Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume Two (7 page)

I pulled away, but I couldn’t stop crying. That night I woke up and went to the kitchen for a drink. As I went by the living room, I saw her, in the same chair, the same position, and beyond her the moon was lighting up the back yard. I kept thinking of that afternoon and night on our way to Salyerville. I hadn’t gone to her because I had known she would pull away from me exactly the same way I had pulled from her. We both cried in his chair, hopelessly, unable to stop or be consoled. And now we were going to do something about it. I didn’t know what. But I felt certain we were on our way to do something about it.

I wouldn’t go to church or Sunday school after he died. The minister came out to talk to us all, and he kept saying things like God’s ways are mysterious, and death is but a transition from this life to a better one, and Jesus would save us all from damnation, if we would admit him to our hearts and not be bitter over God’s will being done on earth. Rob kept saying “Yeah” and “I guess so,” to his questions. Eleanor treated him like special company. “Wouldn’t you like more coffee or another piece of cake?” Mother didn’t say much. She was knitting Eleanor a vest, and she watched her needles and yarn, although her hands could do it alone. I glanced at her once or twice, then away again, afraid she’d see me looking. I was embarrassed for her.

“Elizabeth, won’t you come back to us Sunday? Let us help you in this difficult time. Let God help you.”

I stared at the cake I was holding.

“Elizabeth!” Eleanor’s voice, the voice she used if I tagged along when she didn’t want me. The voice she used when I mimicked one of her boyfriends.

I shook my head.

“Elizabeth, God will help you.”

I looked at the minister then. He was sincere, his eyes were bulging a little and his cheeks were very pink and moist. I shook my head again. He reached out for me and I drew back. I didn’t want him to hold my hand while he prayed God to comfort me. Eleanor had held still for it, I wouldn’t. I drew back and stood up, holding the dessert plate carefully. “Daddy didn’t believe in God and I don’t either. And if I did, I’d hate him!”

Rob wanted to belt me. Another hour, he must have been thinking. Later, his glance threatened. I’ll fix you later. Eleanor was humiliated and ashamed of me. She’d want to fix me later too. Mother put the vest on the table and stood up. “Excuse us, will you please. Come along, Elizabeth.” And she took me out, down the hall to my door, and gave me enough of a nudge to get me started inside. I was still carrying the cake, but now I was shaking. She reached out and took the dish and put it on my dresser. The minister didn’t come back.

After the interstate highway the state road we took was something you might see a stagecoach on at any time. Originally built too narrow, it was trimmed even more by the eroding shoulders. We were on hills that became steeper as we drove. The road twisted and turned to conform to the valleys as much as possible and although it was September each valley was a heat trap, holding moist heavy air.

I glanced at Mother from time to time. She was wearing a little white head scarf to keep her hair from blowing, but strands of hair pulled loose and were curling about her face. I thought what a pretty profile she had. I had always simply accepted her prettiness without thinking about it, this appreciation of her profile and the curling bits of hair below her ear and against her cheek wasn’t like that. I studied her face, examined it closely for flaw and good points, the same way I’d do a new girl at school, or one of Eleanor’s new boyfriends. My mother was very pretty.

“What’s the matter, honey?”

“Is it always this hot?”

“Of course not. Feels like a storm might come up.”

The sky was deep blue, cloudless. I stared at the road. She was humming, very low, probably didn’t even know she was doing it. I got out the road map and began adding up the miles from the highway to Salyerville. We were only doing about forty. One hundred ten miles, about.

“I don’t think it’s very accurate,” She said. “See how far it is to Honeyville, will you?”

“This road?”

She swerved around a pothole and for the next few minutes was too preoccupied to answer. Our speed dropped to thirty.

“I guess no one goes there from the north anymore,” She said finally, when we made a sharp curve and came out on a straight road that was relatively smooth.

We had been on the road for two hours, it was almost five. There was a break in the hills westward, and through the gap I saw the sky. It was grey on black and moving. Mother looked at the sky and braked hard; for what seemed like a long time we watched the rolling clouds through the opening in the hills, like looking at a fight through a keyhole. There was a tension in Mother that hadn’t been there before, not even when a passing truck swung in ahead of us and nearly forced us off the road early in the day. She stared at the clouds, then turned to look at the road we’d come over, and then squinted at the long valley ahead of us. It was a narrow valley, the road went over a couple of bridges, then seemed to end at the base of a steep rocky hill. I knew it was just another of the sharp turns, that after it the road might continue at the base of the hills that had become mountains, or we might start climbing another chilling mountain road, potholed, with no guardrails. I didn’t want to be on a road like that when the storm broke. There was no sound in the valley, and with the thought I knew I was wrong. Water, a stream off to the right, hidden by bushes and low trees, but now I could hear it faintly. The clouds had completely filled the gap. It was like watching the creation of a new mountain range, the upward thrust of darkness. The air was as hot and heavy as ever, more so since we weren’t making our own breeze, but suddenly I shivered.

Mother lighted a cigarette, and that added to my fear; she smoked very seldom. Being afraid when you don’t know why is the worst kind of fear, I thought, and tried to find a reason.

“Well we can’t go back. Can’t turn around here, and I don’t have enough nerve to back up over that last stretch. And we can’t stay here. So, onward. Right?”

“Why can’t we just wait for it to storm and be done with it?”

She started the car and accelerated to sixty, then had to brake hard for the first of the bridges. “Look at it, honey. If there’s a downpour, that little stream will almost fill this valley.” The bridge was like so many others we had crossed, posted Narrow Bridge, 10
m.p.h
. Rickety, ancient, its sides close enough to brush us, four, five, six times the width of the tiny stream it crossed. I glanced to the west and now it looked as if a grey-black mountain range had grown up to the sky and was advancing eastward.

“That was pretty dumb of them,” I muttered, looking at the crumbling road ahead, obviously much flooded in the past. “Why’d they make the road so low? Why didn’t they raise it or something?”

She concentrated on driving and I watched the road and bridges also. It wasn’t that the bridges were so ancient, I decided. It was their design, they were built for a different kind of traffic, not wide swift automobiles. We got out of the valley just minutes before the storm broke and we stopped on the road that began to climb into the mountains again. I twisted to watch the streams turn into torrents; the water swirled and boiled over the road in several places. It became very hot in the car very quickly, and it seemed the rain was coming from all directions at once. There was no window we could open without having rain blow in, and in spurts it came down so hard it was like being parked under a waterfall, and only the pounding roar of the water could be heard. Then a lightning streak would illuminate everything, the hills, the blowing trees, the rocks that appeared turned into glass under the sheen of water, all would flash into sight with painful intensity followed by equally painful blast of thunder.

After the storm, night came suddenly. Driving was even more treacherous because the holes had been filled with water. I searched the map for a turnoff, another road, anyplace to spend the night. Nothing. Sometimes we passed other roads, deeply rutted gravel or dirt roads that intersected ours, vanished among the rocks of the hills. We didn’t turn on to any of them. It would have been stupid to exchange bad for worse. Occasionally we smelled wood smoke. Cooking stoves, Mother said. She was smoking a lot now, more than I’d ever seen before. Our road got worse, the surface crushed rock, and it was narrower.

I dozed and dreamed of being in bed, warm and comfortable, listening to the light murmur of Mother’s voice, and the deeper growly tone of Father’s. I awoke with a jerk “Are you alright?” I asked her as if she had been the one to doze.

“I’m fine.” Her voice was tight.

“Maybe we should just sleep in the car.”

“The mosquitoes would eat us up.” She pushed in the cigarette lighter and groped in her bag for her cigarettes.” We surely will get to Honeyville before long now.”

I found the cigarette pack for her, a new one. It was after eight and I was getting hungrier and hungrier. “I hope there’s a restaurant there.” This was part of it, I thought, glancing at her as the tip of her cigarette brightened. There had to be a better way to get to Salyerville. A better road, even if it meant going out of the way a bit. We should have been there by six, according to our pre-trip estimate. Seven at the latest. I didn’t fall asleep again, but everything got more and more dreamlike. A mist lay low in the valleys and that was right too. It had to be hard and dangerous and seemingly endless. It couldn’t be just another trip. Orange eyes hung in the mist straight ahead.

“Betty, flick your dimmers, tap the horn. It’s paralyzed, hypnotized by the headlights.”

I hit the floor hard and my fingers clenched, ready to whip around the animal. The mist swallowed it. I wet my lips and opened my hands and looked at her. She was too rigid, as frightened as I was. If we had a wreck no one would find us. No one would know. There hadn’t been another car, truck, nothing. I stretched my legs to ease a cramp in my right foot, my braking foot. I tried to imagine how cramped she must be feeling, the soreness of her calf, her shoulders, the stiffness in her neck. She reached up and rubbed the back of her neck.

“Remember that time we were on our way back from Canada?” she said, almost shrilly. “Your father… we saw a deer on the road that night too. He said…”

“I remember.”

It had been a long time since our road had crossed another road. I strained to see the map under the dashlight, but it didn’t help. I had no idea where we were any longer. “Mother, why Honeyville? I can’t even find it.”

“It’s on a side road. I can’t remember the number. It was just the road to Honeyville.” She pushed herself back in the seat, stretching. “I know some people there. We could spend the night. My cousin and I used to exchange visits. Aunt Tattie lived there.”

Before I could ask who she was, Mother said, “Not really my aunt. Or anyone else’s, far as I know. She could take off warts.”

I couldn’t stop my hand from jerking, as if trying to hide all by itself. The warts on my little finger and ring finger felt larger than ever. “Will we see her?” I had read about people like that who could do things.

“Oh, honey, she was an old woman when I saw her the last time, twenty-five years ago.” We came to a cross road then. She hesitated a moment, then shook her head and drove on. It was ten thirty. The fog or mist was denser now, we were creeping along in a white cylinder that grew higher and more solid as I watched. Beyond the walls the world was strange and unknown here, and invisible. It might have been nonexistent, only the fog cylinder and the car real.

“Was Aunt Tattie a healer?”

“No. Oh, warts, and some other kinds of skin blemishes, birthmarks, and the like. My father didn’t believe in such things. We weren’t really allowed to talk about her, or to see her. But we all did at one time or another.”

Like father and my Tarot cards, I thought, and the magazine horoscopes and the palmist who put a sign up at the beach a few years ago. I tried to imagine Mother twenty-five years ago. Long hair? Like mine? Father always said I looked like her, same red-brown hair, same size and shape. “I just hope someone has something to eat,” I said and studied the fog.

We turned at the next intersection. It had to be wrong, I thought. We bounced along on a dirt road that went up and down and back and forth. Mother’s hands were very tight on the steering wheel and she stared straight ahead. She wasn’t smoking at all now. Suddenly I jolted out of the dreamlike state that I kept slipping into by her voice. I thought she had cried out. She laughed harshly. “I’m sorry, honey. I yawned. You’d better talk to me, I’m getting pretty sleepy.”

The road was worse, but the fog was lifting, and off to the right I could see the dim shape of a barn. Farmland here. Maybe here the radio would pick up a station. There’d been nothing but static since leaving the interstate highway that morning. I gave up after a minute or two. Still nothing.

“Nothing has changed here at all,” Mother said, adroitly skirting a hole. “Did I mention to you after this year, after the insurance is settled and everything is straightened out, I’m going back to the university for my Ph.D.?”

“What for?” I stared at her, but she was still looking straight ahead, only now I thought her lips were curved in a faint smile.

“You know that I was just two credits short of my master’s degree. Then Eleanor came along, and… I always thought that some day I’d finish up and go into research psychology. There are so many things…”

I clenched my hands wanting to scream at her, No! That wasn’t what we’re coming back for! But I didn’t know why we were coming back, so I didn’t say anything, then I saw the first lights. Honeyville.

Much of the town was dark. There were three dim street lights, and a few old cars parked along the street, but it seemed that most everyone was in bed already. Then Mother said in an excited voice, “For heaven’s sake! There’s Aunt Tattie’s house!” she slowed down, then stopped. “She’ll know if Emma is still here. Come on.” We got out of the car and went up the sidewalk to the frame house with the wide porch. A bare light bulb hung from chain on the porch. Mother started up before me, but she stopped and I caught up with her. She turned back toward the car. “You go on and knock. I left my purse in the car.”