Witches on the Road Tonight

  “No,” he says. “I don’t like to be tied down.”

  “You planning on going somewhere?”

  “Not yet.”

  “But one day?” she asks. “Do you see yourself going somewhere with someone one day?”

  “I don’t think about it.”

  “Really?” she asks.

  “Really,” he answers.

  “Do you think about what it would mean to be in love with someone in your own house, who is supposed to be part of your family? To see them every day and not be able to touch them?”

  “Shut up, Wallis,” he says.

  “That would be so romantic and tragic, I think.”

  Jasper tosses a hank of hay at her feet, making her take a step back. He hurls another one, more directly at her, hitting her in the chest.

  “Stop it,” she says, “you’re getting my dress dirty.”

  “Why are you wearing that ugly thing anyway?” he practically shouts. He is pitching more hay, fast and furious now, hailing it down on her until she can’t breathe, until her eyes and mouth are full of hay, until she drops to the ground with her arms over her head to protect herself, and then he flings the pitchfork itself, like a javelin. It strikes the threshing floor and skids to a stop.

  “You could have killed me!” she shouts.

  “Why do you have to ruin everything?” Jasper demands.

  “Why can’t you be like normal boys?” she hurls back. “Most boys would kill to be alone with a girl in a barn.”

  He grabs the rope beside him, fitting his sneaker into the hook of the winch, and swings wide over the edge of the loft. He dangles for a long moment and then he drops into a crouch, scattering most of what he raked. She is frozen, not sure if she should run, and then it’s too late, his hand shoots out and grabs her ankle, knocking her to the ground and pulling her to him. He is on top of her, pinning her by the shoulders, his knee pressed into her skirt between her legs. He puts his mouth to the bodice of her grandmother’s dress and sucks hard at her breast through the fabric. She feels a string plucked deep within her, almost painful, it is so intense.

  “What is it,” he asks, “that you like about me?”

  His eyes are over her eyes, his nose, lips above hers. Why would he ask her such a thing? How is she supposed to answer a question like that?

  “I want to fix all the things that are wrong,” she whispers.

  “Do you think I want to be the kind of person who needs to be fixed? Why would I like a girl who loves the parts of me I hate most?” he asks, shoving her harder into the straw. Getting up, he hunts for the pitchfork, needing to clean up the mess he’s made.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “Maybe that’s not what I meant. I meant I want to understand.”

  He is ignoring her now and she knows she can’t call him back. Nothing she says comes out right. Maybe her parents won’t keep him after all and then, if he was out of the house, they could just be boyfriend and girlfriend. Because how could she stand to live with him, watching him date other girls, listening to him call them on the telephone, their names in his mouth like food at the dinner table? She pushes herself up from the hay and returns to her work, hanging the stirrups and the bridle from the row of coffin nails. Tears roll down her cheeks and she swipes them away angrily.

  Jasper reforks his yellow mountain, the top sliding to the bottom, resisting height. He keeps his back to her.

  “Let’s just forget it,” he says as more hay comes slipping down. “Okay?”

  She is silent, she doesn’t trust her own voice.

  “Okay?” he asks again. She nods. It’s the best she can do.

  “They didn’t have any six-gauge wire,” Eddie says. “I had to get number ten.”

  The hearse’s back doors stand open and half a hardware store rests where the coffin should be. Buckets of paint and pallets of shingles. Staple gun, hammer, nails, fuse boxes. An iron hibachi with a bag of charcoal. Brown paper sacks of groceries. Take those first, Eddie tells them. We don’t want the meat to spoil.

  Jasper climbs into the back.

  “Where’s the white for the neutral?” he asks, looking at the five heavy spools of black cable Eddie purchased.

  “They didn’t have any white,” Eddie answers. “Only black.”

  “I’ll try not to electrocute myself.”

  Wallis has never heard Jasper be short with her father. Eddie, too, is surprised. He thought Jasper would be pleased he’d given in, but he’s made a mistake. He has bought way too much of the wrong thing. Wallis reaches in for a bag of groceries and another of charcoal. Jasper tugs out one of the ungainly spools and hefts it onto his shoulder. Eddie trails behind with another bag of tools and the heavy, squat grill. She hasn’t spoken to Jasper since they finished cleaning the barn and sat waiting for her father on the porch. Now it is after four and her throat feels tight and her voice quilted to the roof of her mouth.

  “Did you make yourselves some lunch?” her father asks.

  “We were waiting for you,” Jasper says.

  “If you get hungry, you should eat,” Eddie replies. “It’s your house, too.”

  “Number ten won’t carry as much current,” Jasper says. “The smaller the gauge, the more it can handle. If they didn’t have six, you should have gotten four.”

  “If it won’t work, we’ll take it back.”

  “I can get it to work,” Jasper says. “It’s just not right.”

  There is silence and Wallis steels herself for the retort and recrimination. She finds herself thinking of Mom for the first time since yesterday and wonders if her father called while he was in town.

  “If anyone can make it work, it’s you,” Eddie says kindly. “Around the station you can always make something out of nothing.”

  “It’s not so difficult when nothing’s all you’ve got.”

  Her father matches his steps to the boy’s by way of apology. Halfway up, Jasper’s body begins to relax, and by the time they’ve reached the cabin, she can tell Eddie is forgiven. She doesn’t understand how silence between some people can be so comforting when, between others, it falls so heavy. She doesn’t understand what she’s doing wrong.

  Ducking beneath the low doorway, Wallis takes the groceries to the springhouse behind the barn. Yesterday she had swept it clean but more debris from the roof has fallen and the dirt is even dirtier. She sets the meat and milk next to the beer in the shallow pool of black water where flakes of chipped whitewash float like melting snow. Outside, her dad and Jasper are talking. They sound more natural when she is around, they use her, she knows, as a conduit to each other, like a spring that goes underground to feed two bodies of shallow water. How long would she have to stay kneeling in this building before they lapsed into silence? She looks down to where she swims in the dark, Wallis Alley, a girl who has been kissed and now something more, though she doesn’t know if that something more has added to or subtracted from what came before. Wallis touches her troubled reflection, puts her hand in the cold water to erase herself, wets the back of her neck, rises, walks outside.

  “You can’t let those bastards push you out,” Jasper says. “You have to stay and fight.”

  “Fight what?” Eddie asks. “Late night belongs to the news now.”

  “She’s right,” Jasper mutters, glancing back at Wallis. “You are more comfortable in a suit.”

  Wallis looks to her father.

  “I was picking tobacco and hunting roots when I was your age,” Eddie says, trying to make light of Jasper’s insult. “There are worse things than wearing a suit.”

  “I’d rather be hunting roots,” Jasper says.

  “Jasper says he’s not going back to school,” Wallis announces.

  “Taking a year off is fine, after everything you’ve been through,” Eddie says, serious now. “But you need to finish your education.”

  “Stop talking like a dad,” Jasper retorts. “You’re not my type.”

  They’ve reached the hearse once more, and
Eddie slides out a plywood pallet of plastic-wrapped asphalt shingles. They are too heavy for one person and Jasper steps up to lift the other side. Wallis grabs two gallons of paint like milk pails. Back up the steep path, sometimes Jasper walks backward, sometimes her father, sometimes there is room for them to walk side-by-side. They are going so slow, inching along the drop-off by the overgrown tobacco field. Wallis wants to pass but there is no room on the narrow trail.

  “If you changed jobs, would we have to move?” Wallis asks.

  “I don’t know, we might,” Eddie answers, grunting under the weight.

  “Would Jasper come with us?”

  Jasper looks straight ahead, his jaw set, not wanting to hear his fate discussed. Her father is uncertain what he is supposed to say. Does Jasper belong to them now?

  “I suppose that would be up to Jasper,” he says at last.

  What’s the return policy on you, she wonders, and where would you go if we decided not to keep you? She swings the paint, carefree. Yes, she thinks, we are all at someone’s mercy, and she was here first. The thought gives a little extra momentum to her swing, she doesn’t have to trail behind them, she knows the way up the path to her own grandmother’s house.

  “Watch—” cries Eddie, losing his grip as Jasper drops away. The single misplaced step, then the slide and fall, the boy’s strangled cry swallowed by a crash of the shingles torn from Eddie’s hands, hitting the ground and avalanching over the edge after him. Jasper’s sneaker takes out stone and vine, a pine sapling in a ball of root. He is scrambling, trying to slow his slide, but gravity takes over and his body twists beneath him, flipping him headfirst. The pallet has torn apart and gray shingles slither past in an angular rivulet. Eddie is behind him, leaping down the gully and stopping just short of where Jasper comes to rest.

  “Are you okay?” he shouts. It has all taken place in an instant, though the fall is still crashing in echo. Wallis stands clutching her paint cans. The thin metal hoops cut grooves in her palms.

  “I’m okay,” Jasper says, fighting tears.

  “Don’t move,” Eddie says.

  Instead of extending his hand to the boy, he runs diagonally up the drop, never letting the angle get steep enough to pull him back down. Wallis paces on the path above him, not knowing if she should stay and stand guard over Jasper. Even without the aid of her grandmother’s herbal, she recognizes the twining pale-green leaves of three that fill the pit into which he’s fallen. Poison ivy coiled around his wrists and ankles.

  Her father comes up a few yards ahead and twists an armload of branches from a flowering orange bush. She has seen it growing all along the road and up the mountain path, its nodding orange slippers peeking out against the laurel and honeysuckle. She runs back to help Jasper but her father shouts again.

  “Don’t touch him. You’ll get it all over yourself. Wait for me.”

  He drags a fallen branch behind him and returns along the same path as before. “Here, use this,” he says, extending it to him.

  Jasper does as he is told, grabbing hold and using the branch as a guide rail to come even with Eddie. Her father flings the branch away, grabbing Jasper tightly by the wrist to pull him the rest of the way up, scrubbing his arm violently with the orange blossoms. He pulls the boy’s shirt over his head and tosses it aside, continuing to scrub his naked back and freckled chest, his neck, underarms, down into the waistband of his pants. Jasper pulls away like a startled animal but Eddie yanks him back fiercely, working fast to spread the sap of the plant across his infected skin before the blisters rise.

  “Get some more of that jewelweed,” he orders Wallis. “The bush with the little orange flowers.”

  She drops the paint and races back to the flowering shrub, breathing in the slightly sharp perfume of its break. She’s not sure what part holds the medicine, so she tears roughly at whatever she can reach, spilling blossoms through her fingertips. Sharp, nutty seedpods skip away like crickets. Her hands are full and sticky when she turns to see her father helping Jasper the rest of the way up the hill, rubbing the boy’s other arm as he pulls. He is stained saffron with crushed petals and scraped raw by the twigs. Her father takes the fresh green leaves from her and crushes them between his palms.

  “Close your eyes,” he says, working quickly to cover the boy’s face with a sticky mask. “My mother always said God planted jewelweed close by poison ivy to act as its antidote. In my experience, though, you’ll find acres of poison ivy growing without any jewelweed, but you’ll never find jewelweed without poison ivy lurking nearby.”

  Jasper stands stunned and blind on the path, letting Eddie grind the leaves through his hair and into his scalp. Wallis looks down at the paint cans, the splintered pallet and few remaining shingles. She can still feel his mouth on her breast and has the uncomfortable feeling of wanting to laugh. Did she mean to cause this? Eddie nods to her again and she goes back to the bush for more, taking her time now, relieved to leave the emergency behind. This time she picks more carefully, breaking the stems off at the base as she would for a flower arrangement. How does nature arrange these pairings? she wonders. She turns back to where her father is concentrating as if sanding down an ornate piece of furniture, rubbing behind the boy’s ear, inside its whorl, down the grain of his throat. Eddie has moved down to Jasper’s pale legs when he looks up to find her waiting. His leaf-filled hands pause, gripped around the boy’s thigh. Slowly, Jasper opens his eyes. Wallis stands hardly daring to breathe, clutching her astringent bouquet.

  Eddie rises and takes it from her, passing it to Jasper so that he might finish rubbing himself down.

  “I think we caught it in time,” he says gruffly.

  Eddie rubs his hands roughly on his own cutoffs and turns back to the hearse for the next load. Wallis watches him go, then slides carefully down the hill to see how many shingles might be salvaged.

  “Your mother is going to haunt you,” Wallis says to her father.

  “It’s not her house anymore,” answers Eddie. He is drinking a beer while he washes his paint roller in the sink. It has taken them two coats to cover the kitchen newsprint and now Wallis finds the room falsely bright and cheerful. Her naked forearms are staticky with dried white paint. She can read herself like braille.

  “If she wanted electricity she would have gotten it,” Wallis says.

  “Rural Electrification Administration came through after the war, wiring up all our neighbors,” Eddie tells her, squeezing out his roller. “She said they only came to the country when they ran out of city people to sell appliances to. Power wasn’t about us, if it suited their purposes, they’d keep us in the dark.”

  “Who is they?” Wallis asks.

  “Factory owners, the government, the capitalists, the communists. Anyone with more power than her, which was pretty much everyone.”

  “She sounds paranoid,” Wallis says.

  “Paranoid was the least of it.”

  Eddie washes his hands and dries them, watching Jasper from the window. In the hours before it got too dark to see, Jasper set his drill bit against the surface of the wood and leaned his weight against it, cranking the old hand drill, opening a hole beneath the windowsill of her bedroom. The wood shavings rose around the bit like sparks from a Roman candle, falling in a soft pile on the porch boards below. He had drilled holes in all the other windows as well, feeding through the thick black cable, running it along the baseboard and up to the ceiling, where he screwed in a raw fixture with a hanging chain. Now he has wired everything but the kitchen where Wallis and Eddie were painting, and the circuit snakes along the baseboards, across the breezeway to a new fuse box. It is ugly and exposed and, Wallis thinks, someone is sure to trip over it.

  She tosses her roller into the sink, turning the water to milk, and steps out onto the porch. The wind picked up with the setting sun and tosses the treetops in the hollow. High purple thunderheads muster over the next mountain. Wallis hopes the rain holds off. Eddie told them tonight was the first night of
the Perseid meteor shower. When he was a boy he would sometimes count twenty falling stars an hour. Earlier, Jasper rinsed off in the spring and changed into yet another baseball shirt and pair of cutoff shorts. He is a boy, she thinks, of very few options. He is casual here in a way he never is back home, leaving his dirty shorts in a ball by the porch stairs. Wallis steps over them so as not to infect herself.

  “How is this supposed to work?” she calls to him. “It isn’t connected to anything.”

  “There’s enough cable to run it down to the road pole at the bottom of the path,” he says. “I can hack into the transformer.”

  “You are not going to hack into a road pole,” Eddie says, joining them outside. “When we get home, we’ll call the power company and schedule a hookup.”

  “Why would you pay for it, when I can get it for you for free?” Jasper asks.

  “Because I don’t have insurance on this place,” Eddie answers. “Or on you.”

  “You know the problem with you, Eddie,” Jasper says, shoveling dirt over the cable as he unspools it across the ground. “You’ll feel a girl up but you’re too scared to fuck her.”

  “Excuse me,” Wallis says, offended.

  Her father takes a lazy sip of his beer, not protesting. “Dad?” she insists.

  “What can I say?” Eddie answers, laughing. “He’s right.”

  Eddie sets his beer on the railing and busies himself pouring charcoal into the hibachi. Dousing it with lighter fluid, he strikes a match and stands back as the grill explodes in flame.

  “What will it be, kids?” he queries. “Shall we feast upon the rare burger? Or the well-done?”

  “Raw,” says Wallis.

  “That’s my girl,” he says. “How about you, Jasper?”

  “I’m not hungry,” Jasper says, unwinding more of the spool and packing the dirt around it.

  “Settle down, son,” Eddie calls. “This doesn’t all have to be done tonight.”

  “Settle down, settle down,” Jasper mutters. “I’m not you, Eddie, I don’t like to settle.”

  “Whoa,” Eddie says, not ready to be bullied out of his good mood. “Where’s this coming from?”