On the bus home the day after the fire I found Fender, drunk and shitty. He looked tired, like some of the smut from his brother’s walls had rubbed off on him. I hadn’t seen him in some time. There was still that line between us. There was still the way he’d said, “Sing me something sweet. Sing me that one about San Francisco.” He’d said, “You’re that old man’s little darling.”
“Faker,” I said as I passed him. “You just wanted to show up this morning so that one of us could say we heard your voice chime in when the teacher called roll. ‘Fender Steelhead?’ she said. ‘Yes,’ you said. You just wanted us to hear her call your name.”
I wondered how long he’d spent washing the soot off his arms.
Perhaps he didn’t care. Perhaps he’d already stepped over that white line and didn’t plan on coming back. He was already sitting with K, or Kat or Katherine, when I boarded. As we neared K’s stop Fender began tossing packets of rubbers over the seat. The rubbers were small and red. K took one out and blew it up and the two volleyed it like a balloon.
I didn’t know what a rubber was. But I knew that there was something ugly between them. I knew K would’ve taken Fender’s hand in hers and invited him upstairs to Mother’s bed. Perhaps she already had.
When I arrived home Mother was in the yard. The horses were tethered to the crossties we’d strung between the electric poles where we parked the cars.
“What about Otto?” I said.
“What about Otto?” she said.
“Nothing,” I said.
“I don’t like how he looks at you,” she said.
“Where will we keep them?” I said.
“We’ll build our own barn,” she said. “In the meantime, we’ll board at the farm up street. I called this morning. They’ve got room.”
“They’ve always got room,” I said.
We led the horses up the road toward the new barn. I thought of the night Fender and I sat on the boulder in front of the drive to the Starlings’ house. I thought of the old blind guy in the golf hat and his fat wife. And too of Father walking down the road next to Otto dragging the Shetland’s blanket. “I haven’t stolen anything yet,” Father had said to Otto.
Mother and I walked in silence. The only thing between us was the sound of the horse’s hooves in the dirt of the road.
“They’re paving this fall,” Mother said glancing down at the places where the dust had gathered around her boots.
I looked up the long narrow expanse ahead of us.
Wilson’s dying wasn’t the last of our troubles. It turns out our doctor was a sham. As happens with the travel of news, the Ranger had misheard his story. The doctor wasn’t a medic at all but rather a painter who’d attended art school in Rhode Island in the 70’s. After New York had failed him, he’d witnessed the demise of his first marriage to a young prostitute and had spoiled on the city altogether. He’d met a waitress in a diner one night on his way home from scoring some hash in the park. The waitress had dropped off nursing school and was thinking of getting back to the theatre where she belonged. That night the painter convinced her she belonged to him and the countryside. He moved her out to Fay Mountain to a simpler pace of life, away from the critics and the customers, where they could stare down their disappointments in each other’s company. The doctor painted seascapes and farmhouses. He sold them to local banks and hospitals. Callie had seen one hanging in the hall of the emergency room on the evening she’d gone to visit Wilson before he died, an oil painting of a single sailboat in a bay. That’s all our doctor amounted to, a lousy sailboat in the death wing a second-rate hospital. This explained the pheasants and his wife’s pregnancies. He was an artist and a layabout. He spent all day fucking. When he wasn’t fucking he was out painting the birds.
The news of our doctor’s demise was the pinnacle of the town’s disappointment. We’d lain waste our hopes on his good name.
That’s not the half of it.
A young farmhand had commandeered Cash’s heart. The girl was also a painter and something of a talent. According to the local paper, she’d kept up in a small studio in the center of town. For several months Cash had been begging Ada for a divorce so that he could marry the girl and do right by her talent.
The girl kept a stand at the flea market next to the cabinetmaker. Hers, Margaret said, was the watercolor which hung in the post. I had first glimpsed the girl out of the corner of my eye the day Father and I went to the flea market to purchase Baby. I recognized her months later by her picture in the paper. The picture ran in the Police Records section a few days after Wilson’s death. The article was short. According to the report, the police had been called out to Cash’s farm stand on several occasions that summer. The neighbors had heard people rowing late into the night. When the police had arrived there were holes in the plaster from where Ada had chased Cash around with the broom. The last time they’d had been summoned, Cash had been on his hands and knees cleaning Ada’s preserves off the floorboards when the police arrived. Cash too had his picture in the paper. A long vertical shot of his body which made him look even lonelier than he was. His face was beaten. His hands were covered in flies.
I had seen Cash’s girl working in the fields several times while biking to the farm stand to collect vegetables for dinner. She wore a large wicker bonnet such as the ones the itinerant works wore to shade their face. Father said he thought he’d seen her once sitting in the little office in back of the farm stand strumming on an old cigar-box guitar. “I’d recognize a good White Owl anywhere,” Father had said.
After a while it seemed everyone in the town had once known her. Ray had seen her taking numbers from the circulars he posted outside the barbershop. She’d sold Ruth a bag of peaches for her pie. Even the old half-blind couple who lived next door claimed to have seen the girl pushing a cart at the market. Margaret swore she’d caught her in the stacks at the library taking out books. The boys in town said she’d stop by the diamond in back of the schoolyard to watch the neighborhood kids toss the baseball around.
“Where you from, girl?” they’d say.
“Kansas,” she’d say.
Eventually she just said, “I’ve been around.”
It seemed odd that no one had found her out. Cash was a quiet man, Margaret reasoned with Mother. “He provided a blank slate,” she said. “It’s only habit to draw when there’s so much not knowing hanging around.”
Afternoons alone in the box that had once housed Father’s mower where Fender and I had spent so many afternoons, I used to imagine Fender and K and how we’d all once been. Fender no longer visited. The box was damp now and sagged in places from the changing of the seasons. Liden’s smut had blown off the walls.
The evening of Wilson’s funeral, the wind was so strong I could stand in the yard and smell the last of the season’s fruits where they sat rotting down the road in their crates. Otto had waited two seasons before spreading his son out over the earth. He’d let the fall go by and with the ground now frozen, the best he could do was toss Wilson around the field and let the wind take him where it thought he should settle. Wilson never was much of a walking man. This was as far as he’d travel, I supposed.
I wasn’t allowed to attend the funeral. Otto would be there and there was Mother’s suspicions and the idea, too, that children should not be exposed to death. Birdie needed a sitter.
Otto’s was the first car to return after the service. I was surprised to see his headlights turn the corner. After the sun set and I was sure Wilson was in the wind, I sat out on the portico watching the road waiting for my parents to return. As Otto’s headlights pulled into his drive I was struck by his burden. His Helene was still hanging on, her presence both absent and livid. Every night as he climbed the stairs toward his bed, leaving her alone on the pullout in the living room, I was sure Otto prayed he’d descend to find she’d relieved him.