Chapter One
Fits and Starts
Downstairs in the café a few days back two half brothers went to blows. Cap and Wheeler, fools as old as I am and so far past fighting age you had to shake your head to see them roostered up and feathers flared. The younger boxed the elder, blacked his eye. Gus Wharton, know-it-all and self-appointed hero, by his own account the oldest living black-faced cook in white-faced Oklahoma, took it on himself to fetch our thickest Angus beefsteak to put on the rising bruise.
The brothers' set-to, feeble as it was, had been a lifetime coming. Everybody said so. What would you expect, two men as unalike as Cap and Wheeler, Cap a born-again-and-loud-about-it stockman and Wheeler a state-your-business judge, the way they shouldered up against each other all their lives, brothers as different and the same as, well, as sisters? Their argument concerned the afterlife, as near as anyone could tell, and didn't last a minute. Before you blinked, the two made up, and by and by they left, each to his peculiar progress.
After they were gone Gus groused about the bunch that meets on Thursdays here in the café, the Old Bulls. A pack of long-eared coffee hounds, neck backs gullied down as sand draws? Have to occupy their sacred window table? They're your boys.
"Hot air the lot," Gus grumped, "blowhards and gasbags to a man."
I told him, "Gus, what scares you most about yourself is what you pick to fuss about in anybody else." I told him that the truth was, as far as Old Bulls went, Augustus Adam Wharton looked a little beefy and long in the tooth himself.
His royal self banged down a pot lid, hoisted up his old sag-bottom pants, gummed around his everlasting toothpick, "Maxine, you'd better palsy out and water your petunias. Things out there are looking wizened-up as you."
"Well," I said—or wanted to—"and after all we've been through, Gus, and me the café's boss and ranking you in age and wisdom both." Bit my tongue for knowing he'd come back with, "All right, Max Factor, let's sit down and have a head-to-head about the wisdom part," and remind me for the umpty-hundredth time about a stupid thing I'd almost done to wreck my life a final time a dozen years before.
No matter what the brothers' trouble was or what the hornet was that buzzed around in Gus's Denver Broncos ball cap bonnet, the fight unhinged me. In the middle of it all I had to take myself upstairs to cry. Cried hard. Even muffled in a pillow, the noise I gave out sounded like a seized-up dowser or a gate squeaked open on a rusted hinge.
See, their squabble opened up a well of want too deep for flower-tending or smart comebacks to fill up. Brought to daylit fact the sneaky way the past can loop around your feet—you just walking on and tending to your beeswax, blind enough to think you know the progress of your days, what will happen where and how and when, and journeying along—this same old past can loop like rope around your feet and snatch you up and string you upside down, shake you loose till what falls out of you is sadness at there being no one left to love enough to fight with.
Out of my own mouth came four words I didn't know I had in me to say. I miss my sister. It had been half a life since the girl I was had turned my back on her as if there wasn't blood between us and I wasn't wrong as she was, another half a life since it had hit me what I'd done. Who on earth, I asked Maxine Jane Spoon after yet another half a life had passed, were you to judge?
Anybody reading, did you ever feel like jumping out a window while nobody watched? That day while down below those two clowns had their fistfight, upstairs on my own, the want of Etta fallen sudden on me, I lurched and floundered like a creature with the staggers. Carried on a wrestling match against myself, the way I cried. Flung myself from bed to davenport to chair, clutched the curtains like a let-go lover in a drugstore romance, which I once upon a time had been. Lonesome was one word for what I felt. Abandoned, left behind, for others. Not word-one of them a stretch.
If what I've just put down makes the crying I'm describing sound embroidered, puffed up with feeling to the point you have to squint, I am here to tell you, young or old, it hurt, which counts for something.
Everything I've learned in life—the hill of beans it pleases Gus to tell our regulars this knowledge won't amount to—I've learned in fits and starts. Do a thing and let the reasons catch up later. See the road bump that will crack an axle only miles beyond it. Repent a good half century too late. What happened was that after all this time I came awake again to what I'd lost, and worse than that, I saw again the mark on it of my own telltale hand. Fact was plain as day too many years to count, then dawned sudden as a change of wind.
Maybe it was world times. Across the country far away, on the clearest blue September day, an awful thing had happened to us all, and no one knew just yet what was to come. Maybe it was Cap and Wheeler's fight. Maybe it was just the way regrets roll quietly along behind you where they ought to stay until you get to going good along a downhill patch, and of a sudden they start rolling of their own accord, dragging you behind them.
Once, the man I thought of as a husband fixed an eye screw to a bowling ball and tied it to his old dog's collar. John figured ball and chain would fix the creature's rambling. Days that hound dog dragged the weight around the yard until he found a squeeze hole in the fence and made his break for freedom. Tail-wagging proud old Rover was until he got to zipping down a slope and then the ball rolled past him, jerked his neck so hard he scrabbled hindparts-over-hell-to-come the whole way down, which is the long way round to say the yanksome way that dog looked was the way I felt, and so I flat wanted to jump out of the window.
Even if I jumped, the landing wouldn't kill me. Luck would land me right side up, for I'd lived eighty-something years with not one broken bone, no accident except the one at birth that left me with a slewed right foot, as if the Joker Up on High decreed that one short-changement to a customer would do. And so I didn't jump but only wanted to with every never-broken bone. Wanted to land in that dirt parking lot and hoist what's left of my behind, take off like Jesse Owens, hotfoot off as far away from Hatcher, Oklahoma, as the one good leg would take me. Do the thing I'd done before, which was to put safe distance between myself and me. All this went through my mind while I was deciding not to pry the window.
I wouldn't really. Jump. But I thought about it to the point-of. Then I got hold of myself and splashed some water on my face and went back to the café and the fighting men, the plan in mind to give all three of them what for.
Disrupting the peace, I planned to tell them. Tell them I had been bequeathed this café, run-down as it was, for my old age and my security. They'd blighted one and wrecked the other. Tell them I was staying put come hell, high water, or the wrath to come, and no amount of anything could chase me off. Which of course I didn't, for this last part was beside the point, and, anyway, the two were finished with their fight, then the lunch rush came and set me onto other things.
But I started wondering again about my sister. If after all this time she'd know me and would I know her? If she wandered off the road to Tucumcari and found this little diner, sat down to order breakfast, would I recognize her by the birthmark catty-corner to her eye that sometimes looked a little like a coffee drib and others like a pale brown tear, or by the way she walked—light-footed, as if she meant to sneak around the earth and play a trick on it, nodding slowly side to side as if she had all day to figure how to do it? Would she look beyond my bone white hair, my loose-skinned sack of body, would she see older, smaller, sorry me, say, "Sweet bejeezus, didn't I know you a long time back? Weren't you once upon a time my sister?"
Who knows what we would come to after that, what we might have had? A blood companion to live out our days beside. To laugh about old times. Or cry about the same. Or fight ourselves to kingdom come the way those brothers did. The point is that I wanted her so much just then—all good, all bad—my chest felt torn apart. The cross-grained selves we were and likely would remain meant nothing, and I wanted to lay eyes on Mary Etta Spoon. Hands, too. Wanted to kiss that jut-jawed face and squeeze the stuffings out of her. Barring that, to know what happened to her. Where she went and how she lived. Had she gone to California like she swore she would, or had she wound up closer by than anybody'd guess? She had a little daughter named Georgette. I saw the child one time, yearn, now, to see the grown-up woman she turned into.
Oh, I've played the story out a dozen ways, and all ways featured Etta trying to find me. All ways wound up with us taking up where we left off before the dust storms winnowed us to our worst selves and scattered us like chaff, the two of us old women at the turning of an age, our last days rendered peaceful as the latter end of Job's. But more often than not I wonder if she might well have been one of the wayfarers who make their way out here, could well have sat down in the corner booth for me to pour her coffee, looked up at me through stranger's eyes, then moved on.
History's past changing, and the answer as to whether it will travel past redeeming is beyond me, but I've kept my memories to myself for so long that there's hardly anybody left to tell them to, so I've made up my mind to write them down. Here I sit this pretty September evening while the shadows gather in the way they always have to make me think there's something other than the sun behind them, a way those shadows can persuade a person past her own intelligence that not one season is forgotten in the long memory of earth.
In the bad years you had to wait until the dust storms cleared to see the damage they had done. I expect it is the same with inside weather. Strike or miss, for good or ill, the dust storms scarred a person, deep. Our kind can't throw away a penny pocket handkerchief for fearing future want, can't be stopped from pasting rows of odd-sized stamps along an envelope to make the postage come out right. Jars and butter tubs, don't even ask. The fear is, see, that even if the item had cost next to nothing, somehow even that price was too dear.
In those old days what separated us was hope. Either Etta lost hers early, or it grew so large it couldn't be contained. Whichever was the case, it made her cut her losses and get out. I held on, but which of us was better served by hope is up for grabs.
In hard times, if we needed light, we used kerosene if we had it, candles if we didn't, the wax stubs melting down to puddles smelling high of paraffin and pig. Now, this solitary night, the electric lamp over my shoulder is just bright enough to see the pens and pencils laid out straight, an almost-empty notebook with a sheaf of pages. Here under my writing hand, some thousand ruled blue lines to hold a crooked tale that maybe won't amount to much beyond some long-gone years when people carried on like anybody else and made the same mistakes until they got them right or didn't, and at least one person had the luck to live beyond them. Anybody reading, if I forget to burn them when I'm finished, take these pages how you want, a testament, a tale, a caution. I mean them as atonement.
Copyright © 2007 by Janet Peery. All rights reserved.
