Something Rising

She took off her pack, got out the hammer and nails, and walked around the outside of the shack, hammering down boards that had popped up in the last rain. The hunters hadn’t taken the time to make sure the lone cockeyed window actually fit the hole cut for it, so Cassie had chinked in the gaps with river mud. They hadn’t put up a doore either, just left a hole for one and hung a sheet of Visqueen in it. When the plastic came down, Cassie cut a new piece and hung it herself, using small tacks that didn’t tear. It was important, she thought, to keep the plastic up, to acknowledge the difference between inside and out, else what use was a doorway?

“Light the small sticks, Emmy, we don’t have a lot of matches. Did you have these in your pocket when you were swimming?”

“Ooooh, I’m cold now I’m out of the water. The water’s warm.”

“There’s—I tell you, you have to light the small—”

“Did anybody bring a jacket?”

“Emmy’s asking did anybody bring a jacket or whatnot?”

Cassie stepped back and looked at the roof. It hadn’t been done the way Jimmy would have recommended. Just boards and tar paper. She tried to imagine making the walk back here with a ladder (unlikely), then tried to think of some way to bring a ladder on her bike, but there was no road, only the fields and tree line, and the corn was growing higher. A ladder, a tool belt, some shingles.

Inside, someone had straightened up the books and stacked the empty Mountain Dew cans into a pyramid. A big red candle had been added. Cassie stared at it a moment. The big red candle in the shack was a mistake, as any thinking person could see, and she imagined herself flinging it hard into the river. But taking it away smacked of something Laura preached against, which was Getting Too Thick Into Events. One Never Knows, and sometimes the thing that burns is meant to burn and might be interesting to watch. This set up a jangle in Cassie, truth be told, because no one could say that the shack burnt down was a desirable outcome, or even the shack on fire, interesting as it might be. She walked around inside, periodically stooping down to pound in a nail. A puzzle, the way the nails wanted out of the wood.

“All hail Miss Misty, bringer of fire!”

“Shut up, Bobby Puck, you homo.”

“I’m not watching you kill the frogs, Leroy, I’m going over here and also be quiet about it.”

Misty said, rrrbit, rrrbit.

The book on top of the stack was called Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones. The cover was a photograph, out of focus, of a boy and girl kissing, only one of them was upside down. Mrs. Bo Jo Jones’s nose was on Mr.’s chin and vice versa. Taken in profile. She’s sixteen, he’s seventeen, a pregnant bride, and her bewildered groom … playing a grown-up game with adult consequences. Cassie picked up the red candle and sat it square on the book; this was surely nothing more than treading the edge of events. She walked outside and around back to take a look at the flat platform she’d built between two gnarled-up trees: it was the first project she’d ever finished on her own. She’d built it in case a flash flood came while they were in the shack, and she’d nailed boards into the tree trunk to make a ladder. The platform was about seven feet off the ground—it couldn’t be a biblical sort of flood. She’d come out here and measured and even drawn a diagram in a notebook, then gone back and had Poppy help her cut some tongue-and-groove boards she’d found in the corner of the garage. She climbed up the ladder and stepped on the platform, then jumped up and down. Solid. She knelt down and checked the nails, but they were all snug in, and then she ran her hands over the edge she’d sanded smooth. From here she could see the river slowly moving, and on the shoreline flashes of a white T-shirt. There was a fundamental difference between the shack and this platform, and it could be felt simply by sitting first in one and then on the other, and whatever the discrepancy was made her wonder if maybe she ought not skip putting a new roof on the shack. Below her the fire was just getting going and it smelled good; whatever kind of wood they were using smelled good. A blood scent filled the air.

“You own any guns?” she heard Leroy ask.

Bobby Puck said, “Guns? Are you talking to me?”

Sitting up here, Cassie was waiting for Jimmy but also not waiting, she had let go some. Her own house could be on fire, this was a thing she often considered, and she wouldn’t know it until she made the walk back and found the thing in ruins, the trucks and smoke and neighbors watching. She would have no first thought but many at once. Did Jimmy come home, did Laura stay planted where she was, refusing to leave, did Poppy get the dogs out, was Belle out floating around, weeping in the yard in her white nightgown? Beyond that Cassie didn’t care, there was nothing she would mourn. Who set this fire?

“Cassie?” Puck was looking up at her from the ground, she hadn’t heard him approach. “Can I come up there with you?” He had a very high voice, like a little girl’s. As he climbed the ladder, his green T-shirt came out of his shorts, and Cassie could see a white stripe of skin. She looked away. “Oh, this is rather high up,” he said, looking over the edge of the platform. “I hope it doesn’t make me dizzy. If we were at the tops of these trees we could see my house, it’s over yonder as Leroy would say, the opposite side of the river from your house, we could see my dad’s blue station wagon in the driveway and my mom’s marigolds, my dad has diabetes. He is a diabetic and never leaves the house anymore, one of his legs is gone and he is now blind.” Puck leaned forward and whispered the last word in Cassie’s ear. She turned and looked at him. Mostly she couldn’t abide people who talked too much, and under normal conditions she might have gone ahead and whaled on him. But something in him raised up a loneliness that settled over Cassie like a cloud. “At the Granger School,” he continued, holding Cassie’s eye, “I was assaulted on a regular basis by ruffians. You remind me of them. When I start at your school in the fall, I’m going to be perfectly silent, in class and everywhere else, so I just thought I’d tell you some things now, that my mom is an aide at the nursing home, and about my dad and whatnot. I don’t like sports, I’ve never gone hunting, I prefer comic books and snacks.”

“Puck? Cassie? Want some frog legs?” Emmy called from the shore.

Puck rose, brushed some dried mud from his knees, then bowed to Cassie. “Ladies first,” he said, gesturing toward the stairs with a sweeping motion, like the hands of a clock.

She was back home and on the steps by three o’clock. The day had grown hot, and hours to go yet, so she took off her swampy tennis shoes and wet socks and let her feet dry in the sun. Her gray T-shirt said NOTRE DAME WRESTLING TEAM, it was her favorite shirt. Poppy had found it at the dump, back when he used to be a dump crawler, before Laura put her foot down. Cassie missed those days, the great things he’d come home with: a miniature guitar with no strings, a set of rusty golf clubs, a plastic cereal bowl with an astronaut in the bottom. The astronaut was floating outside of and appeared to be larger than his spaceship. All such things Laura dubbed A Crime. But then Poppy came home with a Memphis Minnie album, and when he handed it to Laura, her eyes filled with tears and she turned around and went up to her room and no one had seen her for a whole day, and Belle said Poppy shouldn’t have told her it came from the dump, and Poppy said, confused, Was I to lie?

Cassie’s eyes were closed and the world behind her eyelids had gone red when she heard the dogs, not Poppy’s dogs who never ran free, but a pack that had been born that winter to a stray down the road. Born in the Taylors’ toolshed. The Taylors had no intention of keeping the puppies or of killing them or of having anything to do with them whatsoever, those were Willie Taylor’s words to Poppy exactly. Anything whatsoever. A stray who picked us out, we didn’t pick her. There were four pups, a brown, a red, a black and white, a black, and they were all hardmuscled, with coats so short they looked like leather, and heads like pigs. Cassie thought of them as the Pig Dogs. They weren’t much bigger than young pigs, either. All day long they killed. They killed chickens, ducks, cats, who knew. Once they had run up to Cassie as she walked down the road, and the head of the brown one was completely covered in blood, all the way back to his shoulder blades, still red and wet. No one could touch them. Now they ran toward Cassie with great joy, nearly bouncing, except for the black and white, who was carrying a dead groundhog in his mouth, an animal more than half his size. They were going to leave it in her yard, she could just feel it. Her opinion was that they’d started killing more than they could eat, so they were spreading the carcasses around for fun. The King’s Crossing was their game board, and they’d left something on every corner. Cassie stood up and took a menacing step toward them, and they all backed up, tails wagging. They had smart eyes, the Pig Dogs, this was one of their worst features. Cassie stomped, waved her arms, yelled Go on! Git! and the dogs turned one at a time, still sneaky and joyous, and started to run back down the road, except for the black and white, who trotted a few steps farther in and dropped the groundhog, then turned and streaked off after his brothers.

“Cassie, you still out here?”

The groundhog had barely hit the earth, and there was Belle so soon, she would take it personally that Cassie had allowed such a thing to happen. Belle stepped out onto the screened porch, wearing a black leotard of Laura’s and an old Indian-print skirt, there was a pointedness in her voice that had arrived only in the past two years but seemed to be here to stay. All the way back in Cassie’s memory to the place it grew dark and muzzy, she saw Belle with her on a day like this, Cassie at five, Belle at seven, performing their different tasks: one her father’s girl, the other belonging solely to Laura. Cassie had her work cut out for her, no doubt about it, being the one to wait and gather clues and wander about the house studying Jimmy’s belongings and trying to capture the smell of him somewhere, in his closet, on his pillow. But Belle, maybe, and this was a thing Cassie had only begun to consider, had it a little worse, because her parent was right there and couldn’t be reached.

Laura, standing in the kitchen, having a contemplative smoke in her butter-yellow capri pants and white blouse, clothes that came from Somewhere Else and marked her. She wore not perfume or cologne but the oil from a love potion made for her by a Yoruba priestess, oil filled with rose petals and something that looked like whole clove. One brutal fight between Laura and Jimmy started when he called her a yat; Cassie had heard yak and assumed her father had been drinking until Belle explained. Bone-thin mother, shoulders slightly hunched, arms crossed loosely over her abdomen, listening to records. She made their meals but didn’t eat with them. She smiled, never lost her patience or raised her voice, it was difficult, in fact, to do anything loudly enough or close enough to her range of vision to even get her to turn her head. Bix Beiderbecke with Frankie Trumbauer’s orchestra, Singin’ the Blues. Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet. One of the only things Laura loved even a smidge about living in Indiana was that one of the earliest jazz labels, the Starr Piano Company and Gennett Records, had been in Richmond. The Friars Society Orchestra had recorded there, and King Oliver, Armstrong, Bix, Hoagy. Laura knew where the building had stood in the Whitewater Gorge, and had driven the girls by on in what was a rare thing for them, a field trip.

This was what Cassie had been thinking of lately, all those injuries of Belle’s, all the flaps of skin hanging from her knees, the head wounds bleeding furiously, the falls down stairs, the bicycle wreck in the thorn bush, her slightly chipped front tooth. How could it have been, the two of them side by side and playing the same game, that Belle was always falling? Cassie rarely got hurt. If they walked across the backyard, it was Cassie who found the dead baby bird, the caterpillars and nightcrawlers, she found treasure in tall grass because Belle was looking up. What she was looking for Cassie couldn’t say, winged things probably, orioles or nuthatches or bluebirds, or those tiny yellow butterflies that arrive in swarms one day and are gone the next. Belle got hurt, she took her pain in to Laura like a gift, she cried then tried to look brave. There was a demand in her. Cassie thought, but couldn’t say (wasn’t sure what the words would be) that this wasn’t the way to go, Laura didn’t like to touch or be touched, she was doing her work at a minimum and preferred to be alone. Belle’s wounds were akin to getting too thick into events. At eleven Belle started to withdraw from the Great Wide World, as Jimmy called it, she moved inside and became top of her class, at twelve had nearly memorized Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, which a thoughtful librarian had given her as a gift. Every day she begged for a copy of Virgil In Translation. She had taken to the house and could almost always be found at the kitchen table, under the hanging light with the round shade, and there too was Laura, staring out the window above the sink, and Belle thought she had gotten what she wanted, but Cassie wasn’t so sure.

“What’s that in the yard? Do you see what I’m pointing at, Cassie? Go on over there and take a look.”

Cassie walked across the gravel driveway, periodically stepping on a sharp rock that made her say ow, ow, ow, and through the side door that led into the cool garage, where she picked up Poppy’s shovel.

“Do you see the thing I’m talking about, that gray mound over there? Mom’s not going to want to walk out here and see it.”

The groundhog was lying belly up. He’d been a fat little guy. Cassie studied his face: dead. Also his small, expressive hands, curled now: dead. She put the shovel under him and felt that he’d—

“What is it, Cassie, do you know?”

—been turned to liquid. There weren’t bones or organs to offer any resistance. The Pig Dogs had had a time with this one. She got the shovel under his back and tried to lift it; he was very heavy, in addition to being liquid, and he rolled off the end of the shovel and landed facedown.

“I’m going in, I’m not watching this. Take it across the road and over the fence. Drop it over the fence, Cassie, so those dogs can’t get to it and bring it right back. Do you hear me?”

Cassie got the shovel under his belly and tried to lift him. He rolled off and landed on his back, and that was about all it took for Cassie to see what she was up against. Her shoulders strained and her back began to sweat, It wasn’t his weight so much as the fact of him down at the end of the long shovel, and her up at the other end. She gripped the shovel in the middle of the handle, stuck it under the groundhog’s back, he was maybe easier to lift this way, but he rolled off and landed on his belly. Simply by turning him over repeatedly, she’d managed to get him a few feet across the yard, so she did that some more: turned him again and again, rolling him like a sausage in a pan. Belly up, belly down. They made it across the road and to the ditch, and putting him in the ditch was no good, Belle would know or the dogs would know. The sun was a violence against Cassie’s back, sweat ran toward her eyes. She took off her T-shirt, wiped her face with it, then covered her hands and grabbed him by his paws, his front two in her left hand, his back two in her right. She turned herself sideways, spun around twice, then let him fly, across the ditch and over the fence. At the peak of his flight his back arched like a high jumper’s, his chin tilted regally, his arms and legs were loose in surrender. Cassie was, at ten, a child who would have to learn to look away.

Thursday evening, after dinner and a visit with Edwin Meyer and Poppy, a game of Chinese checkers and a bowl of green sherbet, Cassie went out on the screened porch and waited, and Friday she got up very early and went outside and waited.

Saturday morning she woke up and listened; if he was still gone, this would be the longest in a while and would signal nothing good, but then she heard them, the voices that had awakened her. Jimmy and Laura didn’t fight about Everything, as some parents did. The tear and scramble of their lives centered around only two subjects, Money and the Prior Claim. The two could be mixed and matched and combined in novel ways. Cassie had hovered for years at the edge of the conversation and could reduce its complex elements to two sentences:

JIMMY: She has a prior claim.

LAURA: Prior to your children?

Cassie had written these sentences in her notebook: for her they were no less than Virgil in Translation. She and Belle both wanted to get to the bottom of something, and even if they ultimately knew what it was—lost cultures, Barbara Thompson in a trailer park in Hopwood—they would keep at it. Young scholars. Their parents were having the conversation in the bedroom next door, which was the marital bedroom and contained many mysteries. Laura complained that she hated every stick of furniture in there, the bed they slept in, the dressers and mirrored vanity that matched it, all won by Jimmy in a card game with the Minor Criminals of the Midwest, who were not famous for their taste. The queen-size headboard was tall, flat, and covered with quilted, yellowed vinyl, attached to the frame with brass buttons, brass mostly missing. The dresser and vanity were made of blond wood, perhaps for a blonde woman, which was the opposite of Laura but similar to Barbara Thompson, whose name so far had not been mentioned.

The voices weren’t much more than a murmur. Cassie had to get out of bed and creep like a cat across her floor in order to hear what she hoped were the sounds of Jimmy taking his change, his keys, and his breath mints out of his pocket and placing them carefully on his dresser, because this meant he was staying for some hours. Last summer he would sometimes drop in late at night or early in the morning, expecting the girls to be asleep, and deposit with Laura a handful of disputed Money and leave again, that went on for weeks. Cassie heard the loose change land on the dresser top, Jimmy say he was tired, Laura make a sound that was perhaps a word or a cry, and then Cassie knew it was okay to get back in bed awhile. Wherever it was he went—and she didn’t believe she’d ever know—her father got very little sleep, he loved to come home and slip into bed in the morning light. She slipped into bed and lay on her back; the sun was coming up on the other side of the house but would reach her soon enough. Her heart pounded, she could see the plaster on the ceiling very clearly, the crack that zigzagged like a fault line from one side of the room to the other. She tried to close her eyes, but they popped right back open.

Last summer Belle had crept into Cassie’s room late one night and gotten in bed with her, then wrapped her arms around Cassie from behind the way she had when they were small and whispered in Cassie’s ear Are you very very sad? In all the great wide world Cassie couldn’t imagine another soul who would ask a question like that one and not expect to get beaten up good. Cassie hadn’t answered, had just lay there feeling Belle’s breath on the back of her neck and trying to think of a true answer. Every day was a vaccination. She missed her grandmother, who had been old and soft, who said few words but who gave to them: she and Poppy had taken them in without a word so long ago, when they had nowhere to live. They’d opened up all the old bedrooms, Buena Vista had gathered up her sewing things and moved them to the attic, and Cassie remembered those years with Buena Vista like a long party where the party is going on inside and no one talks about it. Cassie could still imagine her grandmother so clearly, her white hair curled tight against her head in a permanent wave, the skin on her face that had fallen and kept falling, her watery blue eyes. Buena Vista had been heavy, especially in her legs, and she walked with a kind of back-and-forth Frankenstein gait, and unable to control the distribution of her weight, she had walked hard and made everything in the house shake, especially her animal figurines. She had been just an old woman in a faded housedress, sometimes she even wore her slippers to the grocery store, but something about her had been their hearts’ salvation.

Now, lying in bed, her father asleep in the next room, Cassie felt herself swaying back into sleep. Can you smell the water? Maybe someday she would tell Belle that she hadn’t been, she wasn’t sad, she was … she almost knew, and then began to dream, there was a wide field, pink and spongy, or maybe it was a desert, there was no sign of anything anywhere, only the vast pinkness all around her, and she guessed she had to cross it, so she started walking.

Laura smoked. Belle sat at the kitchen table doing homework and tearing at her cuticles, her fingernails were already so short they sometimes bled. Poppy came in through the mudroom, “Laurie, have you seen my level?,” and Laura said no, she hadn’t, and he left again. A few minutes later he popped back in with Roger, who made a mad dash around the kitchen table and back out the door. “Laurie, have you seen my old canvas camp stool?” No, she hadn’t. He left. Cassie wandered from the kitchen to the screened porch, drinking a soda that made her stomach burn, as she hadn’t eaten anything all day and here it was almost two in the afternoon. She sat in the rocker with splinters. Finally Belle stuck her head out the door and said, He’s up.

Cassie went into the kitchen and casually sat down at the table, picked up Belle’s history book, and opened it to the page on Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. Upstairs the shower was running, then it turned off. Jimmy hummed as he shaved. When he came downstairs he smelled sweet, had a swing in his step. Cassie wrote on her palm with her fingernail the things she wanted to talk to him about: a door for the shack, help fixing her bicycle chain, would he toss the football with her, would he figure out how to get a better fence around the garden—the deer were tearing it up. Poppy needed new propane tanks on the Airstream, and there was something else. She tapped her fingernail on the table.

“Stop that,” Belle said. Cassie stopped.

“Hey, girls,” Jimmy said, sitting down at the head of the table.

“Hello,” Belle said, not looking up.

“Hey.” Cassie glanced at him, his hair was still wet from the shower and he had some tan across his nose. He’d put on a pressed white shirt, linen pants in a mossy green, one of his thin leather belts. He sat at the table as he always did, with his legs crossed like a woman’s, his torso slightly turned. Other fathers looked to Cassie like livestock; Jimmy was how it was supposed to be, a jangly, dancing man. She remembered she wanted to tell him that last week she’d been walking down the road and a fox had bolted out of the tall grass and run right in front of her, she could almost feel him against her skin, and she’d been tempted to follow him. But they move fast.

“Get a some coffee here, Laura?” Jimmy asked.

Her mother turned away from the window, dropped her cigarette in the sink where she’d been washing dishes, filled the percolator with water, slammed it against the counter.

“Whatcha working on there, Bella Belle?”

Belle blushed, tore at a cuticle. “A book report. On Where the Lilies Bloom.”

“Aren’t you—Isn’t this summer vacation?”

“I’m just,” Belle said, placing her hands over her notebook, “doing it on my own.”

“I see. Good book?”

“I liked it.”

Jimmy nodded. “Well.”

Cassie kicked the chair with the back of her foot until it started to ache.

“How about you, Cass? Having a good summer?”

She glanced down at the palm of her hand, where she’d written her invisible list, then cleared her throat.

“Laura, how about putting a little soup in a pan for me?”