The Elegant Gathering of White Snows (3 page)

—30—

The Elegant Gathering: Walking Women

Suddenly, the women popped into Walter Schmidt's headlights a good two miles east of the Timberline Bar and Grill out on Highway K, where he had spent the past four hours drinking tap beer, eating pickled eggs, and playing Michigan rummy with his pals, Poker and Hal. “What the hell,” shouted Walter as he slammed his truck to a halt and shook his head to make certain he was not hallucinating.

Walter had the window open for a number of reasons. First of all, it was late spring and one of those clear, soft, warm nights that brings all the scents, sounds, and sights of a season alive inside of a person. Second, he was as drunk as a skunk, and being eighty-two years old, he needed all the extra air he could inhale to get himself and his '87 Chevy shortbed back to the safety of his dilapidated garage.

This was not the first time Walter had driven home from the Timberline Bar and Grill with his head hanging out the window. When his wife, Gracie, died fifteen years ago, Walter had started going on a regular basis—regular meaning every night of the week, every week of the year.

During those long drives home, Walter had swerved to hit countless deer, run over at least eight good-sized raccoons and ground squirrels, crashed his truck into every ditch on both sides of the road, and crushed about a billion moths, flies, and night bugs on his front grille. More than once, he simply pulled over, threw his jacket over his shoulders and slept until the morning-shift dairy herder stopped to wake him before the cops drove by.

In all those years, Walter had never once seen a line of women walking slowly up the side of the road. Flabbergasted, he still wasn't certain he was sober enough to actually know if he wasn't making the whole damn thing up.

He watched as the women halted for a moment to look into the cab. Walter was immediately struck by the peaceful looks on their faces. He ran his eyes up and down the line, and searched their eyes for something, anything, that might give him a clue as to why they were walking on this remote country road in the middle of the night. All he saw were soft smiling eyes.

He didn't know what to say, which was a miracle in itself. Walter spent his nights at the bar because he was afraid of silence. He was afraid of the empty rooms in his one hundred-year-old farmhouse, afraid of the empty bed, of the long fields that rolled out from each side of his house. The few hours each day that Walter did manage to stay inside were filled with his constant whistling, the endless drone of the television, and his gnarly fingers tapping on chairs, counters and tables. He missed Gracie so much that the sight of all the women walking, apparently happy, was overwhelming. He began to cry.

One of the women walked over to his truck and asked him the question he knew he should have asked them.

“Sir, are you okay?”

Walter reached across the steering wheel with his trembling hand and touched the arm she had placed across the edge of his window. She had dark eyes and lines that stretched out from the edges of her mouth and didn't disappear until they turned the corner at her jawline. It was all he could do to keep himself inside the truck. He wanted to get out and stand in the road and have this woman put her arms around him. He wanted to cry and cry on her shoulder, and then have her drive him home and sit by the bed while he slept off his stupor. He wanted to wake up and hear her singing in the kitchen, just like Gracie had sung every morning as she fried bacon and scrambled the hell out of his ritual three eggs.

When Joanne saw that he was crying, she reached up and wiped the tears from his eyes. Walter closed his eyes when her fingers touched him. Joanne's touch left a warm path down the side of his face, and he put his hand right where hers had been and looked into her eyes.

“What are you all doing out here?” he asked. “Where are you going?”

“We are just walking,” she said simply, as if this was something they did every day. “Just walking.”

Walter didn't think her remark strange. He could see they were walking, but he wondered where in the hell they were going.

“Do you need anything?” he asked.

“You could say a prayer for us,” she told him, stepping away from the truck.

Walter didn't want her to leave, so he quickly formulated another question. “Do you want to stay at my place tonight?” he asked. “I've got plenty of rooms and the house is empty, except for me.”

“That's kind, but we can't stop. Not just yet. We have to keep going.”

“All right then,” he said, nodding, wishing he were young enough to snatch this one away and transform her into Gracie. “You be careful and stay off to the side, especially toward morning when the milk trucks spin by here.”

Joanne was back in line by then and Walter watched them all move away. He lurched his truck forward and drove down the highway, watching them in his rearview mirror get smaller and smaller until they disappeared from view and the highway was empty except for him and the endless night.

Four miles down the road, he turned in to his long driveway and thought about stopping and waiting for them to come by so he could see them again. Then he thought about rushing in to make coffee and getting out some bread for sandwiches. Instead he pulled ahead, parked the truck in the garage, and walked into his empty house.

Walter had left the television set on, he always left the television set on. He had blown out three expensive sets since Gracie died because these new sets weren't made to be left on twenty-four hours a day. On entering the house, without even thinking about it, Walter went into his cluttered living room and turned off the television set. Then he went to the bathroom, brushed his teeth, splashed some water on his face, and proceeded to the bedroom.

After he opened the window facing the highway, Walter took off his pants and socks and shirt and shoes and crawled into bed. Then he turned to face the window and waited to see if he could hear their footsteps on the highway.

He fell asleep in about five seconds so he never heard the footsteps. But in those brief moments before he began dreaming he did hear something rustling in the tree below the window and then a plane flew over. He heard the house crack and sway when a single gust of wind blew out of the woods.

OBITUARY

—30—

The Elegant Gathering: Alice

With each footstep, I think of my baby. She would be a grown woman now, and as we pull up out of the spot here where the cars like to spin around and the gravel hits my ankles, that makes me think of her. She would be like me—with thin legs and hips that never moved back after those babies—and hair that was gray long before the age of thirty. But I hope she would never have experienced this burden of sorrow and this missing inside of her that has eaten a hole right through my heart. Fifty years grown she would be, and there has not been a minute that has passed all these years when I have not thought of her.

My name is Alice Marie Jessup, and I am walking for my baby. The baby who died in my arms when I was only a child myself. The burden of this loss I have kept nestled inside of me year after year without telling anyone about it, without letting on to Chester that he might just as well have shot me in the head the night she died because without that baby girl my life has been a life of sorrow. Only when I met these women and I could sense that they had sorrows and burdens to share did I tell them about Annie, my beautiful Annie. Only when I told them week after week and year after year until finally this walk, did I feel my heart lift and know that my baby was truly in the arms of Jesus.

I can remember every single thing about the day my baby died, and about the night she was conceived and about the hell my heart has entered into.

Chester for sure did not want this baby girl, and that is what hardened my heart against him since I knew Annie came into me straight from heaven. Chester worried about food and money and if the plant would lay him off, which it did over and over again. We had just had our son the year before when I was only nineteen, not caring about food and clothes, only about the touch of those little hands on my face.

When Annie came into me, it was as if a light went on behind my eyes and I saw her face and I knew that she was my beautiful baby girl. But Chester stomped and raged and said he knew a doctor down in the city. I swear to God I could have killed him right then when he suggested such a sick and terrible thing. I have held back that anger until this walking time, I have held back my anger and hate and my sorrow and every mean thought that came and went all these long, hard, horrible years.

For Chester did this to me the night he came home from the Lakewoods Bar smelling like smoke and bourbon and pushing me first against the side of the hard wall and then on the cold floor without consideration of what that felt like. He was drunk, and in a million years could never remember the single act that took away my heart.

We were poor with the war ending and no jobs and the economy zigzagging up and down, and neither of us had more than a country high school diploma. Chester with his bad leg from his uncle's combine was the boy who never went to war and stayed home to wonder what his life could have been like if he had.

Oh, I loved Chester then. He had sad eyes and a way that was soft and made me want to hold him to my breast and tell him that there are many ways to be a man. When we married, it was no different than for anyone else, I suppose. A simple street dress for me, a borrowed suit for him, and nothing after that but the groping in the Manchester Hotel for one night before we started this long life that has brought me to this road.

Richard came along so fast, it was as if he moved from my loins before I could sit down. He was a fine boy, serious though, and I remember that one time when he put his hand on my belly to feel his sister growing inside. A smile crossed his face that was as bright as the sky and he said, “Baby, Mommie, baby.”

Things were so much simpler then. I wanted babies, that's all, just babies. When my girlfriends Gloria and Pat went to secretarial school, I never thought once about doing that. I wanted a house filled with diapers and toys on the steps and a clothesline that stretched across the yard and was never empty. Now people might say that was bad, but in my heart, all along there was never room for anything else but all the babies I never had. All those little fingers that never touched my eyes to see if they would blink.

My mother tried so hard to let me know that it was okay to grieve the loss of a beautiful daughter. Three times this had happened to her. Three dead babies had slipped from her insides into a blanket, and then they were burned out on the woodpile by my daddy, who stood in the smoke and cried. There was no hospital then, only Grandma Jansky, who would come and try to pull the dead babies from a womb that was as hard as a rock.

I never knew something was wrong. That is what I think of as we walk past the spring corn that is just shooting up. All I felt was Annie's heart beating so close to mine and this wonderful feeling of having a baby inside of me. The days passed, and we always managed to eat and we had shoes and Chester went back to work for a time and I would say, “See, now, we are all fine, Chester, just fine.”

I had my Richard then, too. His weight on my hips as I hauled him back and forth from the garden to the house and out to the line was never a burden for me, even though he was such a big boy. He loved to pretend to be a bucking pony, have me bounce him on my hip, then he'd gallop away and back, for another bounce under the pines by the edge of the house.

I remember the sky toward the end of that winter. We didn't have much snow that year, and when it finally came down as if a dam had burst, Richard and I went out right away to try to catch the snowflakes. Once when the temperature dipped below zero for days, we went out anyway. Richard pulled on a long sheet that was frozen solid on the line and part of it cracked off in his hand. I always kept that side of the sheet where I slept after that and when my legs would get cold because of that missing piece, I could remember the sky and Richard's startled face when he came to me with the sheet, white and solid in his hand.