14 ◆ Lyris

CHARLES CALLED LYRIS AND MICAH into the living room on Monday morning before school. He sat listening to the news on the radio, pulling on socks and boots. His socks did not match, but he didn’t seem to mind or even necessarily notice.

A man on the radio said that it was going to be a windy week and now was the time to put away any summer furniture still out in the yard. A woman on the radio said now was the time to buy a hog if you had the freezer for it. The man said he had been unable to get the song “Winter Wonderland” out of his head for two years running, so he was ready for the change of season. The woman said they shouldn’t joke about such a thing, because nuisance music might be a serious problem for some people. The man said he was not joking, he was one of those for whom it was a serious problem.

Charles shut the radio off. “Did you feed the goat?”

They said they had not.

“Here’s how it’s going to work. Lyris will feed the goat in the morning and Micah will feed the goat at night.”

Lyris turned to go feed the goat.

“Wait a minute,” said Charles.

“Are you and Mom getting divorced?” said Micah. He held a plate with toast on it.

“What did I say last night?” said Charles.

“That she will be home today.”

“Is that what I said?”

“That you weren’t sure when she’d be home,” said Lyris.

Micah folded to the floor, cross-legged and crying. He put the plate on the rug. “I want her here.”

“When her work is done,” said Charles. “It might be a while. We thought it was going to be for the weekend, but now we don’t know. They chose her. Of course she would rather be with you. She didn’t ask for it.”

“Is that what she said?” said Micah.

“She said she’ll be home in the spring,” said Charles. “What does crying get you?”

Micah spoke with a trembling voice: “Nothing.”

He and Lyris rode to school on a snub-nosed yellow bus that pitched and shuddered in the wind. The treelines were bright and slanted beyond the fields. Lyris sat far from Micah, as was dictated by the difference in their ages. She knew more than he did. The work Joan had gone to the city for did not figure into Joan’s absence. Lyris was tempted to think Left once, left again, but she knew that would only be paranoia and that in the world Joan had decided not to come back to, she played a fairly minor role. In this light, the blood ties that the Home Bringers put all their emphasis on seemed insubstantial and even arbitrary. Anyone could be anyone’s child.

When she was younger, Lyris had sometimes wondered how it would be if she were someone else. She did not imagine being a person in better circumstances, because she had always had heat, a roof, a bed, and food. Instead she imagined being a child in a war-torn province, what that would be like. She had sometimes come perilously close to wondering herself out of existence. But she rarely thought that way anymore.

Lyris had art history just before lunch. The class was an odd mix of people who cared quite a lot about the topic and people who didn’t care about it at all. This had to do with the way the class had been filled. Art history was mandatory for all the seniors who would be going on the spring trip to Paris, but a fair number of these students had chosen Paris (over Amarillo, the alternate destination) not because of its cultural treasures but because getting there would require a flight across the ocean. Some of them had never flown before, and they reasoned that if they were going to do it, they might as well go as far as possible.

In any case, the students who did not care about art history sometimes tried to disrupt the classroom experience of those who took it seriously. One of the forms this disruption took was the throwing of the methamphetamine tablets called white cross. The idea was to lob the pills in such a way that the person you were trying to bother would have to either retrieve and hide them or risk being caught with illegal drugs in the vicinity of his or her desk. Explanation was out of the question. It would amount to ratting, and no one could rat. In other words, planting white cross on someone was regarded as less of a sin than disclosing who had planted it on you. Lyris did not make up the rules. She sat neither in the front nor in the back. She thought of the long narrow room as a river and her desk near the window as a sandbar on which she might avoid the currents.

The teacher was a handsome if careworn man who had been a painter himself. He had suffered disappointments, among which teaching in this school seemed to be one, and he tended to portray the history of art as an unbroken chain of disastrous events. Today’s topic was a French artist who came to prominence after painting a portrait of the empress Josephine cupping a plum in one hand and a yellow pullet in the other. For a while the young painter held Napoleon’s favor — the emperor presented him with a walking stick with a silver handle. When Napoleon divorced Josephine, though, the artist fell from grace and joined the French army. Wounded at Borodino, he starved to death on the retreat from Moscow and was found with Napoleon’s walking stick clutched in his icy hands. A tragedy, for salt cod was on the way.

“How many of us would show that kind of dedication?” asked the teacher. “Or are we too comfortable, with our soft pillows and our prepared foods? I think perhaps we are. And yet that is what it takes — to be willing to insulate the walls of your house with your rejected paintings and never experience a moment’s doubt.”

This was not the first time the teacher had mentioned the use of unsold paintings as insulation. Another thing he sometimes brought up was how he was saving big boxes in case his radical views got him fired and evicted.

One of the students now asked in what way the story of the painter-turned-soldier demonstrated dedication to art. He stood to ask his question. “I mean, he died in a war — got that. But what’s it got to do with painting?”

The teacher turned to face the blackboard. A white pill bounced off the boy’s lumberjack shirt. The teacher wrote war and painting on the board. “Anyone?”

A good long silence followed. “Because painting is like a war,” said Lyris. She was only guessing. Painting did not seem at all like a war to her. This was just her go-along-to-get-along nature in operation.

The teacher beamed. It was not because she had found the answer he intended her to find. In fact, the boy had raised a good point. So far as the teacher knew, the painter had never picked up a brush after the imperial divorce. The lecture had arrived at a logical impasse, due to the teacher’s desire to leave the students with the image of a dead artist on the side of the road. So he was glad to have any answer. He drew an equal sign between the two words, stepped back to consider the equation, and then underlined the words war and painting.

Meanwhile, some of the students pantomimed the eating of porridge, as was their practice when Lyris spoke up in class. They did so with various hand-to-mouth motions that would have confused anyone who did not know they were trying to make fun of a person who had once lived in an orphanage.

Lyris smiled shyly — she could take a joke with the best of them. Was she so pathetic, she asked herself, that she welcomed even ridicule? She hoped not, but kept on smiling.

Juniors and seniors were allowed to leave the school grounds at lunchtime. Lyris, Mercedes Wonsmos, Echo Anderson, and Octavia or Taffy Perry walked up to the Lake Park Tavern along with another young woman, the senior Jade Teensma. Jade bought all her clothes in the Twin Cities, or “the Cities,” as she called them, and had gained early admission to the University of Minnesota, and was going to Paris in the spring. Her future seemed suspended above them, shining like the sun. Today she wore platform sandals and a long silver coat.

Lyris looked forward to ordering hash browns at the Lake Park. She walked a little ahead of the other girls, going along the alley, thinking of the painter whose career was ruined by Napoleon’s divorce.

“So what happened Saturday night?” said Mercedes. “Did you pull a Dun and Bradstreet?”

Echo tugged on the sleeve of Lyris’s jacket. “Mercy has a question.”

Lyris turned and walked backward with her hands in her pockets. “I’m sorry?”

“With Billy Follard,” said Mercedes. “You know what I’m talking about. You’re within range of my voice. Did you do anything you shouldn’t have?”

“It didn’t go very well,” said Lyris.

“It was ever thus,” said Jade.

“Boys on one side, girls on the other,” said Echo.

“Nothing happened,” said Lyris.

Mercedes took Lyris’s hands in her own. “Tell the truth. Because this is important.” The girls stood looking at Lyris with light in their eyes. They seemed to want a certain answer from her.

“Nothing did,” said Lyris. “We went to a grain elevator. We went to a bridge. He told me a story about Baby Mahoney.”

“The wild child?” said Mercedes.

“Not that old saw,” said Jade.

“Then he wouldn’t take me home, so I found my own way.”

“I don’t buy that for a second,” said Mercedes.

“I do,” said Octavia.

“Swear it on your mother’s grave,” Echo suggested.

“My mother’s alive.”

“But eventually.”

“She doesn’t have to swear,” said Octavia. “I believe her. Every situation doesn’t end in sex.”

Jade brought out a pack of herbal cigarettes, lit one by cup- ping it against the wind, and handed the pack and lighter around. “Let’s hurry up,” she said, and they did, each thinking her own private thoughts and considering what Octavia had said.

Follard worked in a shoestore in Stone City. It did not seem a fitting occupation for a badass, and he felt this himself, but it couldn’t be helped. He had been hired by his uncle, who owned the store. In the twenties, a famous bank robber had bought a pair of blucher oxfords here before being apprehended in another county. Somehow the shoes had been returned to the store, and they still resided in a glass case behind the counter. They had more or less collapsed over the years, and the toe caps looked stiff and set. Sometimes old men brought their grandchildren in to see the gangster’s shoes, as if to say, “Let them be a lesson.” Once, after Follard had begun working at the store, he dreamed that his uncle was chasing him between the racks, wearing the shoes on his hands. When he woke up, he had to walk around the house to make sure no one was there.

Follard was suffering. When he reached for the top shelves, he felt a sharpness in his heart. Naturally, all the shoes people wanted that day were up high. The store was busy for a Monday. When he answered the phone, the caller would ask if he had been running. He refused to admit to himself that his ribs might have been broken by Tiny Darling. At noon he walked down the street to a diner, where a man having the hot beef launched into a sneering tirade against the president. The monologue seemed aimed at Follard, who only looked around. He didn’t care about the president, so this was no way to start something with him, nor was he in any condition to respond. He bought an egg salad sandwich and a newspaper and walked back to the store, where he meant to eat his lunch at a card table in the supply room. When he reached for the glass door, the pain brought him low, so that he was kneeling there, with newspaper and sandwich spilled on the sidewalk, when his uncle came to the front of the store.

“Get up,” he said.

“I think my ribs are broken.”

“You’ve been acting funny all day,” said his uncle. He helped Follard to his feet and brought him inside, then dialed the hands of a cardboard clock to two o’clock and hung it on the door. He directed Follard to sit in one of the trying-on chairs and brought him a paper cup of water. With an ease indicating long years of practice, he hooked a low padded bench with his foot, slid it over, and sat down.

“What happened?”

Follard drank the water and sprawled in the chair. “I fell last night,” he said. “I fell against the stair thing. The post.”

“Your aunt said a plumber came to see you. Did this happen before or after the plumber came?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you fight the plumber?”

Follard crushed the paper cup in his hand. “I fought the plumber.”

“Were you at fault?”

“I am hurting! Do you hear me?”

“Yes, I hear you.”

Just then Dr. Palomino opened the door and leaned into the shop. “Closed, are you?”

Follard’s uncle stood up. “Is it something quick? If it’s a small item, such as a shoelace or mink oil, I could ring you up.”

“I’m looking for a pair of shoes. I don’t like to rush into these things.”

“It’s my nephew — claims his ribs are broken.” He waved his hand, a gesture that meant Oh, these kids and their ribs.

“Want me to take a look? I am a doctor.”

“How lucky. Come on in. We’ll give you cost plus ten. He was in a fight.”

“That’s what it usually is with ribs,” said Dr. Palomino. “Fights and car wrecks and team sports. Get his shirt off. Let’s hope it isn’t flail chest. I don’t suppose you know what a flail is, but your uncle might. A flail is an ancient threshing tool with a free-swinging wooden stick.”

Follard relayed his symptoms while his uncle pulled the sleeves of his shirt. The doctor listened, stealing glances at the new line of hard-soled moccasins.

Octavia Perry gave Lyris a ride home from school. Along the road they stopped to watch someone combining. Five spears of gleaming silver combed through cornstalks, which vibrated in their grip. In the combine’s wake, the ground was shorn and brushy. Lauryn Hill sang on the radio about “that thing, that thing, that thing,” but then the combine drowned her out, harvesting the rows nearest the road.

Octavia took a manila envelope from above the visor. “I want you to give this to Jerry,” she said. “I know that nothing really stops you from opening and reading it, but I don’t think that you will.”

“What’s it all about?”

“He’ll get it,” said Octavia.

Lyris put the envelope in her backpack. “Will do.”

Octavia curled her hair behind her ears. “If you have to know, my parents found out about the setup.”

“Jerry Tate?” said Lyris. “My uncle.”

“I call him Mr. Postman,” said Octavia.

“You have a setup with Jerry Tate?”

“It began at a chess exhibit at the state fair. It turned out both of us loved the game. My mother is livid. She says, ‘I’ll state-fair you.’”

Octavia looked out the window. The red combine had stopped beside a green wagon. She seemed peaceful with her decision, whatever it might be.

“That is a bangin’ combine,” she said.

The farmer opened the cab door and climbed down the metal stairs. He was a young man, but his hair was shaggy and streaked with gray.

“I know him,” said Octavia. “It’s Albert Robeshaw.” She and Lyris got out of the car and crossed the ditch, batting weeds from their way. The farmer removed cinched leather gloves and held them bunched in one hand as he leaned an elbow on a metal-capped post of the fence.

“I used to baby-sit you,” he said.

“And you weren’t ever going to farm,” said Octavia. “That’s what you told me. You were going to travel all over the world and never be a farmer.”

“I did travel some. Made it to Thailand.”

“Albert, this is Lyris.”

Albert and Lyris shook hands. He smiled and looked into her eyes until she blinked. His eyes were brown and kindly mocking. He slapped his gloves against his palm. “I’m going to run this out and then you can go along with me a round or two if you want.”

Albert went back up the steps and cranked the combine so corn began pouring from the hooded spout in a uniform yellow spiral that hissed and clattered into the wagon. Dust rose, swirling and thinning in the blue air.

When the wagon was full, Albert, Octavia, and Lyris climbed into the cab of the combine, and Albert eased it into gear. He seemed glad to have company. “The corn’s standing good this year,” he said, loud enough to be heard over the engine and the augers. “Some years it gets broke over. But this way you can run the snoots high and it makes it easier going.”

“Snoots?” said Lyris.

“These big silver things that you see up front, pulling in the corn,” said Albert. “Some years you have to run them so low they catch in the dirt. It can mess you up pretty good.”

Albert aimed the blades between the cornrows, where they yanked the stalks violently down. The ears of corn boiled up to the hopper.

“Did you like Thailand?” said Octavia.

“It was good. The Buddhists there I hadn’t known much about. This idea of lighting your own lamp. I saw the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. There’s a place of great peace. When I ran out of money, I came home.”

Lyris looked out across the country, which sloped to a distant valley and climbed again to the horizon. The geography of farming was inescapable, the striped pattern of crops harvested and crops standing, the patchwork of fields and pastures and water. Power pylons ran down the trough of the valley, and vehicles flashed on distant highways.

“Is all this corn the same?” she said.

“No,” said Albert. “Some does better in wet, some in dry. Some matures in a hundred days, some in a hundred and eight. The long-maturing ones yield better, but not if you get an early frost. What you’re doing by planting four, five varieties, see, is limiting your risk.”

“You sound like a farmer to me,” said Octavia, pressed against the glass in the corner of the cab. Plowbirds with V-shaped wings darted and dove, following the combine.

“This is the best time of year, really,” said Albert. “All the stuff we’ve done so far isn’t worth anything until you pick it. With planting and spraying, you know you’re doing it, but it don’t look much different anyway. But this here, as you go across, it’s gone, so you can watch yourself going.”

Later a pheasant flew up in front of the combine with a hard clipped beating of wings and coasted low into a thicket. Albert said that some farmers let hunters stand at the end of the rows, waiting for the pheasants to come their way, but he did not care for anyone shooting while he was riding high in a glass box.

Even given this instructive detour, Lyris got home before Micah, owing to the one-thirty release of upperclassmen. She put her backpack in her room and then went down to clean the kitchen. She began by putting the curtains back up. Their rings hung on dowels with nothing to keep them from falling, but for now they looked like regular curtains in a regular house. She scrubbed the stove with steel wool. She even cleaned the vise grips for the burner with the missing knob. On the table she found the penknife that she would have sworn she had returned to Follard. She threw it in the trash. Shoes and boots, pairs and strays, she lined up by the stairs.

From the kitchen she moved into the back yard, where she folded the lawn chairs and carried them to the barn. Then she walked out along the railroad tracks, picking wild asparagus for supper. The goat was in a ditch, trying to make itself inconspicuous. Asparagus in one hand and the goat’s collar in the other, she headed back to the house. Railroad spikes in the grass reminded her of something that had happened while she was living with her foster parents Pete and Jackie. Mail arrived one day with Lyris’s name on it. The tract inside was titled How to Derail Any Train with Items Found in the Average Home Workshop. Reading this document, Lyris learned of many shockingly simple methods by which a train could be derailed, including one described in the Warren Report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

When Lyris showed the pamphlet to Pete and Jackie, Pete said it was meant for him and must have come to her by mistake. Lyris asked why he would want to derail a train, and he said he didn’t but some friends of his were interested in the topic. Lyris then asked why Pete’s friends would want to derail a train, and he said he didn’t think they did either — their interest was of a more scholarly nature — but if they did, it would be because industrial society was unjust. People could get killed, said Lyris. Pete said that no one was considering derailing a passenger train, and Jackie at this point chimed in to say that Lyris was thinking in the way that society wanted her to think.

Pete agreed. “Look at you,” he said. “You have nothing, you have less than nothing, and yet your first thought is to protect the freight of some uncaring rail monopoly.”

Such thinking was not Lyris’s fault, Jackie said. It was something everyone had to work past. Lyris nodded, but her mind would not yield the point. She thought that Pete and Jackie were the ones who had it wrong.