Shelter (1994) Read online

  "What for?"

  "Oh, god. Let's get finished. I'm hungry, I'm so starved. I want to miss flag raising and go to breakfast."

  They traded off, tossing collapsed metal cups into the water, setting the clothes basket in the stream itself to receive whatever seemed clean enough to pass muster. Cap was so silent, Lenny could tell she was scared—or not scared, but puzzling it all out. Crossing the meadow to the woods, with Cap behind her, both of them lugging their silly, cumbersome burdens, Lenny had wanted to tell her it was a pact, like other promises they'd made. But once they'd got to the stream, she couldn't get herself to speak. It was like she was awake and Cap wasn't. Like Cap was always teasing her, pushing, but looking for where to move, how far to go. Mornings, Lenny lay in her cot, waiting for Cap to wake up, listening.

  Very early, crows fed in the space of tangled weeds and tall grass behind their tent. Just after dawn the ratchety screams began, sounding near and far, overlapping echoes that approached and faded. The racket never seemed to wake Cap. She was a bronze color now and slept outflung, like a golden net. Her auburn hair had lost the distinct salon shape Catherine Briarley had charged Juanita with maintaining at a shop in Winfield twice a month; now it nearly touched her shoulders and curled in the humidity. Lenny would look into a shaft of sun, closing her eyes to peer into that cranberry red behind her lids; the red was luminous, like lit-up blood; she could watch it dapple and break into black spots that revolved like dividing cells. Cap liked to say the bats and the morning birds were Queen Lenore's minions, a joke mythology. But the bats were a night populace, no joke. They whistled in Lenny's dreams, sucking a black juice. The crows were black too, but glossy, bigger than chickens. Floppy when they walked, slightly drunken. But they could swoop and dive, hunt with their feet. Their noise was adoration Cap didn't seem to hear, a raucous threat, a beckoning; Lenny imagined the crows alighting with offerings of mice and bats, and hard-shelled water bugs, marooned on their scarab backs. It was praise Lenny understood, praise she might organize, like the ritual of throwing flowers in the stream, chains of ripped scraps and ragged stems to dress their ankles.

  "Look, Cap, the flowers are still here from yesterday." Lenny was standing in the water, pointing to colors in the current.

  "Caught on the rocks. It's so shallow." Cap took the bucket from Lenny and dumped the dishes into a tangled clatter on the bank. "You want more flowers? What a glutton. I could throw some at you."

  "They do look like food." Lenny bent down to cup water in her palm, and drank it, mincing a scarlet petal between her front teeth. She smiled at Cap, and the red stain was on her lips.

  The water gurgled, dappled with flowers that still looked fresh. Pale blue chicory winked and floated, thrown in yesterday by the handful, and the spidery yellow loosestrife bobbed on woody stems. The bee balm were deep red, like wounds in the cold water, and clumps of mountain laurel were the size of snowballs.

  "I have a dream about us being in the stream," Lenny told Cap.

  It was true. Lenny dreamed about Cap when the bats were flying. She dreamed when the crows screamed. Lenny floated on her back in the dream, and she wore a sequined gown like the dress Cap kept draped in plastic in the back of her closet. Catherine Winthrop had worn the dress as a debutante. She really had been Catherine Winthrop then, Cap said, in Connecticut, her brocade skirt sewn with pearls. In Lenny's dream the heavy bodice of the dress was even more elaborate, an armor of beaded flowers bearing Lenny up, and she couldn't open her eyes. Cap stood over her, gently directing the float of her body with long sticks.

  Lenny knew the beaded dress probably still hung in Cap's closet, but Cap's mother was gone. She was turning into Catherine Winthrop again, for real, taking back her maiden name and living in Connecticut with Cap's grandparents. Cap was supposed to be Catherine Briarley now; she was supposed to leave Gaither in the fall and be rewarded with her own sports car. Like Catherine Winthrop of Connecticut, Catherine Briarley was destined to attend a good eastern boarding school and then go on to Barnard, but Catherine Briarley existed nowhere on earth. If she did exist, Cap liked to intone in a vicious hiss, she would be dangerous and vengeful, a desperado implemented to avenge Catherine Winthrop, who likewise did not exist in Gaither, West Virginia.

  A long time ago, Cap had learned to curse as her father cursed, voice held in check, the flat, buttery Georgia inflection and the words burned in, branded on the flesh of their intended: You want I should send her off to some horse-infested snoot school, pay to get her bedded bucked and fucked by some married faculty shit who digs for urns in Turkey and then gives schoolgirls the clap, wasn't that how it went? Lenny was supposed to join in then, doing Cap's mother's voice, a funny, broken tone, defeated, choked with rage: You ignorant rube, you like it that she spends her time with kids whose fathers crawl around in that mine of yours. One of these days she'll marry some grease monkey from the Texaco station and then you'll be satisfied, write her a big check when she hasn't got a dime and be the hero. Now Cap's version of Henry's laughter, picking up words in a mocking interrogative: Big check? Why, she won't need any big check? She'll have that famous trust fund your daddy will invent any day now? She can marry the fucking janitor out at Consol and fly him to some ritz penthouse? Then, flatly: Let her do anything, but don't let her be you—you ate done for. Now an exaggeration of Henry's disappointed, self-mocking chuckle: You have been done many times. And remember, if you condescend to play golf in Gaither, you'd better be playing with somebody's wife. This is not Westchester County or New Haven, your checkered career is over.

  Their fights had taught Cap the only version she knew of her mother's history, and she'd taught Lenny that history as intimate sport between them. Catherine Briarley was nothing like Lenny's experience of a mother, nothing like Audrey, with her endless stories and harangues. Catherine told her daughter nothing, only said, softly, to Juanita, Henry is a bastard. She said it so Cap heard; she said it for Cap. In Gaither, no friends picked Catherine up in convertibles; she'd had only Juanita. Catherine was gone now but Juanita was still there. Juanita was the maid who wore no uniform because there were no maid's uniforms in Gaither, whose husband dropped her off in the pickup each morning and retrieved her after supper. Last fall, shortly after Catherine Briarley had decamped, Juanita would sit peeling potatoes while Lenny and Cap did their homework at the same kitchen table. She tightened her lips while the girls traded lines, repeated, arms akimbo, giggling, the same words she'd once heard float down from the ceiling in the raised voices of the original speakers. Juanita would click her tongue and watch the kitchen clock. When Cap mouthed some of Henry's more colorful epithets, she'd cross herself and begin to giggle too, darting her eyes at her charge as though half afraid and half delighted. Cap said Juanita was a gypsy from over around Dago Hill. She'd never really been a maid but she was the only one who'd answered the ad. She's punctual and she doesn't steal, Lenny was supposed to say when they were alone in Cap's room upstairs. What the hell would she want that you've got, Cap would laugh, being Henry. Cap told how they broke glasses quarreling, drinking cocktails, and Juanita would clean up the mess before she left. At night, Henry went to Catherine's room. Juanita had gone home and didn't hear the muffled sounds Cap thought were more fighting until she was old enough to discern the difference.

  Now Lenny knew: the sounds were a kind of fighting, a weeping. Last night she herself had cried out and they had all disappeared in the sound. Frank's hands were on her breasts, kneading them like a cat, like he wanted something out of them, and his mouth and his jaw and his teeth were in her neck. Cap and Lenny had played games with their bodies before, but now it was different. The water at night was silky camouflage: Cap had wanted to touch Frank, touch her, move them around like they were blind animals. But she'd got scared. It was scary to watch; maybe she had put her hand on Lenny to keep Frank out. She wanted Frank to show them what people did, and she wanted to keep him out.

  "I heard you crying in your sleep. You were dreaming ab
out me then, weren't you?"

  "I dreamed about my sister," Lenny said.

  "But I'm your sister," Cap said, nudging her. "You're supposed to dream about me, aren't you?"

  "You are my sister. You're as bad as Alma."

  They had to do the dishes so often that the chore was automatic. They knelt side by side, their knees in the water, one of them scrubbing at the plates with a flat rock, the other dunking them in the bucket to rinse, then back into the stream. They sat like penitents, their shoulders nearly touching.

  Cap piled the wet plates bottom up, in little towers that tilted and fell. "If you're asleep and I'm awake, I think of things for you to dream."

  "Like what?"

  "Things I know, things of mine. Things you could keep for me, so I could forget them. Like when I first moved to Gaither and I just was alone all the time, except for the cats."

  She'd lived in Gaither five years. That first summer, Catherine had stayed in Connecticut. Henry and Cap had lived out of suitcases, their clothes laundered but never ironed, the big rooms of the Victorian house emptying off each other like a series of deserted squares. Lenny couldn't believe there was a time when Cap didn't know her: Cap lying on the cool wooden floor of her room after Henry went to the mine office, knowing all she had to do that day was wash the sticky plates from her father's fried eggs. There must have been cicadas starting in the summer trees, lulling Cap back to sleep with their warbled buzzing. Lenny let her wake up when the light had changed, run from room to room, draw the blinds and shut windows to keep the house cool. She ran the narrow back stairs Lenny knew so well, up and down from attic to basement, yelling. At noon she made sandwiches for herself and poured cups of milk for the stray cats that lived in the ruined garden of the house.

  "I remember you had cats," Lenny said.

  "There were a lot of cats, like eight or nine. The house had been empty for about a year, and all these kittens had grown up wild. I got some of them to let me tie yarn around their necks and I called them by the colors—Red, Blue, Black. They would all hide in the plants when I came out to the garden, but I wouldn't give them any food until they let me touch them. Then my dad found out about them."

  "What did he do?"

  "He called the dogcatcher and they came with these big nets. But they didn't catch them all. They caught the ones with the collars, the ones I'd tamed. Your parents will always do that to you, won't they."

  "Do what?"

  "Make you part of some trap they think up."

  Lenny laughed. "Remember confirmation class?"

  "That was the first day I saw you, at the church. My dad always tried to make me stay at home until he got back from work—we didn't have Juanita then. But one day I left and walked downtown."

  Lenny imagined the neighborhood, saw it stretch out as empty as the house; for a block on either side, the expansive Queen Annes with walled yards continued. No cars drove by. No kids—older doctors and dentists, aged professors from the local college, their aged wives who stayed indoors, escaping the heat. The map played out: just before Main Street and a downtown of hardware stores, banks, gas stations, ladies' shops, the three restaurants Cap and her father patronized for supper, was the Baptist church, a red brick edifice whose vast windows were leaded in fantastic shapes. Here Cap first saw Lenny, waiting on the steps of the church while her mother signed her up for girls' confirmation classes. She lay across the steps as though the steps were not hard stone, her pale hair in braids, her face so still Cap thought she was asleep and bent over her, looking. When Lenny opened her eyes and stared, her gaze was empty and calm, like a placid lake. Perhaps she'd seemed the opposite of Catherine Briarley; she'd seemed someone who belonged where she was, like rain on a window.

  "You must have walked over a mile," Lenny said. "Didn't we get Cokes at the drugstore? And my mom took you home later. She went on and on at me about your big house."

  "I couldn't believe how you were just lying across the steps, like some bewitched Sleeping Beauty—"

  "My mother had dragged me to the church and I wouldn't go inside, and it was hot and the stone was cool, and I knew she'd be pissed off when she came out and saw me lying there." Lenny was laughing, and shaking the wet metal cups against rocks in the water. The cups jingled. "But I heard this voice in my face, 'Wake up,' and there you were, like you appeared out of nowhere. You made out to my mother that you'd come to sign up to be a Baptist."

  "I did become a Baptist. I guess I'm still a Baptist. I mean, I was never unconfirmed."

  They'd sat together in the sanctuary for weeks while the minister lectured them about joining God's flock. A stained-glass Jesus and the Children towered over them. Light poured through Jesus' robe, scarlet against the blue sky of that other world. They practiced sitting very still in the pew, pretending to be incarnations of the girl in the massive image, the child whose hand rested on a lamb, whose expectant gaze was the essence of glass.

  "Lenny, what happened to the scour pad?"

  "I don't know. It disappeared yesterday."

  "Lenny, you lose everything. I don't know if I'm going to lend you any shoes."

  "Rocks scour the plates just fine. And I'm going to find my own shoes. Who wants to wear pink sneakers, and they won't fit anyway."

  "Juanita packed them. She likes pink. My mother has a deal with Juanita to make sure I get all the stuff she sends me from Connecticut."

  Lenny sat back on her heels. "Didn't your mother finally move down to Gaither after she found out your dad let you join the church? We wore those white gowns that were barely sewn up the sides. And we gave each other lilies. Remember?" Her eyes widened and she fixed Cap with a look that was nearly startled, like she'd forgotten the flowers and their milky smell.

  Together, they'd been confirmed. Henry, amused, had watched from the congregation. Their baptism took place the next morning, privately, in the strange cement pool behind the altar. The pool was a rectangle perhaps five feet deep, hidden behind a heavy velvet curtain. The girls wore white cotton gowns and were barefoot; the pool was filled with water made aquamarine by chlorine drops. Potted lilies lined the border of the cement. The snowy, waxen flowers seemed drowsy. Lenny felt herself submerged in the minister's black-robed arms, her hair swirling in an underwater cloud. She was the only one who'd believed she would float in the act of coming to God, her arms straight in her belled sleeves. When the minister let go and raised his hands to say the words, Lenny opened her eyes, gazing upward as though the roof had lifted from the building. Sinking, she exhaled a Milky Way of tiny bubbles and found Cap within that liquid crescent—she never remembered seeing anyone jump in. She opened her mouth to laugh—suddenly it was all so funny—but the water was big and filled her up when she tried to talk. They grabbed the folds of each other's gowns and struggled to the surface. There they stood gasping, doubly confirmed: it was the first time they'd tried to save anything but themselves.

  BUDDY CARMODY: CARVE THE CROSS

  Waxy rhododendron leaves were cold against his face and neck, they smelled of carrots, cold and sweet, and he pressed them to his mouth, peering through green cover to watch the girls at the stream. The others were sounds receding down the mountain, the soft pounding of their footsteps repeated and repeated. But somehow Lenny and Cap were here, kneeling, their hands in water, jangling and clanking a dank, pretty music. Banging stones, Buddy thought, and he wanted to do it too, then he saw the pile of tin plates and spoons and metal cups they were rinsing in the stream. They were talking and saying words but he didn't hear any words, only the trill and inflection of the words and the laughter, the pour and splash of water, and he could hear their bodies, he thought he could, the way they crouched and knelt and moved on their haunches, their wrinkled blouses white in the clearing by the water. They held out their long creamy arms to each other, handing off piles of plates and stacks of the collapsible metal cups that came in Girl Guide mess kits.

  Buddy had a cup like that at home, one he'd found last fall at Highest
when the tents were rolled up and stored under a tarp. Then the weathered platforms on stilts sat empty like big scattered pieces of a finished game. Buddy had leapt from one to another, hollering like he was after the Russians because these were army tents, and he pretended he was painted in wobbly, muddy colors like the army used when they wanted to hide in the woods. The Russians in his game had faces like Dad's and like prison men, pinched-up faces and wild, tangled hands, and they wore blue prison uniforms like Dad used to wear. Buddy could see them wherever they were, but they couldn't see him, he was invisible, spotted brown and green like the army guys in comic books.

  Now Lenny and Cap looked dappled too, spotted by shade and sun. They really were part of some army, Buddy thought, gold pins on their shirts and braided pockets, but they looked rumpled and their hair was messed. They couldn't win. No matter how old they were, they were only two girls, tall grownup girls, and the Russians would grab them and beat them and put them in prison, and Buddy would make a rescue, yelling special words and fighting with a stick. Russians would get Lenny first because she was the tallest girl in camp, and she would fall asleep in prison from being scared, like Buddy fell asleep sometimes if a bad thing happened. Buddy would make a litter out of sapling sticks and rope with blankets on top, just like he'd seen Mam do once for a big old hound dog lame in two legs. But the dog had been a bundled heap on the litter, crouched low while they pulled him along, and Lenny would stretch out long and thin, sleeping. The dog had stayed on their porch a week before he healed enough to run off, but Buddy would take Lenny to the cave near Turtle Hole and she would never run off: Buddy would tell her how Russians lived in the woods. Russians would look for her but never find her: only Buddy knew about the cave, how it opened like a yawn as tall as him behind bushes and brushy cover, just under the back ledge of the diving rock at Turtle Hole. Lenny could sleep on the mossy rock floor, inside where Buddy was afraid to go, and Buddy would bring food to her; Lenny could wash her metal plates in this same shallow stream as it rattled through the back of the cave in the dark. Lenny would make the same sounds she made now, scouring the plates with stones. Her long pale hair hung loose and dragged in the stream when she bent over. Buddy crept closer and thought her hair would cling to his hands like corn silk damp from the husk.