Postcards

56 The Face in the Moss (#litres_trial_promo)

57 The Jet Trail in the Windshield (#litres_trial_promo)

58 What I See (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

Also By Annie Proulx (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

‘But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.’

DASHIELL HAMMETT, The Maltese Falcon

I (#ulink_784e6449-4ff7-5651-920f-2742d5903e03)

1 Blood (#ulink_d7088425-55a1-5998-b80d-c593be005a68)

EVEN BEFORE HE GOT UP he knew he was on his way. Even in the midst of the involuntary orgasmic jerking he knew. Knew she was dead, knew he was on his way. Even standing there on shaking legs, trying to push the copper buttons through the stiff buttonholes he knew that everything he had done or thought in his life had to be started over again. Even if he got away.

He couldn’t get any air, but stood on his knocked-out legs gasping and wheezing. It was like he’d taken a bad fall. Dazed. He could feel the blood hammering in his throat. But there was nothing else, only the gasping for breath and an abnormal acuity of vision. Mats of juniper flowed across the field like spilled water; doghair maple crowded the stone wall wavering through the trees.

He’d thought of the wall walking up the slope behind Billy, thought of it in a common way, of working on it sometime, setting back in place the stones that frost and thrusting roots had thrown out. Now he saw it as a scene drawn in powerful ink lines, the rock fissured with crumpled strings of quartz, humps of moss like shoulders shrugging out of the mold, black lignum beneath rotten bark, the aluminum sheen of deadwood.

A stone the size and shape of a car’s backseat jutted out of the wall, and below it was a knob of soil that marked the entrance to an abandoned fox den. Oh Jesus, it wasn’t his fault but they’d say it was. He grasped Billy’s ankles and dragged her to the wall. He rolled her up under the stone, could not look at her face. There was already a waxiness to her body. The texture of her bunched stockings, the shape of her nails glowed with the luminous hardness that marks the newly dead in the moment before the flames consume or the sucking water pulls them under. The space beneath the rock was shallow. Her arm fell outward, the hand relaxed, the fingers curled as if she held a hand mirror or a Fourth of July flag.

Instinctively he translated the withering shock into work, his answer to what he did not want to understand, to persistent toothache, hard weather, the sense of loneliness. He rebuilt the wall over her, fitting the stones, copying the careless, tumbled fall of rock. A secretive reflex worked in him. When she was locked away in the wall he threw on dead leaves, tree limbs and brush, raked the drag marks and scuffed ground with a branch.

Down the back fields, keeping to the fence line, but sometimes staggering onto open ground. No feeling in his legs. The sun was going down, the October afternoon collapsing into evening. The fence posts on the margins of the fields glinted like burnished pins, the thick light plated his face with a coppery mask.

Grass eddied around his knees, the purple awns burst, scattering a hail of seed. Far below he saw the house varnished with orange light, balanced against the grove of cottonwoods, like a scene etched on a metal plate. The sag of the roof curved into shadows as delicate as a bloom of mold, thickening the trees.

In the orchard he knelt and wiped his hands over and over in the coarse grass. The trees were half wild with watersprouts and deadwood. The mournful smell of rotted fruit came into his nose. ‘If I get away,’ he said, dragging breath into his constricted throat, and briefly seeing, not what had happened up beside the wall, but his grandfather spraying the tree with Bordeaux mixture, the long wand hissing in the leaves, the poisoned codling moths bursting up like flames, the women and children, himself, on the ladder picking apples, the strap of the bag cutting into his shoulder, the empty oak-splint baskets under the trees and the men loading the full baskets into a wagon, the frigid packing room, old Roseboy with his sloping, bare neck and his dirty hat, pointed like a cone, nothing but a trimmed-up old syrup filter, tapping on the barrel heads, serious, saying over and over, ‘Take it easy now, one rotten apple spoils the whole goddamn barrel.’

Evening haze rose off the hardwood slopes and blurred a sky discolored like a stained silk skirt. He saw and heard everything with brutal clarity; yet the thing that had happened up beside the wall was confused. Coyotes singling along the edge of the duck marsh called in fluming howls. Wet hand ticking the skeletal bean poles, he walked through the withered garden. Moths like pinches of pale dust battered in his wake.

At the corner of the house he stopped and urinated on the blackened stalks of Jewell’s Canterbury bells. The seed husks rattled and a faint steam rose in the trembling shadow of his legs. His clothes had no warmth. The grey work pants, knees stained with soil, were stippled with grass heads and bramble tips, his jacket spattered with shreds of bark. His neck stung from her raking scratches. A gleaming image of her fingernails swerved into his mind and he clamped it off. The cedar waxwings rustled stiff leaves with a sound of unfolding tissue paper. He could hear Mink’s voice in the kitchen, lumps of sound like newly plowed soil, and the flat muffle of Jewell, his mother, answering. Nothing seemed changed. Billy was somehow up there under the wall, but nothing seemed changed except the uncanny sharpness of his vision and the tightness that gripped somewhere under his breastbone.

A length of binder twine hung with bean plants sagged between the two porch pillars, and he could see each hemp fiber, the shadows in the folds of each desiccated leaf, the swell of the seed inside the husks. A broken pumpkin, crusted on its underside with earth, parted like a mouth in a knowing crack. His foot crushed a leaf as he opened the screen door.

Wire egg baskets were stacked in the corner of the entry. Water had drained from a basket half full of pale eggs and pooled under Mink’s barn boots. The reeking barn clothes, Dub’s jacket, his own denim coat with the pocket gaping open like a wound, dangled from nails. He scraped his shoes on the wad of burlap sacks and went in.

‘About time. You, Loyal, you and Dub can’t get to the table on time we’re not waitin’. Been sayin’ this since you was four years old.’ Jewell pushed the bowl of onions toward him. Her hazel eyes were lost behind the glinting spectacles. The ridge of muscle that supported her lower lip was as stiff as wood.

The white plates made a circle around the kitchen table, the shape echoed in the curve of grease around Mink’s mouth. There was stubble on his face, his finely cut lips were loosened by missing teeth. The dull silver lay on the yolk-colored oilcloth. Mink clenched the carving knife, sawed at the ham. The ham smelled like blood. Cold air crawled along the floor, the ferret scurried in the wall. On a hill miles away an attic window caught the last ray of light, burned for a few minutes, dimmed.

‘Pass the plates.’ Mink’s voice, gone thin since his tractor accident a few years ago, seemed caught in some glottal anatomic trap. He tensed his neck, creased across the back with white lines, and cut at the ham. The label on his overall bib read TUF NUT. The red slices fell away from the knife onto the platter, the glaze crackled by heat in crazy hairlines. The knife was thin-bladed, the steel sharpened away. Mink felt its fragility against the ham bone. Such a worn blade could easily break. His pallid gaze, blue as winter milk, slid around the table.

‘Where’s Dub? Goddamn knockabout.’

‘Don’t know,’ Jewell said, hands like clusters of carrots, shaking pepper out of the glass dog, straight in the chair, the flesh of her arms firm and solid. ‘But I’ll tell you something. Anybody that’s late to supper can go without. I cook supper to be eat hot. And nobody bothers to take the trouble to set down when it’s ready. Don’t care who it is, they’re not here they can forget it. Don’t care if it’s Saint Peter. Don’t care if Dub’s gone off again. Thinks he can come and go as he pleases. He don’t care for nobody’s work. I don’t care if it’s Winston Churchill with his big greasy cigar wants to set down to dinner, we’re not waitin’ for nobody. If there’s something left he can have it, but don’t expect nothing to be saved.’

‘I don’t expect it,’ said Mernelle, squinting her eyes. Her braids were doubled in loops bound with rubber bands that pulled painfully when they were worked loose at night, the teeth too big for the face. She had the family hands with crooked fingers and flat nails. She had Mink’s diffident slouch.

‘Nobody is talking to you, miss. You make some money on the milkweed pods and you’ve got to put your two cents in on every subject. How money does change a person. Glad I haven’t got any to spoil me.’

‘I got more good stuff goin’ on than milkweed pods,‘ said Mernelle scornfully. ‘I got three big things this week. I got six dollars for the milkweed pods, I got a letter from Sergeant Frederick Hale Bottum in New Guinea because he read my note with the Sunday school cigarettes, and our class is goin’ to see the robber show in Barton. On Friday.’

‘How many milkweed pods you picked for that six dollars?’ Mink pulled off his barn cap and hung it on the chair’s ear. A feak of hair hung down and he continually jerked his head to the left to get it out of his way.

‘Hundreds. Thousands. Thirty bags. And guess what, Da, some of the kids turned in milkweeds that was still green, and they only give ‘em ten cents a bag. I let mine get all nice and dry up in the hayloft first. The only one picked more than me was a old man from Topunder. Seventy-two bags, but he didn’t have to go to school. He could just fool around pickin’ milkweed all day long.’

‘I wondered what in the hell all them milkweed pods was doin’ spread out over the floor up there. First I thought it was some idea Loyal had for cheap cowfeed. Then I thought they was goin’ to be some kind of a decoration.’

‘Da, they don’t make decorations out of milkweed pods.’

‘Hell they don’t. Milkweed pods, pinecones, spook, popcorn, apples, throw some paint on it, that’s it. I seen women and girls make a goddamn hay rake into a decoration with crepe paper and poison ivy.’

The door opened a few inches and Dub’s florid big-cheeked face thrust into the kitchen. In the thicket of his curly hair a bald spot appeared like a clearing in the woods. He pretended to look around guiltily. When his eyes came to Jewell’s he twisted up his mouth in mock fear, sidling into the room with his arm crooked across his face as if to ward off blows. His thighs were heavy and he had the short man’s scissory walk. He knew he was the fool of the family.

‘Don’t hit me, Ma, I’ll never be late again. Couldn’t help it this time. Hey, I got talkin’ with a fella, said his wife was one of the ones that was up on Camel’s Hump where that bomber went down, looking for the survivors of the crash?’

‘For pity’s sake,’ said Jewell.

Dub turned his chair around and straddled it, his good arm across the back, the empty left sleeve, usually tucked in his jacket pocket, hanging slack. A Camel cigarette balanced behind his right ear. For an instant Jewell remembered how shapely his forearms had been, the swelling flexors and the man’s veins like tight fine branchwood. Mink cut a dice of ham into pieces and scraped them onto Dub’s plate.

The kitchen seemed to Loyal to be falling outward like a perspective painting, showing the grain of the ham, the two shades of green of the wallpaper ivy, the ears of drying popcorn joined together in a twist of wire hanging over the stove, the word COMFORT on the oven door, Jewell’s old purse nailed to the wall to hold bills and letters, the pencil stubs in the spice can hanging from a string looped over a nail, Mernelle’s drawing of a flag tacked to the pantry door, the glass doorknob, the brass hook and eye, the sagging string and stained cretonne covering the cavity under the sink, the wet footprints on the linoleum, all flat and detailed, but receding from him like torn leaves in a flooding river. It seemed he had never before noticed his mother’s floral print apron, the solid way she leaned forward, her beaky nose and round ears. They had those ears, he thought, every one of them, forcing his mind away from what was up under the wall, and Mink’s black Irish hair, so fine you couldn’t see the single hairs.

Dub heaped the mashed potato on his plate, poured the yellow gravy over it and worked it in with his fork. He stuck a lump of chewing gum on the edge of the plate.

‘Plane was all over the mountain. One wing clipped a part of the lion, and then it just end-overed, wings broke off here, tail farther down, cockpit belly-bunted half a mile down. Tell you what, they don’t see how that guy lived through it, guy from Florida, just layin’ on the snow, guts and arms and legs from nine dead men all around him, and all he had was a couple cuts and scrapes, nothing even broke. Guy never even see snow before.’

‘What lion?’ asked Mernelle, picturing the beast behind snowy rocks.

‘Ah, the top of the mountain, looks like a lion gettin’ ready to jump, other guys thinks it looks like a part of a camel. The lion party wanted to call it “crouchin’ lion” but the camel lovers got their way. Camel’s Hump. It’s just stone up there, grade A granite. Looks like a pile of rock. Hey, don’t look like a camel or a lion or a porcupine. Don’t they learn you nothin’ in school!’

‘Seems like it’s been a terrible time the last year or so for terrible things. The War. The Chowder Girl subbing that needle in her eye. That was terrible. That poor woman in the bathtub in the hotel.’ Jewell unleashed one of her gusty sighs and stared away into the sad things that happen, that she guiltily savored. Her eyes were half closed, her thick wrists resting on the edge of the table, fork lying across her plate.

‘What about the fool things,’ said Mink, the words tangled in his mouth with potato and ham, the stubbled cheeks flexing as he chewed, ‘what about that fool that brought the can of blasting powder into the kitchen and put a match to it to see if it would burn. A fool thing, and half the town on fire on account of it and him and his brother’s whole family dead or torn up.’

‘What the hell is this?’ said Dub, pulling something from the mashed potato on his plate. ‘What the hell is this?’ holding up a bloodied Band-Aid.

‘Oh my lord,’ said Jewell, ‘throw it out. Take some new potato. I cut my finger peelin’ potatoes, then when I was settin’ the table I see I lost the Band-Aid somewhere. Must of fell in the potatoes when I was mashin’ ’em. Give it here,’ she said, getting up and scraping the potato in the pig’s slop bucket. She moved with a quick step, her lace-up oxfords with the stacked heels showing off her small feet.

‘Thought for a minute there,’ said Dub, ‘that the taters had the rag on.’

‘Dub,’ said Jewell.