Iona Moon (9 page)

Every third day, Iona gave her mother a spit bath, wiping her frail arms and sore bottom, sponging her knobby back and sharp shoulders. Once a week, she changed the sheets, rolling Hannah from one side to the other so she never had to leave the bed.

At first Iona tried to keep the house clean, but soon she gave up and let the spiders weave their sticky webs. Her father tracked mud and snow through the kitchen. For days Iona could see each footstep, her father's small journeys, but soon he had crossed his own path so many times the entire floor was marked. A blue ring appeared in the tub, a yellow one in the toilet. Dust settled on the shelves and under beds, across windowsills and along the iron frame of Hannah's bed.

By the third week, Iona had stopped cooking dinner. Mostly she and her father just opened cans and ate quickly, trying not to look at each other. One night it was pork and beans, heated so fast they'd burned on the bottom but were still cold on top.

“Should I call your brothers?” Frank said.

“She won't like it.”

“They should be here.”

“There's time,” said Iona.

“I dreamed your brothers came home,” Hannah said when Iona took her a cup of hot milk. She'd taken two painkillers at noon and had slept the rest of the day. “They floated above my head like balloons; they stuck to the ceiling and couldn't get down. Their bodies were fat and round, like babies' bodies; they flapped their stubby little arms, but it didn't do any good. They wore their white baby dresses, as if they'd just been baptized. I saw their bare behinds and tiny genitals. But they had the heads of grown men, too heavy for their puny necks. They hated me. They squinted their eyes and said,
Who's that old woman in our mother's bed?
Their bodies smelled sweet, but their breath was smoky and stale. They hadn't shaved for days.”

Frank Moon shuffled down the hall. He paused at Hannah's door.

“What is it, old man?” Hannah said. “Are you afraid to look at me tonight? Your mama was right after all. Skinny girl like me—I wasn't worth the spit it took God to put my bones together.”

Iona's father came into the room, but he kept his distance from Hannah's bed. “She never said that.”

“Not to you.”

They fought often, about things his mother had said and things she hadn't. “She told me I didn't have the hips to carry a child,” Hannah said. “She wasn't surprised the baby died.”

“Hannah.”

“You know it's true. ‘Two months early, poor little thing never had a chance,' she said.”

“She didn't mean to be cruel.”

“No, she just was.”

Hannah knew it was wrong to be uncharitable to the dead, because you can't ask for forgiveness. Usually she'd hold her tongue, but for Frank's mother she made exceptions.

Later, after another painkiller, Hannah let Frank sit beside her. “Remember,” she said, “I had to teach you.”

“I'd had women.”

“You'd
paid
for women.”

“I knew what to do.”

“It's not the same.”

Hannah turned to Iona. “He was scared because I was so young. I had to take his hand and put it on my belly.
See
, I said,
see how warm it is.
”

By morning Hannah was herself again, saying that Frank's damn dogs had kept her awake half the night. “Just like that winter you went to Seattle,” Hannah said.

“We only had one dog then.”

“He barked enough for three. I didn't get a whole night's sleep for four months.”

“I had to go.”

“Yes, I know.”

They'd had a bad year in '57: the potatoes were small from a dry stretch in July; night winds kept the corn from ripening. Frank went to Seattle to work on the docks. He left Hannah alone with the three boys and two-year-old Iona. The pipes froze and they had to use the outhouse for three weeks straight. Hannah melted snow for water, and Iona got a fiery rash on her bottom and thighs from too few proper baths. Then he blamed her: “I told you to keep the water running at night. How many years have you lived on the Flats?”

“A hundred,” Hannah said.

Those were the last words of the day, but the fight lasted years. In 1962 it rained before they got all the hay to the barn. Frank had gone to town,
Fool's errand
, Hannah said. A thunderstorm caught them by surprise. This was just one more example of Frank Moon not being there when they needed him. In 1965, the potatoes sprouted in the cellar and were rotten by March. Frank claimed Hannah was always leaving the door open, letting in too much light. And of course he couldn't stop himself from saying that she'd lived on the Flats long enough to know better.

They argued even now—as if the potatoes had sprouted this very morning and the clouds had burst this afternoon. Tonight the pipes would freeze. They both knew it, but neither one could keep it from happening again and again.

“Talk to her,” Iona said, though she knew there was no end to the argument. Memories were a web in her mother's body, catching her father every time he moved. He'd avoided her for two days.

“All she wants to do is fight.”

“She wants you to stop being afraid of her.”

That evening he climbed the stairs to Hannah's room and stood at the foot of her bed. “Angel would have recovered if you hadn't been in such a hurry to put her down,” Hannah said.

“You can't know that.”

“I had a dream.”

“And what else happened in this dream?”

“She had a calf that grew to have eight teats.”

“Instead of five legs.”

“And she gave forty quarts of milk a day.”

“That
was
a dream.”

“It could have happened if you hadn't killed her.”

“Go back to sleep and have another dream. Maybe your cows will grow wings. Maybe they'll jump over the moon.”

She closed her eyes. “Turn out the light, old man. I do want to have another dream.”

Hannah woke thrashing, kicking the covers off herself. Iona was afraid to try to hold her down. She kept muttering at someone to wash his hands. “Just a bad dream,” Iona said when her father came to the door.

Hannah grew calmer as she woke, and Iona leaned over her mother, whispering nonsense as she washed Hannah's head with a cool rag.

“Don't you come in here,” Hannah said to the shadow in the doorway. “I saw you digging.”

“You had a dream, Mama.”

“And I kept saying:
It's deep enough, she's so little, it's deep enough
.”

Frank took one step into the room to tell her again: “Not last night, Hannah, twenty-five years ago.”

She'd dreamt of the child, not the cow.

“Why did you dig so long?”

“I had to bury her.”

Frank came to the bed and Hannah turned her face to the wall. “I wanted you to stop digging,” she said.

“You stood at the window.”

“Yes, I wanted you to put her in the ground and be done with it.”

“I thought you wanted me to go deeper. I thought you were watching me so I wouldn't stop.”

“No.” Hannah looked at him now. “No,” she said again. She lay limp and exhausted, one arm and one bony leg exposed.

Frank touched the blankets. “You'll get a chill,” he said, and she let him cover her.

“She was too small for a grave,” Hannah said. “She should have stayed in my body and disappeared.”

“Everything has to be buried.”

“I felt the dirt hit her chest.”

“So did I.”

“Every time you lifted the shovel.”

“What could I do, Hannah?”

“I heard you come inside.”

“Yes.”

“But you didn't come to my room.”

“I couldn't.”

“It was still so light outside.”

“I remember. ”

“How could it still be so light?”

Frank Moon sat down on the bed, and Hannah didn't tell him to go away.

Chickens squawked and dogs yipped. Frank had fallen asleep on Hannah's bed, and the noise confused him as he struggled to remember how it happened that she'd let him stay. He heard the snap of the dogs' tethers. They ran against the ropes so hard he thought they'd break their necks.

As soon as he was outside, he heard the hens flapping against the walls of the coop. He grabbed the shovel by the back door and nearly fell down the steps.

The weasel had a chicken by the neck and was trying to drag it out a tiny hole at the back of the shed. The first blow of the shovel stunned the thief; the second crushed its skull. But the man didn't stop. He gouged its stomach and hammered at the splintered head; he battered the creature as if it were ten times its size and still half alive. Hens fluttered around his head in silly despair, and he swatted at them with one hand while he swung the shovel in the other.

The dogs howled in the yard, and the man stopped long enough to see that the weasel was nothing more than fur and blood. Only the legs and tail still resembled the animal it had been.

He tried to scoop the creature onto the shovel, but it stuck to the floor. He had to scrape it up in pieces and carry them outside. The dogs bounded toward him, flying to the end of their ropes until the chains tightened around their necks. They whined and snarled, frenzied by the smell of blood. He saw he was ridiculous. The thing he'd killed was smaller than a rat.

In the henhouse, Frank Moon kicked straw over the bloody patch on the floor. The chickens clucked at him and puffed their feathers. Four were dead. The weasel had slipped through a knothole and had tried to pull its fat prey through the same opening. It killed another and another, and would have pierced the neck of every hen in the shed without ever understanding its mistake.

Iona found her father washing his hands at the kitchen sink.

“You cut yourself,” she said.

“No, a weasel,” he said, “in the henhouse.”

She didn't understand.

“I killed it with the shovel.”

She stared stupidly at his hands as he scrubbed, at the pink lather of the soap, the murky water swirling down the drain.

“Did it get anything?” she said.

“Four.”

“The little bastard.”

“Will you do it?” he said. The soap slipped from his hands.

She didn't know what he meant. His wild eyebrow curled upward, gleeful traitor, laughing at his misery. Specks of blood dotted his forehead, and she knew exactly how he must have pounded at the weasel, how he'd beaten it long after it was dead, how he hated the little murderer. She wanted to wipe his face.

“Will you call your brothers,” he said.

She nodded and they stood at the sink watching the water stream over his hands, waiting for it to run clear.

“What was all the ruckus this morning?” Hannah said. Frank had changed his clothes and shaved. Even his fingernails were clean, and his wet hair was combed straight back. Now he sat beside his wife's bed, holding her warm milk.

He told her about the weasel.

“So, it's come to that,” she said. “The bear chaser has become a weasel killer.”

She licked her chapped lips. Her mouth was dry, so sticky she could barely make the words. He offered her the milk, but she waved her hand.

“It could have been a coyote,” she said.

Yes
, he thought,
and that would have been worth killing
.

“I've heard howling in the foothills all week.”

“I haven't,” Frank said.

“They're coming down from the mountains.”

“No,” Frank said, “it's just the dogs you hear.”

“They're hungry,” said Hannah.

“It's too early.”

“When you hear them this soon, you know the winter will be hard.”

“No,” he said.

“I saw a pack of coyotes bring down a cow. I was just a girl. An hour later it was nothing but bones. Picked it cleaner than buzzards. Even took its eyes. I don't know how.”

“Please,” he said.

“What is it, old man?”

“It's only the dogs you hear,” he said.

The thought of the coyotes excited Hannah all day. She was hungry herself. She ate two biscuits with huckleberry jam. She rolled the berries in her mouth, sucked the flavor from them, and spit the skins in a napkin. She asked Iona to comb her hair. “Harder,” she said, “it feels so good.” Later she made Frank carry her to the window. She put her nose to the glass. “It's cold,” she said. He stepped back. “No—I like it.”

She's better
, Iona thought.
What do doctors know?
She'll gain weight. By spring she'll walk to the bathroom alone. By summer she'll sit on the porch.

Iona woke in the middle of the night and heard her mother coughing. She ran down the hall. Frank was already there, making Hannah sit so he could pat her back. At last she gagged, spitting up the mashed potatoes and chicken broth and applesauce she'd had for dinner, the most she'd eaten in a month. The coughing stopped. Hannah said, “You'll have to change the bed, Iona.”

The white hills blazed with fresh snow. Nothing moved. Even the cows were silent, and the dogs cowered in their house. Hannah didn't want the boys to come home. “Why?” she said to Iona. “So they can hover at the door and watch me puke? So they can feel sorry for themselves, like your father? I suppose this was his idea. Does he want the doctor to come too? Maybe he'd send me to the hospital. Your father would like that, wouldn't he? Does he want my smell out of the house?” She imagined she heard him, scuffing down the hall. “Hey, old man,” Hannah said, “you can throw me out the window when I'm dead. You can burn the sheets. You can burn the whole damn bed. But until then you'll have to live with me.”

“Shush, Mama, he's not there.”

“No,” she said, “of course not.”

Frank Moon sat with Hannah in the dark. She was asleep at last and couldn't fight him.