Juliet in August (22 page)

“You go back home,” Janice says, beginning to sniffle again. “And watch who you get in a car with. If you smell booze, don't get in.”

“Thanks for nothing,” Shiloh says as he slams the door. “And I hope you get caught.”

Janice and Terry pull back onto the highway and he watches after them until their truck disappears. He doesn't bother sticking his thumb out again. He doesn't want to go to Calgary anymore, but instead of crossing the highway to go back to Juliet he steps down into the ditch. The hay has been cut, but the round bales are a long way apart because it's such a dry year. Shiloh walks toward the closest one and when he gets there he settles down on the north side where he's hidden from the traffic. He can hear the vehicles passing, cars and farm trucks and semitrailers, and even a police car with its siren going. He opens his backpack and takes out the bag of cookies. He closes his eyes and eats an Oreo and smells the cut grass and the sage growing along the fence line. A meadowlark sings from a fence post close by. The east and west traffic sounds compete with each other like dueling banjos, and as Shiloh listens, his bad day vanishes. The ditch doesn't feel like any particular place, and it could be any hour. In the shade of the hay bale, the temperature is neither too hot nor too cold. It's perfect. As Shiloh nods off, he thinks,
I got to somewhere else after all
.

A GOOD MAP

 

The Watch

The words
mortal wounds
keep popping into Lee's head. Astrid used to tease him when he was little by saying “I think it's a mortal wound” whenever he would acquire a cut or a scratch needing her attention and a Band-Aid. He feels now as though his saddle-sore body needs attention, and he rides with the phrase repeating over and over, and after a while it switches to
mortal remains,
which he doesn't like the sound of. And then for some reason
earthly possessions,
which is better because it leads him to think about things other than pain and discomfort. Astrid's tea service, for example. How it needs polishing. Where the polish is kept. And what
Use the silver tea service
might mean, and in what context it could be taken as practical advice. In the light of day it seems simple: Be hospitable. Astrid was always hospitable, and she admired people who used her well. Lee always thought that was a funny way to put it:
She used me very well.

The going is a little easier on this leg, as George said it would be. The ground is still sandy but the surface has been contained by the roots of grass and pasture sage. There are no more dunes, just sporadic patches like children's sandboxes that have been allowed to spill over onto backyard lawns. Lee is grateful for George's old hat, which is keeping his face shaded from the sun. He's no longer thinking about who might haul him the rest of the way; he knows no one along this stretch. He tries to focus on the ground that he's covering, where he is in proximity to home. A map begins to develop in his head. He almost wishes he had a piece of paper and a pencil with him so he could record his route. There are photographs of ancient maps in one of Lester's atlases, and Lee remembers the curious drawings included by the early mapmakers: exotic birds and animals, unusual landmarks, depictions of significant events along the way. Cartography was an art, Lester told him, before it was a science. Lee tries to remember the landmarks he's encountered so far, mapping them in his head and adding little anthropological details much like the quotations he once kept about the Bedouins in his scrapbook:
The dunes provide a handy place for local teenagers to drink their ritual beer away from the watchful eyes of adults.
Or,
George and Anna Varga are an interesting study of lifelong familial companionship, and Anna's kitchen is welcome relief for the hot and hungry traveler.
He has no idea where the word
familial
came from.

He crosses a Texas gate into what he assumes is community pasture, and he sees signs of cattle: droppings baked dry in the sun, narrow trails that wind their way toward water. He follows one of these cattle trails, and when it reaches the lip of a coulee, Lee decides to dip down into it and get out of the sun for a while. The horse edges down the south-facing drop, picking his way through patches of cactus. As they descend farther, they encounter low shrubs and scruffy stands of willow and black poplar, the welcome relief of shade.

There's a creek running through the coulee, not much of one, but when they get to the bottom Lee guides the horse into the shallow water and lets him drink. Lee closes his eyes and listens to the quiet sound of birds and leaves rustling. When he feels the horse shifting beneath him, he opens his eyes and realizes just in time that the horse is about to drop and roll in the water. Lee lifts the reins and gives the horse the heel of his boot, and the horse does a little start as though he's just realized that Lee is still up there.

Lee decides to give the horse a break by leading him through the coulee for a ways. He slides to the ground and splashes himself with water, and then sets off on foot. He discovers it feels good to walk. The horse follows him willingly, tugging just once in a while as he snatches at a mouthful of grass.

Lee has to keep his eyes on the ground to avoid tripping on roots and deadfall. Even so, he steps on the rotten branch of a black poplar and it snaps, and one end flips up and Lee sees a glint of metal, hardly noticeable except that the sun is shining through the trees right on it. He stops and brushes the dry grass away, and sees that it's a tarnished and rusted pocket watch. He uses his shirt to wipe the dirt from the watch and tries to open the face, but it's too rusted. For the second time today he thinks about Lester's watch, the one he'd broken and thrown away in the sand in order to conceal his crime. As he walks through the deadfall, putting off the return up into the hot sun, he remembers how he'd surprised himself with his ability to lie, straight-faced, when Lester found the watch was missing.

Lee knows the empty velvet box is in Astrid and Lester's bedroom closet because he'd put it there himself, with the blankets and photo albums and other possessions, after one of the neighbor women found it when she was helping him with Astrid's clothes. He'd hardly been able to bring himself to touch the box, he'd felt so guilty at seeing it once again. It brought back shame, for the old crime, and for every ungrateful thing he'd ever said or done.

Now, with a different watch in his hand, he thinks again of how it all started with temptation, with his knowing the watch was in Lester's drawer because Astrid had shown it to him one Saturday when he was eight years old and feeling dejected because Lester had lost patience with him. Lester had been trying to repair a combine and he needed Lee's small body to reach into a tight space he himself couldn't get to, which Lee did, but he couldn't figure out what he was supposed to do after that, couldn't follow Lester's instructions, and Lester finally said, “You might as well go to the house.”
Go to the house
was the ultimate dismissal. It was what Lester said to the dog when he was getting in the way. All the dogs they ever had were trained to go to the house and lie on the step, banished, at Lester's command.

Astrid, feeling sorry for him, took him up to the bedroom, opened the top drawer of Lester's oak dresser, and withdrew the velvet box. Inside was a man's silver pocket watch on a chain—a fob watch it was called—and Astrid said it came from Norway and had belonged to Lester's grandfather. “That would be your great-great-uncle,” she explained. An impossible number of years for Lee to comprehend. Astrid told him the watch was an heirloom, and that Lester used to worry about who would get the watch, “but now he doesn't worry about that anymore,” she told Lee, “because he has you, and someday the watch will be yours.”

Astrid let Lee touch the watch. He asked her if it worked. She said it did, but it was delicate because it was very old, so she didn't want to risk winding it up. Lester, she said, would be upset if he even knew she was showing Lee the watch. After Lee had a good look at it, Astrid put the watch away and they went back downstairs. “Remember,” Astrid said, “that Lester may seem impatient sometimes, but you're like a son to him.”

A month or so later, when Astrid was in town and Lester was in the field, Lee took the watch out of Lester's drawer again. He'd only meant to look at it, but the temptation to see if it worked was too great and, besides, he already thought of the watch as his. He wound it and listened to it tick. Then he wound it some more and it stopped ticking. He tried to unwind it and the winding mechanism came off. Through the bedroom window Lee could see Lester coming into the yard on the tractor, and he panicked. He put the blue velvet box back in the drawer and the watch in his pocket and ran downstairs and outside to get his bike.

He rode along the dirt trail into Hank Trass's sandy lease northwest of the farm, climbed through the wire fence and up the first sand hill he came to, and pitched the watch as far out into the sand as he could throw it. Then he ran back down the hill, his shoes filling with sand, and he found a stand of poplar trees that had been covered right up to their leafy branches so they looked like trees that had been chopped off and stuck back in the sand, and he stayed there all afternoon. When he got home, Astrid sent him to his room without supper because he'd been gone so long.

The watch wasn't missed for a year. Then one day Lester took Lee upstairs to show him something and Lee knew it was going to be the watch. When the watch wasn't in the box, Lester called Astrid and Lee was terrified, sure that Astrid would know. But Astrid looked at Lee, and then she told Lester that she'd sent the watch away to be cleaned and it had gotten lost in the mail. She sent Lee to his own room and then she and Lester had a hushed discussion behind their closed bedroom door. Afterward, Astrid had come to Lee's room and asked him straight out if he had taken the watch. Lee had shaken his head and the watch was never mentioned again.

All through his school years, whenever Lee went up the road and west onto Hank's lease, he couldn't help looking for the watch. He knew the chances of finding it were slim, and he didn't know what he'd do if he did happen to find it, but he believed it was possible that one day he would be walking and there it would be. The sand was constantly changing, after all, covering and uncovering roots and bones and objects discarded by their owners. But he never found it.

Lee slips the rusty old watch in his pocket, throws the reins over the horse's neck, and lifts himself into the saddle. He groans out loud—like an old man, he thinks, but who's to hear?—and once again settles into a position that can't in any way be called comfortable. Luckily, the expectation for comfort is long gone.

Although the shade of the coulee is preferable to the heat of high ground, Lee knows the creek will wind and cut back endlessly, adding miles to the journey, so he urges the horse toward the north-facing slope. At the top, he sees a pair of antelope stock-still and staring at him. Up ahead, a fence and a waving field of yellow wheat. The crop confuses him for a minute, and then he realizes that he's ridden far enough south that he's back into cultivated land. To the west he can see a farmyard. He tries to remember who lives there: It's the old Stanish place, he thinks, recently bought by a couple from Ireland. There was a story about them in the local paper, how they couldn't afford to buy land in Ireland so they looked at Canada. They were planning to raise sheep and found the people of Juliet friendly and helpful. Lee looks for signs of sheep but he doesn't see any. In fact, the place looks deserted and run-down.

He watches as the antelope bound away from him and scramble through the fence, down on their knees and up again so fast, it's as though they've run right through it. He adds the fence and the farmyard to the map in his head and composes a notation:
Th
e
land to the south is marked by fences, a sure sign that the settlers of the area intended permanence rather than a nomadic lifestyle.
Then he gets carried away:
A deserted farmyard is a sad reminder of the failed homesteader, who gave it his best effort and then left again with all his earthly possessions, mortally wounded by the loneliness of geographic isolation.

He sees a gate in the wire fence and turns the horse toward it.

Daisy Breaks Something

“When are we going to drop this cake off?” Martin asks. He's still got it on his lap while Vicki drives her old Cutlass up and down the streets and alleys of town looking for Shiloh, and then she gives up in annoyance.

“That boy,” she says. “He has a thing or two to learn.”

“What?” Daisy asks. “What does he have to learn?”

“Many things, Daisy,” Vicki says. “Too numerous to mention. And you'll have to learn them, too, unfortunately.”

“Will I be bad like Shiloh?” Daisy asks.

“Shiloh isn't bad,” Vicki says. “All teenagers have things to figure out and it makes them moody. And don't ask me what
moody
means. Ask your father.”

Daisy turns her attention to another topic: They could stop at Fields, she suggests, and look at toys and maybe Shiloh will see the car parked out front. Vicki agrees to this plan before she takes time to think about it, and once the kids have their hearts set on it, she can't back out even though she knows the afternoon is passing. She angle-parks on Main Street in front of Fields, and the kids throw open the car doors before she's barely stopped and they're into the store and heading straight for the toy section before Vicki can give them the usual warning about don't break anything because she can't afford to pay for it right now. To give some purpose to this stop, Vicki checks housewares for blanchers. The clerk—obviously displeased because the kids appear to be treating the store like a day-care center—suggests that Vicki try Robinson's. So Vicki gets the kids to put all the toys back and they cross the street. At Robinson's, the kids do the same thing they did at Fields. Daisy even asks the clerk for a piece of paper and a pencil so she can write down all the choices for Christmas. The clerk—a teenage girl Vicki doesn't know—tells Daisy it's too early for a Christmas list, Santa hibernates in the summer, doesn't she know that?—but she ends up giving Daisy a pen and a discarded till receipt.

The bell on the glass door of the shop rings and Vicki sees Marian Shoenfeld from the drive-in enter the store. She watches as Marian walks with purpose toward the clothing section and stops in Women's Wear. Now Marian is a woman who would have her beans in the freezer the day they were picked, thinks Vicki. She probably has her whole house in order, top to bottom—or more correctly, Willard's house, she supposes. She sees Marian take a mint-green outfit off the rack and hold it up to herself in front of a mirror. It looks like a pantsuit of some kind, slacks and a vest. Curious that Marian is buying a new outfit. Maybe she's going to a special event, a wedding or a graduation. She doesn't think Marian is the kind of person who would buy new clothes without a reason.

Marian takes the green suit into a change room and Vicki goes back to looking for a blancher. Her eye travels along the row of cake pans and muffin tins, fridge-to-microwave containers, no-stick frying pans, stovetop kettles and cookware sets, colanders and sieves, and, finally, canning supplies, and she concludes that Robinson's does not have blanchers. She won't bother asking the clerk; she can tell by looking at the girl that she wouldn't know a blancher if it jumped up and bit her.