Dwelling Places (8 page)

“All the more reason for you to deliver it yourself.”

“Honestly.”

“How you doing, Mom?”

“I'm fine. How'd your appointment go?”

The woman doesn't miss a thing. He didn't mention his appointment to a soul. But of course Jodie knew. And if Jodie knew, then Mom knew.

“About as well as could be expected.”

“Is it one of the doctors from the hospital?”

“No. This is through some deal with the Lutherans and Methodists and whoever else. Some program that brings in therapists.”

“The Faith and Family something or other.”

“I guess that's it.”

“He any good?”

“Hard to say, the first appointment. Is your dryer still on the blink?” Any new subject would do at this point.

“I did two loads so far this week, and it seems to be all right. I never had a washer or dryer that I didn't have to coddle along one way or the other.”

“Let me know if you need me to look at it.” The one useful thing he can still do is fix things. He's taken apart and put back together all manner of moving parts since he was seven years old. He worked for the school district before the machine parts job opened up. All he did was make sure the buses were running. Basic engine work, basic hours. He still kind of misses that job.

“How's Jodie?”

Mack can't think of an answer. He's been home only a few days, and the two of them are still giving each other lots of space, both of them too afraid to move fast or expect much.

“Pretty good, I think. Doesn't say much, but she looks more relaxed than I've seen her in a while.”

“I wish that Young Taylor would straighten up.”

Mack's stomach tightens. “Things are pretty calm on that front too,” he says.

Rita angles a look at him. “They are today maybe. People are worried that he's on drugs—or in some cult.”

“Have these
people
actually sat down and talked with Young Taylor?”

“That I don't know.”

“He's a kid. Kids get weird.”

“This is the first one I've seen that wears black every moment of every day. He's even dyed his hair that awful, unnatural black.”

“It's just some dye.”

“But why in the world?”

“Who knows? As long as he's still in school and isn't in jail, I'm grateful.”

“Those are pretty low expectations.”

“They'll have to do for now. I'll keep an eye on him.”

“If you can find him. He just disappears for hours at a time. I'm pretty sure he's skipping school.”

“I'll look into it.”

“He was always a sweet-natured boy. Hate to see him get like this.”

“He'll be all right, Mom.”

“Here.” Rita swings her hips around the corner cabinet and heads out the back door. “Help me with this. My knee's giving me fits.” He follows her out and obediently takes the trowel. She points out a plant—thyme, he guesses—and Mack digs it up and puts it into a box. He leaves through the back gate.

“I'll see you tomorrow,” he says back across his shoulder.

“Bye, son.”

The sun is riding low in the sky, pulling evening after it. All Mack can think of is how good it will feel to go to bed. He could almost skip supper and go straight there. He never imagined that he'd miss the deadly routine of the hospital, but the different routine of being home and going to work and being with family makes him feel as if he were getting over the flu.

Today's appointment with George has him arriving home close to sunset. The kitchen light is on. When Mack gets out of the car, a dozen or more sparrows fly from the oak near the porch, scattering like ashes into the soft sky.

He puts the thyme on the cabinet, near where Jodie is working, putting dishes away. A clean bowl and spoon wait on the table for him. He smells chili that's simmering on the stove.

“She still trying to get rid of this stuff?” Jodie nods toward the plant, which looks bedraggled at the moment, alone in its little plastic box next to the flour canister.

“She forced me. I had no choice.” He leans close enough to plant a kiss on Jodie's temple. Her skin is damp and smells sweet.

She laughs a little and just shakes her head. Mack marvels at how smooth and young her face looks, there in the pinkish light coming in from the west. Her hair is gathered into a wispy knot in back, held in place by one of those hinged combs. She looks like a girl, not the mother of two teenagers, not the wife of a damaged man.

“The kids home?”

“Kenzie's at church, something with the youth group. I think Young Taylor's in his room. But you have to open the door to get his attention. His earphones are always on.”

Mack heads for the stairwell. Maybe he's missed something. Rita is a true grandma, always concerned about something that might go wrong. But she isn't stupid. And she understood Alex's troubles long before the rest of them did. What if she is seeing some destructiveness in Young Taylor now?

The door to Young Taylor's room is cracked a couple of inches. Mack peers in and sees the kid lying on the bed, on his back. The earphones are wrapped around his face, and his eyes are closed.

“Hey.” Mack knocks on the doorjamb. The boy doesn't budge. Mack walks over and gently taps him on the knee. Young Taylor's eyes fly open.

“Yeah?”

“What's up?” Mack sits on the edge of the bed, not far from where Young Taylor's legs hang over it.

Young Taylor takes off the phones and rises up as far as his elbows. “Huh?”

“What's up?”

“Nothing.” His hair is indeed too black for such a fair-skinned kid. It is a strange cut, close to his head yet poking out in a few places, as if he's just gotten out of bed.

“School all right?”

“I guess.” Are his eyes glassy? It's hard to tell. He is staring intently at Mack, and Mack is suddenly ill at ease. He can remember days when the two of them talked easily about this and that. This is
as hard to do as therapy. He thinks he would prefer dealing with George's gaze.

“I'm trying to get caught up on what you and Kenzie have been doing.”

“You haven't missed much.”

“You talked to your grandma lately?”

“I was there three days ago. Took a bunch of bricks over for her flower bed.”

“You visit with her?”

Young Taylor closes his eyes. Mack can't tell what that means.

“You know how she likes to keep up with you kids.”

“She doesn't like my hair.”

“Well…”

The dark eyes dart at him and away. “You and Mom don't either. So what else is new?”

“She still likes to visit with you.”

“Nothing to talk about.”

“If you give her five seconds, she'll think of something.”

“So are you sending me over there on assignment?”

“Not this minute. But she worries about you, and if you go by and visit, she won't worry so much.”

Young Taylor just closes his eyes. Mack taps his knee again and stands up. “See you later.” The boy offers no response.

On the landing between floors, Mack pauses and looks out the narrow window that faces the north fields. Samuels has them in good shape. It is a little bit comforting that even though the land no longer belongs to Mack, at least it is in good hands. Samuels is a sensible farmer and a decent guy. Still, the picture framed in this single window flickers in Mack's memory, bringing up earlier renditions of the scene, years before, decades before. For generations his family has gazed across the hills and planned their beauty and purpose, season by season. He can glance out his little window and know at once the sensation of earth under his feet, and how the texture changes from one area to the next, can smell its degrees of growth and decay, can
feel in his now-empty hands the silky and scratchy tones of corn in its successive phases.

Memory has always figured into his every day of getting up and judging the air and earth and doing what is best. A good farmer remembers the meanings of smells and tastes and temperatures. He remembers them from one year to the next. He can't necessarily separate them and explain his thoughts to anyone, but all the information comes to rest on his mind and heart, and it remains stored there, and that remembered knowledge enables him to make the next step today or this week.

Mack didn't think about memory, back when it served him on a daily basis. He didn't give a thought to how he knew what he knew or why he lived out his work in any particular way. But now that it is no longer his work, he is plagued constantly by memories. A scent on the breeze pulls him to a particular day from five years ago. The sun filters through the cottonwoods near the barn, and he relives entire days of the life he has lost.

He pulls his gaze from the outdoors and concentrates on the aroma of Jodie's chili. He hopes that the sight of her innocent stance at the counter will not stab him as other familiar things do.

“How's your mother?” Jodie doesn't look at Mack as she sits at the table with her own bowl of chili; evidently the kids ate earlier, but she has waited for him.

“All right, I guess. Was drilling me about Young Taylor.”

Jodie frowns. “Like you would know anything.”

The comment hurts. He knows she doesn't intend hurt, and she doesn't seem to realize that she has harmed him.
Like you'd be any help at all with a troubled kid.
No, she wouldn't mean something like that. Or would she? Mack stares at her and forces a little laugh.

“I told Young Taylor to go visit her, so she wouldn't worry so much.”

“That could work.”

“He been skipping school?” Mack has served himself from the pot on the stove and sits at the table near her.

“Could be.”

“You don't know?”

“He learned to forge my name on absentee excuses about three years ago. If he really wanted to skip out, he could. I've not spent a lot of time snooping after him.”

Has she always been this sarcastic?

Already the bright glow from the west has gone out, leaving a flat gray horizon, and the kitchen is dim except for the ceiling fan-lamp that hangs over them. In their quiet together, he looks at Jodie, and she sends a beam of smile over to him. He knows that it costs her a lot to smile at him and welcome him to be here. It is no easy thing after what he's put her through.

Jodie

She stands near her dead coneflowers. In July they were glorious and filled with lavender lights. Their life slipped away weeks ago, and a few of them are still standing, their brown petals stuck out from used-up centers, thin and dry as wasp wings. She remembers how depressed she was about her coneflowers when Mack went away. That's how it has felt to her, that he simply went away. She knew he was in the hospital, but it was too difficult to think about that. Even when she went to visit him, she was going to the place that he had gone away to. Maybe he was doing well, or maybe hospital existence was miserable. All she could register was that he was away, that he had
gone of his own will. She had insisted that he see a doctor, that's all. She never asked him to go away. Never even suggested it.

Jodie's mother, who now lives far away and can see the ocean from her living room, grew up in Iowa, barely a hundred miles from Mack's mother. Jodie's parents were schoolteachers, both reared in the country, and they would have taught until retirement—she language arts and he biology and physics—but her father died in his fifties of something viral and sudden, when Young Taylor was nine and Kenzie seven. Jodie's brother Paul had settled in Galveston of all places, to manage a small packaging company, and within two years of Dad's death Mom moved to be near her son and new daughter-in-law and saltwater. The farmland that had nurtured her seemed hostile without her one love in it, and she still talks to Jodie about the sensation of looking out over the water and watching it change colors and breathing something invigorating but not quite nameable. Jodie guesses that manure and wet fields and dusty winds are invigorating but not in a healthful way. She and Mom talk every couple of weeks, and Jodie hears in her mother's voice a triumph of some sort. She is making it without her Ben, and she has befriended a different sort of environment, one that allows her dreams to fly farther.

It was Mom who sang so many hymns when Jodie and Paul were growing up. Her favorite was “In the Garden.” Jodie wonders if she still sings it, there near the seashore where she keeps not a garden but a low-maintenance lawn decorated in carefully chosen stones and shells. Mom has never indicated that she didn't like Iowa or that she longed for anything else. But Jodie often wonders these days if her mother ever loved her garden or if she sang her hymns in the same way Jodie sings them now—out of distraction, the pressed need to make sound but not release the heart's little secrets. Poetry, hymns, and prayers give a person stability by way of pattern and repetition. Do the meanings of the words even matter?

Patterns and repetition became more important to Jodie the day Mack went to see the doctor and didn't come home. Even when they fought, their union was solid and reliable. The fights were part of
how they remained so resilient. Over the years they had said all the cruel things they had feared to say when they were young and starting out. They had said those things and survived. But when depression descended on Mack, their resiliency cracked. They tried to restore it through more fights and tugs-of-war, but none of that worked anymore. So Jodie left Mack in a doctor's care, took Rita back to her house in town, and all the way home counted fence posts. She counted cows. She made her fingers work the same movements over and over on the steering wheel while she traced the ripples of cloud with her eyes five times, ten times. Her counting games held her together as she drove through the county, afternoon light slanting through the car. She came home to an empty house. Young Taylor had gone to the bluegrass festival in Oskaloosa, even though he'd never shown an interest in bluegrass music. Kenzie was attending a youth retreat with the Baptists, at a camp in the next county. Jodie stood in the wistful air that day, out beside the wildflower patch, and she noticed the lifeless coneflowers. The sadness was overwhelming. She didn't know what to think—about Mack or herself, or anything.

But he was gone, and she was so relieved. She couldn't allow herself to think the word
relief
. The house was quiet, the day was getting over, and she thought she might draw a tub of hot water and use bubble bath. She thought that possibly she was relaxed enough to consider something luxurious. She hated herself for thinking that way, as if she were glad to be rid of her suffering husband. She drew the bath anyway, after the light had weakened and disappeared and all colors had been rinsed from the outdoors beyond the bathroom window. She lit a candle—a half-burnt one left deep in the closet from last Christmas—and opened the window above the bathtub in order to hear the slight evening air rattle in the cottonwood. She soaked for an hour, but her eyes remained strangely dry. And she sang “In the Garden” over and over again. She forced herself to remember Dad in his blue jeans and flannel shirts, throwing a softball for little Paul to hit. She pictured Mom bent among the tomato and sweet pea vines, singing her hymns. Jodie joined her in the chorus.

She has been singing ever since. She tries pop tunes that were on the radio when she was in high school, but she has trouble remembering the words. Always, her voice stumbles back to those gray verses and their antique King James phrases. She sings as if the words are comforting, but they don't feel personal at all. Their repetition helps her get up in the morning, get through her day, and face bedtime at the end of it.

Now Mack is back, and what is she to do? They are all right so far, mainly because they don't try to do anything. A holding pattern, a loss for words, a flagless truce. They are polite to each other. They pass out affections throughout the day, the movements that have become second nature and that need no emotion behind them. The quick rub along the back of the neck, the stroking of hair that seems an afterthought. These are safe movements that offer no new ideas and open no old hurts.

She turns from the scratchy flower garden to go into the house and is startled by Young Taylor, who stands just a few feet from her. The look on his face is even more unsettling than his black clothes and hair. He is gazing hard at her, and when her eyes meet his, he doesn't flinch in that adolescent habit of keeping distance. He keeps looking, right into her eyes. She can't determine his mood—is he sullen or merely curious about his mother standing in a dead garden? His eyes seem to have grown blacker and blacker over the past years. The very color of his corneas has deepened with the rest of him.

“You startled me,” she says.

“Sorry. What are you doing?”

“Oh.” She looks away, at the drying soybeans. She didn't expect a question from him. “Just taking a break, checking out the wildflowers.”

“I thought you were mad.”

“Mad?” Now she is confused. “No. Don't know what gave you that idea.”

“Just a mistake.” He shrugs and turns toward the house. They walk together, loosely, a few yards between them.

“How was school today?” She can't believe that this is the most inventive thing she can say to her eldest child.

“Fine.”

“You had a test in social studies, didn't you?”

“That was last week. I got a C.”

“Oh.”

Young Taylor glances in her direction and seems to decide to be easy on her and answer the question before she asks. “I didn't study.”

“Meaning, if you did, a B or A wouldn't be that hard to get?”

“No. But if I got all the answers right according to the textbook we're using, I'd be wrong. I think the book was printed when I was in first grade.”

“Not much money for textbooks, I guess.”

“Or teachers who know anything.”

“I thought Art Samson was pretty good.”

Young Taylor makes a dry sound, not quite a snort. Jodie never knows how to respond to that sound.

“I'm going to Iowa City this weekend.”

“Who are you going with?”

“Some friends.”

“Which friends?”

The look on Young Taylor's face tells her she's gone too far. “Can I take Dad's car?”

“Ask him.”

He rolls his eyes.

“What? Just ask him.”

“He'll tell me yes even if he needs the car. All he wants to do is make us like him or something.”

Jodie stops to stare at Young Taylor. “You'd rather he want us not to like him?”

“Never mind,” he mumbles, walking away.

“What? Don't mumble. If you have something to say, say it.”

“I said, never mind!” The mean-spirited son is back, walking right into the body of the son she gave birth to, who just seconds ago carried on a civil conversation with her.

“Look,” she says, coming closer, “your dad's trying to get back into the swing of things. He wants you kids to keep doing the things you like to do. You don't have to make it sound like he's—what did you say just then?—‘trying to get us to like him.' Jesus! What's that about?”

She says “Jesus” a lot these days, in ways that she was taught always to avoid. A confounded person in her mind's attic asks, “Why Jesus?” but she shuts that door.

“I'm not talking to you now.” Young Taylor turns sharply and walks toward the stand of oaks that separates the yard from the soybeans beyond. She knows that it's hopeless to call after him.

Half an hour later, Jodie watches her other child leave the driveway on her bike. Headed for the Baptist church, no doubt. Kenzie has found a haven there, with other kids who are hot on religion. Oh, well, it's a phase. Jodie's own churchgoing helps mainly to keep her in place; it offers a different manner of repetition, something like the hymn singing. The words and motions of a church service feel distant to her now. For a long time she tried to pretend, to turn nonsense and tragedy into some form of devotion, a spiritual lesson maybe. But with three deaths in the family, a sister-in-law and sweet niece and nephew lost to them now, Mack always on some brink, and the children twirling off on their own tangents, no spirituality Jodie has learned or even recited can justify, make sense, redeem, or offer wisdom.

Yet United Methodist is where her life joins other lives, and with family members cut adrift, any lifeline is important. Now that she is not a struggling farmer's wife but a woman with a regular job who is no longer begging help, however mutely, in the back row of pews, she can walk in, sit down, and not feel that her presence is troubling to anyone else. Her life is not an indictment to families that are doing well.

Mack

He told Ed he would help him get the combine ready for the corn. Ever since Mack stopped farming on his own, he's continued to lend a hand to whatever Ed has going on. There is always machinery to condition or repair, vehicles to move from place to place, buildings to clean out or fix up, and animals to tend. Ed still has a few head of cattle and his hogs. And he is growing corn and beans. If the weather catches them just so, a harvest might need to be turned around in a handful of days. Mack, Ed, and other neighbors have been in and out of one another's fields and lives as they are called for. They trade information, assistance, and storage space. Although Mack has slipped out of the farming life, even at his worst he can't leave Ed stranded with 120 acres of corn to get in. Lacy can run the rest of the farm during harvest, but she steps back and lets the men run the combine, a large, complicated beast that has to be listened to and watched every minute, a powerful contraption that needs to be guided and turned with care. Jodie has driven their combine, but it makes her nervous. A person has to be accustomed to the machine, know it well enough to recognize when a sound has changed even slightly. The men take their machines apart regularly, to ready them for different crops, to service and repair them. So they are more intimate with the sounds and bumps.

When Mack pulls up at the gate nearest Ed's tractor barn, two other pickups are already in the drive. Hal Winters and Coke Muller stand in the shadow of the high barn entrance, each settled back on a hip, posed for conversation. Ed is between them, having a smoke. The three of them nod when Mack walks up.

“You farmers can't find any work to do?” Mack says.

“Hell, there's too much work. We're makin' our to-do lists.” Hal's voice has the gravel of a man who has swallowed decades of dust. He spits tobacco off to the side.

“Ed, I see you brought in the expert.” Hal points to Mack with his chin.

“Damn straight.”

“If Mack can't fix it, just send the sumabitch back to the factory,” Coke says.

Mack smiles. “I've seen you wrestling with hardware a time or two, Coke.”

Coke's only response is an expletive, as if the memory is enough to make his bones ache.

Mack gazes into the rafters, feeling strained but not as much as he expected. He doesn't know what these men have said about him lately, but he can guess.
Shame about Mack. I hate to see times get to a guy like that. Good man, hard worker. Damn shame.
Farmers in general aren't judgmental about a man who falls on hard times. They talk about him if he's lazy or a cheat or if he leaves his machinery out in the weather. If he loses his shirt, maybe they question some of his business decisions. But all of them are too close to disaster on a seasonal basis to be very uppity about another man's misfortunes.

“How's it goin', Mack?” Hal decides to be direct, and the others turn as if relieved that someone has asked. “I hear Hendrikson's real glad to have you back.”

“It's fine. We've got plenty of work.”

“Good machine man'll always have plenty around here. I'm on the lookout for a round baler, by the way.”

“We moved a used one three days ago. Harold's going to an auction up near What Cheer next week. I'll see if he's got a list on it yet.”

They spend another fifteen minutes discussing equipment. The only thing Mack's sure of anymore is that he knows machinery. There really isn't much he can't fix, and everyone in the county knows it. Farmers twice his age call him up or stop at the house. Most of the time now they stop at Hendrikson's. It hasn't occurred to him until just now that in spite of everything that's happened, the men around here respect him. When Hal and Coke take off, he feels warm and stirred up in a good way.