“Used to be an old Indian woman around here who’d do that for you,” Duane said, looking at the pulpy mess in my hand. “Make medicine out of herbs and like that. Like Rinn did, too. But what you got there is liable to get pretty dirty. We’ll wash her out before we put on the gauze. How’d you get a thing like that, anyhow?”
“Oh, it was just a stupid fit of temper.”
The moss had become dark with blood, an uncomfortably soggy thing to hold, and I dropped the messy handful onto the grass and turned to walk up the drive to Duane’s house. A dog lying panting by the granary looked attentively at the bloody pad.
“You get into a fight?”
“Not really. I just had a little accident.”
“Remember that time you totaled that car just outside Arden?”
“I don’t think I could forget it,” I said. “I just about bought it.”
“Wasn’t that after that time out at the—”
“It was, yes,” I broke in, not wanting him to utter the word “quarry.”
“That was a hell of a time,” he said. “I was in my truck going down the road right after you, but when you turned right on 93, I went the other way toward Liberty. I just drove around. After about an hour—”
“Okay, that’s enough.”
“Well, you know, I was going to—”
“That’s enough. It’s all in the past.” I wanted to shut him up and was desperately sorry we had ever got on this topic. Several steps behind me, the dog began growling and whining. Duane bent down and picked up a stone and threw it at the animal; I kept walking straight ahead. I was holding my hand out from my side, letting my blood drip steadily down my fingers, and I imagined that skulking creeping black-and-white beast crawling toward me. The stone connected; the dog yelped, and I could hear it pelting off to a safe distance. I looked around and saw a trail of bright drops on the grass.
“You gonna call Auntie Rinn today?” Duane had reached the cement steps to his house, and was standing down there, his head tilted up at me. “I told her you were coming, Miles, and I guess she understood. I think she wants to see you.”
“Rinn?” I asked, incredulous. “Is she still alive? I was just thinking that she must have died years ago.”
He smiled — the infuriating disbelief of an insider. “Dead? That old bird? Nothing can kill her.”
He came up the stairs and I followed him into his house. The door opened onto a hallway off the kitchen, which was much as it had been when Uncle Gilbert had been alive: patterned linoleum on the floor, a long Formica-topped dining table, the same porcelain stove. But the walls looked yellowish, and the entire room had an air of dirt and neglect only partially explained by the greasy handprints on the refrigerator and the stack of dishes by the sink. There was dust even on the mirror. It looked like the sort of room where an army of ants and mice are poised behind the walls, waiting for the lights to go off.
He saw me gazing around. “The damn kid’s supposed to keep the kitchen clean, but she’s about as responsible as a…” He shrugged. “A cowflop.”
“Imagine what your mother would say if she could see it.”
“Oh, I’m used to it this way,” he said, blinking. “Besides, it don’t do to hold to the past like that.”
I thought he was wrong. I have always held to the past, I thought that it could, would, should be repeated indefinitely, that it was the breathing life in the heart of the present. But I couldn’t speak of this to Duane. I said, “Tell me about Auntie Rinn. Were you hinting that she’s deaf?” I went to the sink and held my dripping hand over it.
“Hang on while I get the gauze and tape,” he said, and lumbered away toward the bathroom. When he returned he took my hand and held it under a stream of cold water from the tap. “You couldn’t say she was deaf. You couldn’t say she was blind. The way I make it out, she sees what she wants to see and hears what she wants to hear. But don’t mess; around with her. If she wants to hear it, she’ll hear. She’s sharp. She knows everything that’s going on.”
“Can she get around?”
“She doesn’t leave her place much. Neighbors buy her groceries, the little she needs, but she still has her egg business. And she rents out her little field to Oscar Johnstad. I reckon she gets by. But now she’s in her eighties, we don’t even see her at church.”
Surprisingly, Duane was a good nurse. As, he talked, he quickly dried my hand with a dishtowel, pressed a big pad of absorbent cotton onto the wound and wrapped a broad strip of tape around the base of my hand, winding it around both sides of my thumb. “Now,” he said when he was finishing. “We’re gonna make you look like a farmer.”
Farms are notorious for accidents: slings, bandages and amputated limbs are commonplaces in rural communities, as are suicides, mental instability and sullen temperaments. In the latter particulars, but not the former, they resemble academic communities. Both are usually thought of as havens of serenity. I entertained myself with these reflections while Duane made his final pass with the roll of tape, tore it with his blunt fingers, and anchored the loose end firmly at the base of my hand. I looked like a farmer: a good omen for the completion of my dreadful work.
Oh, for it was dreadful, an insult to spirit. As the fingers of my left hand began to tingle, suggesting the possibility that Duane might have wound the tape over-tightly, I realized how much I disliked writing academic criticism. I decided that once I had finished my book and had made my job secure, I’d never write another word of it.
“Anyhow,” Duane said, “you could call her up or just go over.”
I would. I thought I would drive over to her farm in the next day or two, after I had settled in at the old farmhouse. Auntie Rinn, I thought, was inhabited by spirit, she was spirit in one of its forms, like the girl whose photograph could make my tongue a stone. I heard the door open and close behind me.
“Alison,” Duane said matter-of-factly but with an undertone of anger. “Cousin Miles has been wondering where you were.”
I turned around, aware that I did not look normal. Gazing sardonically, even contemptuously at me, though with a trace of interest — the contempt seemed defensive and automatic — was a rather thickset, thoroughly Nordic blond girl of seventeen or eighteen. His daughter. Of course. “Big deal,” she said. She was the girl I had seen that morning, clinging to the rider of the motorcycle. “He looks sick. You threaten him or something?”
I shook my head, still trembling but beginning to recover. It had been stupid of me not to remember her name. Heavy-breasted in her T shirt, large in hip and thigh, she was still an attractive girl, and I was aware of what an odd figure I appeared to her.
Duane looked, over at me, then looked again, observing that I was shaken. “This is my girl Alison, Miles. You wanta sit down?”
“No,” I said. ‘I’m fine, thanks.”
“Where were you?” asked Duane.
“Why is it your business?” said this stocky warrior with lank blond hair. “I went out.”
“Alone?”
“Well, if it’s any of your business, I was with Zack.” Again, that flat glass-breaking glare. “We passed him on the road. He’d probably tell you anyhow, so I might as well.”
“I didn’t hear the bike.”
“Jesus,” she groaned, her face an ugly mask of disdain. “Okay. He stopped down by the other house so you wouldn’t hear. I walked up the road. You satisfied? Okay?”
Her face twitched, and I saw that what I had taken for disdain was only embarrassment. It was that torturing embarrassment of the teens, and aggression was her weapon against it.
“I don’t like you seeing him.”
“Suppose you try and stop me.” She strode past the two of us into another part of the house. A television set went on a moment later; then she called from another room, “You ought to be out working anyhow.”