Drowning Ruth (2 page)

I forgot soldiers' names and the purpose of errands. Three days in a row I locked myself out of the room I shared with Eliza. And always I was so tired, so very tired, that I simply could not stay awake, no matter how often I splashed water on my face or how much black coffee I drank. Finally, I surrendered and fashioned myself a nest among the towels in the supply room. I slept there every afternoon from one-thirty to two until the day Ward F ran out of soap, and Frances Patterson was sent to get some. Altogether, I had to admit they were right—I was beginning to make a better patient than a nurse. My body had got the better of me and could no longer be trusted. To tell the truth, I didn't know myself anymore.

And so I agreed to go home, not to the Milwaukee boarding-house full of unmarried nurses where Eliza and I had carefully divided the freezing, mustard-colored room into her side and my side, but back to the farm where I had grown up, where the snowy hills were white as bleached linen and where my sister rocked her little girl to sleep beside the kitchen stove while she waited for her
husband to come back from the war. I knew that, at home where I belonged, I could set myself right again.

Outside the train station, I drew the city's breath, yeasty from the breweries and bittersweet from the chocolate factory, into my lungs and felt better already. My grip on my bag was tight. I wasn't late or excessively early. And now, for the first time in weeks, I was hungry, ravenous, in fact. I went into the station and stopped at a counter to buy myself a bag of peanuts with extra salt and a cup of coffee that didn't burn my tongue. When I'd finished the nuts, I was still hungry.

“Would you wrap half a ham salad?” I said. “No, better make it a whole. And some of that chicken. And maybe a piece of pie. The cherry, please.”

Someone down the counter was drinking a chocolate milkshake that looked awfully good, and I was tempted to order one of those.

“That's what I like,” the counterman said, punching numbers into the register, “a woman who can eat.”

So I changed my mind about the milkshake. As I was paying my bill, they called my train.

“One way, miss? Goin' home?” the conductor asked, steadying himself with his hip along the seat in front of me.

I nearly began to explain that it wasn't right, really, to consider it home any longer, even though legally the farm was half mine. Really it belonged to my sister now, since she lived there, had a family there, and I was just going back for a restorative visit because somehow my body had taken on a life of its own. I wanted to confess that I'd been banished because I had failed as a nurse, because no one, including me, believed that I could coax soldiers back into proper shape when I was such a mess myself. But it isn't in me to say such things out loud.

“That's right,” I said.

He winked. “Tickets!” he bawled and lurched away down the swaying car.

Spring meant even less in the country than it did in the city that year, and by the time we pulled up to the icy little platform in Na-gawaukee, the sky was heavy with unfallen snow. The wind bit at my face, so that I had to duck my head. I watched the toes of my boots as I stepped down the slick platform stairs and picked my way over the snow that drifted across the street in long pulls like taffy. My steps took me one, two, three buildings down from the platform where I stopped at the door of Heinzelman's Bait and Tackle—“A Dozen Grubs for a Penny.” I went in.

The bell over the door jingled, and the coals in the corner stove gave an answering glow to the sudden draft. Then the curtains behind the counter parted, and Mary Louise Lindgren emerged from the back room. She smiled when she saw me, beamed, you could say, and wiped her hands on her apron front in that nervous way she had, as she hurried toward me.

“Mandy! What are you doing home?” She put her hands on my shoulders, pressed her cheek against mine. “Ooh, you're frozen, a block of ice!” She held her warm palms to my face for a moment and then grabbed hold of my wrist and gave it a little tug without pausing to let me answer her question. “Come over near the stove. I can't believe it, just can't believe it's you! I wondered—when I heard the bell—I wondered who would be coming in at this hour, and I thought, It's probably Harry Stoltz, but, of course, it couldn't have been, because he's over in Watertown, and then I thought …”

She would have gone on about what she'd supposed and what she'd thought after that and what she'd done next, but I interrupted. “I'm taking a vacation,” I said, “a rest.” It was true, in a way.

“Mathilda is going to be so happy!” She frowned. “But why didn't she tell me? She was in here only two days ago.”

“Mattie doesn't know.”

That was all I needed to say, because she broke in immediately.

“A surprise! How wonderful! And, Mandy,” she leaned toward me and lowered her voice discreetly, though there was no one else in the shop to hear, “I have a surprise too.” She waited until she was sure she had my full attention. “George and I may have a little one.” She patted her apron front significantly.

I didn't know what to say to this. Mary Louise had been pregnant every one of the five years since she and George Lindgren had been married, and she had lost all five of those babies, each when it was several months along. A person ought to know when to give up, I thought; a person ought not to court disaster. At the very least, she should be wary. She should hold some of her feelings back. But Mary Louise was incapable of reticence, and she didn't have the advantage of scientific training, the way I did. She always acted as if nothing could possibly go wrong, as if this child's birth were written in the stars, and she need only wait for the blessed event. Only her hands hovering protectively over her belly betrayed the worry underneath. What she thought was growing could so easily amount to nothing at all.

“It feels different this time,” she said defensively, although I hadn't expressed my concern.

“I hope so.” Really, what else could I have said?

We agreed then that I should be on my way while there was still light. A few steps from the store, knowing she would be watching, I turned to look back. She held up her hand and, as I mirrored her, I thought of the time when we were just alike, Mary Louise and I, both happy to be finished with school for the day, running and sliding along this very road, scanning the tower of St. Michael's for the lantern light that we believed signaled the escape of a lunatic, talking about why Netty Klefstaad wasn't speaking to Ramona Mueller, and how we knew Bobby Weiss had cheated at spelling, and what to do with the penny after you'd rubbed it on a wart, and sometimes singing.

Of course, that was before Mattie. By the time Mattie was old enough to go to school, Mary Louise and I walked this same road
decorously, with our books squeezed tight against our chests, but Mathilda ran ahead, pitching herself into snowbanks, as we had once done. “Watch me, Amanda! Watch, Mary Louise!” she'd call. Or she would linger behind to study the snowflakes patterning her mitten and summon me back imperiously. “Mandy, look at this one! Hurry up, before it melts!”

I could never make my sister understand that Mary Louise and I had important matters to discuss. For five minutes or so, Mathilda would stay by my side, cocooned with me in a wool shawl, but inevitably she'd pull away and run and slide until she exhausted herself and begged me to carry her. “Piggyback!” she demanded. Yes, demanded, although she was much too heavy. “You're too big now, Mattie,” I protested. I sighed. I rolled my eyes at Mary Louise, whose eight brothers and sisters were never so much trouble, even all together. But Mathilda stamped her foot. She wailed and clung to me, so that, eventually, I bent my knees, and she jumped on my back and wrapped her arms around my neck, tight enough to strangle. Mathilda was always interrupting, always demanding, and I always gave in. I always did what she wanted. Always. Except that last time.

When Mathilda was born, I was eight years old and not, in the neighbor ladies' opinion, a promising child.

“What a beautiful baby,” Mrs. Jungbluth said as she and Mrs. Tully and Mrs. Manigold crowded around Mathilda's cradle and cooed over her pretty lips, her lovely chin. With seventeen children among them, you'd have thought they'd seen enough babies. But Mathilda, apparently, was special.

“Amanda'll be jealous, won't she,” Mrs. Tully said, “to have such a pretty little sister?”

But my mother said, “No, Amanda loves her sister.” She laid the baby in my lap to prove it.

Why would I be jealous? Mathilda was mine. The baby that everyone wanted for herself belonged to me.

A photographer came to the house to take a picture of us on the
day of Mattie's christening. They put me in the big green chair—already, my legs were long enough to touch the floor, if I didn't sit back all the way—and I held her, her dress spilling white down my front, one of her tiny wet fingers tangled in the end of my braid, while outside the April clouds chased each other across the sun so that the room was bright one moment and shadowed the next.

“Smile,” the photographer pleaded, but I refused. At Mary Louise's house, I had seen a picture of the Madonna cradling her baby and I intended to look like her, solemn and noble.

With the pop and the flash and the smoke, Mathilda began to cry. My mother started to lift her from me, but I was determined to hold on to my baby. I would be the one to comfort her. And Mattie, for her part, wound her fingers more tightly in my hair. She wouldn't let go until my mother opened those tiny hooks one by one.

I turned now onto Glacier Road, which runs up a hill overlooking Nagawaukee Lake. At the top, the wind hit me full force, scouring my cheeks and tearing at my coat. I gasped and struggled forward, my head low, as far as the icehouse. There I rested, stamping my feet in the straw and flexing my fingers, unwinding my scarf and shaking it free of my frozen breath. I left the door partway open for light. Before me now, as I stood looking out, the land fell away down the steep slope, and through the trees the frozen lake lay like a white scar on the earth. I shifted right, adjusting my angle slightly, and the tree trunks parted to reveal the familiar dark stain amid the whiteness, a crescent crowned with the lace of leafless branches in the northeast corner of Taylor's Bay, the island that had once been mine. I shifted again and could make out on the island the green roof of the house where Mattie and Carl had lived until the war.

Once I had thought this place was the only one like it in all the
world, but now I knew better. Lakes were scattered all over this part of the country, their outlines different, but their innards just the same. They were drops and drips and splashes on the land. They were holes and craters lined with skin too thin to hold back the springs that rushed to fill them, and most of them were dotted here and there with stubborn little islands, knobs of land that refused to dip their heads under the water.

To the old farmer who'd sold my parents their land, my island had been nothing, or worse than nothing—a useless piece of soil. He never mentioned it to my parents when he pushed the deed toward them across the heavy oak table in what had only moments before been his kitchen and was now ours.

They didn't discover they owned the island until several years later. I was twelve and Mattie four the day my parents spread the papers out on that same kitchen table to determine whether a spring to the north that would have been handy for them really belonged to our neighbors, as the Jungbluths claimed.

“What's this here?” My mother tapped her index finger on a blob marked with an X that looked to be in the middle of nowhere.

My father studied the map. “Well, Mother,” he said, “it looks like we own the island out in Taylor's Bay.”

Mattie was standing close to him, as she always did, one arm crooked around his leg. He scooped her up and tossed her toward the ceiling. “What do you think of an island, missy?”

“Again!” she shrieked. “Again!”

And so he tossed her several more times, while she squealed, until at last he lowered her to the ground, his large hands rucking her dress under her arms.

“Do it again! Please!” she whined, pulling at his trouser. “Again! Please! Again!”

Finally he raised a warning finger, and she started to cry. He turned to me. “Take care of your sister,” he said impatiently.

“We're busy here.” And then he and my mother went back to trying to bend the northern boundary.

After everyone else was in bed that night, I crept down the stairs and unrolled the map to examine the shape for myself. How oddly small and plain it looked, so different from the rocky, tangled place I knew. I rubbed at it with my finger. On paper, it might have been no more than a smudge of blackberry jam.

Under the rush of the wind now, I became aware of the ching-ching of sleigh bells coming up the road. I wrapped my muffler tight around my throat and lifted my bag. I was about to step outside and hail the driver, when the horse crested the hill and I saw just whose animal it was. I shrank back and pulled the door to. I had done something that I didn't want Joe Tully to know, something worse even than my dismissal, and I couldn't stand for him to see me with that shame in my heart. In the darkness, I pressed against the straw-covered blocks of ice and, my eyes closed, my breathing stilled, waited for the bells to cease, for the sound of footsteps, for the light to flood against my eyelids, because surely he'd seen me, had at least seen something and would wonder. Joe was not the sort who could ignore a glimpse of an intruder, or of someone who might need his help.

The bells came on, nearer, nearer, until I could hear the horse snort and the hiss of the runners on the snow, and then they passed by and jingled more and more faintly, until at last they were buried beneath the wind. He must not have seen me after all. But if the stranger I had recently become was relieved, some other part of me shuddered with despair, and I found myself weeping, the tears searing my frozen cheeks, at the thought that I'd had to hide myself from a man I'd once loved.

And then, finally, I had to go on. One can only cry so long, and it would be dark soon and colder. Although the wind was fierce, I had only one more hill to climb. At the very last, when I could see the yellow farmhouse and the smoke from the fieldstone chimney, I
began to run, taking huge, wild steps, picking my feet up high out of the snow and throwing them down again, swinging my bag, as if I were just a girl, propelled by the excitement of coming home.