Dwelling Places (7 page)

“And if you read the history, you know that my brother's dead. He lost his farm and he died.”

George closes his eyes and nods. “And when you say that you're better off than other people, maybe it's your brother you're talking about.”

Mack glares out the window.

“And since you've got a home and a family and a job, and you're not dead, then you'd better not have any complaints.”

“I've got no complaints.”

“But in spite of all your good fortune, you became so severely depressed that your family intervened, and you just spent two weeks in the hospital.”

Mack looks at the therapist, but he sees no rebuke. The look on George's face does not match how harsh these words sound. He cocks his head a bit, and says, in a much gentler tone, “Mack, there's something going on here. You'd like to think there's not, but you're an intelligent man, and you've got to find the thing that's making all this mess. So why don't you just open your mouth and let's see what comes out.”

“I'm tired to death of talking.”

“I know you are. I can see it in your face. I could see it in the way you walked into this room.”

“I'm plumb out of words.” Mack shakes his head slowly. “I've said all I know about everything I know. I just want to get settled in now, go to work, look after my family.”

“I want to help you do that.”

“So what do I do?”

“Let's start with something simple. Give me a short history of your family. You've mentioned your mother and brother, your wife and kids. I don't know much about any of them. Have you always lived around here? You've always been farmers?”

A short history turns out not to be simple. Mack can't talk about his family without backing up a century at least. His history is wrapped up in the property, or the property he used to own. So he relates the family tree: his mother's ancestor homesteaded back in the 1850s. That spot by the creek where the stone house now stands, that was the original home. Over five generations the 40 acres grew to 380. It passed from old Hiram Decker to his son Andrew, who left it to his daughter, who married another farmer and bore children, one of whom was Sarah, Rita's mother. Due to tragic loss of her siblings, Sarah and her husband John inherited the farm, then passed it on to Rita, their eldest, and signed over a portion to their other daughter, Delores. Delores set up her household three miles east of her sister Rita and the original farm. Rita married Taylor Barnes, and they had two sons, Mack and Alex. Mack was the eldest, and the original farm would go to him. A good portion of it was given to Alex when Alex turned twenty-one.

“Was that ever a problem for Alex, that the original farm would go to you?”

“No. It's the way property has always been passed down. To the eldest son, and if there wasn't a son, to the eldest daughter. No one ever questioned it. And Alex ended up having a bigger spread than I did anyway. Dad also gave him an equal portion of the best land. He was as fair a man as they come. I never knew Alex to feel slighted.”

George's eyebrows scoot up. “I feel as if there's a ‘but' there somewhere.”

“Alex never cared for farming. Not like Dad and I did. It's that way with some people. Even if I'd kept farming, I wouldn't have expected my boy Young Taylor to carry it on. Partly, the times have changed and it's just too hard to make it. But partly I've always known he wasn't a farmer by heart. Taylor's a lot like Alex.”

“How does a man who doesn't like to farm make a go of it?”

“When you live in these parts, there aren't a lot of options. Alex's wife had farming in her blood. She's helping her folks work their place in Nebraska now. Her boy's right in there with them. I think Alex thought that it was better to just stay with it.”

“It didn't work out for him?”

Mack's words have become troublesome in his mouth. “You know what happened.”

“Yes, but I don't know why.”

Mack shrugs. “He let things slip. Didn't keep up even when he could have. He'd always liked the liquor—drank heavy back in high school. It caught up with him. Marty and the kids finally left, went to stay with her folks. Alex made a few bad choices. And sometimes one bad choice, if it's big enough, can put you under.”

The room rings with quiet. George is fingering the pen in his hand.

“The bank was about to foreclose. So Alex sold the whole kit and caboodle. Auctioned it off. He barely broke even.”

“That happens a lot.”

“To good farmers and bad ones. Sometimes it doesn't matter what you do.”

“According to what I've read in your files, your mother found Alex dead in the house he was renting.”

“He finally drank more than he could take.”

“I lost a brother in Vietnam. It's a hard thing, no matter what the circumstances.”

“I think we did all we could. But you always wonder if maybe you'd kicked butt one more time…”

“That's a hard question to ask yourself.”

The room isn't so warm anymore, but Mack's heart is pounding.

“We need to stop for today.”

Relieved, Mack makes his way out of the chair. He feels too weak to meet George's gaze, but he's been brought up to look people in the eye, especially if business is involved. George has just rendered a service. Mack looks at the blue eyes long enough to make contact. He says thank you.

“Next week, same time, Mack?”

“I guess so.”

And so the first appointment has gone its own direction, as therapy sessions tend to do. Mack thinks he's figured out these people by now, thinks he knows what they want to hear. By the time he finished at the hospital, it seemed to him that he'd filled in the right blanks and that this had been the goal all along—to have the right answers to the questions that counted. He was never quite sure which questions those were. He figured out that some questions got thrown in just to get him comfortable or something, and once his guard was down the critical questions were slipped in.

On the drive home his attention is captured by odd details. He has not farmed in four years, and lately he comes to the scenery as if it's new or he's a stranger passing through. He is startled now by the lushness of the goldenrod, Indian grass, and other gold and lavender flowers (Jodie can name them all) along the roadside. Clumps of purple aster look like bright bouquets that have tumbled out of crop rows to rest in the ditches. His route home takes him through Oskaloosa, but he stops a ways before town, pulling onto a side road at Maskunky Marsh. A new shade of white catches his eye. He gazes over the water and its reflection of the steel-blue sky and strains to identify the two or three dozen large birds that have landed there. He knows well the shapes of herons and egrets, but these birds are something else. Mack gets out of the car and walks to the edge of the shore, then laughs spontaneously at the unmistakable beaks. Pelicans. He's heard about this but has never seen it. The birds nest in western
states and Canada and migrate south this time of year. Mack watches them flap around each other and mingle with the other waterfowl. They present an exotic little picture, and Mack is visited by a sudden moment of happiness.

Jodie

They still have a little patch of purple prairie clover west of the house. Jodie has seeded it with other wildflowers and forbidden anyone to mow this part of the yard. When they sold the acreage in '96, sharp corners formed around the acres on which the house and other buildings still stand; that acre on the west side of the house bumps up against the new boundary line. Last year Samuels planted those fields in beans. He'll likely never put up a fence; they're neighbors, after all. But he plowed right along the boundary, and so now there is a clear division between the soybeans, which are drying into a brown, brittle expanse, and the clover in its last flush before frost. Today a few butterflies linger among its remaining blooms.

She wanders outside a lot these days. The air of the house is too heavy, and too familiar. This morning she and Mack had another little spat, over who would drive which vehicle. Not a big deal—they've always traded off according to errands. Jodie likes the pickup more than the Dodge because it's heavier and can hold its place better when she's on gravel roads. But when Mack needs to move things or haul a part out to some farmer, he takes the truck. There is no his and hers; they're just vehicles. And Mack should have just said this morning that he needed the truck. But Jodie had already loaded several bags of old clothes and blankets to drop off at the bin in the Methodist church parking lot before shopping for groceries after school. The church is having its annual drive for winter items to be sorted out and given to people who need them, and Jodie has been going through closets for three or four days. Mack might have noticed that and not come undone when he walked out to the truck to find it full of her stuff.

He could have just said something. But he got that look of panic, the one that says life is not going to be okay today. Jodie is so desperately tired of that look. She's tired of him not just saying what he means instead of sighing and shooting dark eyes at her and expecting her to figure out his dilemma.

It's starting all over again, the lack of functioning. Then her anger at him because he doesn't function. Then his hurt and anger that she's angry. And then the silences and stomping around. When she saw him standing with hands jammed into pockets, staring into the truck bed, she was the one who had to go out and ask if anything was wrong. And she can't simply ask. She has to sigh and glare back at him.

She didn't try to mask her irritation. “You might have told me last night that you'd need the truck today, since I leave an hour before you. Good thing you got up early, or I'd be gone already.” This point is moot; he always gets up when she does.

“I can borrow the company truck, then drive it back to the shop and get the car.” The words were reasonable, but the tone wasn't.

She was already pulling the bags out of the truck bed. “I can drop these off anytime. I'll do it tomorrow.”

“Here. I'll get that.” He reached for a bag, but she'd grabbed it already.

“I've got it.” She didn't look at him.

“You don't have to sound so pissed.”

“I'm not. I'm just in a hurry, okay?”

They've had that sort of exchange many times before. But each time it feels bigger, more dangerous for some reason. So she fumed all the way to work, made a point to enjoy Terry's lunchtime smile, and came home to her house, which makes her feel exhausted the minute she walks in the door. She microwaves some leftover coffee from this morning and brings it outside, to stand near the clover. As she sips it she tries to conjure the memory of butterflies in July. They do pretty much the same two or three things day after day. But they look so happy, just flit-flitting like that. She must learn to flit, to dance across
her hours of work. Float across her life. Sweep and dart around Mack's moods, as if they don't have much to do with her. They really don't. That's what the doctors say—that Mack's struggles are not her fault.

Still, she doesn't need to sound so pissed. Mack is right about that.

Mack

As is his custom, Mack stops by his mother's on the way home. After Pop died, it seemed better for Mack and Jodie and the kids to move into the farmhouse and for Rita to move to town. She was too melancholy out there by herself. And Mack's family spent most of their time there anyway. The rent they were paying on the house down the road got rerouted to payments on the house Rita moved to in Beulah. They miss her presence in the rooms of the farmhouse, and Mack comes to see his mother nearly every day. He fixes a faucet or moves furniture or hammers a nail if she needs it. Often he picks up a delivery from Mom to Jodie—a start of some plant or an extra package of macaroni or can of tomatoes. Mainly, he walks in the door after a call through the screen, and they chat for a while.

There was a time when the chats were about Alex. What would they do about him? Had Mack talked to him lately? Yes, but did he listen? Had he been in touch with Marty and David and Sharon? Had he even started getting his fields ready for planting, or whatever it was time to do? Was he keeping up his payments? Around and around they'd talk, much of it meaningless since all they knew was what Alex told them, and often he didn't give out any information. When he got in trouble with his payments, eventually a number of people knew, because that kind of news seemed to get out. That was how Mack had learned of the impending foreclosure—through Pete Jasper, who'd heard about it at the co-op from Dan Thomason, who'd heard it from his wife, who worked at the bank and knew everybody's business.

Now, though, when Mack stops by, he and his mother speak of mundane things, which are easy to manage but in the end don't mean
anything at all. They don't miss the stress they suffered when worrying over Alex's life, but they miss the topic more than they would dare put into words. Mack never mentions it. Rita often does, as if saying her son's name will allow her to remember him better.

Today Mom is yakking at Amos Mosley across the fence. They are discussing tomato hybrids and peering at one another's garden patches. They continue chattering even as Rita acknowledges Mack and the two of them turn and walk toward the house.

“G'bye, Amos.” Rita pulls the door shut behind them and looks at Mack. “How's Jodie's thyme doing? Mine's gone crazy. I can send a start if she wants it.”

“Mom, you know I don't know about that. She screeches if I come within ten yards of her spice bed.”

“It's an herb garden.”

“Same thing.”

“Well, ask about her thyme.”

“Your phone not working?”

Rita purses her lips and glances at him over the top of her glasses. “If you actually ask her about it, you'll be more likely to remember to make the delivery. The last time I sent something, I found it dried up in the truck bed a week later.”