Mr. Splitfoot Page 19

  “I’m Sister Margaret. Just Margaret now. Come on.”

  “I’m Cora. She’s Ruth.”

  “Ruth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come on.”

  It’s hard to look tough while slipping on maternity jeans. I tie my hair into a ponytail. Ruth finds our bags. Why don’t we resist? Why do I have the idea that I’m in training and must meet every challenge?

  Sister Margaret heads downstairs and we follow. She hesitates by one door, holding its handle without opening it. She bows her head against the wood.

  “Where’s that go?”

  “The enclosure. The cloister. Sisters only.” Her wimple keeps much hidden.

  “What’s enclosed?”

  “Exactly.” She wags her finger, smiles. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I know you would.”

  “You’re not going to tell me?”

  “Why buy the cow when the milk’s free?”

  “But I was never even looking to buy this cow.”

  “Still.”

  “But what is it? What does that even mean? An enclosure?”

  “It’s space. Protected space, fenced in, walled off, boxed up.”

  “Why? What’s in the space?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “A girl’s got to have her secrets.”

  The night air’s cold. Ruth pulls on my hoodie, covering her head. It’s filthy. We need a Laundromat. She adjusts the pack, hefting my bag up on one shoulder. The nun looks at the stars. Ruth starts walking and we follow. The nun switches on a flashlight beside me. “There,” she says.

  That’s different, talking company. “Why are you leaving?”

  “The Lord said someone would come when it was time to see my kid again.”

  “You have a kid?”

  “Yes.”

  “How, like, how did the Lord tell you? In words?”

  “Yes.”

  “How’d you know it was the Lord and not your own voice? I’d have trouble separating the two.”

  “Yes. You might.”

  I think that’s an insult. “So. You have a kid?”

  Ruth looks back at me.

  “A daughter. From before.”

  “How long have you been at the convent?”

  “Since she was eight months.”

  The mountains are moist before dawn. “You left an eight-month-old?”

  The beam of her flashlight bobs. “I did.”

  “What’d you do all that time you were gone?”

  “We support a brother monastery. I was a seamstress. Lots of silence.” The nun uses her fingertips to tap her side, then her shoulders.

  “What do the monks do while you’re supporting them?”

  “Pray.” She rubs her hands together to stop the tapping. She moves faster.

  “What’d your kid do?”

  “Her father took care of her.” When she looks at me now, the flashlight’s under her chin, a horror show. “That’s a cruel question,” she tells me.

  “Sorry. I haven’t had anyone to talk to in a long while.”

  “Yes. Your friend’s quiet.”

  “My aunt. She doesn’t talk.”

  “She doesn’t talk?”

  “No.”

  “I’m pretty good at that too.”

  The damp air’s medicinal. I like the privacy of walking at night and how it fuels dread and excitement. If something interesting’s going to happen—say, aliens landing—it’s going to happen in private. It’s going to happen at night.

  “To be in touch with our smallness,” the nun says. “Closer to God up here.”

  “Feels that way.”

  “The world needs stillness.”

  “True.”

  “I wasn’t always still. I sat with the dying. Cooked for the hungry. Once we visited prisoners. I made decisions. I helped pregnant women like yourself. I spun thread.”

  “Huh.”

  The nun sizes me up. “Why? What did you do back in reality that was so great?”

  “Sold insurance.”

  “Wow. Real important stuff.”

  She’s a mean nun. Even if she’s right.

  The sun blues the sky. We head down her mountain into the valley of the next peak. I have to lean way back to stay balanced. “What’s with the show tunes?”

  “Sister Kate. I’ll miss that.”

  The road flattens eventually, and we head into town. We leave the berry briar and white pines. We pass through a forest of car dealerships, three on the left, two on the right. Despite their open, optimistic nature—broad plate-glass display windows, generous lots with wide drives—only one of the five dealerships remains in business. A battery of fast-food restaurants lures travelers off the cloverleafs. Sister Margaret sets her hands evenly on her hips. She stops walking. “What’s that sound?”

  I stop to listen. Water running. We must be back by the canal. “The Erie.” We should have taken a canoe down the canal instead of all this walking.

  “I haven’t been off the mountain in a while.”

  “Why are you going to find your kid now?”

  “Think she forgot about me?”

  “No. But—”

  “Listen.” Margaret sharpens again. “Do you have any idea what’s about to happen to your life?”

  “Some.”

  “You won’t ever know peace again.”

  I shrug.

  “I was a terrible mom. I couldn’t stop worrying. I thought about men with machetes, pedophiles, high staircases, electrical sockets. You name it. Once on the street, a stranger chucked my daughter under the chin. He thought she was cute. I went home and covered her with anti-bacterial gel. She was three months old.” Her eyes roam the air behind me as she makes her list. “Redneck drunk drivers, brain damage from a fall off her changing table. I thought about her soft head all the time. I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t let her sleep. Sleep looked like death. Eating looked like choking. Friends looked like murder.

  “Hormones attack you,” she says. “Hormones will try to kill you.”

  “You didn’t let your baby sleep?”

  “I imagined danger so well, I made it real.”

  “You didn’t let your baby eat?”

  “Her father took better care of her than I could.” She looks up. “Motherhood,” she says, “despite being immensely common, remains the greatest mystery, and all the language people use to describe it, kitschy words like ‘comfort’ and ‘loving arms’ and ‘nursing,’ is to convince women to stay put.”

  The sun lands on us awkwardly. I don’t say it, but I think she’s forgetting half. There’s a lot about mothering that’s good. I had a really good mom. We walk on in silence.

  “Where are you going?”

  “My aunt’s taking me somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  I hesitate. “I have no idea.”

  “Exactly. That’s what I’m telling you.” She looks at Ruth. “Maybe she’s hardening you up into the warrior you’d better be before that baby arrives.”

  “Maybe.”

  Feels a little bit like more mother-hazing, so I prepare for another episiotomy story, the horrors of child birth, blah, blah, but one doesn’t come.

  “How old is your girl now?”

  “Ten.”

  “Well, what are you going to do? What’s the plan?”

  “Catch a bus to Forked Lake. Find her. See if she’ll forgive me. Let me in her life somehow.”

  “What if she won’t?”

  “Yeah,” Margaret says. “Then there’s that.”

  In town the nun points to the pharmacy where the buses stop. HALF GALLON OF MILK $1.50. The terminal’s not open yet. The nun takes off her wimple and shakes out her hair. With the wimple removed, I can see her neck and it’s a horrible thing. Thick brown, purple, and black lines, ligature marks, damaged and ghastly as if she’d been hanged then resuscitated or her wimple had been faste
ned so tightly it choked her. I worry her head will detach entirely without it now. She sees me staring and nods. “I’m telling you, it’s not easy. Life and death are not clean, separate functions.” She gently touches the marks on her neck.

  I want to get away from her, but she keeps talking.

  “Motherhood makes you a dealer in death. No one tells you this beforehand. You will become obsessed with all the ways a person can go because while it might be easy to deal with the fact that you will one day die, it’s not at all easy—totally unacceptable—to deal with the fact that one day your child will die. Do you hear me?”

  I nod. I hear her. I do. “What am I supposed to do? Just give up? Not even try to be a good mom?”

  The nun exhales. “You’ve got yourself a real live one here,” she says to Ruth, smiling. “Are we done? We’re OK?”

  Ruth gives her something, money maybe, like she’d hired the nun to teach me, though clearly that can’t be true.

  Margaret tucks whatever it is into her bra. She has a seat, waiting for the bus with a drunk and a soldier on a bench out front, feet planted for battle, rubbing her neck.

  “Good luck,” I mumble.

  “Same to you.” Then the nun asks God to be with us. Then the drunk hums “O Night Divine” though Christmas is still a long way off.

  A WOMAN ON THE RADIO speaks with a French accent. “Brasserie Caribou. You cannot beat our meat.” Nat and Ruth fly into the back seat. “Howdy, lovebugs,” Mr. Bell says. “How’d it—?”

  “Go!” Ruth need only say it once. Mr. Bell locks the doors, engages the engine, depresses the accelerator with everything he’s got. They find their breath in the dark car. She leans forward as he speeds away from the house, and as they fly past, she sees a man running for the car. The man is not Zeke. It’s Ceph, running out of the woods by the house. Ceph calling her name, “Ruth! Stop! Wait!”

  “Don’t stop,” Nat says. “Don’t.”

  Streetlamps ripple overhead, passing in sickening waves of darkness and light. None of them speak yet because Mr. Bell’s I-told-you-so is loud enough for all to hear.

  The vehicle moves away from the house at speeds ranging from thirty-five to forty-five miles per hour for a time period of twenty-three minutes. Once sufficient distance is gained, Nat can finally speak. “I need some water. Please.”

  “Of course.”

  At Andy’s Discount Food and Dairy, Mr. Bell locks Nat and Ruth inside the car while making his purchases. As soon as Mr. Bell’s gone, Nat starts to plead. “Don’t tell him I fucked up so badly. OK?”

  “But the man knows his name.”

  “The man knows your name too. Maybe it’s your fault also. Did you think of that?”

  She looks out the window.

  “Don’t tell him. Not everything. Please.”

  “If I have to, you can’t be mad.” She pushes a spot between her eyebrows. “What happened to his nose?”

  Nat shakes his head. Ruth imagines the lonely appendage stashed in a cup, a mug, a gift box, blackened, crusted in parts, and all the smells it ever knew. Grass. Bacon. Seawater. Mildew. More likely though, it was eaten away slowly, crumbled and wasted in bits.

  “And what the hell was Ceph doing there?”

  “Poor Ceph,” Ruth says.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Mr. Bell passes Nat a bottle of water, juice, and a bag of snacks. He opens beers for each of them, using a quarter pinched as a pry bar. “You look like ghosts. What happened? Did the dead actually speak this time?” He smiles. The alcohol hits Ruth’s blood, swiftly cooling hot metal. Mr. Bell catches Ruth in the rearview. “What is it?”

  She shuts her eyes, so Mr. Bell drives. They pass three farms and one home-heating oil depot. Finally she answers him, “The man didn’t have a nose.”

  “What?”

  “He didn’t have a nose. It had been eaten away. Just a hole in his face.”

  “Terrible.”

  Nat grabs her thigh, squeezes as if holding her reins.

  “More snow in the forecast, Jim. The county’s on alert. We’re looking at accumulations of anywhere from thirteen inches to two feet. More than that up in the mountains.”

  “No nose?” Mr. Bell stretches his fingers, regripping the wheel. The streetlamps end. “What happened?”

  Ruth turns to Nat. He’s still looking out the window, though there’s little to see besides the metallic flash of the passed mile markers. “They lost some money, and Nat told them it’s in an empty pool.”

  “A man lost both his nose and his money? Seems a bad sign. How much?”

  “They didn’t say.”

  “Well, Nat? Is it in a pool?”

  “Not that I know of. No.”

  “Maybe?” Mr. Bell asks.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Nat allows his half-drunk bottle of water to fall into the foot well. They drive a ways in silence.

  “He knows you, Mr. Bell. He called you Carl.”

  Nat digs his nails into her leg.

  Mr. Bell takes a moment to respond. “I’ve never met a man without a nose.”

  “Zeke. He knew you.”

  “He called me Carl? Did you tell him that was my name?”

  “No.”

  “He called me Carl? And he lost some money?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’ve never met a Zeke.” Mr. Bell shakes his head.

  “It didn’t go so well,” Ruth says, but begins to worry that she’s brought trouble to Mr. Bell. If Zeke knows his name, it’s because he looked at her marriage record. She’s endangered Mr. Bell. And Nat.

  “Why? They thought you were lying?”

  Ruth leans into the front. “Do you know a motel we can stay tonight? Outside of Troy?”

  “We’re not going home?” Nat asks.

  “He knows where we live.”

  Mr. Bell finds Ruth’s eyes in the rearview. “I’m sorry.” He has to look back to the road in order to drive. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Why? What did you do?” The challenge between Nat and Mr. Bell is plain. Mr. Bell doesn’t answer. They pass the paint factory’s color test field. They pass a rotten dresser someone left on the edge of his property.

  “I know a motel,” he says finally, and drives toward Bethlehem, where on August 11, 1859, a meteor fell nearby. They pass Snake Hill. They pass Old Pond. They pass a street whose name remains unknown because a vandal stole the sign and stashed it in his basement years ago.

  Ruth chews the dead skin of her thumb. Mr. Bell drives haltingly as if out practicing with a learner’s permit or lost in thought. The road dips. There are a few houses, a mobile home, then nothing for a stretch. A sewage treatment plant lit up like a UFO crash site appears. He keeps driving. A sign says something about the Forestry Department. Nat curls up. Ruth irritates a hangnail. A few snowflakes start to fall. They pass through towns at night. They pass a prison. They pass a number of businesses with vague names: AmSure, Angiodynamics, Noss. The carton of grapefruit juice has warmed up between Ruth’s legs.

  An hour later, near Lasher Creek, meteorite found in 1948, Ruth sees a sign for a motor lodge. Underneath the words there’s a depiction of a bosomy woman, dressed in a hula skirt, shaking it underneath a limbo bar, though there’s nothing else Hawaiian about the place. It looks like a cinder block.

  Mr. Bell rings the office buzzer twice. A young girl lets him in.

  Nat is slumped against the car door, snoring.

  Mr. Bell returns to the car with their room key attached to a wooden spoon bearing the number four on its bowl. Ruth squeezes Nat’s wrist. “Come on.” The three of them drag into the room.

  “No one’s to blame,” Mr. Bell tells Nat. “Every town has a time limit. Our luck was running out in Troy and I knew it. In fact, I suspect that this is probably my—”

  But Ruth doesn’t want to hear them bicker. She locks the bathroom door behind her. She adds no cold to the mix, climbing into the shower, scalding her shoulders and che
st. She unwraps a thin bar. The soap will make her skin tight. She lathers up anyway, standing under the water until the burn fades. She scrubs her armpits and crotch with the soap, plucking her curled hairs from the bar and dropping them into the tub. She dries off and gets dressed.

  The room is dark. The men have already gone to sleep, two exhausted lumps under synthetic covers. Ruth climbs into Nat’s bed. She rests her hand on his stomach. Her fingers brush the wires there. Nat’s grown a tremendous amount of hair rather suddenly; even his belly button has changed, because she’s in the wrong bed. She’s in bed with her husband. Ruth holds her position a moment longer, a tailor making measurements, so close to what’s inside Mr. Bell: blood, brains.

  Ruth finds her shoes and the spoon key. She steps out into the night. There’s a light on in the office. Maybe someone’s making coffee or setting out plastic-wrapped Danish, that fake, sweet cheese. The door opens with a jangle. There are out-of-date magazines as in a doctor’s waiting room or transfer station. Ruth takes a seat, opens a women’s periodical. “Best Low-Fat Potato Chips.” “Our Favorite Bras.” “Tools to Organize Your Living Room.” Essential female information.

  Don’t leave him there alone, Ruth tells herself. At the end.

  The smell of coffee finally hits her nose, and there’s a shuffling behind a set of saloon doors. Ruth sits up straight. The noises stop. Then a racket. The doors swing open. “What’d you say?”

  “Me?” Ruth asks. “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Don’t leave who there alone?” The young woman steps up behind the registration desk. “Early riser, huh?” She’s not a typically sullen kid, looks more like someone who relies on curiosity to survive.

  Ruth nods.

  “What brings you here?”

  “Visiting a friend.”

  “A friend from here? What’s her name?”

  “Umm. Eleanor. Bell. Yeah. El Bell.”

  “Cool name. Never heard of her.”

  “You know everyone in town?” Ruth closes the magazine.

  “Pretty much. It’s a small place.”

  “What goes on around here?”

  The woman shrugs. “Not much.” She rests an elbow on the desk, chewing one finger to help her think. “Lots of waiting around, I suppose.”

  “For what?”

  “Grow up, get married, divorced. Maybe a kid. You know, die. School to start. Coffee to brew.”