Something Rising

“Are you—you were there a long time—all right?” Edwin was wearing the clothes he favored for work: polyester trousers in a horrible shade of tan or green and a seersucker dress shirt from Sears. His thin dark hair lay flat against his head, Laura said he had a Lovely Face. Laura called him Sweet Reason. Cassie told Belle one night she thought Edwin loved Laura, and that’s why he was always calling on them for Chinese checkers and hot tea, but Belle said Cassie was wrong. She said he came for other reasons, and he was Pure.

“I’m fine, yeah.”

“A pool hall,” Edwin said, shaking his head. “I would have been in all kinds of trouble if I’d been caught in a pool hall at your age.”

Cassie looked out the window. Roseville was closing the shutters and rolling up the streets, as Jimmy would say. “What kind of music is this?”

Edwin turned the volume up. “It’s a polka. A German polka. My parents were German, you know, very firm. Firm, hardworking people.”

“Okay.”

“This is my favorite kind of music, although I don’t ordinarily say so. My parents had a Victrola, a real one, and a collection of seventy-eights. Big records. They used to put on a polka record on Saturday nights, just like tonight, and we would dance, it’s very joyful music, as you can hear.”

“Okay.”

“And my father became a different man. All week long he”— Edwin paused, drove—” counted the grains of salt we were allowed to put on our potatoes. He counted for my mother so she wouldn’t cheat. So Saturdays were great. For me.”

They drove out to the edge of town, turned on 300 West, headed for the King’s Crossing. “Do you know anything about bicycle chains?” Cassie asked, embarrassed.

“I surely do. I’m thinking about your bike, what sort of chain you need.” He thought. “It’s too old and slow and meant for a boy,” he said, as he turned the car around and headed back to the hardware store.

“Not if it’s a bother,” Cassie said.

“We’ll take care of it.” Edwin leaned in toward the steering wheel, smiled. “A project.”

They finished late. Cassie rode the bike down to the crossroads and back, and told Edwin it felt like new.

“I don’t think it was ever new, Cassie.”

“It’s better, though.” She thanked him, and he tipped an imaginary hat and got in his car and drove away, the faint strains of a German polka following him.

The house was quiet: Cassie found Belle at the table, reading her book and making notes. Her reports were so exhaustive, Laura said, that no one would ever need to read the things themselves. Belle drained a book.

Laura was standing at the kitchen sink, staring out into the dark yard where the finches fed, as if it were daylight and as if there were finches. The dinner dishes were done, and Cassie realized she hadn’t eaten. She fixed a peanut-butter sandwich, poured herself a glass of milk, and sat down on the floor next to her mother, leaning up against the cabinet door. Behind the door were cleaning solvents and toilet-bowl chemicals and various ammonias and bleaches, some still bearing the neon-green MR. YUCK! stickers from years before. Poppy had put the stickers on.

“Look how dirty your hands are,” Laura said, “up against that perfectly white bread.”

Cassie looked. “Yep.”

“It’s sort of pretty, isn’t it, the contrast.”

Belle made a sound from the table, a small disgusted explosion.

“Is that—Are your fingers blue?” Laura’s innocent, beleagured tone. “Were you playing pool?”

Cassie shrugged, looked away from Laura, whom she could feel continuing to stare at her for some seconds. Then there was the snap of the cigarette case opening, and the grinding of the wheel on the fighter, and Laura had looked back out the window, Cassie knew. Leaning against the cabinet door reminded her of a dream she’d had lately, a Replacement Dream, she was thinking of calling it. The Original Dream had been of flying way up in the air, above rooftops and treetops; once she had seen the details of a weathervane on top of an old bam. Once she had crash-landed in a pond and scared herself so badly she’d jumped out of bed. She had those dreams for a long time, she just spread her arms and fell forward (or backward, on one memorable occasion) and let the wind take her, nothing to it. And then she had a dream in which flying required a code word, and Cassie didn’t have it. The only way she could get it was to turn her head and look over her left shoulder as a flying horse crossed the path of the moon, and somehow she managed it, and then she was up in the air and the feeling in her gut was stronger than when she was just sailing over barns like Peter Pan. That went on a while, the searching for the code or the key; once it was in a refrigerator in a dark basement, and the refrigerator was filled with vials of something. But the Original Dream was completely gone, Cassie could sense it, because now she was dreaming that she had to enter a windowless room of her own house, or at least she was told repeatedly it was her own house, and kneel in front of what might be a filing cabinet or a kitchen cabinet just like this one, open the door, and roll into it backward as if she were doing a backward somersault, and then she was propelled into what the Other People in the dream called flying, except where was the sky, where was the air? She seemed to remain in the cabinet with this strange, tossed-about, sick feeling in her gut that was like the flying feeling, only much stronger. And no flying.

Laura cleared her throat, said, “I know you’re the only one who remembers, Cassie, besides me, and that’s what’s wrong with you.”

Cassie put her milk glass down slowly and rested the sandwich on top of the glass and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Belle’s pencil stopped for a moment, then continued.

“He was so sweet,” Laura said, “he was the sweetest, funniest man. I was engaged to someone else, you know, at home, before I came here.”

Cassie didn’t move, but of course she knew, she’d known for years.

“He had money. He had old family money, which doesn’t mean anything here, there’s no such thing. And I had my whole life planned out, how things would be after I’d married him, what our children would be named and where I’d sit in church and what my relationship to his mother would be, his brothers. And all that money, like Christmas every day. I even knew which chair on the veranda would be mine during the carnival season. I didn’t know, I was nineteen years old, I didn’t know that the heart can make grave mistakes and that who you end up married to is largely a matter of accident and then you’re stuck with it forever, and I know there are people who are not stuck forever and I envy them. They have something, there’s a switch in them or a special gene, I don’t understand it. But from the very beginning with your father, I felt that every decision we made, every move we made, was wrapped in a kind of holy light, no doubt because I had been driven mad by Catholic school and I felt guilty for the things I’d done with him which are not the issue and I’m not going to mention them. Two weeks, that was how long we had together. And then he left New Orleans in a stolen truck with a pool table in the back. And I. Cassie. If you ever engage in something you perceive or misperceive as holy, you will not let it go and you will not defile it. And so I packed one suitcase and jumped on a bus and followed him here, it took twenty-six hours, and all that time I was feverish with fear and it seemed such a long time but in fact was nothing. Because time is relative, isn’t it, Belle, and now I’ve been sick with following him for thirteen years and that bus trip passed in the blink of an eye.”

Cassie turned her head and looked at she, the tight posture Belle had developed from sitting so long at the table with a pencil in her hand, her head tilted to the right. Belle glanced up, and the look she gave her sister was complicated, it seemed part cold anger and part fish on a hook. If someone else were here, Poppy or Edwin, Laura would stop. But Cassie couldn’t make her stop.

“And when I got here, you know. But what I want to tell you is something I’ve been remembering all day today, it was something that happened after all the drama—well, all the initial drama— had cleared up, and Jimmy and I went to the justice of the peace and got married, I cried all through the ceremony, I didn’t even know why I was crying.” Laura stared at the yard as if the answer were there somehow, a scene she’d missed in an old tale. “I bet a lot of women would say the same, if they were honest. We were married at the courthouse in Hopwood by a little man who looked just like Elvis would have if he’d lived to be eighty, and if he’d somehow gotten shrunk by a ray gun. And this little judge or clerk or whatever he was couldn’t read our names, he called us Larry and Sally. And when he said Do you Larry, your dad said so officiously, / Do, and I was laughing and crying at the same time, and we were married under those names. We might not be legally married for all I know. And we went to a motel at the edge of Hopwood and spent one night there and I know the whole idea of your parents’ wedding night must be psychologically shocking, but in truth we spent the whole night laughing, Jimmy detailing his many exploits to me, remember we didn’t know each other. And then the next morning he said he had to go take care of a few things and he left me there, and I slept awhile, and then walked around the parking lot, and watched the cars on the highway, and the whole day passed. There wasn’t a telephone in the room and I didn’t know where to call anyway, and that’s when it started, I was sitting on the curb in the parking lot and I started saying to myself, I married him, I married him, I married him, and I knew I couldn’t call my mother because she’d said I was dead to her. I’d left her to clean up the mess of my broken engagement, and remember she still had to work for his family, and all of her hopes for the future had been tied up in my marrying him. And Jimmy didn’t come back all that day or that night, and then I got really scared, because I didn’t know if he’d paid for the room or if I was going to get kicked out and I didn’t have any money, not a dime, and I was from the South and the people in the Midwest are so cold, they’re so judgmental and superior, they act as if we aren’t all human making human mistakes, but in fact they are human and you are something lower in the hierarchy and you disgust them. I’m exaggerating but if you knew how people in Louisiana would react to an abandoned pregnant bride as opposed to how people in Indiana would you’d see I’m not far off the mark. I walked around in a daze saying I married him, I married him, and I had no money and no food. I finally took the change Jimmy left on the dresser, and got something out of a vending machine. But the more important thing is that I didn’t call my mother or Buena Vista because it was already too late, no one could help me, I had crossed over. All I could do was wait for him and hope he would return and save me, because no one could do it but him. There’s probably a name for this illness, I don’t know, I had entered some other atmosphere. I married him. And he showed up the next day and of course I cried and hit him and screamed and threw things, and then he gathered me up and we came here to Poppy’s house, and Belle was born and I knew he was still seeing Barbara, everyone knew it and he didn’t really try to hide it, and then you were born, Cassie, and he was still seeing her, and there was a single time I might have left him but it passed. Everything before that time and everything after it was the same and it is still the same, I want you to understand this, because later you’re going to look back I’m afraid and think I had no pride or I was filled with selfhatred, that’s probably all true but it isn’t the whole story.”

Laura lit another cigarette and blew the smoke out through her nose, and Cassie looked down at the blue chalk on her fingertips. She scrubbed her hands against her jeans, but it was embedded in her nails and even in the whorls of her fingerprints and wouldn’t come off.

“I stayed and I stay, Cassie, because of that holy light. To this very day I pass the grocery store where he and I went for a cold root beer the day I first got here, the day I got off the bus, and even though he told me he was engaged to someone else, I look at that grocery store and see the holy light. The courthouse in Hopwood is holy, the little wizened Elvis clerk is one of the saints. And after you girls were born, you can’t imagine how that increased. Everything you wore, every piece of furniture you touched, it’s all sacred, this house and yard where you took your first steps, even—I swear this is true—the faucets in the bathtub, because I turned them on and off so many times giving you baths, and he gave you baths, those are our faucets and they’re filled with holy light. Do you see what I’m saying, I could leave him, I could leave this house and try to find a way to start again but there is no place to go because I took my vows and what is done can’t be undone. I can’t very well take you away from Poppy, he has nothing else left, and so I’d have to stay in Roseville and Roseville is sacred because my marriage and my children are sacred, and so I’d be living in the shadow of my own life and every day seeing the light in the grocery store and in a park bench where I sat with him once and in the gas station where we stopped to get gas on a family trip to Clifty Falls when you were babies; it’s tender, this feeling I’m talking about, it’s a feeling you can’t put any pressure on because it hurts too much. If I could go back to the time I had the strength to leave I would, I’d do it and accept the consequences, but I can’t go back.”

The clock ticked in the sudden silence, Belle’s pencil scratched out a description or a question or a revelation.

“I’m trying to say it really really irritates me, Cassie, the way you favor him and wait for him and suffer his cruelties, but I understand it perfectly well. I do. If he said to me any day, any hour, that he was coming home, I’d let him come, I’d welcome him home, and so there might be days ahead, they might have already happened, when I act like I hate you because of him, but in fact it’s the other way around.”

Cassie stood, stretched her legs. They’d fallen asleep, sitting on the hard floor. She threw the rest of her sandwich away, then stepped in front of Laura and washed out her milk glass, placing it carefully on the towel. “Good-night,” she said, to no one in particular.

‘“Night,” Belle said.

“Good-night, sweetheart,” Laura said, without looking at her.

In her bed, Cassie lay on her back and looked out the west-facing window; she thought she would never sleep. Her shoulders ached and she wondered if maybe she should get up and try to remember some of the things Uncle Bud had said so she would write them down, but it was no use. They were tangled up now in Laura’s story. When Laura was growing up, Cassie knew, she’d had a religion, she’d gone to Catholic school, and her whole life had been Catholic. Cassie had found a cigar box in the attic years before, filled with cards, prayer cards and funeral cards, Laura must have collected them when she was a girl. There were pictures of Mary, shepherds, guardian angels, guiding children over a rickety bridge. And some of Jesus. Cassie had stolen one of him, for reasons she didn’t understand. He was looking out, looking at her, and his robes were wide open and the inside of his chest exposed. Belle found it in Cassie’s drawer one afternoon, putting laundry away, and had carried it into the kitchen, saying, “Look what I found: the Radioactive Heart of Jesus.” Belle had laughed, she had no use for Catholicism, thinking the Greeks far superior. And Laura had laughed for reasons of her own. But Cassie had snatched the card away and, unable to remember why she’d wanted it at all, buried it in the backyard in a sandwich bag.

Laura had had all those cards and a rosary and a lace cap she wore in church—Cassie couldn’t quite put a structure on what she was thinking—but her daughters had done without. Jimmy had the gods he believed in and no others, and no one could put a name to them or quite work out their powers; sometimes they were kind and sometimes they kicked his ass, is what Jimmy said. But Laura. She had traveled a long distance, a long, long way. Cassie stretched out her legs and raised her arms above her head, comer pockets, then lowered her arms like a snow angel: side rails. And when Laura found herself alone in that motel room, no mother father sister Christ crucified or Blessed Virgin Mary, she had been … Cassie raised and lowered her arms, she felt like the bed was rocking her … Laura hadn’t been completely alone, had she? Belle had been there, just a seed. But Laura hadn’t mentioned that, and Belle, too, had kept her peace. Cassie slept.

In the morning she got up very early and went downstairs, trying hard not to wake anyone. She made lunch, left a note on the kitchen table, got her bike out of the garage, and tested the chain. It was still good. She rode down the King’s Crossing to 300 West, turned right, and headed in to Roseville, then through town to Railroad Street. At Uncle Bud’s she parked her bicycle in the shade and sat down on the rear steps and waited for him to come and open the back door. She took an apple and a sandwich out of her backpack, along with a chocolate milk; she finished them before the sun was fully up. All that day she waited, and when Uncle Bud arrived at three o’clock, she asked him if he’d be willing to give her a set of keys. She told him she was a person he could trust.

THE FLOOD, 1985

Cassie had gathered up Laura’s library books from around the house and matched them against the receipt she’d been given when she checked them out. They were all present and accounted for. She put them in the truck. Belle had given her the grocery list, and she’d put that in her back pocket and gone to Uncle Bud’s to practice for three hours, then over to his ramshackle house on a back street in Roseville. He needed help hanging the kitchen cabinets he’d gotten at an auction. By late afternoon she was headed out of town toward the library in Hopwood.

In the library parking lot she’d gone through the books, removing Laura’s bookmarks, the scraps of paper on which she sometimes made notes, and had come across a whole piece of paper folded in half. This:

1. We dream of rational creatures transcending the stain. Gauze and feathertip, the spill of clean scent like a trumpet bell, a bargain in the confectioner’s market In truth they judge and bruise.

2 Rather than kick it we tried to lift the dead horse He stood for a moment and we prayed he would fall away from us. I remember the place on his belly where the fur was rubbed thin and how when he landed his head hit last and the remaining air in his lungs rutted the grass. O, for a falconer’s voice, To lure this tassel-gentle back again!

It had been handwritten by Laura, with no date and no title, on a light green sheet torn from a stenographer’s pad with the orphaned scraps of paper clinging to the top. Cassie had never held with leaving such scraps, and now, reading the poem, or whatever it was—an idea, a group of sentences—she plucked them off one by one and dropped them on the floor of the truck. Laura and Belle talked about poetry all the time, but Cassie had no particular feelings about it. There was a way in which the obscuring of communication was painful, but the opposite was also true. She had no interest in anyone presenting her with the bleak, unvarnished truth. If Belle were here, Cassie thought, she would try to figure it out a word at a time, and she’d stick with it until she could make some judgment. Belle would take this tack in part because she had nothing better to do, and because the process of analysis struck her as pleasurable. Cassie shook her head at the notion. Belle enjoyed analysis, with the result that she was back at the house with Laura; and Cassie, at sixteen, was the only person in the house with a driver’s license and a vehicle, and the beginnings of tendinitis in her right elbow. She rubbed her elbow, then went inside the library to face the kindness of the librarians. The librarians were always kind.

She had memorized the poem, or whatever it was, and was repeating it to herself as she turned on to 732 East, the Percy Creek Pike. It was a long straight road all the way to the reservoir, and she would travel it for miles, so she sped up. Who were they who judged and bruised? Which rational creatures could transcend the stain, and the stain of what? And when had Laura ever been on a horse? And when had she seen a horse fall? Cassie passed the squat cinder-block building out of which a man with a wooden leg (which he kept displayed at all times; he actually rolled up his pant leg to do so) used to sell produce in the summer. The building had been unused for years. Next to the front door, in emphatic black lettering, someone had painted No CAR WASHING!, as if that were the world’s gravest temptation. Then there was nothing on either side of the road, just trees and fields. Cassie squinted. Far in the distance she could see something in the middle of the road. Heat shimmered upward. Beware the mee-rahj, as Jimmy used to say; a lot of the world looks like one thing but is really something else. When she was fourteen, she and Bud had traveled to Georgia for a big game, a serious money game, with the man who was at that time unbeatable, Lewis Lee. Cassie had played him all night in a cowboy bar (no cowboys in evidence), her fortunes rising and falling, until finally Lewis pulled it out and remained unbeatable, and Cassie and Bud turned around and headed home. She had been driving for hours in the dead of night when she saw a deer standing in the middle of the road (had it been a horse?), standing only a few feet away, standing and staring in that impassive way of the massive thing. Cassie had slammed on the brakes and thrown Bud, even wearing a seat belt, so far forward he had bruised his sternum nd been mad at her for a week. She kept asking, Should I have hit it? And he would say, There was No Damn Deer, and she would say, Yes, but should I have hit it?

She slowed. The thing in the middle of the road was about the size of a three-year-old boy and was picking at the stringy remains of something, raising and lowering its head. It was mostly in her lane. A turkey buzzard. She was getting closer to it, and she would be damned if she would swerve. She thought she’d go ahead and speed up, she’d go ahead and get thick into events with this bird. She didn’t care what they did or how foul they were, they could ravage all the carcasses of her county. But they weren’t going to boss her around in terms of driving. She was twenty feet from the bird and it didn’t move, and she was ten feet from it, a hot day and both her windows down, and just as she moved over—she did move at the last minute—the buzzard decided to take flight, and took flight. It spread its wings like an enormous black kite, and as Cassie passed it, the wind moving through the cab of the truck pulled the bird in through her window. For a single moment its lizard-skinned claws, its breast and face, were on her, one claw caught her forearm and tore it. She slammed on her brakes, and the bird tumbled out. It took flight with an awkward turn and then a terrible, fluid ease.

Cassie parked the truck at the side of the road and got out, doubling over in the heat. That, Cassie decided, was what a nightmare would smell like; the unbelievably dense odor of decay, layer after layer, no end to it. Her forearm was bleeding, and she could still smell the bird on her clothes, and in her hair. She gasped, kept her head down. Beneath her the pavement shimmered.

“Where are the groceries?” Belle asked.

“I didn’t get to the grocery store,” Cassie said from the mudroom, taking off her work boots, her jeans.

“Why not? Oh my God, what is that smell, don’t even think you’re coming in here. What happened, what is that smell? Where are the groceries?”

“Get me some clean clothes, Belle.”