Shelter (1994) (16 page)

The warmth of the food made Alma sleepy again. She squinted through curling steam above the platters to see Mrs. Thompson-Warner seating herself at the other end of the table. Today it was their turn to have Mrs. T. as breakfast guest. When she sat with one of the three tables of older girls it was called a mealtime lecture, since the Senior girls of Highest were too busy in the wild to have heritage classes, but when she sat with the Juniors they were meant to converse. Alma always tried to sit near her, which meant Delia was forced into the same vicinity out of loyalty. Delia regarded Mrs. T. now with sullen skepticism, then, dutifully resigned, stood up and shifted places as Alma led her closer to Mrs. T.

Alma knew a secret. Yesterday, after archery, she'd helped collect equipment and overheard the counselors talking in their cynical whispers.

"You know the story about her, don't you?" someone said. "Her rich husband was a suicide. Shot himself early one morning in some public place."

"Right, so she wouldn't have to find him. Sick."

What public place? Alma couldn't ask. And what did it mean, sick? He wanted someone else to find him? A bridge was a public place, though no one ever went to Mud River Bridge, or walked along it, or did anything but drive over it. The bridge was not beautiful. It rattled. Some people in Gaither said Nickel Campbell had driven off the bridge on purpose, but he'd never seemed sick at all. The man Alma had seen at the drive-in was probably sick. And Mrs. T.'s husband must have been. Sick. In a public place. He'd wanted to be discovered, like a secret. He must have known secrets, his own secrets or secrets about Communists. Alma sat down now beside Mrs. T., her forearm nearly touching the ample, satisfied wrists of Mrs. T. She watched Mrs. T.'s every gesture and expression and linked each one to an entry on a list of details she kept in her head concerning Mrs. T.: the dead husband, pamphlets about Communism passed around in heritage class, the sick husband, the wedding ring with the big diamond and the other rings Mrs. T. kept in her room, the gun, the public place, the books about Lenin and Stalin on display in Great Hall, the silver hairpins Mrs. T. wore. Somehow the details linked up, the lists corresponded, like those pages of lists in grade school workbooks, those tests where kids drew lines running corner to corner between "wood" and "mahogany," "fruit" and "cherry," "morality" and "rules." The penciled lines would get mixed up and erased and drawn again in web-like combinations.

Alma tried to make conversation. "Mrs. Thompson-Warner, do you live near Gaither?"

"Gaither, dear?"

"Our town, where we're from. It's near Bellington, and Winfield."

"No, I live in Pittsburgh, in the Shady Side section. You know it? I am a widow. My late husband worked with Bethlehem Steel, advising them of European developments in the industry." Mrs. Thompson-Warner ate with one hand on her lap—the left hand, with the diamond—and ate only with her right hand, shoulders squared, tilting her head to gaze directly at a speaking girl, a slouching girl, girls who ate too quickly, girls who didn't eat.

Delia, reprimanded just yesterday, kept one hand out of sight. She held her fork by the recommended method and pinched Alma's knee under the table with the method that was always most effective: impale and grasp. Alma ignored her. "Did you call your husband Thompson?" Delia asked Mrs. T.

"What?" Mrs. T. opened her roll with her fingers. Never, she'd instructed the girls, cut a fresh roll with a knife, it ruins the dough. "No, his name was Berwick Thompson-Warner. He was British, you see. He'd lived through the Blitz in London."

Delia was silent and Alma threw her a stern cautionary glance. Alma would pay her back later if she didn't stop; maybe she'd refuse to walk with her at hiking. "The Blitz was during the war," Alma said, "in England."

"Yes, certainly." Mrs. T. nodded approvingly. "The Germans bombed the British day and night for weeks. It was a terrible siege. Mr. Thompson-Warner remembered it well and appreciated freedom for what it is—a great gift."

Delia, separating her scrambled eggs from bits of syrupy pan-cake, trained her hazel eyes on Mrs. T. "What happened to him?"

"Pardon me?" Mrs. T. leaned slightly forward.

Alma felt herself redden. How did Delia know things, without knowing?

Delia was expressionless. "What happened to your husband?"

Mrs. T.'s fork, poised in midair and tuned to some fine frequency, appeared to vibrate. "We ask personal questions, Delia, only of those with whom we are on intimate terms. Even then, we speak personally only in private."

Alma heard her own voice murmur, "Delia's mother is a widow too."

"I see." Mrs. T. nodded and her fork came to rest on her plate. "She has my sympathies. I hope it's not recent?"

"No, it isn't." Delia picked up the job jar and peered through the glass at the numbered plastic chips inside.

It wasn't time to pick jobs. Alma was afraid Delia would begin shaking the jar like a maraca, or even hurl it the length of the white table like a bowling ball. The white chips would fly out and snow down on them all, cover them with numbers so no one would know if they were a two or a six, a scraper of plates or a stacker.
A storm would be wonderful,
her mother had said,
it might as well storm.
They'd sat in the car outside the funeral home while Audrey tried to stop crying so they could walk inside. Far away, Mrs. T. was saying, in her voice that let in all these pictures, "Alma, I look forward to your speech. You're doing the supper speech for your cabin tonight, aren't you?"

"Yes ma'am."

"I hope she gets to go last," Delia said, "because the one that speaks last always wins the most applause for best."

"I'm afraid your observations are correct," Mrs. T. said. "Still, perhaps tonight will be an exception."

"I doubt it," Delia added. "It's so loud with all of us doing our jobs and carrying dishes back and forth, nobody can really hear, anyway."

Alma sighed and began to load her plate with food. She didn't want to think about the speech, and she wished the end of the day would never come. She reached for the syrup pitcher.

Every breakfast was the same, an endless bounty of soft, warm food heaped in piles, in aspect not unlike Hilda Carmody herself. The scrambled eggs were hot and yellow and moist, mounded up like whipped potatoes at a Thanksgiving, and there were plates of pancakes, their speckled surfaces stacked ten and twelve deep, and saucers of sticky, browned sausages, their links unbroken as though whole boxes had been fried at once. The syrup was cold and thick and Alma poured it on her plate with abandon, not caring if the sweetness permeated every color and shape. Then she didn't have to distinguish one thing from another, note the limits of this or that, allow for discrepancies experienced many times, look out for new ones. She knew her table manners were atrocious; her mother had said so.
Don't mix your food, honey, and don't sit there staring at your nose. Make people aware of you, converse ... impolite to say nothing and pretend you're alone at the table.
But sometimes Alma liked to pretend she was alone. She looked at her food, not really seeing it, and heard all that was said. The food was a warm soup, and the Senior girls trooped in amidst the cacophony of another breakfast.

"Alma," Delia said in low tones, nearly in reverence, "there's Lenny and Cap. They're late."

They were later than all the other Senior girls; Alma wondered why. Seated across the hall, she watched her sister as a stranger might, a stranger in possession of stories and facts. Facts were facts, but Alma didn't know what the stories meant. Even so, they accumulated in her mind, bolstering one another, and most of them were images, pictures with no words, or words that didn't match. Not long ago she'd gone down in the basement at home to get Wes's tape measure out of his toolbox for Audrey. In with the hammers and screwdrivers, the small plastic boxes of nails and washers, Alma found a wallet-sized plastic portfolio. It was creased and dirty, nearly empty of snapshots, but when she pulled one free from its cloudy envelope, Alma recognized Wes and Lenny. They were a different version of themselves, Lenny a child with white, flyaway hair and an open grin, Wes holding her with both arms, laughing, the two of them staring into the camera. It was a machine picture, taken in a photo booth like the one at Hart's Drug in Gaither. Maybe it was the very same machine where Alma and Delia sometimes spent a dollar on Saturdays. There were two more photos of identical size, one of Audrey, staring soberly into the dark screen before her, and another of the three of them. They were all laughing, crowded into the picture.
I don't know,
Audrey had said when Alma asked,
probably from some wallet that wore out. Lenny should have these—Where were you? You weren't born yet, or maybe you were on the way, just barely. See that look in my eye? There you are.

"Where were they?" Delia said, her face so close Alma smelled the peppermint tinge of her breath. "They must have gotten in trouble."

"Yeah, probably so." Alma watched Lenny across the dining hall, knowing her sister would never tell her what the trouble was. Just now Lenny kept her eyes on her food and didn't look over at the younger girls. Lenny looked different at camp, Alma thought, less cared for, the way her hair was never really combed, just pulled back tangled in an elastic, and her lips, maybe chapped from the sun, were redder. She looked more rugged, or brave. And she didn't even need to be more brave. Lenny never told secrets or talked about troubles. She didn't talk to their father because Wes himself never talked. She didn't talk to Audrey because, well, just because she didn't. And she didn't talk to Alma. She and Wes were both like stars Alma saw in the sky from the earth of home, with Audrey. Alma could look at the stars or wish for them, but she couldn't tell them her own secrets, surrounded as she was with Audrey's voice and talk, Audrey's stories of how things were.

"Want to try to talk to them after breakfast?" Delia pretended to keep her interest low.

"No. I'm not going to ask them a thing. Anyway, there won't be time. Activities is hobby hours, and they always rush us over there."

Alma sighed. The noise of the dining hall seemed to swell and crest around the seated bodies of the Senior girls. Far away, they broke bread. Alma and Delia shifted closer to one another, leaning into the current.

He sleeps alone in the shack. He has left the truck with the other men at the river and walked back to lie down on his narrow pallet. Sleeping is like falling. Sinking into his own body.

The girl who was a fish circles deep within the bowl of Turtle Hole. Parson feels her undulating movement in his body as a sliver of silver in his chest, and the silver moves like a bright minnow into his belly, cool in the heat of his sleep but hurting like a burn. He knows he should wake up. But he holds still, careful, trapped in his own dream. She travels within his sleeping length, seeming to whip and move in his darkness that is vast and deep as the dark of Turtle Hole. She is shining in that water, shining inside him, long and thin. Her darkness lengthens, skating through water like a snake. The glow of her yellow hair pressed flat to her head has become the shine of her dark flesh. She is a snake with human eyes and the wide gaze of the angel of death, and in the dark water of Turtle Hole she sees the children floating in their bubbles of air. They are sleeping, all of them, curled into themselves, and she opens her gaping slash of a mouth and swallows them whole before the evil can touch them. The water is crowded with shadows that moan for light and air; Parson hears their reedy, warbled voices and feels their wavering approach. But the snake moves through them, limitless and closed, shooting for the surface in a long black streak that shines and contracts, a rapid'S, and when the head of the snake breaks water, Parson sits up in his sleep. She has found him.

Before he opens his eyes, still dreaming, he knows the door of the shack is ajar; he feels air on his face. Early morning. Waking in the fever of his dream, Parson watches himself get up from the pallet to pull on his khaki pants. It is then he sees the snake, lying motionless along the edge of the floor, just in the shadow of the slanted wall. Come from Turtle Hole, Parson knows, along the narrow path through the trees. He imagines the silky, comfortable slide of the snake through dense shade, through trailing vines barely disturbed by its passage. The snake is a long straight form except for the half oval it curves around the shoes—Lenny's shoes. The shoes sit abandoned, their shape so approximate and human that Parson has imagined Lenny standing in them in the dark. Not Lenny herself, but a shade of Lenny, a shadow whose patient form exudes a rustling whisper. The snake has heard and drawn close.

Parson approaches slowly, grasps its jewel-like head, and pulls it along the rough floor of the shack, a big snake—blacksnakes, people call them, a rope of flesh redolent with the feel and smell of the reptile. Lukewarm silk, Preacher used to say, dead and alive, and he never touched the snakes his parishioners brought to services. Parson did. Some folks up the hollows were snake handlers and used copperheads for their cleansing poison, but Preacher's people only kept garden snakes, river swimmers, pest eaters. Snakes hunted vermin; their sliding, secretive forms could tempt evil and draw it out. In prison Parson had stopped talking. Before, as Preacher's shouting boy, he'd thundered over the jostling heads of the faithful: snakes are the living memory of evil, respect and fear them. As Lucifer himself was an angel fallen from grace, so these shades of the Devil are fallen from the mantle of evil, thrown alive from the whirling vacuum of hell, humbled, crawling on their bellies toward the scent of redemption. Perfect power, perfect shame, Parson preached, extending his arms for the snakes to climb as that room in Preacher's Calvary house shook with ecstatic bodies.

The room of the shack holds still. The snake is no messenger; it is a probe of God. Parson holds it waist high before its tail end clears the ground. He raises it higher to see the quick tongue slit the air. The snake contracts, lowering, looping its lower coils to stand like a one-footed creature on Parson's thigh. He still holds the compact head, a solid bullet, but feels the snake rise of its own accord until its long straightened length has reached his height. And he feels her there, the girl who was a fish, long and cool in the head and length of the snake. Parson peers into her bright eye as though into binoculars, wanting to know, to see, but the eye is a flat glass of power and rejects his gaze. He sees only the reflection of his own searching eye. Startled, he loosens his grip, and the snake moves through the curve of his hand. Takes him over, begins to coil along his arm, travels upward to his shoulder and around his neck. He makes a basket of his arms for the snake to fill and it does, coiling rope on rope to an inverted bowl of flesh, and when Parson steps to the broken front windows he knows he will see an angel at the water, and it is the girl, Lenny.