Search Party (30 page)

L
ARRY
K
EPHART
was Susannah's first boyfriend. He was a heavyset boy with sloping shoulders, as solid in body and mind in his senior year as he would be at thirty. He had a football build but he had had to drop football because his father died. Suddenly his mother and the farm were his responsibility. He worked the farm the same way he had played football, pushing and straining. He never shirked any of the things his father had put off, from fixing the augur on the old combine to lugging rocks into the fencerows. At school he slept at his desk, with his head in his arms.

That was how Susannah met him. She was helping in the clinic, actually a supply room with a cot behind the shelves, for girls with cramps, where Larry's homeroom teacher sent him to sleep at lunch time. He had the cot every day, under a window with no blinds. He slept in the hot sunlight, sweating. One day he thrashed and carried on so much in his sleep that Susannah put down her inventory pad and laid her hands firmly on his hot, tanned arms. When he sat up and made the discovery he was crying, he covered his face, and then blinked in the light to see who had hold of him, and that was the beginning.

On weekends he went to sleep at the drive-in as soon as Susannah had pulled him close to her. Sometimes right after he woke up he broke down and cried about his father. Susannah saw clearly that this boy must not wait to be comforted. She would not be class salutatorian after all. They married without graduating.

Susannah had thought she could never leave her father and sister, but she left easily, impenitently. They moved in with Larry's mother. Susannah had her one girl, Stephanie, when she was eighteen, and then her three boys, and hardly any time after this second life began—fifteen years, though it seemed more like four or five—Larry had a heart attack, just as his father had, and died.

He had it on his backhoe. Jo had won an award for her photograph of the backhoe. She had given it to Susannah and it was Susannah's right to take it off the wall and hide it on the top shelf of her dish cupboard. She was afraid to throw it away because by
then she thought it might be worth money—there were books with Jo's photographs in them, and a glossy catalog of one of her shows—and she was not sure what money there was going to be.

Instead she had a fight with Jo before Larry's funeral about her insistence on carrying her camera everywhere she went. Jo had been walking around all morning with it slung on her shoulder. Was she going to take it to the cemetery? Susannah was hollow from drinking coffee and sore in the arms from grasping the receiver and listening to people tell stories of how many men in Larry's family had gone in just that way, at work. Young. Though not as young as Larry. She looked at her younger sons' bodies, already stiff and striving at nine and seven, burly in their funeral sports coats. The thirteen-year-old, the one with the secretly favored face, whom it seemed to her she had been nursing only weeks before on the art gallery steps in Chicago, was already a man. He pushed in and out of the swinging kitchen door carrying the food for later.

Susannah felt a weight on her. She sat down. It was the weight of having done a dangerous thing, in never hearkening to the stories from Larry's family, in thinking her own story—not her family's, of course, but her own—reached forward and secured Larry as it did her.

That was what she had always thought. Larry gave the story that was told about her its ending. “Yes, indeed, the little Floyd girl lived, she was found, she grew up, she married Larry Kephart.”

And so . . . and so she had not seen the shape of things that Larry dragged with him, in his fast breathing and the crease between his eyes and his big restless body held back by its own muscles. And when the Vietnam War came he had been 4-
F
, but that was such a familiar fact in their lives that she could not remember the reason he gave. He had football injuries to his knee; she had thought it was that.

How were you to choose, out of the familiar facts, those things that were going to be the important, deadly ones? He
had claimed his only problems were the knee and his bad hearing, from the deafening PTO on the secondhand bulldozer. Certainly nothing, ever, about his heart. Certainly he never frightened her.

She saw Jo and her camera. “Get that out of here!” she said in a dreadful, tight voice, like a teacher. She thought later that probably she, who was known for her good temper, had never spoken to any of her children, let alone to Jo, in just that voice.

Jo put the camera down hastily, but she recovered herself. “What did I do?” she said.

“I . . . I . . . I,” said Susannah savagely, whereupon Jo backed away and shut her eyes. Tears squeezed out of them. She gave a deep sob, but Susannah had already gotten up to put her arms around her.

Jo had a very short, peeled-back haircut. It exposed her forehead with its one line and gave her big eyes a challenging look, which passed over Susannah's house as if everything in it, from the fatty pork roast in the refrigerator to Larry's caked steel-toed boots on the back porch to the children themselves, especially the stocky little boys, pointed to the thing that had happened to them. “Oh, Jo. It's OK, I'm all right,” Susannah said, as if Jo were crying for her, but Jo cried on and then stopped, as if she had lost the point, and then laughed and clutched Susannah and cried again.

By the time he died, though he was only thirty-four, Larry had sold the land off his parents' farm and had his own machines and five employees, and was running a profitable operation clearing stumps and digging ponds and the foundations for the shopping centers the towns were all putting in.

Even when Larry turned out to be a success, Jo did not forgive Susannah for marrying him. His success did not matter to Jo, any more than Jo's beauty had mattered to him. “She's OK,” he would say, when Susannah pushed him. “Her skin . . .” Jo had fine scars, a faint leaf pattern in the hollow of each cheek, from the rashes she had torn at with her fingernails as a child. If anything they added to the somewhat harsh beauty of her face, Susannah thought. They never kept the boys away. If there was anything
at all the matter with Larry as far as Susannah was concerned, it was this inability to see what attracted men to Jo.

At first Jo was enraged at being left behind, at having to stay where she was and graduate so that she could get into art school. Then Susannah was pregnant, a worse, mysteriously worse and more serious breach.

As the children were born, Jo took for her theme the fact that Susannah, while seeming to leave, had stayed, in actuality, close by their mother. Between them, Larry and their mother, Jo said, had caused Susannah to miss everything that could have freed her, all the alterations of the sixties.

Susannah knew what that meant to Jo, that she was the same as any starch-fat war-blessing farmer's wife, such as they had never known and only Jo could think existed, even then, in a county growing and changing as theirs was. Half the farmers' wives, in the years Susannah was having her children, were just as apt to be the kind of women—young and newly arrived, with money from somewhere that they let their bearded husbands put into acreage they would attempt to farm—the kind of women who, although they canned ceremoniously all summer and tried to initiate quilting bees, tried just as hard to get reading groups going with the women in town, and gatherings to discuss the war and the changes creeping into everything.

For a while these women called Susannah, as if she were the newcomer and not they. Susannah and Larry had in fact laughed at them in much the same way Jo, away in Chicago, laughed at the country women of her imagination. Larry, who had been recruited by the state schools when he played football, called these women the scouts. “See any of the scouts at the store?” Years afterward, when she went to work in the county office building where several of them, too, had ended up, Susannah wished obscurely that she could let Larry know they were her friends.

Of course the county was different now, almost a suburb of Washington. Women had less time for thinking up things to do, a good many of them commuted the forty or fifty miles in. Only
the big farms supported anybody now. The old combine Larry had repaired still sat on the lot, unsold.

While Larry was alive Susannah thought Jo's disgust with her for getting married was because Jo wished to be married herself. After Larry died she thought differently. She was no longer sure. She saw that Jo liked having boyfriends—lovers, she called them angrily if Susannah said boyfriends—but disliked and avoided men who were not her lovers.

If a man crossed the barrier of Jo's dislike, he became her lover, unless he had powerful reasons for not doing so. It had been thus since high school, when her boyfriends were boys from no particular town or farm, who lived in trailers or on roads that ended in wiregrass growing up through car chassis, where Jo herself did not know whether the thin young men drinking on porches were fathers or big brothers. Jo's boyfriends were good-looking lordly boys of no influence in school, who took shop and got kicked out or quit to join the air force. One or another of them would always be walking in the corridors with a hand low on Jo's back, and offering the other boys a secret smile Susannah hated.

“I want you to tell me right here and now why you never got pregnant in high school,” Susannah said to Jo in the delivery room, groggily pressing on her own loose stomach, after she had her last boy. Larry laughed. It was when they first started letting husbands in. When the nurse saw who it was delivering she had let Jo in too. Both the nurse and the old doctor doing the delivery had been members of the search party, the nurse with the Methodist Youth Fellowship, the doctor with the Lions. The nurse said, “You can have anybody your little heart desires. I mean it. If you want Betty Ford in here, we'll give her a call.”

Jo was leaning on the wall, her hair stuck to her forehead. “Hah!” she said. “You think I didn't try?”

“But Jo. What would you have done?”

“I would never have had an abortion.” Jo said this shakily, sitting on the floor wiping her oily face. She had come close to fainting during the birth, and the nurse had made her sit on the floor. In the delivery room you would not have picked her for a woman who had gone into the slaughterhouse with a camera.
But she was getting her bearings now. She got up and gripped Susannah's hand. “I would have given the baby to you.”

Jo was not fond of women, either, except Susannah and a few women years older than herself, art people in Chicago. She never noticed women or talked about them, except their mother.

T
HEIR
mother did not die. Not for years. In the books and magazines Susannah read, people who had come dramatically loose from life, the regular course of life, the onward direction in which everybody was more or less heading, died. She remarked on this to herself whenever she heard one of these symmetrical accounts. They died, as often as not, of drinking, or grief, or by putting themselves in the way of accidents, or by withering away. Or in some modernized versions of these stories, they got powerful viruses or cancer.

But of the real confederation of those who turned their backs on life, it seemed to her that few withered or died. This was another kind of story, not as relished, told with a certain reproach at the inability of the characters to wind things up.

There were such people all over the countryside, like the woman with the dogs, whose husband had crossed the state line taking his tenant's daughter with him, a girl of twelve. He had been chased and sent to prison, and he had widowed his wife without ever coming back. And then to the woman's story was added the postscript of her appearance in the search party, and then the matter of her existence was closed again, though she still barged through the Safeway every few months loading a cart with hams and frozen cake.

Their mother's story had taken the place of their mother, for most people. Nevertheless certain women, such as Mrs. Bayliss and their Sunday school teachers, saw to it that their father got them to the occasional birthday party after Stevia left, in houses where they stood with their knees tight and their eyesight dim, one or the other of them the wrong age for the party because they were always invited together, among girls neither one of them played with at school.

They were sent to church camp. Teachers took them shopping.
Susannah had a friendly memory of Mrs. Grayson, who taught her in the sixth grade and was to teach Jo. Mrs. Grayson took them to Seven Corners when it was new. She was old enough to be a grandmother but she had no children. She had a chin wrinkled like a walnut and a Kleenex box in her car with a little skirt on it that seemed to Susannah the emblem of settled life. “She came into the booth with us when we tried things on. She inspected our underpants,” Jo said, when Susannah reminded her of Mrs. Grayson. “Pulled on the elastic and looked in. Mine were dirty. She
told
me.”

“But she was probably getting us new underpants.”

“I don't care. She said, ‘What a dirty little girl.' I don't know why she said it to me and not you, I was younger.”

Susannah almost said, “Maybe you were dirtier,” but she didn't. You could not say something like that to Jo, or not for a laugh. If you said it you would have to retrieve her; you would have to lead her by degrees, with compliments, and canceling memories, out of the fitting room where she might easily crouch forever with her back turned, stuck-out shoulder blades grubby in her undershirt, and coax her back into the light of the present.