Dwelling Places (30 page)

This is one of those rare times when she longs for her mother the way a child just wants to be snuggled on a warm lap. Of course they talked over the holidays, and they have always talked easily enough. But years and distance have taught Jodie to handle most dilemmas without any parental guidance. And she is afraid to speak anything aloud about this mess she's made. It was possible with Rita because Rita took command of the situation; but for Jodie to tell her own mother would require strength she cannot muster. She's pretty sure
Mom would be understanding. She might even insist that Jodie come down to Galveston for a visit, to get away and find some perspective. But right now, this confrontation with Terry has already taken too much out of her. She looks ahead to the next several days and chooses one afternoon and makes an appointment with herself to make the call. In case the fallout is really bad, Mom will need some warning at least.

Mack

New Year's Day starts with a bang. Mack was looking forward to sleeping in now that Marty, Joe, and the kids have left and life has settled down, but he awakes to the furious voices of his wife and son. He puts on his robe and hurries downstairs. Jodie is standing in the middle of the family room, quaking with rage. Her attention is aimed at Young Taylor, who sits on the couch. As usual, his every item of clothing is black. In addition, his fingernails and lips are black. His eyelids are blacked clear to the eyebrows. The rest of his face is death-white.

“It is New Year's Day, and I will
not
have you sitting around the house looking like this!”

“You don't have to look at me.”

“What, I just ignore you? Like that's possible.”

“Yes, just ignore me. There are lots of rooms in this house. When I'm finished watching this movie, I'll go upstairs and you won't have to look at me the whole rest of the day!”

“Hey!” Mack's voice cracks across the room, and they both look at him where he stands halfway down the stairs. “Watch your tone.”

“I'd rather not talk to her at all. She started it. I was just sitting here not bothering anybody.”

“You're bothering me by looking like a corpse,” Jodie throws in.

“Like I said, you don't have to look at me.”

Mack has reached the bottom of the stairs. He is trying to calculate exactly how to approach both people. Once Jodie's eyes reach this
level of snap, she has run out of patience. Young Taylor, on the other hand, is a master of perseverance and will wear out both of them if allowed to keep on in this vein.

“Jodie, why don't you let us talk.” He hopes she'll take his cue and make her exit.

“I'd rather talk to Dad anyway.”

Jodie throws up her hands. “Fine. Because I don't have anything left to say to this child. The two of you just go for a really long walk or something, because I've had it.” She walks past Mack and into the kitchen. Young Taylor stares at the television screen, remote resting near his leg. Mack walks over, picks up the remote, and turns off the set. He ignores the colossal sigh this elicits from his son.

“We've both got the day off,” Mack says. “It's been a while since we had a talk.”

“That's not
my
fault. You're always busy or going somewhere else.”

This surprises him. “You never act like you're interested in talking to me. I can't read your mind.”

Young Taylor remains mute.

“Anything in particular you want to talk about?” Mack sits carefully on the couch, a foot or two from Young Taylor.

“Maybe.” The boy looks straight ahead.

Mack sees an opportunity and decides to take the risk. “If you want a conversation with me, you'll have to wipe that mess off your face.”

Young Taylor just stares at him. If it weren't such an unhappy situation, he would be comical, like a clown who has run out of the usual bright colors.

“I mean it,” says Mack. “I want to look at somebody who at least resembles my kid.”

Young Taylor gets up and heads down the hall. Mack follows him into the bathroom just off the family room, the one his son has claimed for his own. Young Taylor opens the cabinet and takes out a jar of cold cream.

“Does your grandma know you've got her cold cream?”

Young Taylor sets down the jar and glances at Mack, his eyes widening a bit and stretching the seams of black that surround them. “It's not hers.”

Mack takes the jar and screws off the lid. A scent strikes him, and suddenly he is a child at his mother's dressing table. It seems impossible that his son and his mother can be linked by such an ordinary thing.

Mack puts down the jar. Young Taylor leans back against the sink, his arms folded.

“So take it off,” says Mack.

“You do it.”

“Why should I take off your makeup?”

“You're the one who wants it off.”

Young Taylor hasn't budged. He doesn't look particularly rebellious, just very patient.

Mack picks up the jar. “All right, I will.”

He scoops a bit of the cold cream with two fingers and swipes it onto Young Taylor's cheek. He rubs it in.

“How much does it take?”

“About that much, only all over.”

Mack puts more small swipes on the boy's chin, nose, and forehead.

“There's something I can't stop thinking about,” says Young Taylor.

“Yeah?”

“How is it that Grandpa would turn the tractor that short on a slope?”

Mack's heart makes a skip, but he keeps his voice steady. “It happens.”

“But nobody knew that field better than Grandpa, right?”

“Why would you be thinking about that? You were only six.”

“But I've heard you and Grandma talk about him turning the tractor too sharp. I've looked at that spot, and it doesn't make sense.”

Mack stops swabbing the boy's face. “What do you mean?”

“It's almost like it was on purpose.”

Mack is caught in midswipe. He is standing too close to Young Taylor to avoid his son's gaze. With both hands, he smooths the cold cream evenly over the kid's face. The black around his lips and eyes begins to smear. Young Taylor keeps talking.

“I mean, it makes more sense than him dumping it over by accident in a place where even Kenzie would know better than to turn like that.”

“Has somebody said something to you about this?”

“No. It's what they don't say.”

Now Young Taylor's face is an ever-changing greasy-gray cloud. Out of the cloud, his lips move. “And the insurance money helped us keep the farm, a while longer anyway.”

Mack can't come up with an immediate answer. He feels responsible for this conversation. He somehow released the topic for fresh review when he spoke to Mom days ago. “It's not as simple as that. He wasn't losing the farm.”

“But he was losing a lot of money.”

“Along with most other people about that time.”

“So what do
you
think?” The boy's voice echoes off the tile of the bathroom.

Mack reaches for a tissue and sees his hand shaking. “I think your grandpa was too tired to be in the field that evening. Sometimes you make mistakes when you're fatigued and not thinking straight. Grandpa was a hard worker, not the type to just give up.”

“What about Uncle Alex?”

He winces at his brother's name. The memory of Alex's death is bad enough, but what Mack thinks of now is how hard Young Taylor took it. He'd been old enough to feel grief in full—he used to follow Alex around like a puppy.

“Your uncle drank himself to death. It was bound to happen sometime, but he probably didn't plan to go that particular day. If he had, he'd have used his hunting rifle.”

“See, you've thought about this too.”

He wipes grease off the fine-boned face, avoiding those dark eyes. “Yes, I have, and I think that Alex tried to be something he was never cut out to be.” He lets their gazes meet briefly. “It's real important to know what you love and what you're good at. You have to figure it out and then live accordingly.”

“What do you love?”

Mack stops rubbing off makeup and steps back for a moment. “I love my family. And I love this place.” He throws away the tissue, gets another, and begins clearing away the white around Young Taylor's nose and lips. The death-pale skin of his son's face is turning a natural pink.

“Even though you don't farm anymore?”

“I've got a job I'm good at. That's enough.”

“So you think you can stay now?”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes I wish I could die for a little while to go see Grandpa and Uncle Alex.”

Mack makes himself concentrate on the black residue under the boy's eyes. “I don't think it works that way.”

“I'm pretty sure it doesn't. I almost died last summer.” Young Taylor waits for Mack to meet his eyes again. “When Bobby and Dale and I went camping. We got really drunk out in the rowboat—”

Mack bites his lip and watches the tissue sweep away grime in a neat line.

“—and I fell out. It was pitch dark, and the guys didn't have a flashlight and couldn't find me. I seemed to be down there forever.”

“Last summer?” Mack asks, hardly a whisper.

“Yeah. And then I started taking in water, and I tried to find the surface but couldn't. I couldn't see my own air bubbles. I thought,
This is a stupid way to go.
”

Young Taylor pauses. So does Mack, the greasy tissue still in his hand.

“And then I had this feeling that I was going someplace else and that everything would be okay. I knew that in just another minute I'd see people on the other side. But all of a sudden somebody grabbed
me real hard and pulled me straight up out of the water. I thought it had to be one of the guys, but it felt like somebody a lot stronger. When I hit the surface, I could hear Bobby and Dale screaming my name—they were at least ten yards away. I tried to see who pulled me up, but nobody was there.”

Mack feels a jolt of adrenaline, and tiny pinpricks along his arms and neck.

“We agreed not to tell anybody—you know, what was the point? It would have just scared everybody after the fact. And…I didn't even tell the guys about being pulled up like that. You're the only person who knows that part.”

It is now that Mack sees Young Taylor's entire face, clean. He stands back and stares. He doesn't know what he expected to find. Seething rebellion, or resentment? But all that's here is his boy, looking new and a bit pink.

“Why did you tell me this, son?”

“I thought you needed to know. Death is just another country.”

Mack is still staring in amazement at this beautiful child.

“It's another country. And God's taking care of things there, the same as here. God's in charge of getting people from one place to another. You don't need to worry about it, or be afraid of it.”

Young Taylor's eyes have taken on a sheen. He blinks.

Mack instinctively touches his son's cheek as if to reorient himself to a place he hasn't been to in a while. Young Taylor stares at Mack and keeps talking.

“That's why I'm not afraid of death anymore. I like hanging out with it, sort of like walking a fence line, knowing that the property you're looking at will be yours before long.”

“Is that why you're always in costume? You like to hang out with death?”

“No, I just want to prove that I'm not afraid.”

Mack's eyes are filling with tears. “I had a different idea.”

“Stop worrying about me. I've figured stuff out without having to die.”

Mack looks at Young Taylor's face, at the lips pink instead of black, and he remembers the boy as a two-year-old. He used to make a joke out of kissing people. He liked to run from person to person and make loud smacking sounds against their lips.

“I appreciate your telling me this,” says Mack.

“Don't worry about me, okay?”

Mack cups Young Taylor's chin in his hand. He draws the clean, bright face to his own and kisses his boy on the lips. “I like you better with your real face.”

Young Taylor gives Mack a quick hug and goes on his way. Mack watches him the rest of the day—noticing where he is in the house, following his easy movements across the bare field to the woods, going to hang out with death, or God, or the angel that pulled him up from drowning.

Mack wants to tell Jodie what he has learned. But he feels in his soul that this is not the right time. He carries his son's comfort with him in solitude, wrapping it around his mind like a quilt.

Kenzie

“I'll understand if you decide to stay.”

Mitchell is standing in the middle of his barn, the finished sculpture reflecting afternoon sun from its multiple surfaces. The same light washes over him, giving his complexion a healthy, bronze glow. The top two buttons of his shirt are undone, dark hair peeking out, and Kenzie wants to rest her head right in that spot. But she stands several feet from him, her arms loaded with metal scraps. They are cleaning up, because Mitchell won't be creating any more sculptures out here for a while, maybe never again. Why he wants to be clean and orderly all of a sudden, she doesn't know. But she is here to help in whatever way she can. Staying busy makes it easier for her to cope with the many pains racing through her.

“I don't want to stay,” she says. “I want to be with you. That's my calling. I just don't know how to leave without making a disaster
for my family.” She wasn't able to get away from the house until after lunch. Mom and Dad decided to fix a big pancake and sausage breakfast, which they didn't eat until ten-thirty. Then, because the Christmas tree was already drying out and shedding needles, Mom declared that it was time to take down decorations. That took most of the afternoon. They stopped at two to eat some leftover chili. Mom and Dad acted content to have everybody there working together, even though the day had started with a huge argument between Mom and Young Taylor. But even Young Taylor calmed down and cooperated.