Chapter 2
Birdie
The mailbox shaped like a barn was still there, and somebody had shot it.
Not recently. The hole had rust in it. But somebody, at some point, had put a round through my grandmother's mailbox at what I'd estimate was close range and a low opinion.
Cricket idled at the foot of the drive.
"This it?"
"This is it."
"There's no car."
"She doesn't have a car. She has a truck and she keeps it behind the barn because she says the front of a house is for company."
"Huh." He looked up the drive. Four hundred feet of gravel, an ash tree, a porch with a swing on it, and a house that had been white in some previous administration. "That's — okay. That's a lot of open ground."
"That's a yard, Cricket."
"Sure. Yeah." He didn't take his hands off the bars. "Prez said don't stop."
"You did stop."
"Prez said don't stop at the Kesler gate."
"So you're fine."
"I'm interpreting," he said, in the voice of a man who has recently learned the word.
I got off, got my duffel, got my grocery bag.
"Hey," Cricket said. "You want me to walk up?"
And I looked at him — nineteen, twenty, a jacket with one patch on it and a lot of empty leather, a kid who'd been given one job — and I thought about how everybody in this town so far had been extremely calm about my grandmother in the exact way that people are calm at a funeral.
"No," I said. "Go on."
"He's gonna ask if I walked up."
"Tell him I said no."
"He's gonna say I should've anyway."
"Then he should've come himself," I said, and Cricket's whole face said ohhh in a way I filed for later.
He went. I walked up the drive.
Here's what the forty acres is, if you've never been.
It's a shelf of good flat ground on top of a bad hill, and it sits at the exact place where the ridge road stops being one thing and starts being another.
From the porch you can see nine miles of nothing.
My grandfather bought it in 1968 for reasons my grandmother describes only as he was in a mood.
There's the house. There's the barn with the roof my grandmother has been fixing for thirty years by talking about it. There's the pump house, cinderblock, ugly, the size of a large closet.
And there was a man sitting in my grandfather's chair on the porch.
He was fortyish and narrow and he had a face that had gotten thin ahead of schedule, and he was wearing a black leather cut with a wolf's skull on a crown on the back — I saw it because he'd hung it, no, he was wearing it, but he was sitting sideways with one boot up on the rail, so the back of it faced me as I came up the last of the drive.
It didn't fit him. That's the thing I noticed before anything else, because I have spent my life fitting halters on animals. The shoulders were built for somebody a size and a half wider. The leather had a memory of a different body in it, worn light where a bigger chest had pushed it out.
I clocked three things on the walk up, in this order.
The porch light was on at four-fifty in the afternoon, which my grandmother would sooner die than do, because a porch light in daylight is money burning where the neighbors can see it.
The swing was pushed all the way back against the wall and hooked there, which is what she does in January so the wind doesn't bang it.
And the burn barrel behind the lilac had ash in it up past the second rust hole, and my grandmother burns on Saturdays, and it was Tuesday.
"Hi," I said.
He looked at me. He had a chin like a shelf.
"You're the granddaughter."
"I'm the granddaughter."
"She said you'd come."
"Did she."
"Said you'd come and be a whole big thing about it." He smiled. He had good teeth, which somehow made it worse. "Wendell."
"Scarlett."
"That's a mouthful."
"It's four syllables."
"That's a mouthful," he said again, comfortably, like a man repeating a joke he liked.
He didn't get up. That's the other thing. I'd walked four hundred feet up a gravel drive with a duffel bag and a grocery sack and a helmet under my arm and he sat in my grandfather's chair with one boot on the rail and watched the whole approach like a man at a fence watching a horse come in.
"You need a hand with that?" he said, when I was already at the top step.
"Nope."
"Just being polite."
"You're really not," I said.
And Wendell Pike laughed — a nice laugh, an easy one, the kind that makes other people at a bar look over and want in — and said, "No, I guess I'm not."
"Birdie," said my grandmother, from inside the screen door.
And then the door opened and there she was, seventy-nine years old, four foot eleven in shoes, wearing a cardigan over a Steelers shirt over what I am confident was a second shirt, holding a dish towel, absolutely and completely fine.
I want to tell you what relief does. It doesn't feel good. It feels like getting hit.
"You look terrible," she said.
"I've been on a bus."
"You look like a stoplight."
"It's a hoodie."
"It's a flag, is what it is." She held the door. "Get in here. Wendell, you want coffee?"
"I'm all right, Miss Odile."
"You're all right," she agreed, and let the screen door bang.
That's the tell, if you want it. My grandmother has offered coffee to people she was actively feuding with. She offered coffee at my grandfather's funeral to a man she had not spoken to since 1974 and did not speak to again after. Coffee, in that house, is not hospitality. It's a procedure.
She'd offered it. He'd declined. And she'd let it go.
She has never in her life let anything go.
Inside, the kitchen smelled like it has always smelled, which is coffee and Comet and, faintly, forever, dumplings. There was a table with four chairs and a fifth against the wall. There was a wall phone with a cord long enough to reach the stove.
There was a door under the stairs with a bolt on the outside.
"Sit," she said.
"Grandma."
"Sit."
I sat. She poured coffee I hadn't asked for into a cup that said WORLD'S OKAYEST GOLFER, which had been my grandfather's joke about himself and had outlived him by twenty-two years.
"Who," I said, "is on the porch."
"That's Wendell."
"I got Wendell. Who's Wendell?"
"He does some work for me."
"What work?"
"Around."
"Grandma. What work."
"He's been putting a new gate up on the low field."
"Is there a new gate on the low field?"
"There's a post," she said, with a certain amount of feeling.
I turned the cup around. "Three Sundays."
"Hm?"
"You didn't call for three Sundays. You've called every Sunday for six years, including the Sunday you had shingles, including the Sunday of the ice storm when you called me from the truck—"
"The truck has a radio."
"The truck has a CB and you called the fire department and made them patch you to me and they have never forgiven you."
"They're volunteers," she said. "That's what volunteering is."
"Three Sundays."
She wiped a counter that was clean.
And here is where I want to be honest about the shape of that afternoon, because I have replayed it and replayed it and I keep coming out the same place.
She wasn't scared. I know scared. I have walked into stalls with scared. Scared has a sound and a stillness and she didn't have either.
She was lying, and she was lying the way she lies about salt in a recipe: cheerfully, fluently, with the confidence of a woman who has never once been caught, and completely without regard for how much I could see.
Which meant she wasn't lying to fool me.
She was lying so I'd have something to be told.
"Phone's been out," she said.
I picked it up off the wall. Dial tone, loud as a bee.
"It's been in and out."
"It's in."
"Well, it's in now."
"Grandma."
"Scarlett Ann." She turned around and put both hands on the back of a chair. "You rode three hundred miles."
"I took a bus."
"You sold your jacket," she said, "and took a bus, and walked into a kitchen with a gun in a grocery sack, and I want you to hear me say that I'm glad you're here and also that you're leaving Thursday."
"I'm not leaving Thursday."
"Thursday."
"I don't have anywhere to be."
"That," she said, "is the saddest sentence I've heard this year, and I go to a lot of funerals."
I laughed. She didn't. That's how she gets you.
"How's the horse," I said, because I wanted her somewhere she couldn't lie.
"Petunia's fine."
"When'd you last have the vet out?"
"She's twenty-six. What's a vet going to tell me that twenty-six hasn't?"
"What's she eating?"
"Grass. Feed. Apples."
"How many apples?"
"...Some apples."
"Grandma."
"There's a tree, Scarlett. It drops them. Am I supposed to stand out there catching them in a net?"
"You're supposed to fence the tree."
"I've been meaning to fence the tree."
"For how long?"
"Since Clinton," she said. "Don't look at me like that, your grandfather was in charge of the tree."
"He's been dead twenty-two years."
"And it shows," said my grandmother.
I got up and rinsed my cup because I had to do something with my hands, and standing at that sink I could see straight down the yard: barn, run-in shed, the ash tree, the pump house, and past all of it the low field going down to a fence line and then nine miles of blue nothing.
And the padlock on the pump house was new.
Brass. Bright. Everything else on that property has a patina you could date, and there was a padlock out there that had been bought inside a year.
Outside the porch chair creaked, and we both heard it, and neither of us looked at the window, and the not looking went between us like a note passed in church.
"Okay," I said, quieter. "The cut he's wearing."
Her chin came up about a quarter inch.
"What about it?"
"It doesn't fit him."
"Lot of things don't fit people."
"Whose is it?"
"Birdie."
"Whose was it?"
And my grandmother — who has never in her life been at a loss, who once told a Jehovah's Witness that she was in the middle of a seance — stood in her kitchen and said nothing for four full seconds.
Then she said, "Drink your coffee."
I heard the bikes before she did. That's the one thing I've got on her; her hearing's gone soft on the low end, which is why she has the TV at a volume that could stun a bird.
Two of them, coming up hard off Old Ridge, downshifting at the cattle guard.
Wendell came off the porch chair fast. I saw it through the window — the boot came down, the whole loose sprawl of him snapped up into something with angles, and he moved to the rail and stood there with his hands where I could see them, which is a thing people do on purpose.
"That'll be trouble," my grandmother said, in the tone of a woman announcing a casserole.
"Trouble as in—"
"Trouble as in the president of a motorcycle club is about to walk into my house for the first time in four years," she said, "and I have not put my good shoes on."
Then she went to the mirror by the door and fixed her hair.
I sat there.
"Grandma," I said. "How do you know the president of a motorcycle club?"
"I fed him," she said.
Roman came up the steps and Wendell said something and Roman said something back, and I couldn't hear either one, and then the screen door opened and the kitchen got smaller by half.
He filled the doorway. He had to duck a little, which I hadn't noticed at the picnic table because at the picnic table he'd been sitting down and the world had been an ordinary size.
And he did the thing. The thing she told me about later and I saw before I understood it: he came in and he stepped around the cellar door. Not far. Not obviously. Just a little wide of it, the way you'd go around a hole in a floor.
"Miss Odile," he said.
"Roman."
"Ma'am."
"You want coffee?"
Something went across his face and got put away.
"Yes, ma'am."
She poured it. He took it. Nobody said anything for a second and the whole kitchen was full of twenty-eight years, and I was standing in the middle of it holding a golf mug like an idiot.
"You've met my granddaughter," she said.
"We've met."
"He gave me directions to a strip mine," I said.
My grandmother turned around so fast her cardigan swung.
"He what?"
"To see if I'd check," I said.
"Roman Kade."
"She checked," Roman said.
"Of course she checked, she's a Bly—"
"That's why I did it."
And my grandmother stopped. Just — stopped, with the pot in her hand, and looked at him, and something moved behind her face that I did not have the code for.
"Well," she said. "All right."
"You want pie?" she said.
"No, ma'am."
"There's pie."
"I'm all right."
"There's pie, Roman."
"Yes, ma'am," he said, and sat down, and let a seventy-nine-year-old woman put a plate in front of him like she'd won something, which I think she had.
I watched him take the first bite.
I want to describe the face he made, and I can't, quite. It was a man tasting something he hadn't tasted in a long time and having to do arithmetic about it in front of an audience.
"It's good," he said.
"It's the same pie."
"I know it is."
"It's been the same pie since 1998."
"I know it has," Roman said, to the plate.
And my grandmother turned around and washed a fork very thoroughly for a while.
"Ma'am, I need a minute with you."
"You've had four years of minutes."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Sit down, then. Both of you. Birdie, get the chair off the wall."
I got the chair off the wall. There was dust on the top rail. Nobody had used the fifth chair in a long time.
And through the window I watched Wendell Pike walk down off the porch, out across the yard, past the barn, hands in his pockets, easy as Sunday —
— and stop at the pump house.
Just stood there. Looking at a cinderblock shed with a padlock on a hasp.
Looked at it the way you look at a thing you've already decided about.
He stood there maybe fifteen seconds. Then he took his hands out of his pockets, and reached out, and put one flat on the padlock — not pulling, not testing. Just resting it there. The way you'd put a hand on a car you were thinking about buying.
Then he walked on down toward the low field like a man out for air.
"Grandma," I said. "What's in the pump house?"
Roman set his coffee down. Very carefully, and very quietly, and about four inches to the left of where he'd have set it if nobody was watching.
And my grandmother said, "A pump."
"Grandma."
"There's a pump in it, Scarlett. There's been a pump in it since 1968. It's a Goulds and it's louder than God and it comes on at four in the morning and if you're going to sleep in the back bedroom you should know that."
"That's not what I asked."
"It's what I answered."
She sat down at her own table, across from a man she'd fed when he was sixteen, and folded her hands.
And then she said the only completely honest sentence she gave me that entire week:
"Birdie. There is a thing on this property that I have been the only person in the world responsible for since before your mother met your father.
And I am going to keep being the only person responsible for it for as long as I possibly can.
And I'd appreciate it if you'd let an old woman have the last piece of work she's any good at. "
The clock ticked. The chair on the porch didn't creak, because nobody was in it.
"That's not a no," I said.
"No," said my grandmother, "it certainly isn't."