out and organized so it was like making a tree house or cave. We stocked it too. Flashlight flyswatter canteen blankets pillows cupcakes chips. Andy was disappointed he couldn’t drag the TV in but other than that he seemed pleased. Good thing too because no sooner had we finished than somebody began knocking on the door downstairs.

It was a Western Union telegram boy or that’s what he pretended to be. He looked about sixty and between that and my never having gotten a telegram in my life I was immediately suspicious.

“Telegram for Andrew Peach,” he said. I still had my robe on and I saw him blushing but it wasn’t my breasts that were doing it to him but the shame and embarrassment of having to lie.

“Telegram?” I said all innocent. “Well you’ve come to the wrong place, sonny. He’s down in Diseaseville in the army.”

The next day a UPS man knocked on the door claiming he had a package for Andy and I told him the same thing. These were like fire drills and Andy learned to scoot into the hiding place pretty quick. August came that afternoon on her weekly visit and it was hard for me since she was so open and loving and yet I couldn’t even begin to tell her what was happening or how I felt. I kept her outside mostly but then we went into the kitchen and I made her some whoopie pies to take back to the Shoe. She was excited because they had traded for their first heifer and by winter hoped to have a bull if they could find a farmer willing to let one go. She ate her pies and I thought maybe her expression was a little more curious and questioning than usual but that was probably just me.

The state police came on Tuesday. I had called in sick for two days but couldn’t do that anymore and I’d left a note for Andy and was on my way out to the car when three cruisers pulled up to the house. I knew all of them either because they lived in town or because I saw them at the hospital when they brought victims in after car wrecks.

“Mrs. Peach?” Robbie Silver said acting formal and stiff. I’ve known him since he was seven. “We have a warrant to search for your son.”

They could have found him if they really wanted to but they not only knew me from way back when they knew Andy from way back when and if you knew Andy it was impossible to believe he could do anything so energetic as deserting. I was smart enough to ask if they wanted coffee and when I went into the kitchen I slipped the note I’d left Andy into the trash. Gus Lombardo rummaged through the bedroom closet but only got as far as the box of shoes and came back out holding his nose.

At least Robbie had the decency to act ashamed. “I’m sorry about this, Dottie.”

“It’s a funny thing,” I said.

“Funny?”

“I never figured you for Gestapo.”

Once they left I waited to make sure they wouldn’t double right back. “Andy?” I called into the closet. After a few seconds seemingly a hundred miles away he called back. “I’m happy, Mom.”

“Well come on out, they’re gone now.”

“I think I’ll stay in here for a while.”

“Come on out, Andy. There’s nothing to worry about.”

The curtain made by his old baseball shirt and Boy Scout uniform parted and there he was stooping under the rod acting embarrassed trying to hide something around behind him and it was a few seconds before I realized what he was hiding was a dark stain on the seat of his pants.

I’d felt protective before this but it was nothing compared to what I felt now. “It’s hot in there, you go and take a shower and I’ll get lunch ready,” I said trying to keep my voice calm. Never in my life had I felt pity like that or determination. All that talk about war with Russia made Perry stock the house with guns and while I got rid of most of them after he left there was a shotgun I saved to scare crows off my garden and what’s more I knew how to use it. While Andy showered I went and found it and put it under my bed. Guns had taken my first son they could damn well protect my second.

There was a lull of three or four days where no one bothered us. I pulled Andy away from the TV long enough to discuss his plans though that was a joke because neither of us could come up with any. What I wanted was for the war to end and everybody be forgiven but one glance at the news at night threw cold water on that. I knew draft dodgers were safe if they got to Canada and I was guessing that meant deserters too but even though the border was just ten miles away it didn’t seem like a real possibility.

Canada could have been Poland or Africa for all we knew about it. The high school basketball team sometimes went up there for games and there were plenty of Frenchies in town and people with bad teeth drove there for cheap dentists but except for bootleggers in the old days and drug smuggling now it was hard to think of any connections with Canada at all. There was only one road leading up there only one border crossing and it was sure to be watched. You could bushwhack through the woods and swamps but Andy was never what you would call outdoorsy and sent on his own he would probably lose his way and starve.

On Saturday we felt confident enough that he came outside and helped me work in the garden through a perfect August afternoon. We talked about taking a swim in the stream to cool off but then suddenly a hoarse gritty stirring in the air caught my attention and my sixth sense kicked in and putting my finger to my lips I shooed him inside.

I went around to the porch and for the third time that summer had a Greyhound bus squeal to a stop in front of my house.

The driver got out a different one than last time but just as polite and put down his stool with a little flourish and even whisked it off. The passenger who climbed down bowed and slapped him on the back so it was obvious that in the course of the bus ride they had become great pals.

There’s no use pretending. What struck me first about the passenger was his blackness and his blackness almost knocked me down. In two hundred years probably not a single Negro had ever set foot in town since we never had slaves and there are no cities nearby and we don’t get tourists even white ones. And his blackness was black there was no brown. Between that and his being so well dressed in a sports jacket that was a little tight on him and a skinny white tie and a straw fedora with a madras band my first reaction was that this was one of those civil rights campaigners come to integrate us.

Big mistake. No civil rights worker had a waist like his which was small as a ballerina’s or shoulders which were like a lumberjack’s or held that ramrod posture and made it seem perfectly natural and at ease.

He carried no bag and the bus drove off without the driver tossing one down. He looked at the hills just like August had and like August seemed stunned by their beauty. He finally saw me and stared for a long time and I don’t want to say he mentally stripped off my clothes because that’s going to make it seem like all I think black men do is go around lusting after white women’s bodies but that’s what he did he mentally stripped me and then was polite enough to soften his expression and let me get dressed.

First words out of his mouth. “Any bears up here? Looks like evil bear country to me.”

“Oh, they’re out there all right,” I said. “They like to raid corn fields at night.”

“Yeah? I want to get a postcard of a bear. Maybe you’ll tell me where I can obtain one?”

He was my age in his forties. His nose was the snub kind you see on little girls which was laughable in a face so manly. Wrinkles or scars slanted up from the corners of his eyes like wings or horns more burgundy colored than black. Like I said his jacket was tight on him and where the sleeves shrank back I could see the veins on his arms which throbbed outwards almost to the bursting point and would have been easy to poke an IV into. Don’t ask me why but it was those veins that made me guess.

“You’re army.”

He beamed. “Twenty-three years!”

“You’re a lieutenant. No, a sergeant.”

“Master sergeant!”

“You’re Sergeant Cobb.”

He smiled even broader. “So he talks about me!”

Already the trap.

“He writes about you in his letters.”

“A fine soldier! Makes us all proud!”

“You came all the way up here to tell me that?”

I thought it was smart to call his bluff right away but he ignored me and waved his arm toward the hills.

“He’s always explicating how great it is up here, raving on about how pretty the beaches are and how the girls are so elegant and about the bars and restaurants and clubs. Makes it sound like paradise on earth so I always wanted to peruse it for myself. Yes, ma’am. His eyes would light up just telling me about it all. And now I can see why.”

Beaches? Blondes? Nightclubs? He might as well have added on roulette wheels and roller coasters. And the funny thing is Cobb looked around like that’s exactly what he saw.

“A fine soldier, always volunteering, always ready with a quip. Out on a route march we came to a river and I required someone to swim to the other side. You think any of those other effeminate no-account spoiled mamma boys would volunteer? Chop chop your boy’s hand shoots right up. ‘Master Sergeant Cobb,’ he says like a real man. ‘I know the river is full of evil cottonmouths and water snakes and crocodiles and leeches and my chances of getting unscathed to the other side are approximately zero but if it’s for the good of the unit I’ll gladly give it my all.’”

I looked him right in the eye. “Sounds like Andy all right.”

“You know that song by King Cole they’re always playing on the radio.” He started singing. “Bring out those lazy hazy days of summer! I think old Nat must be thinking about life right here.”

It’s hard to describe his voice because it changed nearly every sentence but imagine a flat Midwestern accent combined with sounding like an Englishman in a war movie adding in a drawl like Amos and Andy or a Baptist preacher. Either he was trying to confuse people with it or he was pretty confused himself.

But right from the start I was storing up things about him I could use to fight back. He considered himself a ladies’ man. He liked to talk a lot with big words thrown in. He enjoyed playing games. I knew when he left off bullshitting he’d be dangerous and the trick was to know when the bullshitting stopped.

“You must be tired after your bus ride, Sergeant Cobb. Luckily, I have some beers in the ice box.”

He switched to Amos and Andy now even rolled his eyes. “Thank you kindly, ma’am!”

I sat him down on the porch while I went inside. I knew Andy was in his hiding place by now so what I mostly worried about was blurting out something that would give him away. The mosquitoes were bad so I lit a citronella candle and brought it back out with me even though it wasn’t yet dark. Cobb wrinkled his nose at the smell and I thought well here’s one more bug I have to get rid of but all he did was sit back on the rocker and put his feet up on the rail.

“Bottle okay?” I handed him two.

“You dwell alone here?” he asked tilting one back. “No husband around?”

“No husband around.”

“No gentleman friend? Must get lonesome at night. Big place for a lady on her own. Does it get lonesome?”

“Nothing I can’t handle.”

He smiled like I was doing better now and he was really enjoying our little duel.

“So, how is Andy?” I said.

“Andy?” He looked puzzled like the name was new to him.

“It’s been a long time since I had any letters. I understand you’re shipping out.”

He wiped the suds off his lip. “Fine soldier, makes us all proud.”

“You’re not going to Vietnam with them?” I handed him another beer.

“That’s a lachrymose story. Been there twice. Two tours and the second was even better than the first. Got this minor wound in my shoulder here, those VC insurgents shot straight for a change, so they deployed me over to Louisiana to instruct all the youngsters and it breaks my heart not to go over with them and show them the sights.”

I handed him his fourth beer. The longer he talked the louder his voice grew so it seemed like he knew Andy was hiding in the house somewhere and wanted to make sure he heard every word. It was all about Vietnam and how much fun it was. The weather was perfect the accommodations were luxurious anytime you were at all concerned about anything all you had to do was pick up the phone and call in an air strike and go back to bed. The officers were handpicked for their leadership abilities all they cared about was the welfare of their men and the local people really appreciated them couldn’t do enough to make them feel at home.

I handed him his fifth beer.

And as much fun as it was out in the field that was nothing compared to how enjoyable the leaves were and when you saw how enjoyable the leaves were you wondered why you had wasted so much time back in the States. There were bars in Saigon three blocks long and behind every stool stood a gook waiting to take your order or fix you up with some weed or find you a girl all you had to do was ask and ten seconds later it was yours. Not just any booze either but the finest whiskey in the world and not just any weed but the purest money could buy and not just any girl but Eurasian ones meaning their father was a Frenchman and their mother was a gook and there was no better way to mix races at least not when it came to a bar girl’s looks.

I handed him his sixth beer.

Sure they were a little small on the boob side but that was more than compensated for by their asses which were tight enough to strike a match on and just a little bit bigger than a man’s palm. You could control them like a puppet just by putting your hand on a cheek and they would smile for you and make a fuss over you and if you kept squeezing you could generate just about any expression you were in the mood for and if their smiling got boring you could always squeeze a little harder and make them wince. After that it could be anything and that included having two girls suck you off at the same time which was the sweetest thing a man could hope for in life it was worth going over there just to experience.

“All that I’m describing is for a black man,” he said real amazement on his face. “You double the pleasure if your boy is white.”

I’d had that done to me before where a man starts being crude and waits for you to slap him down and keeps getting cruder if you don’t. But the longer he went on that way the safer I felt especially with him downing those beers. The sun sliced in on us through the porch rail but it didn’t have the power it had earlier in the summer and all it did was turn his Budweisers copper.

I gave him another one wondered how he could drink so much and not have to pee. For all he rambled on about Vietnam it turned out what he really wanted to talk about was China.

“Shit ma’am, that’s where the real peril lies. You think a piss ant country like Vietnam can cause us any peril?”

China was out to get us Vietnam was just a sideshow before the real battle commenced. He learned that back in Korea when he was just a rookie watching those hordes come streaming over the ridges and okay it was just a word people used hordes but it was one thing to throw the word around and another thing to actually be crouching in a frozen foxhole watching hordes come at you hordes upon hordes you could machine gun all you wanted and the hordes kept coming.

Next time they would beat us. They were waiting for Russia and America to blow each other up then they would move in with their garbage trucks and sweep up the debris. World dominion had been their goal all along he had made a detailed study the truth was plain as day. Had I ever read the writings of Dr. Sun Yat Sen? Hell, people always talked about Chairman Mao but he was nothing he was only following the strategy set out by Sun Yat Sen in 1913.

I handed him his eighth beer but instead of opening it he leaned forward in the rocker and looked me right in the eye.

“You ever read old Sunny Yat Sen? You should, you’d be surprised at how he had history all planned. You think we influence anything? You think the Soviets do? You think the Germans caused trouble or the Japs? It’s all there in his books, how the Chinks plotted and schemed, and now those peanut pissers have us right where they want us, all it will take is a few more years. Mean bastards, too. Who would you want your sister to marry, your basic Hebe or your basic Chink? Personally, I’ll take the Hebe every time.”

He burped belched staggered to his feet. “Scuse me, missus,” he said in his southern drawl voice. I thought I had him then just another drunken good old boy soldier. He stumbled around to the bushes and I could hear him against the house and when he came back all the beer was hosed out of him and he was sober again sucking his stomach in bracing his shoulders back jutting his chin out like he was on parade.

“And now Andy’s mom, I’ll take that little tour you promised.”

He held the door open pointed for me to go in first. I think he must have been bored with our game because he didn’t bother trying to bullshit me anymore but walked through each room looking things over touching the walls picking up lamps and ashtrays like he was searching for evidence or secret panels or fingerprints. I did okay downstairs but once we got to Andy’s bedroom my heart beat so fast I was sure he could hear it. Andy’s old Boy Scout badges lay on the dresser and he picked them up and twisted them to the light.

“Fine soldier. Very proud.”

I held my breath while he searched the closet but like the state police he didn’t look any deeper than the clothes rod. There was only my bedroom after that and I said to myself search it yourself if you want to I’ll be downstairs but just as I turned away I felt his hand grab my arm not so hard it hurt but pretty close like he was telling me he knew where the border was for pain and if he wanted to he could take me across.

My bedroom was in the same sorry state it’s always in but it seemed to amuse him the unmade bed my pajamas on the sheets my bra and panties. “Pink, I like that,” he said making his voice go husky and for a moment I thought he was going to lick his lips.

I never saw a man switch moods so fast. “Thank you for the tour, ma’am,” he said when we went downstairs. He shook my hand very formally. “And now I’ll be parting, but I appreciate your hospitality very much.”

“Do you need a ride somewhere?” It was dark out now and the moon swirled the porch with silver cream.

“Bus station would be fine.”

He didn’t say anything on the drive but sat with his face pressed against the window like he was still hoping to see bears.

“I don’t think there’s a bus until morning,” I said when we got to town.

“I’ll wait.”

“I should tell you something, Sergeant. This can be a pretty rough town on Saturday nights. Farm boys drive around looking for trouble. I’m not sure what they would do seeing someone like you.”

He looked over at me now. “You mean a nigger?”

He laughed with that really laughed so it was like his back teeth went rolling over the front ones pushed on by his tongue. Nigger. Tough town. Farm boys. Night. Nothing funnier! He opened the door came around to my side waited until I rolled down the window and he could say one last thing.

“A lonesome journey for a man like me, going back to Louisiana. A long and lonesome journey.”

There it was the line I’d been expecting ever since he first stepped off the bus. “Buy yourself a magazine,” I said.

He smiled straightened back up waved his arm around in a big circle. “I can perish happy, having seen it here now. Yes sirree ma’am, I can perish happy.”

I’d been mostly scared until then but that changed to anger pretty fast. So Cobb was tough enough to relish fighting farm boys but not brave enough to get through the night without getting laid! That was so typical it was the way Perry had been and it always made me want to laugh and scream thinking of their egoism thinking of them thinking that three minutes inside you was enough to do away with loneliness like it was a fluid they could pump into somebody else. Okay your problem now woman. Wasn’t that what they were saying when they came? Cobb or Perry I could have screamed at them both. Loneliness? You have the nerve the arrogance the balls to use that word? I can tell you what loneliness is and I don’t need a stubby little cock to illustrate my point.

I found Andy in the kitchen puffing on a cigarette which wasn’t something he did very often. A Red Sox cap was pulled low over his forehead and when I came in he tried hiding his face.

“What happened?”

He shrugged. “Got bonked.”

His cheeks were scratched one eye looked black and blue and when I lifted the cap back I found a cut nearly deep enough for stitches. I fetched some bandages a bowl of water sat him down under the light went to work.

“You going to tell me more?”

He winced under the iodine.

“I heard you bring him upstairs into my bedroom and then the closet. All along I figured he’d be the one to come find me. Seemed better if he found me outside so I pulled back one of the ceiling panels, dropped down into the mudroom and ran out the back door.”

“You were hiding in the yard?”

“Kept going all the way to the woods. Pretty dark in there, pretty scary. Scratched myself on some branches then I tripped against a rock and got bonked. Finally decided to just sit down. What I thought about was how Danny used to take me back there and we’d balance along that old stone wall seeing who could get farthest without falling off. He always found things I didn’t know about like arrowheads and moose antlers and woodcock nests.”

I had the gauze all the way around his forehead now but I added on another wrap just to make sure.

“We sat on a stump and Danny told me, not bragging or anything, that he was smart and ambitious enough to be anything he wanted. He’d been thinking about it, too. The best thing in the world to be was a Hollywood producer. That’s why he watched so many Westerns, to learn how. Then he laughed at himself the way he always did. ‘I’ll probably work in a garage like Dad,’ he said. ‘But you know what? It’s damn well got to be my own garage.’”

“Is that why you’re not in the mood to shoot anybody? Because of what happened to Danny?”

I said that casually like it just occurred to me though I’d been wondering about that all along. He shrugged his Andy shrug seemed really considering the idea then slowly shook his head.

“Nah, it’s just that I don’t really feel like it.”

“Sergeant Cobb says you’re a good soldier.”

He sucked his stomach in sat up straighter perfectly imitated his voice.

“A fine soldier. Makes us all proud.”

“He’s a complicated man.”

“I’ll say. He warned us if we ever messed up or crossed him he’d hound us all the way to our grave. We called him Hound after that or Hell Hound. He’ll drink too much, then go into town and beat up civilians.”

“Civilians?”

“Chinks.”

He took a drag on the cigarette then did something that surprised me. He brought his hand up through the smoke and gently patted my arm.

“Listen Andy. Mary Belcher from work has a going away party tomorrow afternoon and I have to go or people will be suspicious. You know the drill now, what to do if anybody comes?”

“Sure. Tomorrow night’s the next Uncle episode. Ilya’s temporarily gone over to the Russians so Napoleon Solo is on his own.”

We both slept late in the morning and after that we picked berries until our hands were blue but at four it was time for me to go. The party would have been sad anyway since I’d known Mary for twenty years and hated the fact she was moving but worrying about Andy made it torture. It was seven before I could make an excuse and leave and I think Mary was hurt that I left so soon.

The fog was so thick I couldn’t drive home as fast as I wanted. The first thing I heard when I got out of the car was Nat King Cole singing Lazy Hazy Days of Summer and it made me mad that Andy could be so careless with the radio but then the words stopped and there was a burping sound and when they started up again they were in a lower key. I walked from the barn around to the front of the house. Sitting on the porch under the bug light making his fingers wiggle like he was playing piano was Sergeant Cobb.

“I thought about you last night,” he said. “Your lips, your eyes, your fine evil ass. I hate skinny bitches, no meat on them. Full breasted, that’s what enamors me. Sweet Jesus F*ck, you’re full breasted.”

What startled me was the fact he had his army uniform on. Where had he gotten it? Yesterday he hadn’t even carried a bag. On his sleeve were his sergeant stripes and over his chest a row of medals hanging down like slack little penises spray painted in gold. The uniform made his waist seem even smaller than before so I thought of the term wasp-waisted and realized for the first time how repulsive a wasp can be.

“You had a long walk from town,” I said trying to keep my voice even.

He pointed toward the grass. Parked there under the locust was an Army jeep with a white star painted on the hood and an aerial looped over in a hoop.

“Andy’s not here,” I said. “You’ve wasted your leave or assignment or mission or whatever it was brought you here.”

He swung his arm around in his favorite gesture the one that seemed to take in all the world.

“I never lost one before which is really saying something the crap they send me. Greasers and retards and hoodlums and frat boys and mental defectives. They draft them and send them to me to whip into line and somehow don’t ask me how I do it. I embark them on that plane for Saigon and the government gives me another medal and my pay goes up ten dollars a month. I never lost one. Never lost one, goddamn one. But even worse would be losing that ten dollars.”

He pushed himself up from the rocker came over to where I stood on the furthest edge of the porch. Like he was hot or his collar had suddenly become too tight for him he unbuttoned the top of his tunic until I could see the olive colored t-shirt underneath.

“Know something? If I had someone to help with the lonely part I would leave tomorrow chop chop, no questions asked.”

He brought his hand up and I thought he was going to grab my arm but it kept going higher turned into a fist tapped me lightly on the chin. A love tap was that what it was supposed to be? I backed away but now his other hand grabbed my arm and like yesterday he squeezed just hard enough to let me know it could be a whole lot harder if he chose. He pulled me toward him very slowly enjoying every second in no hurry at all and then suddenly sensing the bargain had been struck sensing by who knows what sign that I had agreed to it initialed our contract given in he pulled much harder and brought his lips down and pushed his breath into my ear.

“You’re a prevaricating little cunt, but I like that.”

He took me in through the dark up to my bedroom. I heard a scraping noise and figured it was Andy crawling to his hiding spot but it didn’t seem high enough it seemed coming from downstairs. Cobb didn’t hear it he was way past the hearing stage now. For all his swagger he stripped off his uniform fast enough like it burned like it was hateful like it was poison.

I wasn’t ashamed of what I was doing and I know that must confuse you but I don’t know how else to explain. We had our bargain and it was the same bargain whores struck every night in their miserable rented rooms or unhappy wives made in return for being kept or tortured women made to protect who was dearest to them or to escape whatever trap held them or simply to survive. Cobb was lost in passion but that was okay he could buck and moan all he wanted to it was balanced by what I felt which was a protective instinct ten times stronger and harder and tougher than anything he could feel himself and was backed up by all the strength I gained from thinking of all those women who over the centuries had made the same bargain.

That’s what I thought about as Cobb hunched over me. As it turned out I only had to think about it for a minute and a half.

He rolled off me grunted flopped his arm over my thigh. He was snoring soon enough. I listened the way you listen to a clock ticking not particularly liking the sound but not particularly disliking it either it was just this harmless mechanical thing in the dark. But then much quicker than I expected the sound stopped and when the sound stopped I became very frightened.

He climbed into his uniform even faster than he’d taken it off. He saw me staring waved his hand in something that could have been see you later alligator or wham bam thank you ma’am or just as easily could have been drop dead. He didn’t step into the hall right away but leaned his head out and peered. The loaded shotgun was under the bed and if I had to I could quickly slide it out. I knew if I thought of Danny I couldn’t touch the trigger but thinking of Andy I knew I could.

I put my robe on and followed him downstairs. He walked from one room to the next sniffing like a bloodhound and didn’t care that I was following right behind. He went into the dining room but it was quiet and still. He went into the front parlor and turned the lights on then turned them back off. He walked down the hall in the moonlight then suddenly swerved left into the TV room and went right over to the set. He stood staring down at it then squatted and put the back of his hand flat against the screen.

Just that little gesture putting the back of his hand against the screen like a doctor checking a patient’s temperature and then with a little nod to himself he was gone.

I was a fool not to read that gesture better. So sure was I of things that I didn’t even bother waking Andy up before going to work though I suppose not wanting to face him had something to do with it too. I had punched in at the hospital and gone to my locker when I saw Wendy Poor the meanest of our aides talking to three other aides by the coffee machine.

“What a commotion!” she was telling them. “It was by the town hall and I could hardly squeeze past there are so many state troopers. There are these other guys in suits and sunglasses and they look like they mean business.”

“Drug raid,” one of the aides said knowingly.

“Drugs baloney. It’s a posse and leading them is this big nigger soldier driving a jeep.”

I walked as fast as I could to the stairs and by the time I got to the parking lot I was running. My heart shook so hard it blurred any thoughts that formed so I couldn’t come up with a plan all I could think about was getting to the house before they did. It was a ten-minute drive for me and twenty minutes for them which didn’t give me much time. I drove faster than was safe but then all of a sudden I noticed a yellow rectangle in my mirror that was going even faster honking its horn to pass.

It was the truck from the Wooden Shoe that dilapidated psychedelic truck that usually could only huff and puff along but now went so fast it was like they had poured LSD straight down its tank. And not just its tank. On the flat bed of the truck holding on for dear life were four or five girls dressed like can-can dancers waving with their free hands and blowing kisses even though there was no one along the road to watch. Music blared from the radio this pounding rock and roll. That was on back. Up front in the cab things were different. Three men sat with their shoulders pressed tight as bookends and they looked as grim and determined as the girls did gay. The driver honked again and where the road straightened out they went speeding past me downhill.

A party I decided an outing of some sort a merry jaunt and my mind jumped around so frantically it wasn’t capable of making any more sense of it than that. I decided if they could drive that fast then so could I so I shoved my foot down and went careening around the last curve before home. When I wrestled the wheel back I got my second big shock of the morning. The truck instead of racing past the house braked hard and turned in.

Andy stood outside on the grass looking startled and embarrassed and bashful and confused all at the same time. He had just his underwear on and when the girls sprang down from the truck and rushed over to him he covered up his groin with his hands.

The girls didn’t care about that. One was August and the other was the Dahlia girl I remembered from the night Lilac’s baby was born and another was Kit the Viking who had been so steady. They danced around him like he was a Maypole they were throwing flowers at and all Andy could do was stare at them in bewilderment because he just couldn’t get his mind around what was happening.

Granite jumped down from the cab with two of his henchmen one of who looked like General Custer in a cavalry outfit with a mustache and ringlets. He had a bugle he blew now as loud and triumphantly as he could. Granite knocked it away from him with one brutal swipe then marched over to me not in the mood to waste words.

“Get him in the truck.”

I was so surprised and frightened I must have froze because I could see his expression change to disappointment and contempt that I of all people could freeze. In the distance we could hear sirens now lots of sirens closing in fast.

He signaled one of his men to keep watch on the road then went over and pulled the girls off from Andy. “Get in the goddamn truck!” he yelled.

Andy still looked bewildered and instead of doing what Granite ordered he began backing up toward the house. He’s going to bolt I decided going to turn and run to the hiding place and if he does that he’s finished. The sirens really howled now we probably had no more than three or four minutes and it was only then when the pressure was greatest that my head finally cleared.

I grabbed Granite’s arm which was like grabbing hold of a nail. “Ask him politely,” I said.

Granite stared down at me. “What?”

“Ask him nice!”

He made a what the hell gesture went over to Andy put a brotherly arm around his shoulder and said something too low for me to hear. It must have been as polite a request as one man ever made to another because between one second and the next Andy without even a wave or last glance back was running over to the truck and the men were boosting him up on back and the girls were laughing and singing and waving their arms in excitement and delight. Granite climbed up to the cab and threw the gears into reverse and spun the truck around speeding off in the opposite direction from the sirens more on the shoulder than the concrete so stones flew up pebbles branches sticks like spray from a motorboat heading away from all the sirens all the confusion heading away to the hills away to the forest away to that brave foolish dream of a country where no one could find them or touch them or hurt them.

For just one second one terribly short second I felt like shouting in victory and triumph then a second later I felt sick from exhaustion and the little smear of loneliness left in my womb. I had four minutes before the posse arrived with their sirens and cruisers. I decided to wait for them inside the house and the room I ended up in was the TV room and what I ended up staring at was something I’d totally forgotten about after Andy came home which was that little peel of wallpaper I had discovered writing beneath then immediately pasted back up. And that’s where they found me and for the whole time they shouted bullied threatened I became just an empty headed gal with nothing on her mind but walls and wallpaper and prettying up her home.

They tore apart so much of the house it’s a wonder they didn’t rip off the wallpaper and save me the bother. When they finallyleft instead of trying to clean up their mess I started scraping and discovered the writing wasn’t just doodling but a woman’s story.

When I started reading all I was aware of was how different she was from me it was all so far back in time but soon I realized how similar we were to each other and how fifty years is nothing but a second a flick of the eyelashes a snap of the fingers a whisper.

I don’t have to tell you this about Beth because it’s how you must feel yourself. After I finished her story I worked in the sewing room until the walls were all bare. Seeing this running my hand along the smooth plaster I felt like a little girl who has a secret and will burst if she can’t tell it to somebody. Like that except it’s not an itchy spot in my tummy or a buzzing on my bottom or a tugging on my pigtails or however it feels to a girl. My heart will burst if I don’t tell my story to somebody and that doesn’t feel like a figure of speech but the simple truth and the feeling hurts even worse because there’s not a single living person I can tell.

Nurses at work always tease me about my pens about how I carry so many colors and why bother since all we ever write are memos to doctors or the charts on beds. Now that I had a wall to write on I was happy to have so many and I spread them out across the floor like they were paint brushes I could pick up or put down according to my mood. In a way I can’t explain the bare walls are DEMANDING I write on them so it isn’t just the secret in me bursting to get out but something outside me yanking just as hard.

Stripping the paper off reading Beth’s story has been good for me it’s helped get me through these first days after my sweet lovely foolish boy left but the part of me that will never heal is the part I need to write down. Everybody has a secret they can’t share but MUST share and it could be who you loved or who you hurt or lied to or cheated or envied or f*cked or didn’t f*ck or a secret shame or crime or failure or even a secret triumph no one knows about but you and all that goes on the wall or stays inside you and rots.

I’m telling you this in the last few seconds before I finish my writing and cover it up with wallpaper that might not be stripped off for another fifty years. First Beth then me now you. We are the sharers of secrets we are sisters we are the women who write on walls.