Sourland

That poor boy not right in the head was how people spoke of Arvin afterward. Like my mother, and my aunt Elsie. You’d think his parents would keep a closer watch, a retarded boy like that wandering and getting lost.

In Herkimer where I live now, I see Steve and Dan sometimes. I see their families at the mall. Steve married a girl I knew from school, they have two children at least. I think they live on Buell Road, Steve works for a contractor. Dan Burney was in the navy with Michie, got sent overseas and when he came back he got married and later divorced and he works at the stone quarry where my husband Frank Schmidt is foreman. Dan is grown to three hundred pounds muscle-and-fat and shaves his head so his head and face look swollen like something made of hard rubber. Dan lives with his mother who has some wasting disease like Parkinson’s.

We see each other at Kroger’s, or Eckerd’s, or at the mall. There’s a glaze over our eyes when we meet. Steve Hauser, Dan Burney. If they tried to call me DeeDee, I’d tell them no: I am Diane. But they don’t call me any name at all. We talk together trying to remember why we know each other. The guys always ask about Mitch but there’s nothing to say about Mitch, he will spend the rest of his life in “death row” at Attica. The death penalty in New York State is lethal injection but no one has been executed for a long time.

Steve Hauser and Dan Burney and me, there’s a nagging feeling between us. But we don’t know what.

We ask about one another’s families. Dan takes his mother to the Church of the Risen Christ some Sundays, helps the old woman with her walker. Dan doesn’t always sit in the pew with her but waits out in the parking lot, smoking. He’s a big man but soft and vague in the eyes. Sometimes he will push into the pew beside his mother. I see Dan Burney, I smile and wave and Dan will wave back. I wonder if Dan sings with the rest of us! The way some men sing under their breath like they don’t want anyone but Jesus to hear.

I have two daughters: Kyra who will be in seventh grade next year and Tamara who will be in fourth.

Their eyes! The most beautiful eyes. When I tell Steve Hauser and Dan Burney about my family I tell them my daughters are getting to be big girls but I don’t tell them how beautiful my daughters are, it’s hard for me to speak of it. The other day Frank said, You see those girls, you know why you were born.

Out of nowhere Frank said this. It isn’t like him, or any of us to speak in such a way. But I’m hoping it is that simple, what Frank said. All I’d needed to do to be saved was have my babies, that is my purpose on earth. You would not need a soul for that!

A feeling used to come to me sometimes, a true life is being lived somewhere, but I am not in that life. Since having my babies, I don’t feel this way. It’s a stronger feeling even than Jesus in my heart.

Because you can backslide and lose Jesus. But you can never lose the fact you have given birth.

Strange that it’s water moccasins I dream of, that I never saw. I never dream of Arvin Huehner. I dream of myself in the swamp and the snakes and the quicksand but I never dream of Arvin Huehner and there is probably nobody who knows that name Huehner where we live now.

I saw the hood ornament on a four-wheel-drive pickup, a long time ago. I think it was the same kind.

Things that scare me are any kind of snakes. Even a picture of a snake, a feeling like faintness comes over me. Also the shadows of clouds passing on the ground. In the countryside you can see these shadows miles away on the hills, it takes your breath away watching them move so fast. Sunshine and green fields and the swift shadow rolling toward you taking away the green. I think The valley of the shadow of death.

Another thing that scares me: mammograms and pelvic exams. Pap smears. My legs tremble so, though I have given birth from my body yet I am frightened of the sharp instruments. I am frightened of the doctor seeing into me. For one day it will be revealed You have tested positive for cancer, Mrs. Schmidt. Your punishment was deferred but will now begin.

And I am afraid of my own anger sometimes. Wanting to smash things, precious things to me like the girls’ faces when they are stubborn and mouth off at me. Kyra is the worst, the way her eyes slide over me in scorn. Beautiful eyes so liquidy-brown and their faces are beautiful yet I could grab these faces and squeeze until the bones broke. My husband says, God damn it, Diane, keep it down, you should see yourself, Jesus. Frank starts toward me and I back off, fast. Frank could break my face in his hand if I hurt the girls so this is O.K., this is good. I’m grateful for that.

I asked Reverend Loomis what is the root of anger, why I am angry sometimes at my family I love, and Reverend Loomis said it is a test put to me. Every day and every hour of my life is a test, will Satan triumph, or Our Lord. Diane, it’s that simple!

Soon as I heard those words, I was comforted.

After you leave school, there are people you’d been seeing every day of your life you never see again. Even relatives.

Last time I saw my cousin Michie close up, I guess he’d been Mitch by then, it was at the 7-Eleven out on the highway and I was only just married then and not more than a few weeks’ pregnant which I hoped Mitch would not know. It was after 10 P.M., I was going for milk and cereal and cigarettes and Mitch was going for beer and cigarettes and there was no one else in the lot, the pavement was wet with snow. By then Mitch had been discharged from the navy and was back but not living with his family. It was rumored that Mitch was dealing in drugs. Also Mitch was said to be apprentice to a bounty hunter in Watertown. You had to have a license to be a bounty hunter, you were allowed to carry a concealed weapon. Mitch was wearing his hair long and tied in a pigtail and his jaws were covered in whiskers and in the midst of these whiskers he was smiling at me. Heat lifting from his skin and I could see the swell of his eyeballs moist and quivering like gasoline somebody might hold a match to, it would explode into flame.

He’d just jumped down from his pickup. Every vehicle I see, my eyes slide over the hood, I can’t stop myself looking for a shiny hood ornament, Mitch was driving a four-wheel pickup like a jeep, with no ornament on the hood. Smiling at me with just his teeth saying, Hey there, DeeDee, like there was something between us and it wasn’t that we were blood kin. I was smiling at Mitch quick and breathless which was my way around guys like Mitch, I felt this faintness come over me thinking He has a knife he carries, he can kill me any time. And my cousin’s hands were big-knuckled, and scarred. It was six months before he’d kill his girlfriend Sheryl Ricks at Alcott but there was no sign of that now. Seeing he’d scared me Mitch was in a teasing mood pushing close to me, laughing like there was some joke between us, I smelled beer on his breath, he’s saying, How’re you doing, DeeDee, you and Frank, and I said, trying to keep my voice even, not stepping back from Mitch like he was daring me, We’re doing really well, Mitch. But I’m not DeeDee these days.

The Barter

1

Let something of mine be taken from me! Let Father be returned to us.

So the son David Rainey, thirteen years old, who prided himself on not-believing-in-God, prayed.

2

In the medical center whose higher floors were frequently shrouded in mist, in the men’s lavatory in the eighth-floor cardiac unit, he hid away to cry. What he hated about crying was his face shattering into pieces like a pane of struck glass. His eyes turned to liquid. His ridiculous nose ran. In a fury he tore off a long strip of toilet paper in which to blow it. A Mobius strip, unending. In despair thinking I hate them all! For it seemed to him that all of the family, not only his stricken father, had betrayed him.

His father would be nine days in the cardiac unit. On the first interminable day, David entered the lavatory to hide and realized too late he wasn’t alone. Somebody was in one of the stalls, sobbing. A helpless muffled sound as if the invisible person (a boy David’s age?) was jamming his knuckles against his mouth.

Quickly, David retreated. He was in dread of meeting another so like himself.

3

The father was down, the Rainey family was stricken.

For years they’d been Meems and Dadda, Kit-Kit, the Goat, Pike, and Billy-o. They were Granmum Geranium,