Beyond Deserving (15 page)

“I know, Ma. Don't you think I remember how hard you both worked when I was growing up?” She would think he would remember. He was always a help to her, a lot more than Evelyn, who should have been. Evelyn used to whine and fuss about housework. She didn't think she should have to get dressed on the weekend. She moved out the day she turned eighteen. Geneva said to her, the last time she saw her, “Please come home, darling. At least come stay a little while.” Evelyn said. “Pop wouldn't like it. You don't know, Ma. He never liked me, and now he wouldn't for sure.” She must have meant because she was pregnant, but Geneva didn't know that then.

She doesn't want to complain, it isn't her way. She is grateful not to have spent her whole life tied to one place, doing one thing, the way a lot of women do. She has never been bored by marriage. She fell in love with Gully's light heart and she rode it around the country twice, to Mexico and Guatemala, across Canada. She had a happy year in the shipyards during the war, before Evelyn came along. She lived in old BLM cabins, school buses, garages, the backs of trucks. She loved Gully's adventuresome spirit. The underside of it, the way he needs to be alone, to dig down deep to a place that hurts—that was a surprise to her. But they got through hard times and this is the reward, growing old together. It isn't boring anymore to have one place and a life that repeats itself day to day. And it is a bonus to have close-by sons.

“I think I'll help Fish this summer with some carpentry jobs.” Michael speaks so quietly she isn't sure what she heard. She turns what she believes is her better ear toward Michael. “He's had several people ask him to work. Has to hire out like a handyman, by the hour, because he isn't bonded or anything. I might look into that.” Michael shakes his head slightly as he speaks, agreeing with himself.

So that's it. A gush of pure pleasure goes through Geneva, as though to wash her bones. “You'd like that kind of work?” Gully always had those two out making something or taking something apart. They built boats, birdhouses, radios, cars out of pieces of other ones. There was an endless parade of Fisher projects. Gully was proud of what he could do with his hands, of being a welder. He built ships for this country, and machinery that carved out roads in Alaska. He worked on dams (though he never mentions them anymore). He built every house they ever owned, except this one, and he improved it.

“I would like it, Ma,” Michael says. He pops a knuckle and shakes his hand out.

Gully comes in, calling to her as he goes through the big porch. “Genny!” he calls. He is with some old coot he met in the woods. Homer. This one looks as bad as his dog-crazy friend Austin Melroy. Homer is wearing a plaid flannel shirt, a worn-out pair of wash pants, a Levi jacket, and boots. He smells to high heaven of sweat, liquor, and woodsmoke.

“Sure pleased to meet you ma'am,” he says. He is respectful for a bum. Who talks like that these days? Maybe Gully rehearsed him, to cozy up to her. “My wife, she's a sucker for a sweet word,” he could have said.

Gully apologizes for being late. “We got to jawing before I saw how low the sun had got.”

Geneva stiffens. “You wash up outside.” She has never liked it when Gully messed up her kitchen. There is a sink in the laundry room and another back of the trailer, where she has a table for potting, though she has let the flowers all go this year. If she wants to see flowers, she can look in the neighbors' yards. Her back hurts.

As soon as the two men are out the door she says to Michael, “I don't think he can sleep right if he hasn't preached a little. Dragging in a bum like that! You've seen those little books he carries in his overalls? He takes them out and reads them to anybody who will sit still for it. Sentimental dribble.” Gully is a man who finds it hard to say happy birthday, let alone I love you. Yet here he is quoting poets, preachers, the Bible.

“He seems to be feeling happy, Ma.” Michael takes the extra plate she hands him and sets it on his side of the counter, then pulls a chair over from the little desk with the telephone. “Really, he looks good to me. He's already getting some color in his face.”

“There's something about it I don't like.” She doesn't want Michael to misunderstand her. “Your dad always went by the Bible, mind you. He didn't go to church for a long time, but he knew the Word. He knew the Commandments. But this stuff eggs him on past all reason. He's got good advice all mixed up with nonsense, and there's
too much of it
. Who does he think he is? A missionary? Does he think he is supposed to save these fellows?” She turns and moves her head toward the screen door. She can't hear the men yet. “I bet you, right now, he's got him out in that yard telling him how
he
used to drink. How he doesn't anymore. Talking, while dinner's getting hard around the edges.” It galls her that Gully uses the past like that. She thinks it ought to be a private thing. She thinks he makes himself out worse than he ever was, for the effect. After the treatments at the hospital he didn't remember things right. He used to get morose, and go off by himself and drink some, that much is true. But he never stumbled around acting crazy, and he never drank so that it interfered with his work. The meetings he's been going to for years now rile him. She thought they were a temporary measure, to tide him over after the hospital. Can't he see how much they disturb him? Why else does he need to get away so much, in the woods?
What is out there
? Couldn't he give up history for the sake of the present? It isn't fair. She never butted him around with his faults and lapses, when they hurt the most,
when they mattered
. She doesn't need to be reminded now. Sleeping dogs ought not to be yapping and growling. That's why they have a saying about them.

She rummages around in the refrigerator and comes up with a can of pears and half a carton of cottage cheese. She gives Michael the can with an opener. She spoons Miracle Whip into the cottage cheese and stirs it around, then plops it onto the fruit halves, two to a plate for the men and none for her.

Michael pushes his plate back toward her. “Take one of these.”

“Can't stand the stuff,” she snorts. She can finally hear Gully and that man clomping up the steps into the tiny hall.

“Bless the Lord and paint the rafters. Now we can eat!” she says.

Gully seems cheerful. “I worked up an appetite.”

Homer says, “I had coffee and crackers this morning.” He has a wily look. He takes his time deciding on one of the two available plates before he sits down beside Michael.

People who don't eat regular have to store it up when they can. She remembers that from a long hungry childhood. It has been fifty years since she had that terrible gnawing in her belly. Gully always kept them all fed. He always knew she could stretch a dollar and a bean, and he counted on that, but the dollars were always there. He left her money when he went off to be by himself. She's been sad, and she's been glad, but in half a century with Gulsvig Fisher, she hasn't ever been hungry.

“Help yourself,” she says pleasantly to Homer, and passes him the meat loaf.

22

“Homer here worked the Tok highway,” Gully says.

She must look surprised. Gully says, “Sure a small world, ain't it?”

“That so?” she manages to say. The “ain't” was for Homer's benefit, she supposes. A man who has read the Bible, William Shakespeare, and Herman Melville knows better.

“Yes, ma'am,” Homer says with his mouth half-full. “Lived in this old tin-can trailer all one winter, burning scrap wood and green logs, waiting for the work to start up again. From the Canada border up above Tok.”

“The highway went past that.”

Homer laughs. “Sure did, but I'd heard about work farther north that paid real good and—well, it sounded like an adventure. I wanted to see the real north. It didn't work out so good.” He takes a huge mouthful of potatoes.

“Think of the miles they built with my machinery,” says Gully, with awe in his voice. She hopes he won't start naming places. He loves to look at a map and put his finger where he's been, where they have been as a couple, as a family. Best of all he likes to point where a ship has sailed that he helped build, or a road. One time in Guatamela, they saw a railroad engine he said was from Sumter, Oregon. He clears his throat. “A man takes a journey one step at a time.” Homer swallows and says, “Sometimes it's that first step kills you.”

Gully knows. “That's what friends are for,” he says. He sticks one finger up in front of his nose, his way of announcing a quotation. He says, “The comfort of a true friend is an affirmation of life.” He looks over at Michael. “Homer's got a dilly of a drinking problem.” Geneva thinks Gully looks pleased.

“I never heard of nobody getting talked out of drinking,” she says sourly.

“Oh yes, ma'am, I'm sorry but they sure do.” Gully sucks at his teeth. “Somewhere, every night of every week of the year, and lots of noontimes too, that very thing is going on.” He holds up his finger again. “Though, ‘Let no one be deluded that a knowledge of the path can substitute for putting one foot in front of the other.' M. C. Richards.”

“If you say so.” Geneva clears their plates. Homer has sopped up the last streak of grease with his bread.

The silver maple outside the kitchen window rustles in the evening breeze. The tree sprang up all on its own after the fire. Gully said it was from the roots of the tall tree twenty yards away, on the Lewis property. He said the trauma of the fire must have let it loose.

“I could make coffee,” she says unenthusiastically. She can feel all three of them getting set to run.

“I've gotta get home, Ma,” says Michael. She doesn't comment. She has never asked a married son to give her time that belongs to his wife. She does wonder what they do on a Friday night, though, that he can't sit with her a little while, especially now that he can see how his father is.

“We'll set a spell out in the yard.” Gully pushes Homer toward the door.

“Appreciate the chow, ma'am,” Homer says. Geneva sets her mouth to keep from saying something she will regret. Homer seems to her the veteran of too many soup kitchens.

Gully fed that other fellow on Tuesday night, hauling him home after that blessed meeting. She stayed in her room. Three pieces of pie was all that was left. Gully said
he
ate most of it, but he couldn't eat that much in a sitting. He gave it away to hold that old drunk captive to his talk.

She lies on her bed with the pillows all propped and the tv on with no sound. She tries to read from a
Good Housekeeping
, but there isn't one article to catch her eye. Editors think women die at forty.

Off her little night stand (a fruit crate covered with contact paper), she picks up one of the invitations she sent out a few weeks earlier:

You are invited

to celebrate

with Gully and Geneva Fisher

Fifty years! On the back she printed “An old-fashioned recipe for a successful marriage.” Gully thought most of it up, though it had been her idea, and she set down the words. They had a good time figuring it out.

1. Get together one boy and one girl.

2. Set the date.

3. Get a blood test, buy a license.

4. Find two friends or hangers-on.

5. Do it.

6. Stick to it.

People will either understand or think it is funny. It is the truth, though, and more people could stand to know it. Young people expect too much of marriage. What do her own sons want? Michael has done okay, all things considered. He is a good family man. Ursula isn't the friendliest woman, but she does her share, and they have the kids. But Fish and Katie are a downright wonder. She didn't even know they were married for the longest time. She hardly saw them half a year at a time. She never saw Katie pregnant. Nobody brought it up. It was little Juliette who told her, and Juliette who said Katie went away with her baby and came back alone. At least Katie had it. At least she didn't kill it instead.

Geneva never asks Fish anything. She can remember times he said he was going out for cigarettes, and she wouldn't see him for a month. When he was in Vietnam he didn't write for so long it drove her crazy. She wrote his commanding officer, who sent the chaplain to talk to Fish, who wrote her to say if she ever did that again he wouldn't come home when it was over.

She knows what it is with Fish and Katie. They are too self-centered for a baby. Neither one of them has grown up. Though she can't speak for Katie's mother, she knows she did her level best. You can look at Michael and see that. Fish could have turned out better. Twins, like two sides of a coin. She thinks Gully had a lot to do with it. There was something he recognized in Fish right away, something Michael didn't have. Now he is sorry. He said just the other day, “Isn't it something? Fish buys a house on the GI bill, and here neither one of them lives in it!”

She will be surprised if she sees Fish or Katie either one tomorrow. She asked Katie to take her shopping for napkins, because she thought it would give them a little time together. She wanted to see how Katie was getting along. But Katie stood her up, no different than she might have figured.

She goes to Gully's room at the other end of the trailer and straightens up the bed. Every morning Gully pulls the blankets up over whatever mess he has made of sheets and pillows, and, every day, sometime before bed, she straightens it all up, tucks things back in, and pulls the blankets back up as if she has not touched it.

The room has the faint acrid smell of Gully. Socks on the floor of the closet, like a little boy. His wool sweater on a hook, stretching out the neck. She sits on the edge of his bed. The mattress curves in like a hammock. She told Gully they both needed mattresses last year, but Gully insisted on her getting one, and not him. He said he liked his bed as it was.