THE GOOD MAN
I should mention my father.
When I was telling Phoebe’s story to Gram and Gramps, I did not say much about my father. He was their son, and not only did they know him better than I, but as Gram often said, he was the light of their lives. They had three other sons at one time, but one son died when a tractor flipped over on him, one was killed when he skied into a tree, and the third died when he jumped into the freezing cold Ohio River to save his best friend (the best friend survived but my uncle did not).
My father was the only son left, but even if their other sons were still alive, my father might still be their light because he is also a kind, honest, simple, and good man. I do not mean simple as in simple-minded—I mean he likes plain and simple things. His favorite clothes are the flannel shirts and blue jeans that he has had for twenty years. It nearly killed him to buy white shirts and a suit for his new job in Euclid.
He loved the farm because he could be out in the real air, and he wouldn’t wear work gloves because he liked to touch the earth and the wood and the animals. It was painful for him to go to work in an office when we moved. He did not like being sealed up inside with nothing real to touch.
We’d had the same car, a blue Chevy, for fifteen years. He couldn’t bear to part with it because he had touched—and repaired—every inch of it. I also think he couldn’t bear the thought that if he sold it, someone might take it to the junkyard. My father hated the whole idea of putting cars out to pasture. He often prowled through junkyards touching old cars and buying old alternators and carburetors just for the joy of cleaning them up and making them work again. My grandfather had never quite gotten the hang of car mechanics, and so he thought my father was a genius.
My mother was right when she said my father was good. He was always thinking of little things to cheer up someone else. This nearly drove my mother crazy because I think she wanted to keep up with him, but it was not her natural gift like it was with my father. He would be out in the field and see a flowering bush that my grandmother might like, and he would dig the whole thing up and take it straight over to Gram’s garden and replant it. If it snowed, he would be up at dawn to trek over to his parents’ house and shovel out their driveway.
If he went into town to buy supplies for the farm, he would come back with something for my mother and something for me. They were small things—a cotton scarf, a book, a glass paperweight—but whatever he brought, it was exactly what you would have picked out for yourself.
I had never seen him angry. “Sometimes I don’t think you’re human,” my mother told him. It was the sort of thing she said just before she left, and it bothered me, because it seemed as if she wanted him to be meaner, less good.
Two days before she left, when I first heard her raise the subject of leaving, she said, “I feel so rotten in comparison.”
“Sugar, you’re not rotten,” he said.
“See?” she said. “See? Why couldn’t you at least believe I am rotten?”
“Because you’re not,” he said.
She said she had to leave in order to clear her head, and to clear her heart of all the bad things. She needed to learn about what she was.
“You can do that here, Sugar,” he said.
“I need to do it on my own,” she said. “I can’t think. All I see here is what I am not. I am not brave. I am not good. And I wish someone would call me by my real name. My name isn’t Sugar. It’s Chanhassen.”
She had not been well. She had had some terrible shocks, it is true, but I did not understand why she could not get better with us. I begged her to take me with her, but she said I could not miss school and my father needed me and besides, she had to go alone. She had to.
I thought she might change her mind, or at least tell me when she was leaving. But she did neither of those things. She left me a letter which explained that if she said good-bye, it would be too terribly painful and it would sound too permanent. She wanted me to know that she would think of me every minute and that she would be back before the tulips bloomed.
But, of course, she was not back before the tulips bloomed.
It nearly killed my father after she left, I know it, but he continued on doing everything just as before, whistling and humming and finding little gifts for people. He kept bringing home gifts for my mother and stacking them in a pile in their bedroom.
On the day after he found out she wasn’t returning, he flew to Lewiston, Idaho, and when he came back, he spent three days chipping away at the fireplace hidden behind the plaster wall. Some of the cement grouting between the bricks had to be replaced, and he wrote her name in the new cement. He wrote Chanhassen, not Sugar.
Three weeks later he put the farm up for sale. By this time he was receiving letters from Mrs. Cadaver, and I knew that he was answering her letters. Then he drove up to see Mrs. Cadaver while I stayed with Gram and Gramps. When he came back, he said we were moving to Euclid. Mrs. Cadaver had helped him find a job.
I didn’t even wonder how he had met Mrs. Cadaver or how long he had known her. I ignored her whole existence. Besides, I was too busy throwing the most colossal temper tantrums. I refused to move. I would not leave our farm, our maple tree, our swimming hole, our pigs, our chickens, our hayloft. I would not leave the place that belonged to me. I would not leave the place to which, I was convinced, my mother might return.
At first my father did not argue with me. He let me behave like a wild boar. At last, he took down the For Sale sign and put up a For Rent sign. He said he would rent out the farm, hire someone to care for the animals and the crops, and rent a house for us in Euclid. The farm would still belong to us and one day we could return to it. “But for now,” he said, “we have to leave because your mother is haunting me day and night. She’s in the fields, the air, the barn, the walls, the trees.” He said we were making this move to learn about bravery and courage. That sounded awfully familiar.
In the end, I think I merely ran out of steam. I stopped throwing tantrums. I didn’t help pack, but when the time came, I climbed in the car and joined my father for our move to Euclid. I did not feel brave, and I did not feel courageous.
When I told my story of Phoebe to Gram and Gramps, I mentioned none of this. They knew it already. They knew my father was a good man, they knew I did not want to leave the farm, they knew my father felt we had to leave. They also knew that my father had tried, many times, to explain to me about Margaret, but that I wouldn’t hear it.
On that long day that my father and I left the farm behind and drove to Euclid, I wished that my father was not such a good man, so there would be someone to blame for my mother’s leaving. I didn’t want to blame her. She was my mother, and she was part of me.
FISH IN THE AIR
Gram said, “Where did we leave off with Peeby? What was happening?”
“What’s the matter, gooseberry?” Gramps said. “Did that snake bite your brains?”
“No,” she said. “It did not bite my brains. I was just trying to refresh my memory.”
“Let’s see,” Gramps said, “didn’t Peeby want you to tell your daddy about Mrs. Cadaver and Mr. Birkway hacking up her husband?”
?
Yes, that is what Phoebe wanted, and it is what I tried to do. One Sunday, when my father was looking through the photo albums, I asked him if he knew much about Mrs. Cadaver. He looked up quickly. “You’re ready to talk about Margaret?” he said.
“Well—there were a few things I wanted to mention—”
“I’ve been wanting to explain—” he said.
I plunged on. I didn’t want him to explain. I wanted to warn him. “Phoebe and I saw her slashing and hacking away at the bushes in her backyard.”
“Is there something wrong with that?” he asked.
I tried another approach. “Her voice is like dead leaves blowing around, and her hair is spooky.”
“I see,” he said.
“And there is a man who visits her—”
“Sal, that sounds like spying.”
“And I don’t think we should go over there anymore.”
Dad took off his glasses and rubbed them on his shirt for about five minutes. Then he said, “Sal, you’re trying to catch fish in the air. Your mother is not coming back.”
It looked like I was merely jealous of Mrs. Cadaver. There in the calm light of my father, all those things that Phoebe had said about Mrs. Cadaver seemed foolish.
“I’d like to explain about her,” my father said.
“Oh, never mind. Just forget I mentioned her. I don’t need any explanations.”
Later, when I was doing my homework, I found myself doodling in the margin of my English book. I had drawn a figure of a woman with wild hair and evil eyes and a rope around her neck. I drew a tree, fastened the rope to it, and hung her.
The next day at school, I studied Mr. Birkway as he leaped and cavorted about the classroom. If he was a murderer, he certainly was a lively one. I had always pictured murderers as being mopey and sullen. I hoped Mr. Birkway was in love with Margaret Cadaver and would marry her and take her away so that my father and I could go back to Bybanks.
What I found most surprising about Mr. Birkway was that he increasingly reminded me of my mother—or at least of my mother before the sadness set in. There was a liveliness to both Mr. Birkway and my mother, and an excitement—a passion—for words and for stories.
That day, as Mr. Birkway talked about Greek mythology, I started daydreaming about my mother, who loved books almost as much as she loved all her outdoor treasures. She liked to carry little books in her pocket and sometimes when we were out in the fields, she would flop down in the grass and start reading aloud.
My mother especially liked Indian stories. She knew about thunder gods, earth-makers, wise crows, sly coyotes, and shadow souls. Her favorite stories were those about people who came back, after death, as a bird or a river or a horse. She even knew one story about an old warrior who came back as a potato.
The next thing I knew, Mr. Birkway was saying, “Right, Phoebe? Are you awake? You have the second report.”
“Report?” Phoebe said.
Mr. Birkway clutched his heart. “Ben is doing an oral report on Prometheus this Friday. You’re doing one on Pandora next Monday.”
“Lucky me,” Phoebe muttered.
Mr. Birkway asked me to stay after class for a minute. Phoebe sent me warning messages with her eyebrows. As everyone else was leaving the room, Phoebe said, “I’ll stay with you if you want.”
“Why?”
“Because of him hacking up Mr. Cadaver, that’s what. I don’t think you should be alone with him.”
He did not hack me up. Instead, he gave me a special assignment, a “mini journal.” “I don’t know what that is,” I said. Phoebe was breathing on my shoulder. Mr. Birkway said I should write about something that interested me. “Like what?” I said.
“Oh, a place, a room, a person—don’t worry about it too much. Just write whatever comes to mind.”
Phoebe and I walked home with Mary Lou and Ben. My brain was a mess, what with trying not to flinch whenever Ben brushed against me. When we left Ben and Mary Lou and turned the corner onto Phoebe’s street, I wasn’t paying much attention. I suppose I was aware that someone was coming along the sidewalk in our direction, but it wasn’t until the person was about three feet away that I really took notice.
It was Phoebe’s lunatic, coming toward us, staring right at us. He stopped directly in front of us, blocking our way.
“Phoebe Winterbottom, right?” he said to Phoebe.
Her voice was a little squeak. The only sound that came out was a tiny “Erp—”
“What’s the matter?” he said. He slid one hand into his pocket.
Phoebe pushed him, yanked my arm, and started running. “Oh-my-god!” she said. “Oh-my-god!”
I was grateful that we were nearly at Phoebe’s house, so if he stabbed us in broad daylight, maybe one of her neighbors would discover our bodies and take us to the hospital before we bled entirely to death. I was beginning to believe he was a lunatic.
Phoebe tugged at her doorknob, but the door was locked. Phoebe beat on the door, and her mother suddenly pulled it open. She looked rather pale and shaken herself.
“It was locked!” Phoebe said. “Why was the door locked?”
“Oh sweetie,” Mrs. Winterbottom said. “It’s just that—I thought that—” She peered around us and looked up and down the street. “Did you see someone—did someone frighten you—”
“It was the lunatic,” Phoebe said. “We saw him just now.” She could hardly catch her breath. “Maybe we should call the police—or tell Dad.”
I took a good long look at Phoebe’s mother. She did not seem capable of phoning the police or Mr. Winterbottom. I think she was more scared than we were. She went around locking all the doors.
Nothing more happened that evening, and by the time I went home, the lunatic did not seem quite so threatening. No one called the police, and to my knowledge, Mrs. Winterbottom had not yet told Mr. Winterbottom, but right before I left Phoebe’s house, Phoebe said to me, “If I see the lunatic once more, I’ll phone the police myself.”
THE BLACKBERRY KISS
That night I tried to write the mini journal for Mr. Birkway. First I made a list of all the things I liked, and they were all things from Bybanks—the trees, the cows, the chickens, the pigs, the fields, the swimming hole. It was a complete jumble of things, and when I tried to write about any one of those things, I ended up writing about my mother, because everything was connected to her. At last, I wrote about the blackberry kiss.
One morning when I awoke very early, I saw my mother walking up the hill to the barn. Mist hung about the ground, finches were singing in the oak tree beside the house, and there was my mother, her pregnant belly sticking out in front of her. She was strolling up the hill, swinging her arms and singing:
Oh, don’t fall in love with a sailor boy,
A sailor boy, a sailor boy—
Oh, don’t fall in love with a sailor boy,
’Cause he’ll take your heart
to sea—
As she approached the corner of the barn where the sugar maple stands, she plucked a few blackberries from a stray bush and popped them into her mouth. She looked all around her—back at the house, across the fields, and up into the canopy of branches overhead. She took several quick steps up to the trunk of the maple, threw her arms around it, and kissed that tree soundly.
Later that day, I examined this tree trunk. I tried to wrap my arms about it, but the trunk was much bigger than it had seemed from my window. I looked up at where her mouth must have touched the trunk. I probably imagined this, but I thought I could detect a small dark stain, as from a blackberry kiss.
I put my ear against the trunk and listened. I faced that tree squarely and kissed it firmly. To this day, I can smell the smell of the bark—a sweet, woody smell—and feel the ridges in the bark, and taste that distinctive taste on my lips.
In my mini journal, I confessed that I had since kissed all different kinds of trees, and each family of trees—oaks, maples, elms, birches—had a special flavor all its own. Mixed in with each tree’s own taste was the slight taste of blackberries, and why this was so, I could not explain.
The next day, I turned in this story to Mr. Birkway. He didn’t read it or even look at it, but he said, “Marvelous! Brilliant!” as he slipped it into his briefcase. “I’ll put it with the other journals.”
Phoebe said, “Did you write about me?”
Ben said, “Did you write about me?”
Mr. Birkway bounded around the room as if the opportunity to teach us was his notion of paradise. He read a poem by e. e. cummings titled “the little horse is newlY” and the reason why the only capital letter in the title is the Y at the end of newlY is because Mr. Cummings liked to do it that way.
“He probably never took English,” Phoebe said.
To me that Y looked like the newly born horse standing up on his thin legs.
The poem was about a newlY born horse who doesn’t know anything but feels everything. He lives in a “smoothbeautifully folded” world. I liked that. I was not sure what it was, but I liked it. Everything sounded soft and safe.
That day, Phoebe left school early for a dentist appointment. I started walking home alone, but Ben joined me. I was completely unprepared for what happened on the way home, and for what would happen later. Ben and I were simply walking along and he said, “Did anyone ever read your palm?”
“No.”
“I know how to do it,” he said. “Want me to read yours?” He took my hand and stared at it for the longest time. His own hand was soft and warm. Mine was sweating like crazy. He was saying, “Hm” and tracing the lines of my palm with his finger. It gave me the shivers, but not in an entirely unpleasant way. The sun was beating down on us, and I thought it might be nice to stay there forever with him just running his finger along my palm like that. I thought about the newlY born horse who knows nothing and feels everything. I thought about the smoothbeautifully folded world. Finally, Ben said, “Do you want the good news first or the bad news?”
“The bad news. It isn’t real bad, is it?”
He coughed. “The bad news is that I can’t really read palms.” (I snatched my hand away.) “Don’t you want to know the good news?” he asked. (I started walking.) “The good news is that you let me hold your hand for almost five minutes and you didn’t flinch once.”
I didn’t know what to make of him. He walked me all the way to my house, even though I refused to speak to him. He waited on the porch until I was ready to go to Phoebe’s, and then he walked me to her house.
When I knocked at Phoebe’s door, Ben said, “I’ll be going now.” I took a quick look at him and turned back to the door, but in that instant that I was turning my head, he leaned forward, and I do believe his lips kissed my ear. I was not sure this was what he intended. In fact, I was not sure it happened at all, because before I knew it, he had hopped down the steps and was walking away.
The door inched open and there was Phoebe’s round face, as white and frightened as ever you could imagine. “Quick,” she said. “Come in.” She led me into the kitchen. On the kitchen table was an apple pie, and beside it were three envelopes: one for Phoebe, one for Prudence, and one for their father.
“I opened my note,” Phoebe said, showing it to me. It said, Keep all the doors locked and call your father if you need anything. I love you, Phoebe. It was signed, Mom.
I didn’t think too much of it. “Phoebe—” I said.
“I know, I know. It doesn’t sound terrible or anything. In fact, my first thought was, ‘Well, good. She knows I am old enough to be here by myself.’ I figured she was out shopping or maybe she even decided to return to work, even though she wasn’t supposed to go back to Rocky’s Rubber until next week. But then Prudence came home and opened her note.”
Phoebe showed me the note left for Prudence. It said, Please heat up the spaghetti sauce and boil the spaghetti. I love you, Prudence. It was signed, Mom.
I still didn’t think too much of it, but Phoebe was suspicious. Prudence made the spaghetti, while I helped Phoebe set the table. Phoebe and I even made a salad. “I do feel sort of independent,” Phoebe said.
When Phoebe’s father came home, Phoebe showed him his note. He opened it and sat down, staring at the piece of paper. Phoebe looked over his shoulder and read his note aloud: I had to go away. I can’t explain. I’ll call you in a few days.
I had a sinking, sinking feeling.
Prudence started asking a million questions. “What does she mean? Go away where? Why can’t she explain? Why didn’t she tell you? Did she mention this? A few days? Where did she go?”
“Maybe we should call the police,” Phoebe said. “I think she was kidnapped or something.”
“Oh, Phoebe,” Mr. Winterbottom said.
“I’m serious,” she said. “Maybe a lunatic came in the house and dragged her off—”
“Phoebe, that is not funny.”
“I’m not being funny. I mean it. It could happen.”
Prudence was still asking her questions. “Where did she go? Why didn’t she mention this? Didn’t she tell you? Where did she go?”
“Prudence, I honestly cannot say,” her father said.
“I think we should call the police,” Phoebe repeated.
“Phoebe, if she was kidnapped, would the lunatic—as you say—allow her to sit down and write these notes? Mm?”
He stood up, removed his coat, and said, “Let’s eat.”
As I left, Phoebe said, “My mother has disappeared. Sal, don’t tell anyone. Don’t tell a soul.”
At home, my father was slumped over the photo album. He used to close the album quickly when I came in the room, as if he were embarrassed to be caught with it. Lately, however, he didn’t bother to close it. It was as if he didn’t have the strength to do that.
On the opened page was a photo of my father and mother sitting in the grass beneath the sugar maple. His arms were around her and she was sort of folded into him. His face was pressed up next to hers and their hair blended together. They looked like they were connected.
“Phoebe’s mother went away,” I said.
He looked up at me.
“She left some notes. She says she’s coming back, but I don’t believe it.”
I went upstairs and tried to work on my mythology report. My father came to the doorway and said, “People usually come back.”
Now I can see that he was just talking in general, just trying to be comforting, but then—that night—what I heard in what he said was the tiniest reassurance of something I had been thinking and hoping. I had been praying that a miracle would happen and my mother would come back and we would return to Bybanks and everything would be exactly as it used to be.