Shelter (1994) (11 page)

But Nickel had left Mina; hadn't he?
No, I'll never believe it. He wouldn't have left those kids. My god, how we agonized over all of you.

Shoes. The women at Bird's shop liked to take their shoes off and warm their feet in front of the little coal stove. The cast-iron front was molded in the shapes of hearts and birds with banners in their beaks, painted white, like everything in the shop, but the paint had turned pale pink in the heat, pink like the pink counters and chairs, the baseboards and window frames, Bird's uniform. Alma thought of the glow in the belly of the squat stove as a kind of heartbeat, the fire racing up and shifting when Bird opened the little door. Up on the third floor, where Bird wanted Mina and the children to live, there was a sleeping porch with a swing. Alma loved to sit there while Delia said how stupid and bossy Bird was. The girls dressed Johnny in his jacket and hood, let him have the swing, while they sat on the floor bundled in their coats and watched traffic move the length of Main Street. Up high the trucks weren't so loud, and the dirt of the coal didn't seem to reach them. The upper rooms were full of strange wallpapers that hung down in strips, and flaked, fuzzy spots on the ceilings that looked like forest lichen.
Delia's right not to want to live with Bird.
Alma would hear her mother's voice float behind Delia's complaints.
Bird is common, just like her sister. Mina's idea of a good time is to go bowling, and have babies one after the other. There were three miscarriages before Johnny, and after every one she'd get to drinking, and he'd send her back to that same expensive hospital. She was always after Nickel to sell the piano, get rid of those boxes of books, go deer hunting with Henry and his cronies. Can you imagine? Nickel out in the woods with Wes and Henry. What would they talk about, Dickens and Beethoven?

Downstairs, Alma knew the women would be talking about other women, or the change, or stories about teachers at the high school, or sick headaches. There was a warm convivial laughter and the smell of nail polish and hair dyes. Moments at a time, Alma wished her own mother could magically transform into one of Bird's customers, be like the others. This is how women were.

Women like this might finish college, be camp counselors in the summer, but they brought along a set of electric hair curlers and makeup kits well stocked with blushers and lipsticks. Pearlie rolled her frosted hair every day before dinner, and shaved her legs. Her voice was pert and chiming and she was just the kind of girl boys would like—boys with cars, boys like the ones who hung out at the Stardust in Gaither. But Pearlie was from Winfield, which was almost a city, and she probably wouldn't think of talking to high school boys from Gaither. Her name was Colleen, she'd told everyone, but they should call her Pearlie, like her sorority sisters at the university did. Alma imagined a sorority was for rich girls who could pay for nice clothes; the rooms would be like hotel rooms and there would be a maid to do the cleaning. McAdams had stood up then and said she was B-wing counselor.

Tall, lanky, tawny-complected, McAdams wore her dark hair cropped short and straight in a shimmery bowl on her head. Alma recognized her immediately as one of the princes in John-John's
Fantastic Fairy Tales,
the book he insisted Alma and Delia read to him over and over. Alma had read it so often that she no longer heard her own voice enunciate the, words. Johnny didn't care; he just wanted someone to provide a chant of accompaniment as he turned pages. Even in the heat of Camp Shelter, Alma could smell the chill of the tunnel staircase in "Twelve Dancing Princesses." Suppose McAdams were the one descending those damp stones, dressed in brilliant clown-like trousers and velvet slippers, carrying a raven and a lamp? The prince, pictured from behind in the illustration, looked broad-shouldered and strong, but slender, and his hair was black.

McAdams would be a junior at Presbyterian, a small private college in Gaither, which meant she'd lived near Delia for two years. Her window might have been one of the small, lit rectangles Alma had glimpsed at night, across the old baseball field from the porch of Delia's house. The Campbells lived in an enclave of one-story frame houses once owned by the college (for faculty, Nickel had said—more likely for groundskeepers, Mina had corrected him over supper—and wasn't it ironic that he lived in a house like the ones his grandparents had built for their employees). The college had sold off the houses long ago, but now they wanted to buy them back and tear them down and build a new student union. But everyone on Fayette Street ignored the college, just as they ignored the old'train tracks that ran in front of their string of similar houses. Kids were allowed to play on the unused tracks and the neglected baseball field, but they weren't allowed on the campus itself, a sea of green lawns bordered with clipped hedges, shaded by immense oaks and maples. From Fayette Street, the college seemed a town unto itself, a perfect town of four-story brick buildings with antebellum, white-columned entrances and balconies. Alma's mother, Audrey, had gone to school there, and Delia's mother had too, just for business courses, when the Campbells first moved to Gaither. Now that Nickel was, what, gone, buried, disappeared, Mina went to class every day to finish her degree, so she could support the family. Audrey had told Alma why.
The insurance company is disputing Mina's claim, I know all about it, and Henry Briarley, bless his generous soul, won't pay them any pension because Nickel didn't die at work. Work! My god! Life is work, Alma, and you may as well know it now.

McAdams didn't know about the funeral, about Delia's house on Fayette Street, about Audrey saying she'd planted sweet corn so she could lie down between the rows in August when it was too hot to move anymore. Alma watched McAdams and felt free. This was a new life. Watching McAdams helped her feel that if this life ever ended and camp was over, they might all return to the old life and find it unchanged. Audrey would never have begun the Saturday trips to Winfield to see Nickel Campbell, Alma would never have seen the Winfield bus station or gotten a baton she could still barely twirl. Bird would again be Delia's maiden aunt who ate with them on holidays and birthdays, the one her dad made jokes about, and Nickel himself would be there, back from the afternoon at Whitescarver's when he'd stayed so still in the box, looking utterly unlike himself, being the first dead man Alma had ever seen. He wouldn't be dead anymore. He would be a little sleepy, that's all, not talkative, and he wouldn't remember anything about where he'd been.
No use asking,
Mina would warn Delia and Alma,
you two take Johnny outside and leave your dad be now.

But wishing nothing had ever happened was like walking around asleep in the dark. Was he bleeding when they found him, when someone pulled him out of the river? No, the water had washed the blood' away. He would always be dead. And Delia would move into Bird's apartment, the one above the beauty shop, where Mina and Johnny were staying right now so Bird could mind him in the mornings while Mina went to class. It all had to do with whether the insurance company paid. Everyone in Gaither, not just Audrey, knew. Alma had heard Mina take the phone into the pantry once at Delia's house, and talk with the door shut, asking in a low, steely voice why her husband would drive off a bridge on purpose, and was that what she was supposed to tell her kids?

She hadn't told them anything, Alma was sure of it. John-John didn't understand anyway, and Mina didn't tell Delia things, woman to woman, the way Audrey told Alma. Delia was lucky, in a crazy way. And Alma was the only kid who knew more than most of the grownups knew, more than Nickel's wife or Nickel's daughter. At camp, with Delia, Alma wanted to stop knowing. Mina had almost kept Delia at home to baby-sit Johnny. She'd tried to get the deposit back but the camp wouldn't return it, and thanks to the generosity of a benefactor, would offer Full Supplement toward the balance. So Delia had come to camp with Alma.

Camp was like being asleep, like a long, long dream. Even Delia's fall seemed not to have awakened anyone. Introductions night seemed weeks ago; in fact, this was only the tenth day in Camp Shelter. Time was big here and Alma wanted oceans of it, more and more, so that her past seemed a smaller and smaller island, barely discernible as the sailor looks back from the sea. Now McAdams announced today's schedule and the girls listened, most of them still in their cots. They did look like a rustic version of the dancing-princess story, Alma thought; there were actually twelve cots to a wing, with look-alike worn white sheets and olive-green blankets. There was a footlocker under each rumpled bed, not a shimmery gown and slippers. The girls' faces were indistinct in the early morning light, the blinds of the big windows still drawn in a futile attempt to discourage the migration of mosquitoes through the rusty screens at night. McAdams was the perfect organizer of ignominious royalty; she delivered her pronouncements in a jaunty tone that brooked no argument, yet forgave in advance any clumsiness or fear. She addressed them as a group, captains of industry, little wanderers, B Troop, and she never yelled in high-pitched frustration like Pearlie, only joked, increasingly tongue-in-cheek, as though camp were an elaborate game, and the idea was to increase the intricacy of the game by inventing ever more detailed rules and rituals.

"Arise, group. We now have nine minutes to flag raising and breakfast, then we shall proceed in tandem to hobby hours, since, if you remember, archery was yesterday. Heritage class will serve as a restful interlude before activities, which include a hike to Highest camp and the peak, if we move fast enough to make the peak, I make no promises, and then, after lunch"—a dramatic pause—"canoeing." McAdams consulted her watch as Alma groaned. "Now, now, this is not a transatlantic voyage, merely a serene meander under the bridge to the dock past the turn in the river. Those of you with hives or rashes or other skin ailments"—she pretended to regard them in turn through imaginary pince-nez—"will please not ingest river water, berries, or small pebbles." Laughter from the assemblage. "And you will please not lose your footing, as Frank—yes, Frank—has agreed to assist us, help you to your precarious seats in the aforementioned canoes, since fishing girls out of the drink will only retard our progress and delay the moment when Frank helps you back
out
of said canoes." More laughter. "Eight minutes. Inspection while we're gone. Tuck your bed corners. On to the enchanted forest."

She turned and was gone, taking up her position outside, near the cabin steps. She never watched them carry out her orders but elicited a secretive cooperation. Everyone hurried to comply while McAdams's voice counted down. "Eight minutes ... seven ... six minutes, group." To Alma the room resembled nothing so much as a living pinball machine, with girls ricocheting to and from the closet-sized bathroom as though set in motion by pump-action levers. They jumped into wrinkled uniforms, stood on their beds to pull the dingy sheets tight. Alma knelt by her cot, smelling the wool drab of the blanket as she tugged its frayed edges. Close to her face, the scratchy cloth was faintly redolent of wet dog, or of John-John's wool teddy, the one he liked to drop in the sink at Bird's shop. The teddy was a hand-me-down: Johnny was named after President Kennedy's son, Bird liked to say, but he was minus the silver spoon in his mouth. Johnny would be standing now in the playpen at Bird's salon, watching the electric fans turn in the narrow windows, long strings of the yellowed blinds dangling and twirling. In summer the space heaters were put away and the fans swiveled their mechanical necks, stirring the perfumed air into windy ripples. The rings on the window blinds were all decorated with scented artificial roses Bird had ordered from a catalogue. Their bright red plastic weighted the strings and their revolutions seemed measured as a minuet; in motion, the roses resembled tiny faces with pursed mouths. Johnny would be watching them circle and sway, and the air would be full of the machine hum of dryers and fans, the squeaking of the elevated chairs as Bird or her employees worked the foot pumps, the voices of the women a watery murmur punctuated with the shrill dual chimes of laughter and exclamation. Johnny was still there, like a bright raft bobbing on sonorous water. Alma wished he were here instead, at camp with Delia and her, where they could all be proper orphans and walk the trails from one established point to the next. John-John was small for his age, Alma reflected; he could sleep in Delia's cot with them, in the middle between Delia and her, and he wouldn't even need his crib. Delia wouldn't sleepwalk anymore. And they could all live in this green construction until Alma thought of where to go next.

Alma had watched McAdams draw on her clipboard during hobby hours. She knew McAdams drew mazes, elaborate mazes that grew from a central penciled point and expanded in straight, squared lines, perfect angles, all in miniature. Alma imagined wending her way to a new home through one of those graphite maps, discovering as her prize the exact beginning of a world. She wanted to hold Johnny by the hand and keep her arm around Delia, and stay there, the three of them, in the center, watching and waiting in the heart of a fortress. Only someone very wise would ever find them.

The big oven had a silver front. It was like a black box crouching on short legs, and on top there were eight heavy burners shaped like crowns. Mam washed them with the bristly silver wool that stuck in her cuts and scrapes, little iron hairs that sting, don't you touch that scour pad. He wanted to pick up those crowns but if she caught him on the stool he'd get a licking. Sweet jesus Buddy do you want to burn your hands clean off and get me fired in the bargain, get on outside till I can get this breakfast cooked, and when he stood just inside the black screen door and looked out at the trees, everything was silvered by the glisten of warped mesh. The redheaded directress was outside. Frank and the workman with the pickup truck were loading up her junk again. That workman, the darker one, sometimes looked up when Buddy sat on the swinging bridge to watch the men's slow progress, digging and hauling by the river. Now Buddy watched him slant his eyes at the directress's powdered face. Scared of her, maybe. Buddy wasn't, and he kicked the screen door hard with one foot, keeping time. Kitchen bang and clang behind him, and that same radio station playing girl songs.
It's my party.
When the directress tried to talk to Buddy through the screen, he backed up and crouched in the shadowy pantry. He'd rolled the marbles out onto the floor and they were bright glass eyes with the rippled colors burnt clear through. Tilting and spinning, they gleamed off each other like marauders. He heard the pickup drive off and Mam's white, thick-soled shoes appeared beside his hands, what you got out here Buddy, pick them things up before someone breaks their neck. Mam, filling up the small space, opening armfuls of big cans, Honey Bee orange juice smell, sweet tin syrup, brassy and gold. She pushed him a little from behind and her big hands smelled of water and dough, and when the door banged he was outside alone.