Miller's Valley (9 page)

F
our months into junior year Mrs. Farrell, the chemistry teacher, asked to see me after school. “Ooooh,” one of the boys said, but I knew it was nothing bad.

“You're Eddie Miller's sister?” Mrs. Farrell said, and I nodded. “And Tommy Miller's, too, then, I imagine.”

They must have had some time figuring that out, all the teachers at the high school. The boy who gets straight A's and the boy who can barely read. The boy with the slide rule in his shirt pocket and the one who has the circle of a rubber permanently imprinted on the leather of his wallet. They all probably thought little sister was going to wind up somewhere in the middle, but by junior year they knew different.

“There's a summer science program at the university that I'd love to see you enroll in. You've got a real natural facility for the subject.”

“I can't, Mrs. Farrell. I work at the diner full-time during the summers. I'm saving money for college.”

“Well, I guess I have to respect that. Where are you thinking?”

“State, I guess. It's cheaper than anyplace else except the community college.”

She nodded. “I don't think you need to think about the community college, although I've had some fine students spend a year or two there. I've got some thoughts about other places and about scholarship opportunities, but it's early yet. You want to take physics next year?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“The advanced section? It'll be pretty small, and it won't be easy, even for you.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Can I talk to your mother?”

“I'm pretty sure she doesn't know anything about physics,” I said, and Mrs. Farrell smiled.

“I wouldn't put anything past your mother,” she said. “When your brother was struggling with bio she came in here one day, sat down, and said, ‘Tell me how we fix this.' And we did. He wound up with an A minus at the end of the term. It would have been a solid A if not for that first bad month.”

“Tommy aced bio?”

“Not Tom. Edward.”

I would have thought she was confusing my two brothers, except that that was impossible.

“I think maybe I just spoke out of turn. Obviously Edward was an excellent all-around student.” She paused. “But not as good as you are, I don't think.”

“I've never heard that before,” I said.

“I was so glad to hear that your brother Tom came back safe from the service,” she said. “Your mom and dad must be relieved.”

“They are,” I said, which was sort of true and sort of not.

“I always thought Tom was an untapped resource.”

“I've definitely never heard that before.”

She stood up, and so did I. I knew that soon she would give me harder textbooks, extra-credit work, college catalogues, contest entry forms. I was beginning to know the smart-girl routine.

“Eddie almost failed bio?” I said that night after dinner while my mother and I were washing the dishes.

“Never you mind,” said my mother.

“What else don't I know?” I said.

“You should assume you still have a lot to learn, Mary Margaret,” said my mother, and then she dried her hands on a dishtowel and said, “Although not as much as some.” It was the closest my mother had ever come to paying me a real compliment.

“Mrs. Farrell wants me to go to some summer program at State,” I said to my father next morning in the barn while our breath froze in front of us.

“Oh, Mimi, that's a tall order,” he said.

“I said I couldn't.”

You can tell time by a farm, a day's worth of time, a year's worth. There's a particular kind of quiet on a farm in the morning, which isn't really morning the way other people think of it. It's still dark, with just the smallest idea of black sky getting lighter around the edges, and unless there's a moon the only light comes from the bare bulb hanging like its own moon from the center of the barn ceiling. It's a place where it's just as easy to feel lost as it is to feel contented. I felt lost most of the time now, but I never said so, even to myself: in that same way I knew it was odd for a grown woman not to leave her own home, I knew it was odd for a teenage girl to feel like there was a big rattly empty space between her stomach and her heart. But it made me wonder whether other people felt the same way without showing it, whether Tommy felt the same now that he was back in town, whether my father felt the same way when my mother gave him a hard time about not taking the reservoir plan seriously, or about kicking Ruth out and moving Callie and Clifton in. I helped my father out in the barn some mornings at least as much to make sure he wasn't feeling sad as to cut down on his work time.

It was always warmer in the barn than it was outside because of all the cows crowding together, breathing and snorting and farting, making a fug that hung in the place like cigarette smoke over the poker game my father used to have once a month in the dining room, before my mother told him he needed to stop smoking and move the game to the VFW. Cows at dawn are different than cows at dusk. A farm in winter feels different than a farm in summer. The whole year passed in front of me on the farm. The cornstalks with yellow edges that meant summer was over and the classroom getting ready to close around you. The pumpkins of October that squatted where the yellow flowers sprouted on the vines in August. The mornings when you could hear the cattle complaining like a bunch of old men with tobacco throats and you knew, you just knew, that it was February and their water trough was frozen solid and you were going to have to go out there with an old shovel and beat a hole into the ice until it fell apart like a broken window.

The one constant all year round was the sound of my father, in the foggy mist of summer or the dry-ice mist of winter, taking care of business in the barn. My father liked to whistle while he worked in there. He had a strange whistle, more like a breathy thing that came out between his teeth than that full pursed-lip sound my brother made, or used to make. My father usually whistled from the time he slid the barn door open until he slid it closed. On Saturdays, when I'd sleep in a little bit, I'd roll over in bed sometimes and hear it, faintly, unless it was raining hard and the rain was bigger than my father's whistle. Then it would wind up drowned out completely by the thunk of the sump pump.

My father took a lot of pride in keeping a neat farm. He never said much but you could tell he had contempt for people who had messy knock-around farms, with broken hay wagons falling apart in the corner of the field and moldy straw to one side of the barn door. My father even dug a big trench down one edge of the barn and into the far fields so that when the groundwater was deep, which happened more and more the older I got, the cows wouldn't get foot rot. There was an order to running a farm right, and my father appreciated it, and so did I. It was a little like math, one thing in front of another until it was solved. Sometimes I would pull on a pair of dungarees and a sweater and give my father a hand before I got the bus to school. Sometimes he'd drive me to school so I wouldn't have to take the bus at all.

I was already halfway across the road one morning in March, stepping carefully because of the black ice slicks on the tar, my wool gloves frozen into hand shapes because I'd left them to dry outside by the door, when I heard my father stop whistling and say, “Lord give me strength.” I came up behind him and saw that where our big tractor always sat there was an empty place, and an empty forty-ounce bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. My father favored Iron City or, when he was feeling flush, Rolling Rock.

We were less than a mile along the road when we found the tractor overturned down the side of the shoulder. The engine was still running but it made a grinding noise, like it was butting up against something it had no business touching, and Tommy was lying half under it with blood on his face and all over the front of his shirt. I could hear the tractor but no sound of breathing but my own, and I made a fluttery motion with my hands in their old gloves, then put them under my armpits to make them stop. Tommy wasn't even wearing a coat, and there were two other beer bottles near the tractor, although they could have been from anyone since there was a lot of racing down our road at night and throwing beer bottles from the window, which was probably why my father hadn't noticed the sound of the tractor starting up in the first place.

“Don't try to move him or you might make it worse,” I said.

“I couldn't if I tried,” my father said.

We were a family that didn't use the rescue squad, figuring we could handle most things ourselves with a first aid kit and iodine, but my father sent me back to the house and I called for an ambulance. I called the hospital, too, and told my mother we were coming in. “I'm going down to emergency,” she said in her nurse's voice, calm and cool, which was noticeable because I was crying and my nose was running and I was having a hard time catching my breath.

“He can't have lived through all that in Vietnam and then die drunk on a damn tractor,” I sobbed.

“Take a deep breath, honey,” said my mother, and I cried even harder because my mother only called me honey when things were really bad. Then I heard the sirens and got off the phone.

“Mary Margaret, what's going on?” my aunt Ruth called from her living room window, and I realized it was getting light and that I was going to miss school.

“Tommy,” I called back, and ran onto the road.

W
hen my brother had finally come home for good, people said he was a changed man. That wasn't true. He looked a little like Tommy Miller, and sometimes he even talked a little like Tommy Miller. But the real Tommy Miller was gone. I don't know where he left him, but that guy didn't live in Miller's Valley anymore. One day a car had dropped him opposite the barn just as I was getting home from school. I wrapped my arms around his neck, but it was like hugging a mannequin. He peeled me off as soon as was decent, or maybe sooner.

“Who was that?” I said as the sound of the car's spitting muffler receded. “Damned if I know,” said Tom, picking up the military-issue duffel at his feet.

We weren't even sure where he'd been. He'd been gone more than three years, but Eddie was certain he hadn't been in the service all that time. It was funny, Tom had changed so much but Eddie hadn't changed much at all, still serious and a little anxious. He was working as an engineer at a big real estate development company, had bought a nice little house just outside Philadelphia. He'd gotten married a couple of years after college; Tom was supposed to get leave to be his best man but just never showed up. I was a bridesmaid; my dress was purple and a little big on me, and they did my hair teased and lacquered into some kind of updo. As soon as we got home I tore it all down and my mother changed into slacks and a summer shirt. It was like we had been visitors in Eddie's life, and we were glad to be back sleeping in our own beds.

“They seem like nice people,” my father kept saying about Debbie's parents.

I guess you could say that it was the other way around with Tom after he got back, that he turned into a visitor in our lives. He got himself a place near town and we didn't see him a whole lot, and when he came to dinner or stopped by to use the washing machine we had nothing to talk about. “What have you been doing?” I'd say, and he'd say “Not much,” and where do you go after that? He even scared me a little. He'd grown a big mustache and his hair was even longer now, and everything about him had coarsened, his skin, his body, his language, his eyes. The light in his eyes was gone, and so was the grin. That broke my mother's heart, I think. The fact that he was living in a falling-down trailer on the other side of the valley and yet always had enough money hardened my father's. I was glad we lived so far from anyone else so no one could hear him and my father yelling at one another after they'd had a couple of beers, or more than a couple. My father might drink six beers during the course of an evening and just get quieter and quieter, until finally he'd say, “It's the sandman for me.” But Tommy was one of those drunks who went through all the stages: sociable, silent, sulky, mean, nasty, violent. He tuned my father up, although he'd probably say it was the other way around.

One evening after Tommy had been back a few months Callie asked me to pick her up at work because her car was in the shop. She'd been a good friend to me, Callie, when I'd found myself without anyone, Donald always promising to come back but never showing up, LaRhonda off with God and the Goddettes, Tommy smelling of smoke and whiskey and unwashed clothes. Callie had her evening shift at the diner and she was taking classes in the mornings at the community college and there was Clifton and her grandmother had emphysema and was always wanting her to do this or that, but she somehow made time every week to stop over and spend an hour with me, or ask me to walk her through any of the schoolwork she needed to know for a test.

Callie brought a slice of German chocolate cake out to the car from the diner and we put it on the seat between us and picked at it with our fingers as we drove. We both had coconut under our fingernails.

“How's chemistry?” I asked.

“I'm never going to be a whiz like you, but since you went over that last chapter with me I've got a better idea of it. I'm going to pass, at least.”

“Of course you're going to pass.”

“They grade on a curve. They have to. There are some real dummies, although some of the girls are smarter than you'd think.”

I licked some frosting off my finger. “Your grandmother's okay?”

“If you listen to her she's at death's door. One of the things I like about your mother is she never complains about her health.”

“She's never sick,” I said. “I don't know why. Willpower, I guess.” And we both laughed, and then Callie sucked in her breath the way people do when they're getting ready to say something they think you won't like.

“I just needed to talk to you without your mom and dad around,” she said.

“You're moving away,” I said.

“I wish,” Callie said. “What would I do with Clifton without you and your parents and my mom and grandmother and everybody? I need to stay put at least until full-day kindergarten. It's about Tommy. I need you not to leave Clifton alone with him.”

It was quiet inside the car. Someone was honking a couple blocks over, but then they stopped. Finally I said, “Don't worry. I never would. Never ever.” Saying it like that made me know it was true, and why it was true, and it must have showed on my face because Callie put her hand on my arm and rubbed it the way she did with Clifton sometimes when he was crying.

“I know this has to be hard for you, Mimi. I know you love the guy. But I just don't think he's reliable with a little kid, you know?”

“I know. It must be hard for you, too.”

“Not really. I got to be honest, I didn't really know him that well. You know the way he was, like he could sell ice to the Eskimos. He picked me up at the Dairy Queen one night, and the next thing I know I'm in the backseat with my feet out the window. In a way I don't regret it because how could I regret Clifton? I knew from the beginning that I was going to be on my own. Well, not really, because your mom was a lot nicer about the whole thing than I thought she'd be. But you know, Tommy and me, it didn't amount to much. I'd like it if he liked Clifton and Clifton liked him, but I'm not so sure what's going to happen at this point.”

“Is he giving you any money? He has money.”

“It's fine. Your mother has been great about stopping by with groceries and buying Clifton clothes. She buys him the cutest things.” I knew that. I knew, too, that my father had told her to stop doing it. “A father should support his own son,” he'd said to my mother. “You shouldn't let him off the hook.”

“Don't let Tommy off the hook,” I said to Callie.

“Really, it's okay. Sometimes he drops over some milk, or toys. He doesn't really know what to do, you know? He brought Clifton a bike. Like, a big bike. I don't think he knows that he's three. Or what three-year-olds like. Or something. So that's another reason. I'm fine with him seeing Clifton at your house, or when he's with you. But not taking him out, you know? I'm not sure what he'd do with him.”

What could I say? She was right. Even when I was around, Tommy looked at Clifton like he couldn't quite figure out what to make of him. Half the time when he was supposed to come to the house and see him he never showed up. Once or twice I ran into him by accident. The day after I talked to Callie I saw him when I was coming out of the library. Mrs. Farrell kept saying that she wanted me to enter the state science fair and I was searching for something I cared enough to spend six months studying. I kept thumbing through books about diseases and space exploration, but I hadn't found anything I really wanted to do yet.

“What are you doing here?” I said when I saw Tommy in the parking lot between the library and the high school.

“Meeting up with a guy,” he said. He acted like he barely knew me, kept looking around the lot as he smoked a cigarette. He didn't offer me a ride, and I wondered if he was nervous because he figured our father was coming to pick me up and they might get into it again. I wouldn't have driven with him anyhow. His eyes looked funny.

“What are you doing here?” he said. “Isn't it late for school? What, you have cheerleading or something?”

“You're kidding, right? I'm working on a topic for the state science fair.”

“So, no cheerleading I guess.” He sucked on his cigarette like it was oxygen. He had a skull tattooed on the back of his hand. Every time I looked at him something inside me felt jagged, like I'd swallowed a razor blade and just had to hold really still so it wouldn't move around and slice my insides up.

“You should come see Clifton,” I said.

“I saw him.”

“When?”

“I don't know, a couple days ago,” he said. “You were there. I brought him that thing, what was it?”

“That was two weeks ago. He's your son. You should see him every day.”

He flipped his cigarette to the ground and mashed it with his heel. “Who died and made you God?” he said.

“What happened to you?” I said. I must have been crazy to ask that question, or really tired. Between work and studying and helping my father with the farm and looking after Clifton and looking after Ruth, I didn't get that much sleep a lot of the time.

Tommy smiled then, but it was that kind of hard humorless smile that's worse than no smile at all. “Little sister, you have no idea,” he said.

“Try me.”

It was like for a moment a mask was lifted and from his eyes shone the old Tommy, the piggyback-ride Tommy, the bring-me-a-tadpole-in-a-jar Tommy, and the razor sliced at my gut and he must have seen it. For the first time since he'd gotten out of that rattly car in front of the house he really looked at me like he saw me. I could feel a sweet-sour smell coming off him but I could see Tom in his eyes.

“I wouldn't do that to you, Meems,” he said. He hadn't called me that for a long time. He called me that again a week later after I got back to the slope where the tractor lay, its engine quiet now, the ambulance guys working with my father to get it off him. I saw the old Tommy again just for a minute, even through all that blood. “I really blew it this time, Meems,” he'd said, and he coughed, gagged, spit a big maroon clot onto the ice, and then passed out.