Callie was the only woman I saw disrobe that summer. Mornings Callie lay out on Otto’s front lawn in her bikini before the day reached noon. The curve of her thighs and the flat of her stomach shone with oil. I passed the afternoons awaiting the sound of the occasional wood-paneled station wagon rumbling over the gravel, come to park at the base of the trail for a hike or a picnic over the butte. Even the milkman dropped our road from his circuit. If Mother wanted eggs, she had to send word via a form the postman delivered to the dairy. From a bird’s-eye view, our town might’ve resembled Ada and Wilson’s checkerboard; those people that moved did so with a worn-out deliberation.
Mother regarded the road with suspicion. She and Father sat in bed at night leafing through the local paper. To Mother, even the front page stories read like fiction. They reminded her, she said, of Birdie’s first trip to the train station. We’d made the voyage to visit Granny Olga in the city. Mother had wanted to see her daughter baptized in the old church. In the elevator on the way to the platform, Birdie had pointed to a man standing next to her. “Mommy,” she’d said. “Why is that man’s skin brown?” The elevator had been packed. There was no way the man had not overheard it. He shifted his weight, tugging on the edge of his suit jacket. “Country folk,” I’d heard him say to his companion as they exited the elevator. “Haven’t seen a shadow of the world bigger than their own two feet.”
I spied on Mother in bed nights flipping to the last page of the paper to read the police blotter, looking for some texture of life that had survived the summer’s suffocation. One evening she came across a headline about The Long Walker. She read the report aloud to Father: “Young ‘ambassador cougar.’ Seen by Nebraska Sowbelly. 23 Merriam Road. 6:30 pm. Attacked no humans or horses. Droppings consistent with Native Black Hills predator. Residents advised to keep pets indoors.”
“The Long Walker,” Mother said.
“What’s that?” Father said, flicking the edge of his page so the paper collapsed in the middle, enough for him to see over it and into his wife’s face.
“Nothing,” Mother said. She paused for a moment looking at Father’s eyes over the rims of his glasses.
“Have you heard of the Black Hills?” she said, tracing his beard with the back of her wrist as he nestled his hand between her thighs.
“Sure,” Father said, “Some 2,000 miles west of here. Highest peaks east of the Rockies.”
“That’s quite a distance,” Mother said.
“I’m more interested in these black hills,” Father said, digging his hand deeper into Mother’s lap.
The next day Mother drove Birdie and I out to the butte overlooking the highway while Father was at work. She parked on the edge of the cliff. Below the steep drop, cars sped by. The air had an industrial tinge to it, which Mother seemed to find comforting. She pushed the driver’s seat into recline so that she could rest her feet out the open window and feel the breeze whenever a truck passed. As we listened to the sound of the trucks cresting the hill before the way station, Mother took out the old Atlas that she kept crammed in the glove compartment of the car for emergency. The Black Hills, she told Birdie and me while taking Birdie on her lap in the driver’s seat, were an isolated mountain range that traversed from South Dakota to Wyoming. The trek east had taken the young ambassador nearly a year. As I looked out the window at the highway below, I pictured the body of the cougar as it emerged into the floodlights of Nebraska Sowbelly’s chicken coop. Father often surrendered after work to nature documentaries on PBS. His favorites were about large birds of prey. Beyond the scenery, I wasn’t much taken with these nostalgic glimpses of the hunt. What impressed me more were the strange feats of travel animals engaged in primarily for breeding. Birds flew south to the equator, migrating long distances called flyways, signaled by the length of the day. Salmon swum headlong upstream. Animals possessed honing devices that sounded at disparate intervals. This was something to which I sensed Mother could relate.
7
Not long after the Long Walker was first sighted, Mother blew the house out. An awkward tri-level structure set at the bottom of a hill, the face of the house was blocked from view of the road by two trees of knowledge, trees which, by the time we purchased the property had abandoned their vertical thrust and grown into rooty, gnarled affairs — save for in spring when they vomited garlands of nauseating white blossoms.
The exterior of the house was made to resemble an English style country house, really a New Englander’s version of an English style country house, a stately old salt box set amid sprawling beds of rugged wild flowers, thrifty crossbreeds that renewed themselves each year after the frost — both house and beds impermeable to any amount of cold or moist weather. Along with the apple trees, Mother called the house the Bottom Feeder.
“It opens up possibilities,” Mother said of the blow-out plan, “In a glass home you are so much closer to the reality of the world.” Modern living made life richer and deeper. She’d read it once in college in her roommate’s copy of Western Living with its barefoot architects and 1970s California contemporaries.
Unlike the temples of glass and steel of which Mother dreamt, the Bottom Feeder had been built with the goal of providing maximum insulation and cover from direct light. The previous owners, the stencilers, had been elderly. On our first visit to the property, the man of the house sat in a rocker in the living room, smoking his pipe in front of the wood stove. The living room was lined on the inside with reams of cedar paneling. The heat of the fire and the humidity of the man’s smoke fogged up the windows. For several months after we’d first moved in, the room smelled of wet wood and tobacco whenever it rained.
The exterior of the house was covered in a thick white stucco, a paint which, like the attitude of the house itself, retained a grainy, salt-and-pepper consistency. Occasionally, when you ran your hand over it, you discovered an unusually large blemish, a fly or two that had dried into the mix.
The blowing out of the house that summer was a family project. Mother hired a contractor to knock out the exterior wall of the house and install a band of modern floor-to-ceiling windows, large sheets of dual-paned glass, which she said would invite some of the outside world in. The contractor’s team was comprised of several high school boys who stomped around the living room in tank tops and works boots, flexing and sweating to the radio. Occasionally, they went into the yard to smoke a cigarette with Mother. What the blowout plan lacked in insulation, it made up for in Mother’s joy.
Once the windows were in, Birdie and I were given large soft-bristled brushes and sent to the sides of the house out of view of the road where the stucco finish had been abandoned in favor of wooden paneling, each panel thin enough that we could follow the grain and cover the entire width with a single stroke. When it came to painting, Father said the side of the house was all about getting on a good cover. Overlooking the marsh, appearance didn’t much matter.
It was after a Separatist’s meeting that the necessity of blowing out the house had come about. Birdie and I had spent a good part of the day at the Starlings’, swimming in their pool. Ruth and Ray Starling were our closest neighbors and Mother’s only friends on Fay Mountain, a fact established by proximity and common denominator; they were the only other couple under sixty living on our road.