Iona Moon (7 page)

“‘Just a little jolt, Mrs. Tyler. This won't hurt at all.' But they put a piece of rubber in your mouth so you won't break your own teeth.”

“Sssh, Mom, don't think about it. Just go to sleep.”

“I heard my spine crack.”

Jay put his arms around her. “You're safe now.”

“I could feel my blood burning my brain. The doctor said, ‘One more time.' That's when I died, Jay. I swear to you I died. When I woke up, I kept thinking about your father and his father, walking me up the steps, one on each side, the last day of my life. I looked at your grandfather. His face was tan and wrinkled, his teeth too white when he grinned. I said, ‘Please don't leave me here,' and he said, ‘There now, be a good girl, Delores, and don't put up a fuss.'”

Jay found the keys down the crack of the seat. He could have taken the car home, parked it in the drive, awakened in his own bed, but instead he drove toward the Snake, all the windows down, March wind blowing through his hair, the radio blasting: a pair of dueling banjos that made Jay pound the wheel. He longed to fill the night with noise, but beyond this car the only sound was the slow water of late winter.

He knew every curve of the road, every bend of the river. His life eddied at the banks with the beer cans and the drowned cat. He pressed himself to the hard chest of Iona Moon; her fingers moved to his crotch. He hit sixty and felt good. He had steady hands.
I
can control myself
. It didn't even last that long, didn't feel that much better than what he did alone in the bathroom—no, it was worse because Muriel lay there so still, and he had to ask, “Are you okay?” Then she looked at him as if nothing was ever going to be okay again.
Don't worry. I pulled out in time
. Iona Moon pulled the cat out of the river and tossed it up on the bank.
I've touched plenty of things that were dead longer than that
. The Chrysler could still do eighty on the highway. He pushed it to sixty-five. Muriel said, “I'm pregnant, Jay.”

He raised his arms to save his eyes. She came out of nowhere, leaped onto the road as he barreled around the curve. He couldn't stop or swerve in time. The high beams of his headlights cut the night and struck her eyes, paralyzing her thin legs. Her body flopped on the hood, the most terrible sound he'd ever heard. Her small feet shattered the windshield. The car spun and the doe hit the pavement. He tried to get out but couldn't move his legs, couldn't even curl his toes without the pain shooting all the way to his skull. He didn't know if the blare in his brain was his stuck horn or his own screaming.

Jay's right leg was fractured in three places, his left in one. Shards of the windshield had cut his arms and hands, left slivers embedded in his cheeks. His eyes were spared.

“You broke your own legs,” the doctor said, trying to offer some comfort or lay the proper blame. “You would've been all right if you'd just relaxed. People punch the brakes and go rigid. Just your luck to have such strong thighs.”

“Yeah,” Jay said, “I'm a lucky guy.”

All that spring Jay waited for a disaster, an avalanche or a flood, a search for survivors that would make his father turn up the sound on the television. He wished his mother would get off her bed and knock on his door, so he could hear himself say:
Leave me alone
. Any day, he thought, a car will turn in the drive, just by mistake.

The grass grew greener. Leaves unfurled. The air grew hot and his skin itched under the casts.

Muriel came in August. “My father would whip me if he knew I was here,” she said.

“You shouldn't have come.”

“I had to see you, Jay.”

He stared at the wall. He wanted her to go.

“I feel like I lost a part of myself,” she said, “like my arm's been cut off, but the missing thing is inside.”

“Yeah, well, you're lucky,” Jay said.

She looked at his legs, the right one still huge and heavy in the dirty cast, the left one withered and white. “I'm sorry,” she said. “Sometimes I'm so stupid.”

“I hate it when you say that.”

“When I say what?”

“Sorry. Why the fuck are you so sorry?”

“I didn't mean—”

“Forget it.”

At his bedroom door, she turned. “It was a boy,” she said, “if you want to know.”

Days shortened. Crickets sang. One night he broke his dinner plate, flung it across the room, saw it splinter against the wall. The sound split the air, but no one ran to his room and nothing changed. His father and his grandfather still walked his mother up the steps; he still had Muriel Arnoux pinned to the backseat of the Chrysler. When he closed his eyes, the doe leaped out of the woods. He saw her dark, startled gaze, her thin legs.
Why didn't she run?
He slammed the brakes, but there was no way to stop.

5

Iona Moon wasn't exactly happy when she heard what had happened to Jay Tyler, but she wasn't sorry either. He never came back to school that spring, and he still hadn't returned by fall. So he wasn't going to college like Mama had said. No educated girl with light hair and straight teeth was going to follow him to White Falls.

Iona had imagined Jay Tyler's life with one of those pink-skinned women who played afternoon bridge with the ladies. She'd cut the crust off the tiny sandwiches and serve cookies no bigger than Iona's little finger. All the women would kiss her soft cheek when they said goodbye. But at night this same pretty woman, loved by the ladies, would lie beneath her husband like driftwood, her limbs smooth, her body cool and hard.

Later, there would be blond children, and everyone would say Jay Tyler was a lucky man to have a beautiful wife and beautiful babies. Certainly an educated woman would be clever enough to have one boy and one girl. She'd grow waterlogged and heavy with love for them, devoting her days to matching their socks and wiping their runny noses, combing the tangles from their silky curls and sewing fur collars on their little wool coats. Every night, exhausted by the endless needs of her children, she'd sink into sleep as wood sinks to the bottom of a lake.

Some evening Jay Tyler might find himself dragging Main, looking for a girl like Iona Moon, the kind who didn't mind the cold vinyl of the backseat, a resourceful girl who knew how to find her own way home.

But none of this was going to happen, because Jay had locked himself in his room. He wasn't going to be a dentist like his father or marry a woman who looked like his mother. Only a rich boy could afford the luxury of staying sick on purpose, that's what Hannah said. He drank his tea from a porcelain cup; he ate baby peas with a silver fork. But he might as well have bars on his window because he was just as much a prisoner as Iona's mother was. Only Jay was worse: he chose. So he was a damn idiot besides.

Iona started to think that no one she knew ever escaped White Falls. Everett Fry was the last one who'd left for good, and he had to kill himself to do it. Sharla Wilder nearly killed herself too. She bled on her daddy's couch for two days before he gave in and took her to the doctor. When she recovered, she packed one bag and headed to Seattle, but she was back home in six months. Now she had an apartment in town and worked graveyard shift for the phone company. At least she'd gotten off the Kila Flats and out of her father's house.

Hannah said there were three ways out: the river, the tracks, the long, winding road. Iona remembered the summer Leon jumped a train. Bruised and broke, he called three days later. Frank said, “You got your ass to Portland, you can get your ass home.” And it was true. Getting back was easy if you didn't mind the hunger, the cold night wind blowing through the slats, the steady clatter of the boxcar.

One March, when the river was fast, a woman leaped from the bridge to the water. She twisted like a cat in midair. When she hit, her body lost all grace, crumpled on the hard surface. The kids in the bus watched her red coat swept downriver and thought she'd disappear. But even she was saved, brought back, raised up, revived against her will.

In the winter, Iona's brothers moved to Missoula to work at the pulp mill. Every year they said they might stay on, but every spring they sat on the porch again, waiting for the ground to thaw. They reminded Iona of the three mongrels Daddy kept on tethers in the yard. The dogs had big heads and long tails, hair the color of mud. Yipping and dancing in the cold morning light, they bounded after one another. But the ropes were always shorter than they remembered, and the spikes that held them were planted deep. Chains tightened around the dogs' necks, and the animals fell back, squealing and betrayed. They butted their knobby heads together and nipped at their own legs, lashed their tails and hopped on one another's haunches.

A fine layer of snow blew across the fields, exposing patches of bald earth. Iona wore the coat Hannah had always worn for milking, Frank's fur-lined jacket. The zipper had broken last year or the year before; now Iona hugged herself as she ran to the barn.

She whispered to her cows, scratched their heads, murmured in their ears.
Don't ever sit down at an animal's rear end without letting her see who you are
, Hannah had said the morning she taught Iona to milk Ruby. But the cows knew her footsteps, recognized her breath.
A cow knows everything she needs to know. When her udder's full, she's glad you've come to milk her. When you're old, she'll feel your cheek against her flank, soft, unchanged. When she's old, your touch will bring her more comfort than the grace of God
.

Iona gripped Ruby's warm teat, remembering her own small hands moving beneath her mother's hands.
Breathe when she does
, Hannah said. The dense smell of cow shit made her light in the head. It was almost sweet if you liked it, and she did.

Cows have no God, so they don't fear the future
. Ruby's milk rang against the metal pail. She groaned, an almost human sound, soft and satisfied, from somewhere low in the belly.
A
cow has no wish to be anything other than herself
. Except for Angel after the five-legged calf died.

Iona remembered that February morning, the hay in Angel's stall damp with her water. Frank put his whole arm inside the cow. “She's not ready,” he said, pulling himself free. He turned to piss in the gutter. Hannah whispered to Angel and held the cow's head in her hands.

The barn was cold. Wind cut through the cracks; the other cows moaned, but Angel only breathed, her whole body heaving.

Iona's father tried again. “I have it,” he said. He gripped the calf's legs, tugged two hooves to the gaping mouth of the cow's vagina. He slipped ropes around the legs and used his full weight. The hair of his arms was matted, dark with blood and mucus, like the hair of the calf's legs. At last the head emerged, eyes already fluttering beneath the lids. Angel turned, anxious to use her great tongue, to lick the eyes open, to lick the calf's genitals and know for herself.

Only then did they see the flaw, the short fifth leg protruding from the calf's belly, as if there had been twins and one calf had swallowed the other in their mother's womb. “We'll have to kill it,” Hannah Moon said. “Five-legged animal's a curse.”

“Waste not, want not,” Frank answered.

By dawn, the calf had four legs and a bandage on its belly, but he was spindly and weak from the start. Two of his mother's teats went rotten. The calf died and Angel's milk was thin for months, not worth the milking.

Cows have no God
. Iona kept hearing the words. Angel rubbed herself raw, snared herself in barbed wire. Frank said he had no choice: he had to put her down.
Cows don't fear death. They're terrified by fire, but not the idea of fire
. Hannah said it was a blessing to live this way, to be able to look a man in the eye even as he raised the gun.

But now Iona wondered.

She took her time with the cows and still had fifteen minutes to sit alone in the kitchen, drinking her coffee with cream skimmed from the milk. She knew the exact moment she would hear her brothers on the stairs, so she was already on her feet, sliding biscuits in the oven, dropping sausages in the pan.

Soon they sat at the table. Dale looked sleepy and dim. His hair was thick, but his eyebrows were wisps, so he always seemed surprised. Sometimes Iona wanted to put her arm around him, and sometimes she wanted to hit him. Rafe smiled to himself, remembering a dream or thinking up ways to steal Dale's sausage. He was hard. A little tree, Iona thought, muscles tight as burls. Leon's brow furrowed into three deep creases. He worried about the day ahead of him, and the one after that. He couldn't sit still waiting for biscuits to bake, so he rolled a cigarette and took his coffee to the back steps. Iona watched him. He was built just like their father, thick through the chest and not too tall; his arms bulged, but his legs were skinny and his butt flat.

Frank was the last to sit at the table. He wore a flannel shirt and blue jeans, just like Iona's brothers.
A matched set
, Hannah called the four men, and for some reason this never failed to amuse her. Frank Moon had one wild eyebrow. A tuft of hair whipped up in rebellious glee over his right eye, silent mockery of a serious man. He slicked his dark hair straight back, exposing his high forehead and the blue vein that throbbed in his temple.

Leon came inside, and Iona filled his plate. He grunted. She closed her eyes and turned back to the stove.
What made Leon so afraid?
She knew the answer: the rest of his life, all the mornings just like this one. He couldn't imagine a wife or a child, a life that was his own. One day soon he would sit in his father's chair, thinking his father's thoughts. He saw himself old and he saw himself dead.

When Iona turned around again, all the chairs were empty, as if the men had simply vanished. They'd left dirty plates and half-filled mugs, pans to scrub and food to put away. And it was late. Mama was awake by now, ready for her white coffee: one quarter coffee, three quarters milk. If Iona wasn't standing on the road in half an hour, she'd miss the bus to school, and Mr. Fetterhoff would call again to remind her she had eight absences.
The year's hardly begun, Miss Moon, and already I wonder if you'll graduate
.