I watched as Mother leaned close to Wilson on the rail, helping him remove the elastic of the mask from around one of his ears. “It’s okay,” she said, freeing him. “You can speak as much as you want out here. There so much air, whatever you have won’t travel.”
As The Sheik started to tire, I walked toward the far part of the pasture away from the jumps and the makeshift ring. The earth there was rocky and sloped, unsuitable for riding. I felt a pang of guilt in my stomach as I carried Margaret’s camera. She’d wanted me to capture some of her lift. I’d stood close to one of the oxers and snapped a few shots as she’d cleared them. Capturing the frames gave some pause to her steady forward throttle.
The far end of the pasture was covered in milkweed. It was the season where their husks dried and the pods split. I sat down in a dense patch on the far rise of the hill. There was a feeling of disassociation watching the seed take to the air. The area was thick with flies and bees that propagated the cycle.
As Margaret circled the ring through the haze of the milkweed, I was reminded of the winter Fay Mountain had been stormed in by a nor’easter. The drifts had risen half way up the door to the house. Father had to shovel a path into the yard. There was talk of pipes freezing. After the electricity went, I’d helped Father empty the contents of the refrigerator into bags which we’d buried in the drifts in front of the house. Mother’d grilled pancakes in a skillet on top of the wood stove. Afterwards, she’d washed Birdie and me in pots of water she had warmed on the wood stove. By the time we carried the pots to the bathroom, the water had already gathered some of the chill of the house. We stood for a quick dousing. Mother took off her rings and set them on the rim of the tub so as not to scratch us. “Those will be yours,” she’d said, “After I go.”
We’d driven to the barn. Margaret had insisted. She needed to get home. Mother sat in the front seat with her legs stretched out over the bench toward Margaret as we drove away. “Chicken legs,” Margaret teased her. Margaret drove as she did normally, one hand at midnight, one leg crushed up under her crotch. The brush at the bottom of the driveway to Otto’s barn grew thick over the fence. “Blind drive,” Father had warned Mother. “Be careful when you turn out.”
The accident happened much the way I’d watched The Sheik leap up over the rail as Margaret had ridden him. The world slowed. Movements were jerky and halting. He’d come careening. He’d accelerated around the corner. His bike went up and over the hood. We watched through the windshield.
Mother was the first out of the Volvo. I recognized the tan of the windbreaker laying in the gutter to the side of the road. It was Wilson. “Don’t move, baby,” Mother said crouching down next to him. She patted the old man’s hair where it folded over his forehead. Mother’d had an accident once in a barn as a youngster. Her spine had ruptured on the concrete where she’d fallen out of the loft. “Don’t move her,” the man who owned the barn had said to her parents. For a few weeks she’d been in a body cast. Afterwards she’d walked off.
We waited silently by Wilson’s body until the ambulance came.
That night Margaret stayed with us. “He’ll be alright,” Mother said. “He’s a good boy.” Every few hours the phone rang. Callie called from the hospital with updates. “Observation,” she said. “There’s nothing we can do now but wait.”
Margaret sat in the club chair in our living room while Father smoked his cigars. Every now and again she got up and paced the room. She had the same blank face I’d seen on Father the morning I’d found him sitting there after Mother had left for the city. “Don’t stare,” Mother said to me, adjusting the afghan on Margaret’s shoulders.
For Margaret’s sake we went through the motions. “Blind drive,” Mother repeated, taking Margaret’s hand as she led her up the stairs to bed later that evening. “It could’ve happened to any one of us.”
Margaret passed the night with my parents. Mother made her a bed on the chaise that lined the far end of their room under the window.
I woke in the night to the phone ringing. Granny Olga answered it. After she hung up, she padded up the stairs in her slow heavy gait. She paused outside my parents’ room before she entered to collect her breath. I reached down between my legs to feel around for something to make me feel better. Something to make me land. All I felt was the sweat from the day and the nervousness.
Sometime later I needed to pee. As I crossed the hall, I stopped in front of my parents’ room. Their light was on. The door was open a crack. Margaret was standing on the deck where Father went out to do his screaming when he couldn’t sleep nights. He was standing there now beside her with his back turned. Margaret was in Mother’s arms. They had closed the slider so as not to wake us. Through the glass I could make out the outline of Margaret’s face as she covered it with a pillow and unleashed whatever it was she was needing to say.
In that moment, I felt Wilson’s presence rise up over the road. I imagined him as he had been in the barn that evening. “I’m gonna rake a girl,” he’d said, dancing in the dimly lit barn. Here was the moment, I thought, when all the knowledge the world had kept from him came rushing back into his body like the third eye I’d often heard Margaret speak to Mother about.
“What’s the difference between vision and a vision?” Margaret had said, placing her fingers on her forehead and exhaling the breath in her body until she was empty, so empty she said she felt weightless until her chest rose up again and sucked the world back in.
I had seen Wilson’s face that night. His breath had steamed up the window despite the summer heat, Skeeter Davis’s “The End of the World” playing on the hi-fi in the background. “Just lie back,” I’d said. Or maybe Otto’d said, “Just look out the window.” When Wilson had knocked, I’d looked up at him. He’d waved. “Let him watch,” Otto had said.
Perhaps, I thought, this is what is meant by witness. The act of stealing something private from someone, something they otherwise would never have released into the world. As Margaret released her long, low scream, I thought I was free. I knew Wilson was no longer with us.
20
The roads that circled the town were hilly and lush. Occasionally on the bus when school resumed, we passed one of the old farmhouses with their acres of clear land traversed by long runs of post and fence. Windmills of painted pewter spun over the barns. Animals were once again let outdoors. If you closed your eyes to a slit and looked out the window you could follow the gradations of green as the landscape shifted. A short jaunt down the road was a single story prefab, the likes of which I’d seen the tractor trailer trucks deliver down the highway. The bikers who lived there had plowed a circular drive in front of the house to park their chrome. A line of roadsters littered the drive and the grove under the pine trees in front of the house. They’d hung an American flag out a window. Next was the junkyard where people brought the automobiles they’d driven to the ground.
Stacks of compacted cars towered around a two-door garage constructed of plywood and strips of corrugated metal. The sign out front advertised tires and parts. A pit bull ran the length of the barbwire that lined the yard each morning as we passed.
Granny Olga had seen me off the first morning. “Here,” she’d said pushing a small bag of wax paper into my hand before I’d boarded the bus. “One for each of your little friends.” She was standing on the porch, her hair still wet on the curlers. Around the thin ply of her nightgown she’d wrapped the old mink Mother kept in the closet in the hall, the one she’d bought in the city.