Stony River Read online

  They had to be towed into Springfield—a real hoot because they got to stay in the car, staring at its nose in the air, their backs pressed against the seats. The tow truck had room for only the driver and his pimply son—younger than Richie, maybe fifteen, and so shy he could hardly look Linda in the eye long enough to say his name was Dwayne. His denim shirt and dungarees were oil-stained and he shook her hand with a sweaty palm. When he and his father hooked up the Nash and Linda and her parents were tipped back, ready to roll, Mother said, “He seems like a nice boy.” Linda rolled her eyes at the back of Mother’s head, imagining the sympathy she’d get at school if Mother died during one of her hospital stays and how tragically romantic she’d look to Richie in black.

  By the time they bounced into Springfield every restaurant was closed, including the one with the Baked Alaska. The tow-truck driver also owned the auto repair shop. He got them a “good deal” on a room in a hotel close to his shop, within walking distance of the Lincoln museum, a place he said they might enjoy visiting. The desk clerk said, “We had a heap of rain past couple of days. You might spot a water bug or two in your room.” Mother’s face got that preheadache look.

  Linda and Daddy walked a couple of blocks in the warm night air to a small, smoky place named Vi’s that was sold out of everything except beer and Danish. “Earth Angel” blasted from a jukebox, sending Linda all dreamy. Boys dressed like hoods were shooting pool. That started her wondering why she’d once seen Richie as just another hood, but now more like poor dead James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause: trying to fit in but confused as to how.

  The hoods must have gotten Daddy thinking, too, because on the way back to the hotel he said maybe it was a good opportunity to express his concern over reports Linda had been seen more than once walking with Richard Sulo. Daddy said that he too had gone through a rebellious phase when he was younger and that Richard might be a fine person under all that pomade and bluster but didn’t she think he was too old? She considered asking “for what?” but she knew he meant kissing, which she and Richie had never done, another reason she’d concluded that God was involved: according to Reverend Judge, Jesus had hung around with harlots—apparently it was okay to say that word—only because he had compassion and a wholesome love for anyone trapped in sin. Hoods weren’t harlots, of course, but Linda thought the general principle applied.

  Back at the hotel Mother said stale Danish was a poor excuse for a birthday dinner. Linda told her she’d rather go to the farmhouse restaurant near her grandparents’ place for a belated celebration. It served country-fried chicken, mashed potatoes, biscuits and white gravy in family-sized bowls so that you could have seconds. “I don’t need Baked Alaska,” she said. “Blueberry pie would be swell.” But Mother seemed to want to be miserable. Honestly, if you didn’t laugh you’d cry at the impossibility of keeping her happy. She never told you what she expected until you failed to deliver it, and sometimes not even then. Linda and Daddy did most of the housework even when Mother was well because it eliminated at least one reason for her giving them the silent treatment. They sometimes turned their frustration with her silence into little jokes. Daddy might ask Linda, “Did you forget to do something you promised, like defeat communism?”

  The next morning the hotel floor was carpeted in undulating water bugs. They made a crunchy sound under Linda’s sneakers. Mother barely spoke as they trudged around wax figures and old documents at the Lincoln museum. The car needed a thingamajig that wouldn’t come in until the next day, so Daddy said, “Let’s make lemonade out of lemons and go out for the birthday dinner tonight.” Once there, Mother stared at her food like she was a wax figure. It took forever for the Baked Alaska to arrive and it had vanilla ice cream inside, not Neapolitan. Sometimes it was a relief to have Mother in the hospital where you didn’t have to see her sadness.

  The car had been ready this afternoon, thank goodness. As boring as Kansas would be (nobody was allowed to stay up past nine-thirty because Grandpa, who hadn’t farmed in decades, rose at five each morning to listen to the hog and grain report), Linda was relieved to be finally heading there. Daddy had just paid for the repairs when Dwayne, all stuttery and red-faced, asked Linda to a square dance that night, and didn’t Mother finally open her mouth and say, “If you’d like to go, Linda, we can stay another night.” Thank heavens Daddy said, “Sorry, we have to be on our way.” A few minutes later he said, “Sometimes you amaze me, Betty.” Mother just stared out her window.

  Linda was staring out her window now, too, thinking that Dwayne had reminded her of the boys she’d met at church camp last month. They acted all shy and innocent during services but tried to get the girls alone behind the chapel after dark. Richie hadn’t once tried to hold her hand, even when she secretly wanted him to. God had kept her safe until she understood that her love for Richie was to be only compassionate and wholesome and that her mission was to ease his confusion about how to fit in.

  ELEVEN

  SEPTEMBER 12, 1956. Dawn, soft as a lullaby, creeps in on timid fingers and toes across the early sky. Miranda lies abed, picturing herself at both ends of a tug-of-war. Which side does she want to win: the one keeping her “grounded in the here and now,” to use Sister Celine’s words, or the one beckoning like a Siren? The Voice of James exhorts her to abide in three worlds at once: that of the physical, the soul and an saol eile, the Other Life. Imagine yourself under a deep ocean, aloft in the sky and firmly on the ground all at the same time. Oh, how she tries!

  The closest she’s gotten was the day Doris took her to a beach where people sunned themselves like tortoises. Wearing a bathing suit of Doris’s that felt tight as a sausage casing, Miranda ventured into the ocean, clinging to the safety ropes strung between posts. The cold stung her legs but the inhaling and exhaling of the waves drew her in. Farther out she went. She closed her eyes and felt the water inside her body change first to ice and then to cloud and rain. She understood, then, Augustine’s claim that God created the Earth in a single moment. But almost immediately a wave caught her unawares and she lost her grip on the rope. Flailing around in the surf, she was terrified of drowning. As terrified, it occurs to her now, as the dead must be in the fires of Purgatory.

  She rises from her infirmary bed and removes her coarse woolen nightgown. She slips a tunic over tights and laces her black oxfords as morning enters the city beyond St. Bernadette’s gates. James would have called it a soft old day. If she could, Miranda would spend all her days in meditation, trying to straddle the shores between worlds, but Sister Celine has impressed upon her the need to tether herself to the earth. She told Miranda of a mystic convent nun she once knew who was lost to the community when in rapture, leaving others to do her work, something that offended Sister Celine’s sense of fairness. So that Miranda might develop a practical skill, Sister has her report to the library two hours a day to assist the librarian, Sister Theodore, a woman so tall and thin she appears stretched.

  St. Bernadette’s library is industrious, with school classes in and out during the day and inmates encouraged to borrow books for personal reading. Miranda marvels at the Dewey decimal system that allows you to find any book easily and restore it to its proper place. When she returns home she’ll reorganize the books there. So many she never opened because they were too high on the shelf or she didn’t know what they were about. She relied on James to tell her what to read. Now, at Sister Celine’s urging, she selects books from the library at random.

  In the past few months alone, she’s read books on plant life cycles, elephants, opera, geysers, sedimentary rocks, planets and asteroids. Books about ancient philosophers, exotic countries, modern history and so many other things she was ignorant of when she lived in the protective cocoon James spun for her. He may have assigned her novels that spoke of hatred and brutality, but they were too beautifully written and set in places too far-flung to seem real. She feels foolish for not having questioned him more. The Voice is unapologetic. You needed to know your inner wor
ld before you faced the outer.

  The library isn’t only for inmates. Scholars from all over the world come to do research, using its collection of antique books about church history. Many cover the time in England when it was criminal to be Catholic. Speaking of that period makes Sister Theodore emotional. “Being a priest was high treason,” she said one day. “Harboring a priest could get you executed.”

  “How dreadful,” Miranda said. The image of a sweaty priest crouching in a dark pantry darted across her mind. “My father told me that similar things happened to those who honored the gods and goddesses of the earth, water and sky.”

  “If you mean pagans and witches,” Sister Theodore said, “then most terrible things absolutely should have happened. The Bible says thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

  Since arriving at St. Bernadette’s Miranda has read most of the Bible several times. (She could endure the begats only once.) “Are not changing water into wine and casting demons into swine the magical acts of a witch?” she asked Mother Alfreda after Sister Theodore’s reproof.

  “Not when performed by God’s son,” Mother Alfreda replied. She doesn’t get annoyed at Miranda’s questions. In fact, she encourages her to arrive at her own beliefs through reason and the wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Anselm and others whose dried-up words bounce off the walls of Miranda’s brain as if it were a babe’s rattle. Miranda dutifully writes in her journal words like theophany, ontological, Mariology, apostasy, exemplar. It’s only when Mother Alfreda speaks with passion about desiring to find a transcendent and personal god that Miranda’s emotions are inflamed. How accepted she felt when Danú visited her and, for days afterward, how transformed. How transported when the Voice of James guides her to a state outside of herself.

  Sister Celine warns that what Miranda and Mother Alfreda are doing is dangerous: “You could die, you know, and the reverend mother would only say, ‘She was ripe for Heaven.’ She’d love to boast of a martyr under her roof.” Sister Celine says Miranda needs to glimpse the world, not Hell. She is preparing Miranda already for the day she’ll leave St. Bernadette’s womb by instructing her about life on the outside. “You must face what you don’t want to know about your father,” she said. “That won’t happen if you stay here.”

  Miranda doesn’t mind dying if she can walk among the dead with James and Eileen. But such thoughts are selfish. The children of Danú are light and order, James once told her. They are born to counter the children of darkness and chaos. With him gone, Danú has charged Miranda with raising this child of light and guiding him to his mission. Sister Celine’s instruction about bank accounts and budgets, jobs and apartments offers no clues as to how to do that. Nor does the book she gave Miranda by a Doctor Spock.

  Miranda loops her rosary over her belt and leaves her room, patterning her walk after Sister Celine’s fluid glide. Today will test her ability to stay in the physical world. She will spend it in the nursery helping Sisters Cameron and Joseph herd the children from place to place and keep them occupied. She heads there after breakfast. The children are watching Romper Room, their faces bathed in the television’s flickering moonlight. Cian flaps his arms and makes a buzzing sound. He’s doing the Do Bee dance. Registering her presence, he hesitates a moment then resumes with more energy, bubbling like porridge. She sits on the floor behind him, watching his two-and-a-half-year-old body move with abandon. When he’s done dancing he crawls onto her lap, looks at her with his ancient eyes and pats her face.

  Miranda asked Mother Alfreda one afternoon how Mary raised Jesus to be a savior. Mother said she supposed Mary simply loved him and let God do the rest.

  TWELVE

  DECEMBER 16, 1956. Buddy started going to Sunday matinees with Tereza when it was too cold to do much outside for Dearie. He went the first time because he wanted to see Battle Cry again—an “encore performance,” the theater had called it, trying to put one over on them.

  Tereza wasn’t big on war movies but Buddy said they helped him understand what his father went through. He didn’t call him his old man. Buddy was born the month the war started—a bad omen, he said. His father lived in a photo on a radiator cover in the parlor; a tall man with wide shoulders, standing hands behind back, army pants tucked into combat boots. Next to the picture was the Purple Heart he’d gotten for letting a shell fragment pierce his heart. He’d volunteered after Pearl Harbor, Buddy said. Had been in only four months before he got zapped. After Buddy told her why he liked watching war movies, Tereza didn’t mind seeing them. She pictured her own father, not Jimmy, as one of the happy-go-lucky film soldiers who give speeches about what they plan to do when they get home, right before falling on a grenade to save a bunch of other kids’ fathers.

  They went to a theater in an Italian neighborhood—not much danger of running into anybody she knew there. The lobby stank of sausage as well as popcorn but the theater had a crystal chandelier and a Wurlitzer organ. They’d go early enough to nab two seats in the balcony. They were watching Love Me Tender when he first put the heel of his hand on her mound and curled his fingers under her crotch. She hardly breathed. The theater was packed with screaming girls, making Buddy’s gutsy move even more impressive. She glanced over at him staring at the screen, chin thrust out all intense, as if that hand couldn’t possibly belong to him. They sat across from each other at Sunday dinner that night like nothing had changed. But Tereza felt the way she had after scoring a home run on the empty lot beside Vinnie’s house.

  The next week Buddy did the same and the week after.

  Never looking at her, not saying anything after.

  She put her hand on his fly the first time during The Mole People, expecting he’d swell up under it. He didn’t.The next time he covered her hand with his and pushed down on it so hard his balls had to be shrieking, but it did the trick. You’d never have known by his face, though. It reflected only the flickering screen. Tereza had to take short, hard breaths to cool down.

  They’d sat that way today, groping each other, Tereza trying to be as blasé as Buddy while squeezing tight. Later, at the dining-room table, they went on and on to Dearie about how much they liked the clove-speckled ham, the creamy scalloped potatoes and the peas. Tereza was sure she could hear Buddy’s heart laughing as hard as hers at their secret.

  Hanky-panky!

  How strange love was. She could almost understand how Ma had ended up with Jimmy.

  DECEMBER 19, 1956. Dearie stood in the parlor, her breath fogging the window as she watched Ladonna trudge down the sidewalk with the shopping list, any skip in her step long gone, if it had ever been there. Two little girls half a block behind her had stopped to play hopscotch. Dearie could hear their excited laughter. The weather was too mild for Christmas, but school would be out any day now. Buddy’d be working full days at the A&P through New Year’s.

  The parlor smelled of the Scotch pine he’d lugged home a week ago. The three of them had decorated it with the blue lights and ornaments she and Alfie had collected over the years, including Junior’s red and green paper chains, faded now, and angels that Buddy had cut out of black oak tag when he was little. Ladonna seemed to get a kick out of throwing the tinsel any which way. Dearie was surprised Buddy hadn’t gotten annoyed at that, him being such a neatnik.

  It seemed to make Ladonna feel important to think some truant officer would nab her if she didn’t come home by the end of the school kids’ lunch break. Dearie didn’t think that was likely. Ladonna might have a tiny chassis but her face was older than her years. “If you ask me, Alfie,” Dearie said, “the only ones who care about that little girly are me and Buddy. Over a year and nobody’s come looking for her.” Dearie sent her out with a list every day so that Ladonna would get some sun.

  Dearie didn’t mind having some time to herself now and then either, for personal things like dusting Junior’s picture. It needed attention every few days; even the skimpy winter light coming in from the window right now showed every speck of dust. She studi
ed her son’s face, so like Alfie’s and Buddy’s, especially the long, thin nose. Tried not to think of Junior’s bones mixed up with the hundreds of others the Japs had dumped in a mass grave after marching the soldiers to death in the Philippines. At first, the army reported only that Alfred Eldon Jukes, Jr. was missing. Nearly two years later they sent a medal and admitted his unit had been captured.

  The Purple Heart had come in a box Dearie kept closed so the fancy ribbon wouldn’t fade and the medal wouldn’t lose its shine. She opened it and ran a finger lightly over George Washington’s face, raised in gold against the purple like a cameo on a fancy brooch. Alfie had made up the story about the shrapnel for Buddy’s sake. “Nobody could fault you for that,” she said. The prisoners had been starved and beaten, some bayoneted and others beheaded with samurai swords. How could you tell a boy that?

  She picked up Junior’s picture. Rubbed her cloth slowly in and around the pewter frame’s embossed curlicues, imagining as she always did that it comforted Junior. She kissed the cool glass, something she would feel silly doing in front of Buddy or Ladonna. But Alfie understood.

  She often pretended that Junior had refused to surrender and was hiding somewhere, not knowing the war was over or that Moira had taken off practically the minute she heard he was missing. Dearie wondered if regret over marrying that fickle girly hadn’t driven him to enlist. Alfie built the room in the attic for Moira and Buddy when Junior went overseas. Moira hadn’t wasted any time taking advantage, going out togged to the bricks nearly every night, leaving Buddy with Dearie. She’d come home half-lit, her hair and makeup a sight.