Half Wild Read online

  RACIST “REDNECKS.” That is the headline just below the picture of the children playing in the pile of leaves. Cora feels her blood burn, but she feels something else too: ill, thin, not hungry. She thinks for a moment of that face in the night: his bright eyes under the trees outside the barn dance where they stepped to get some air, of the way he leaned against the side of the building and looked at her, then belted out Hank Williams songs—“Move It on Over” and “I Saw the Light”—out of tune and so loud that Cora covered her mouth to keep herself from laughing. But enough; she’s too old for this. Cora tucks the newspaper under her arm and walks fast so that her calves burn. At the top of the hill she pauses to take in her world: silvery and glistening and cold and clean. Normally its beauty would bring her a surge of joy, but this morning it all feels strangely off-kilter. She looks at the barn and thinks of going in there—just a quick look—but decides against it. She doesn’t need to go sneaking around behind Kevin’s back.

  Inside she lays the paper on the table and pours herself another cup of coffee. She adds a half spoonful of sugar, something she doesn’t normally do—has never done before. The article says the group is assumed to be linked to Confederate flags seen in the back windows of pickup trucks in the school parking lot and some racially charged graffiti on a black student’s locker. Cora turns toward the window. More milk, he would say, reaching that tin cup up toward her.

  The letter to the editor on the next page doesn’t help, the one that says the hate crimes (that’s what the writer calls them) are being perpetrated by poor, uneducated white trash. That’s the term the letter writer uses, “white trash,” a term that Cora’s own father used once or twice and Fred used often, referring not to themselves, or other farmers, or the people they went to church with, but to the people who lived in the mobile home park at the end of Cora’s road, the kind of people who had moved here recently with no roots, the kind of people her people, on this piece of land, were not. But what about Stacey? Is that how Stacey and Kevin are seen: trash? Her father had been a selectman of this town for forty years, an upstanding farmer, a God-fearing Christian, a singer in the Baptist choir. When Stacey needed a place to live the farm seemed the best place: plenty of land left. A good spot for a trailer. But what does that make it, her, them, now?

  Cora scrapes her chair backward and clears her breakfast dishes. She needs to get away from this house, these words. It’s Tuesday, and on Tuesday she drives into Nelson and does her grocery shopping.

  It’s a beautiful day, the hillsides lush with color, the sky a radiant blue, and Cora begins to think, driving her Chrysler through what feels as perfect as a photograph, that maybe she has been wrong about Kevin. That paint, those boards, that ruckus in the barn—it must be something different altogether. But that doesn’t settle her entirely; she goes around a corner too fast and overcorrects, almost sideswiping a blue mailbox.

  At the grocery store as she’s reaching for eggs Cora’s eyes are drawn to a skinny black woman and her daughter ahead of her in the aisle. She admires the tight, neat braids in the girl’s hair: how shiny, nearly iridescent. The color of a bantam rooster’s tail. When Cora gets to the checkout line, the woman and the girl pull their cart up at the same time, and Cora can’t help but notice the mother’s slender, revealed waistline: a belt of beautiful, smooth skin. The mother turns to Cora and smiles. “You’ve got so little,” she says, motioning for Cora to go ahead of her in line. Cora is taken aback by the kindness. If feels so rare these days.

  On the ride home she thinks about that waist: Cora certainly never wore pants like that, never let her belly show. But an image of herself in a field at eighteen flashes across her mind—her shirt pulled up above her waist, thin fingers climbing her ribs—and again she goes around a corner too fast and drifts over the yellow line and barely misses a gray sedan coming toward her. Good God. Pull it together.

  She grips the steering wheel, her arms shaking slightly. When she gets home she puts her groceries away and sits at her window and stares at the calm gray siding of her barn.

  That evening Cora sees headlights and hears a truck coming up the driveway: the familiar throaty rumble of diesel. It’s Kevin’s truck, a GMC he has lovingly repainted red and jacked up on big wheels. She’s glad he’s here; she wants to see him, to remind herself he’s a good boy. She wants some grounding. Cora sets down her glass of wine, throws her husband’s old wool coat over her shoulders, and walks outside.

  Kevin climbs out of the truck as Cora approaches. “Hi, Grandma,” he says, smiling and turning to spit into the dirt of the driveway. He wears a Boston Red Sox cap pulled down low, jeans cinched tight around his waist. A working kid’s clothes. Nothing hateful or sloppy or “trashy” about it: just the clothes one would wear to go chainsaw in the woods or move bales of hay or fix a truck.

  “Hi, Kevin,” she says.

  He reaches into the back of his truck, pulls out a couple of empty boxes, and smiles again at Cora—a sweet boy, a shy boy, those blue eyes like her own father’s. “Need to clean up the barn a little,” he says, nodding at her and ducking his head.

  “Oh yes, just do what you have to do. I was just coming out to say hello. You want some dinner?” She looks at the trees, the mist, the blanched-out field.

  “Nope. Ate already.” Kevin is looking at the barn like he wants to go inside it, but he stays where he is, shifting his feet back and forth, too kind to walk away from an old lady. He looks at her again. “Grandma?” He swishes some chew around in his cheek. “You all right?”

  “Yes, I’m all right,” Cora says, embarrassed to be seen just staring like that. What is happening to her? “Oh yes, I was just coming out to say hello. You do what you have to do,” she says, turning around and going back into the house.

  But she watches from the window. Kevin goes into the barn and closes the door behind him. When he comes back out, ten minutes later, his arms are full of boxes. He dumps them into the bed of his truck and climbs in, glancing at the barn and then once toward Cora’s house before turning the truck around. She looks away quickly so he won’t think she was watching.

  That evening is beautiful, the hard maples near the house reaching their peak orange, but for the first time ever they don’t feel like her own; they feel as unfamiliar to her as exotic wildlife, as peacocks’ tails or the bird of paradise she saw on TV. Just boys being bad, she tells herself. Boys locking kittens in washing machines and messing with sisters’ dolls. But she can’t stop thinking of the girl in the grocery store, of the little blue plastic gem ring on her finger, of the signs, nailed to those trees, and of him. Him. What is this . . . this unnerving? She washes the dishes and wipes the counters until her body clenches with pain and exhaustion, and then she falls asleep easy, early.

  But she wakes again in the night. This time she forgot to close the curtains at all, and that upside-down half moon, like a baby’s cradle, is staring at her, shocking her with its gaze. And again, that face: high cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes, and thick, dark hair. Lawrence. She hasn’t thought of his name in years. Lawrence. The syllables slide down her throat into her belly, warble there. French Canadian, he said, and she thought that was all.

  She hardly knew him at school; he was a couple years older than her, worked at the quarry, had a younger sister named Mollie in Cora’s class who had beautiful, thick, dark hair and wore threadbare, handmade dresses. Cora hadn’t thought much about him until the night of Glenn Orfee’s dance when he came up to her and quietly held his hand out with a crooked smile on his face and a look in his eye she couldn’t name, and she doesn’t know why but she said yes, and then—those arms, that endless spinning.

  The next week he had walked her home from school, smoking his cigarettes and whistling between the gap in his front teeth, singing those off-key country songs. He said his mother loved the radio, listened to it all day while cleaning other people’s houses, and all night when she was home, that her favorites were Ernest Tubb and the Carter Family. He said she
worked too hard, and that he was grateful for that music. At the corner of Stark Road, he reached his hand out, and she took it, and they walked like that the back way home, across the Maise hayfield and through the woods, not saying much, Cora rubbing her finger along the lines of his palm. She’d never held a boy’s hand before and was surprised at the warmth there.

  “The quiet one. Who likes to dance,” he said after a while, that crooked smile again across his face, to which she had replied, “Quiet but not simple.” And a few weeks had passed like that, traipsing through those springtime woods, stepping over logs and crossing Silver Creek and getting out of breath on the last hill up to the farm, and then his hand slipping from hers and her turning to see him wave and grin and disappear back down the path from which they’d come.

  Sweet Jesus, it’s too hot in her bedroom. She throws the covers off and lies there on her back in the moonlight in her thin cotton nightgown. Her body has always been slender, small-breasted, not at all like her sister’s voluptuous curves, and for years she lay next to Fred and wondered if her body was the kind of body he really wanted, or just the warm flesh that happened to be next to him. Now, lying in the moonlight without the covers, she realizes that after twelve years of living alone she has come to love her thin body, its jutting hip bones and small breasts that have never gotten in her way or weighed her down. Lawrence touched them once. Oh God. For a moment she can’t breathe; her skin erupts in goose bumps. Stop this. But she can’t. Or won’t. It was one of the last days of school, late spring, and they walked up that path toward the farm. Before they reached the open fields, Cora stopped in a clearing of hay-scented ferns and sat down, flattening the cotton of her skirt over her knees. He sat next to her, both of them looking into the trees in front of them. He took his cigarettes from his pocket and lit one, and Cora reached out and asked for it with her fingers, and he gave it to her, smiling as she put it to her lips. Then she lay down in that bed of ferns and closed her eyes and heard a jay’s screech above her and then, that speckled light flashing against the dark of her eyelids, felt fingers touching the skin at her waist. Tobacco-scented. Slender and callused. Then she felt those fingers climbing up her skin, up and under her cotton blouse, up and over her ribs, until they landed on her left breast, and stayed there, not moving. Jesus. Cora can feel it now, moonlight and heat and a tingling sensation that ripples down her whole body. What has gotten into her? Toby, that tomcat, and that black woman’s waist, and Kevin, and the newspapers, and the barn, all of it too much for her, enough to send her slipping off solid ground. She closes her eyes. Lawrence Pial. That was his name. Lawrence Pial.

  It’s still dark—the clock says 3 A.M.—but she can’t sleep; she’s been up for hours. She switches a light on and goes into the kitchen and makes a pot of coffee. When it’s ready she dumps two spoonfuls of sugar in—decadent, wasteful, so unlike her. So sweet it makes her cheeks burn. She sits with the warm cup between her palms and looks out the window at the barn, lit up in that moonlight. Forty Jerseys used to live in there, calve in there, let down their milk two times a day in there. The paint has worn off the siding, and it’s a weathered gray now, a few roof slates slipping. The door, she sees, is open, swinging in the wind. Kevin must not have closed it all the way.

  She only saw Lawrence a few times after school let out; there was no longer an excuse to go walking through the woods with a near stranger. Once had been at the Nelson General Store. She sat in the passenger seat of her father’s truck and watched as he stepped outside into the light, blinking, and lit a cigarette. Long legs, blue jeans, cowboy boots. His mother stepped out after him, a tall woman with a straight back and dark eyes. Cora ducked back into the shadows of the truck, half-wishing he wouldn’t see her, but he did. “Hey!” he called out, grinning and walking toward her, but Cora’s father was watching from the pump—she could feel those blue eyes burning behind her—and she shook her head at him, said quietly, “Not here.” The second time was at Sunset Lake in July. Cora’s sister lay on the stretch of pebbly stones in her bathing suit, two or three boys standing near her, skipping stones across the water. Cora sat in her skirt on a flat white rock a ways off, her toes burrowing into cool, wet mud. It was late afternoon and the sun shone on the water, creating a glare she had to squint across, and it took her a while to see that there were a few people farther off, down at the next grassy beach, a place at the edge of the cow field where not many people swam. They were boys, shouting and jumping; she couldn’t tell who. One stood waist deep, back and arms and head silhouetted against the sunstruck water. It was a beautiful sight, and Cora felt her body turn strangely light with curiosity, felt a streak of desire shoot from her breasts down to her legs, and then he dipped into the water and disappeared, the surface suddenly still for too long. Cora felt a tremor in her chest: had she imagined it? The water was resplendent, silent, no movement or splash, and she scanned the far bank, and almost called out for help, almost leapt up to go tell the others someone had disappeared out there, when she saw a rippling, then a flash of underwater sun-darkened skin, and then he flung his head up out of the lake inches from her feet: smiling, water spurting from his wet lips, eyes waterlogged and bright. “You coming in?”

  A loud bang comes from the direction of the barn, and Cora leaps up. Her legs and knees ache—that coffee too early, that sugar. The wind has picked up, and the open door is swinging wildly, knocking against the pine siding. She doesn’t want to go out there, but what else is she going to do? She slips into her rubber boots and wool jacket and grabs a flashlight and goes out into the dark. The night is cool, dry, full of the windblown scent of apples and rotting leaves. She reaches the barn door and grabs onto the iron handle and swings it closed and is about to secure the latch when another gust of wind comes and the door swings open again, out of her grasp, sending her hundred pounds shuffling backward. She stumbles on the uneven ground, catching herself, but in the moment before she does she imagines falling, her bones snapping like kindling. How long would it have been before Kevin came to find her body, covered in frost and fallen leaves? Another gust of wind blows the door farther open, and she glances, for the first time in a long time, into the barn. The windows on the back wall blaze squares of night-sky blue; everything else is shadow. She can just make out the shapes of Fred’s old junk, rimmed in moonlight. A bat darts from one rafter to another. She should go back to the house, climb back into the warmth of her covers. But she doesn’t.

  Instead Cora steps inside the barn and turns on her flashlight. She can see where Kevin and his friends hung out: a few old armchairs set up next to a low table. On that table sits a kerosene lantern, a deck of cards, an overflowing ashtray, and some darts. Some of Fred’s things, she sees, are hung on the walls: a rusted Coca-Cola sign, an ugly life-size plastic reindeer, a rusted milk sign. There are posters she has never seen before too: one of a race car spinning around a track and one of a truck, not dissimilar to Kevin’s, jacked up on oversize wheels with two blond women in bikinis in the front seats, the skin on their absurd breasts tan and glistening. Boys. She lifts her flashlight upward and sees that there are some other things pinned to the wall. She steps closer and is surprised to find that they are black-and-white pictures of her father: standing next to a prize bull, riding his International across a field, in his World War II uniform. They must have been in some box out here in the barn. The sight of them makes Cora’s cheeks swell with a pride she didn’t know was still there; her father was a handsome man who believed in hard work and self-reliance and proved the glory of those things and whose only cause for despair was that he had no sons, just two daughters who could not farm, who married men who would not farm. It’s nice, she thinks, to have her father in the barn again. It smells like animal still, and like hay, and like the cigarette butts that are scattered across the table.

  Something moves against the far wall, and she catches it with her light: a swallow, flitting out of the rafters and making for an open window. She follows it and when it disappe
ars she notices there is something drawn on the beam in front of her with a marker. Some thin lines, loosely sketched. She steps closer, and slowly lowers the beam downward, and sees it is the outline of an animal. A deer. Its body peppered with tiny holes, divots, and on the table, a bowl of darts. Darts. Into the deer’s body. That is all.

  A gust of wind slams the door closed again, and the whole barn seems to reverberate. She is freezing; she is shivering; she thinks of her body out there in the yard, covered with frost and broken, she thinks of that black girl at the supermarket, her blue ring and perfect braids, she thinks of Fred, hitting their boys with the thin leather of his sweat-stained belt, of the look in those small boys’ eyes. Her light is still on those darts on the table, and when her eyes refocus she sees next to them something scratched into the table with a jackknife. Some letters—NHR—and below it the words NIGGER-HATING REDNECKS.

  She reads it again, lowers the light to the floor. She can hardly breathe in the cold. Her Kevin. “No,” she hears herself say out loud. No. She feels as if she has swallowed a penny. She lowers herself into the green-checkered armchair behind her.

  That August of 1947, the last time she saw Lawrence, he came to find her. It was a hot, dry evening, the sky luminous and the night breeze sweet with fresh-cut hay, and no one wanted to be indoors but they had finally gone in, Cora and her mother and father and sister, and were just sitting down at the table, her mother carrying meat loaf from the stove, Don Fields and the Pony Boys on the radio, when they saw the Pials’ mint-green Plymouth pull into the driveway.

  Her father looked at Cora’s sister, who shrugged, and then at Cora, who looked back at him, and then he got up and went to the door and opened it. Lawrence stood there in his blue jeans and cowboy boots, his hair combed back. Cora watched her father look him up and down slowly.