Dwelling Places (26 page)

Mack

The sun is rising into a clear sky this morning, making the day appear warmer even though the thermometer outside the kitchen reads twenty degrees. Mack has the day off because Nancy Hendrikson's father passed away last night—massive heart attack. He was seventy-five and had worked hard his whole life, but remained forty pounds overweight. It was his second attack, sudden. At least family was with him; his grandson Jason had come over to help the old man string Christmas lights. Mack and Jodie will take food over later and then attend the wake. This is the first of probably several deaths that will reach them during the winter. The old folks just can't take the cold as
well. They stay indoors in the stale air and get the same ailments over and over. And they get tired of all the gray outside.

The radio is on as Mack guides the car down the frosty road. They have come to the obituaries, and Mack turns it up, to hear about Nancy's father. He listens through several variations on “Funeral services for eighty-one-year-old Hal Lundeen of Oskaloosa will be held Thursday at ten-thirty
A.M
., with burial at Cedar Hill Cemetery. Visitation begins at seven o'clock Wednesday evening. The Marshall Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements for Hal Lundeen of Oskaloosa.” Nancy's father is next to the last.

He feels like taking pictures. He still keeps the prints tacked to the walls of the stone house. He has four rolls' worth now, lined up like ragged banners along the light paneling. Every other day or so he stops by and stands in the cold room and looks at his collection. They aren't going to win any photography awards. Hardly any of them have turned out the way they looked when he shot them. But he's grabbed enough information to help him sort and hang them. They are divided into four groups, designated by which direction the scenes lie from Mack's home. There are the East Pictures and the West Pictures, the North and South Pictures. Underneath each print is an old business card, blank side out, bearing more information: “Thompson place,” “Harold Cane's barn,” “Mrs. Richie's house,” “Fernmuller place.” Each is a version of the same truth: an empty structure of some sort that still has enough form to be called something. Some days Mack loses track of time as he stands there and looks at these frozen scenes.

He stops now, four miles from home. A truck path leaves the county road and enters a pasture. There is no fence. Mack turns off the road and follows the track. He's pretty sure this is the Simonsons' property. The ground is frozen hard, allowing the car to enter the field with little trouble.

After a couple hundred yards, the track fades. It ends at a solitary structure, a corncrib someone's grandfather built. It edges what was a beanfield before the harvest. Where the tracks peter out, a single faint
path continues, looking as if it leads to the end of everything. Mack considers putting his feet on that path and stopping only when it stops. It might take him to the beginning—the place before farmers or even Indians, the place as it was in the beginning and that it wants, deep down, to be always. Whoever gave men the idea that they could change its face and plant it as they saw fit, and make it serve them?

He takes six pictures and then drives back to the county road. He heads north as the sun climbs into the crystal sky. He passes what used to be the McDougle place. He recognizes the low slope of the chicken coop. Back in the summer, Mack had approached the deserted yard, thinking he spied blackberries. Insects shrieked from the layers of shoulder-high weeds that choked the yard and old hog pens, and breezes swirled eerily through the empty rooms of the house. But more disconcerting were the clear sounds and faces that crowded to the front of his inner senses. The McDougles have been dead twenty, thirty years, their three children routed out of this yard long ago, having established in some busier, happier town the family's new center of gravity. Yet this spot at the far end of the cornfield seems populated by ghosts, or by other beings never quite visible but always threatening to appear. Mack shivers even now, from the cold and from intuition, as the scene slips past his window.

He drives into Beulah and walks into the Lunch Hour. By now it's midmorning, and the small toasty space hums with people trying to get warm and grabbing a second cup of coffee before going back to work. A couple of the men nod to him, and he nods back. He sits not far from three women who share a table. They are middle-aged, with graying hair cropped short and decorative sweatshirts topping off stretch pants. The women around here seem to become thicker and more masculine as they age, while their husbands grow more spindly and softer around the edges.

Mack sits in a booth and asks for coffee and apple pie. From there he observes the conversation going on at the counter. Julie is pouring coffee refills, and the farmers gather round in their overalls, their denim rear ends reminding Mack of the backsides of cows at a feeding
trough. His gaze travels to their faces. He sees them not as faces of people he knows but as merely faces on people. It is an odd sensation.

It's not always easy to read a farmer's face. You see the windburn on his cheeks and the cracks in his hands and know what work he does. You see the weariness in his eyes and understand that his life is not easy. But the details are hidden away, behind the handshake, the work clothes, and the slight smile that is part of his greeting, a standard hello for anyone he passes. His eyes do not speak of what calamity he's dealing with now—a market that's bottomed out or a wife's illness. His expression tells you that there's work to be done, that's all.

But when Mack looks at his own face in the mirror these days, his eyes say far too much. By now he understands that his depression does not set him apart from many folks around here; everyone has a share of it, because everyone's life has had its hard times. But for some reason, Mack had to crawl to the heart of his darkness. That's how he is different from the men at the counter.

And he has put everything into spoken words, has sat in rooms with those doctors who knew nothing, nothing at all, about the life he and all of the others have lived. He sat there and told all, offered up revelation after revelation, relinquished all of their stories with his one.

And so his face is different now from the faces of his neighbors. He looks in the mirror and sees layers of information right there in his eyes. Technically, he is no longer a farmer. But week after week, in George Dooley's small office, he delves into what it means, more than a subject should ever be explored. He has been led by people in light coats, people with smooth, sensitive hands, into the world of talking, talking, talking. He has talked, has uncovered things that can never be understood. And now his face shows all the confusion his words have caused.

He leaves the café twenty minutes later, stepping into the sharp air. The Lunch Hour sits at the end of a block. When Mack turns right and walks east, the sidewalk takes a dip, and suddenly there is
Ray Danson's barren soybean field. No matter where he turns, there is someone's land, and there is the history of his own industry. George is right: a person can survive here only by redefining everything. Mack's instincts must be redirected, his memories reorganized toward a different story and outcome.

It is a week before Christmas, and the weather is cold and bleak enough to chase everyone inside. In the middle of the workday, Beulah's streets are empty. Mack continues to wander around in the car, not yet ready to be home. All his life he has studied details: the inner workings of machinery, the texture and smell of ripening crops, the coarseness of dirt under his boots, the shade of the sky just before sundown. He needs to see other details now. He wants to see. So he parks the car on the east side of the old town square. The four streets that enclose the block are too clean, even for the dead of winter. There is little clutter of business, only smooth, empty storefronts instead. In good weather, a handful of kids with skateboards command the sidewalks, their wheels making echoes among the old, lonely trees.

The grain elevator, two streets over, towers over the small downtown. It is twice as high and twice as thick as any other structure nearby. The bank, snug at the corner of Main and Second Streets, is still the town's most beautiful building. Solid limestone up to the large front window, above it exact configurations of deep red brick. It is an opera house among the storefronts, its original name Beulah City Bank, still embossed above the arched window. Underneath, within that window, is the bank's current name, which has changed three times in five years. To avoid straining anyone's short-term memory, everyone calls it The Bank.

In the next block is Rexall Drug, the American Legion, and the post office. The post office lobby closes at four-thirty, but the door to the bank of PO boxes stays open later. Mack peers through the glass door at the frosted office window, the wall of bronze boxes, filigreed and looking just the same as when he was a kid. His family always had a mailbox at the end of the farmyard drive, and Mack had wanted one of those bronze boxes, which required keys.

The end of this block is the end of any real business. A filling station used to be here, and long after it closed the two pumps remained, quoting regular and premium prices from 1982. Some restaurant owner finally yanked up the pumps, leaving light squares on the grease-stained pavement. The pumps probably now adorn some overpriced sandwich shop in Des Moines or Chicago. Probably that sandwich shop is painted inside to look old and nostalgic, that peeling-paint, two-toned look. Here, at Ralph's old Gulf station, the outer wall, formerly a gleaming white, is bled through by its underlying rusty brick. But no one pays good money to sit there and have a ham and cheese, chips, and Coke. Even the ghosts have moved on.

He crosses the street and walks back to the square, then along its north side, past the shoe store that has become an insurance office. Then the JC Penney store that has turned into the town museum, the large interior piled in loosely organized fashion and sectioned off into rough portions of the town's history.

A bare maple tree casts shadows at the corner of the former Lee's Clothing Store. This is a friendly little spot in the summertime, when the shadows become full shade. Three or four metal chairs and a round aluminum table provide a place for several of the old men, who keep up a hoarse chatter in the quiet afternoon. If you stop to say hello, they will nod and ask how you are and keep talking, as if they don't have much time or room for anything beyond their own business, as if what younger people are concerned about has little hold on them anymore.

He walks over to the south side of the square and follows Des Moines Avenue east, into old yards and residences. On most of the streets in Beulah there is no real curb anymore. The tough grasses of dead autumn lawns fall out of their boundaries and into the light pavement of the streets. Now, with a flat layer of snow remaining, the best definition of a street is the line made by cars and trucks parked along its edges.

He goes several streets over to the community park, one block square that sits at the center of several homes and their yards. They
used to have 4-H picnics here. Three large walnut trees overwhelm the set of swings and the picnic shelter. He remembers how every autumn the black, husked walnuts lay everywhere, resting under the tables and gathering in the indentations of the concrete floor.

Mack sits on a picnic table and tries to look at the houses around him as if he's never seen them before. He can hear some mom getting after her kids, her voice thin behind storm doors and windows. He sees her standing in a picture window not far from where he is. Her hands are on her hips, and she is looking down, probably at a toddler. She looks ready to yell or make a sudden movement. But as Mack watches, she suddenly laughs and bends down, out of view.

Jodie laughed a lot when the kids were little. She played with them whenever she could, to the point that Mack was sure she'd had kids just so she could keep playing as an adult. Maybe all women stop playing after enough years have passed. He can't think more about that now.

He dusts off the seat of his pants and heads back toward the square. He knows that, although he doesn't see people in the houses, they see him. In a place so small, every movement matters. People keep track of who sat at a picnic table in mid-December. He wonders briefly what the silent witnesses think of him, what they murmur to spouses or in-laws as he passes down their sidewalks.

Jodie

Rita is in a bad mood. She called Jodie at eight this morning and asked her to stop at the post office for her because she's staying in bed today. She sounds defeated. Jodie can't tell if this radical change in behavior—the staying in bed, not the bad mood—is the result of feeling bad physically or being frustrated about the car. Mack informed Jodie two days ago that Mom would be without a car, and they'd need to run errands for her.

“Poor Tom,” Jodie said. “Is he working on it again?”

“No. Tom and I have an agreement. He won't figure out what's wrong until Mom's over the bronchitis.”

She looked at him in surprise. “Well, this is a new strategy.”

“Actually, once she's better, I'll just sneak back into the garage and fix it myself.”

She laughed then, admiring the man who stood in her doorway. She'd forgotten how tricky he could be. “You know she'll figure it out after a while.”

“I don't care. I'm taking her wheels away.” He leaned against the doorjamb and sipped coffee. For just a moment, Jodie felt that her old Mack had returned.

So this morning Jodie has shopped for groceries, delivered pharmaceuticals, and picked up the mail in Rita's stead. It took half the day, and Jodie has experienced a new wave of admiration for her mother-in-law. She hopes to be so active twenty years from now but dares not think that far ahead.

At the pharmacy she runs into Annette Peters, a member of Beulah's First Methodist, where the Barneses used to attend. Annette is one of the few people Jodie truly misses, now that she and Mack attend church in Oskaloosa. Even though they encounter people of their former church in other situations, it feels different not to worship with them anymore. Annette was not only a sweet person but a conscientious friend. There was the time she arranged for a surprise birthday luncheon for Jodie, off in Pella, just a few miles down the road. Jodie went to the address thinking it was a Methodist women's meeting at someone's home, only to find that it was a home converted into a tearoom. Six other women from church were seated when Jodie entered the homey dining room, with its clean white walls and deep oak woodwork, small tables draped in white linens, and pretty lamps and potted plants giving the area a warm glow. The lunch was from a menu that changed weekly. And each woman got her own pot of tea or coffee. When the owner brought out Jodie's dessert—a decadent lemon chiffon pie—she was joined by two other women who sang
“Happy Birthday” in Dutch. Annette just grinned while Jodie laughed and blushed.