Gypsies

Michael thought, He almost took me with him. That day before we left Toronto. Had me hypnotized or something, had me following him back down some ugly back door out of the world.

  He remembered that place he had almost gone. He remembered the feel of it, the taste and the smell of it. And unlike the world he had dreamed last night, it was not very far away at all… Michael was certain he could find it again if he wanted to.

  It might be necessary one day. It might tell them something.

  Furtively now, he raised his hands in front of him.

  This was probably not a good idea … he told himself so. But it was important, he thought. A piece of the puzzle. This was the step Laura or his mother would never take; this was Michael’s responsibility.

  He made a circle of his fingers.

  He looked through that circle at the town of Polger Valley, calm under a quarter inch of snow.

  Felt the power in him… looked again, looked harder.

  The town changed…

  It was recognizably the same town. An old steel-mill town on the Monongahela. Maybe even, in a way, better off. The mill was bigger, a huge compound of coal-black buildings strung out along the riverside. There were complex piers busy with odd wooden barges; the river was crowded with traffic. But the town was also dirtier, the sky was black; the houses hugging this hillside were tin-and-tar-paper shanties. There was snow on the ground but the snow was gray with ash; the trees were spindly and barren. The traffic down at the foot of this hill was mostly horses and carts; the one truck that ambled past was boxy and antiquated-looking. Michael caught a faint whiff of some sulfurous chemical odor.

  He squinted across town to the police station and the courthouse, plain gray stone buildings a quarter mile away down Riverside. He saw the flag flying over the courthouse and recognized that it was not an American flag, not a familiar flag at all: something dark with a triangular symbol.

  Bad place, Michael thought. You could feel it in the air. Poverty and bad magic.

  This is his home, Michael thought: this is where Walker lives. Not this town, maybe, but this world.

  He shivered and blinked away the vision. His hands dropped to his side.

  Maybe they would have to follow Walker into that place. Maybe that was their only choice. It might come to that. But not yet, Michael thought. He felt soiled, dirty; even that brief contact had been chastening. He moved down the hillside toward Polger Valley—how clean it suddenly seemed—thinking, Not yet, we’re not ready for that yet… we’re not strong enough yet for that.

  He was halfway home down Riverside, past the Kresge’s and the Home Hardware, when Willis pulled up next to him.

  “Hey,” Willis said.

  Michael stood still on the cracked sidewalk and regarded his grandfather warily through the rolled-down window of the Fairlane…

  “Get in,” Willis said.

  Michael said, “I wanted to walk.”

  But Willis just reached over and jerked open the door on the passenger side. Michael shrugged and climbed in.

  The car was dirty with fast-food wrappers and cigarette butts, but it smelled only faintly of liquor: Willis was sober today.

  Willis drove slowly down Main. He looked at Michael periodically and made a couple of attempts at conversation. He asked how Michael did in school. Okay, Michael said. Was it messing him up to be out for so long? No, he figured he could make it up. (As if any of this mattered.) Willis said, “Your old man left?”

  Michael hesitated, then nodded.

  “Shitty thing to do,” Willis said.

  “I guess he had his reasons.”

  “Everybody has some goddamn reason.”

  Turning up Montpelier, Willis said, “Look, I know what it is you’re running from.”

  Michael raised his head, startled.

  “You can only make it worse,” Willis went on, “doing what you’re doing.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I think you do, though. I think you know exactly what I mean.” Willis was talking now from way down in his chest, almost to himself. He downshifted the Fairlane and slowed, approaching the house.

  Willis said, “Timmy used to go off like that. Off up into the hills or God knows where. And I knew what he was doing, just like I know what you’re doing. I could smell it on him.” Willis pulled into the driveway and on up into the tiny, dark garage. He pulled the hand brake and let the motor die. “I smell it on you.”

  Michael reached for the door but Willis caught his wrist. Willis had a hard grip. He was old but he had hard, stringy muscles.

  “This is for your own good,” he said. “You listen to me. It brings him. You savvy? You go out there and make a little door into Hell and he climbs out.”

  Michael said, “What do you know about it?”

  “More than you think. You don’t give me much credit, do you?”

  Michael felt Willis’s huge anger rising up. He shifted toward the door, but Willis held tight to his wrist.

  “My Christ,” Willis went on, “didn’t your mother teach you anything? Or maybe she did—maybe she taught you too fucking much.”

  Michael remembered what Laura had told him, how Willis used to beat them. He realized now that it was true, Willis could do that, he was capable of it. Willis radiated anger like a bright red light.

  “Admit it,” Willis said, “you were up in those hills opening doors.”

  Michael shook his head. The lie was automatic.

  “Don’t shit me,” Willis stormed. “I’m a good Christian man. I can smell out the Devil in the dark.”

  It made Michael think of the sulfurous stink of Walker’s world.

  “I don’t do that,” he said.

  Willis’s grip tightened. “I won’t have you drawing down that creature on us again. Too many years—I lived with that too goddamn long.” He bent down so that his face was close to Michael’s face. The dim winter light in the garage made him seem monstrous. “I want you to admit to me what you’ve been doing. And then I want you to promise you won’t do it again.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Crap,” Willis said, and raised his right hand to strike.

  It was the gesture that angered Michael. Made him mad, because he guessed his mother had seen that hand upraised, and Laura, and they had been children, too young to do or say anything back. “All right!” he said, and when Willis hesitated Michael went on: “I can do it! Does that make you happy? I could walk out of here sideways and you’d never see me go! Is that what you want?”

  Willis pulled Michael close and with the other hand took hold of his hair. The grip was painful; Michael’s eyes watered.

  “Don’t even think it,” Willis said.

  His voice was a rumble, gritty machinery in his chest.

  “Promise me,” Willis said. “Promise you won’t do it again.” Silence.

  Willis tugged back on Michael’s hair. “Promise!”

  Michael said, “Fuck you!”

  And Willis was too shocked to react.

  Michael said between his teeth, “I could do it here! You ever think about that? I could do it now.” And it was true. He felt the power in him still, high-pitched and singing. He said without thinking about it, “I could drop you down through the floor so fast you wouldn’t be able to blink—do you want that?”

  Willis was speechless.

  Michael said, “Let go of me.”

  Miraculously, he felt Willis’s grip loosen.

  He wrenched open the door before Willis could reconsider. He stumbled down onto the oily concrete.

  “You’re lost,” Willis said from the darkness inside the car. “Oh boy… you are damned.” But there was not much force left in it.

  Michael hurried into the house.

  2

  “I don’t like telling it,” Mama said. “I can’t tell it all. I don’t know it all. But I guess I can tell what I know.”

  The kitchen clock ticked away. Karen and Laura sat sipping coffee. Karen understood that
silence was best, that her mother was staring past these walls and back into a buried history. Hard for all of us, she thought.

  Privately, Karen was frightened. The words pronounced in this room might change her life. Beginning now, she thought, the future is dark and strange.

  Karen took another sip of coffee, waiting. Beyond the steamy windows a still morning sunlight filled the backyard.

  “Well,” Mama said. “I was a girl in Wheeling when I met Willis. You know, this was all so long ago it seems like a story. Your Grandma Lucille was working at the Cut-&-Curl and that year I had a teller job at the bank.”

  She settled back and sighed.

  “I met Willis through the church.

  “It was a little Assembly of God church, what I guess nowadays they would call fundamentalist. To us it was just church. Willis was very serious about it. He went to all the functions. I was there every Sunday but I didn’t do any work or go to the meetings much. There was a Youth Group that met in the basement and I went there sometimes. Willis was always there. He knew me from Group for most of a year before he worked up the nerve to ask me out. Maybe that seems strange, but it was different in those days. People didn’t just, you know, jump into bed. There was a courtship, there was dating. But pretty soon we started going together. And I liked him well enough to eventually marry him.

  “He was different when he was younger. I don’t say that to excuse anything. But I want you to understand how it was. He was fun to be with. He told jokes. Can you imagine that? He liked to dance. After we got married a cousin of his got him a job at a mill up in Burleigh, and that was when we moved out of Wheeling.

  “I guess it was hard for me being away from family and in a strange town and living with a man, all for the first time. Just being married, it was very different. Willis wasn’t always as gentle or as interesting as he seemed when we were dating. But you kind of expect that. But he was doing a lot of overtime, too. There were days I hardly saw him. I will admit I was lonely sometimes. I made a few friends but it was never like Wheeling—it was always a strange place to me.

  “We wanted children. Mostly I wanted them. I wanted them especially because the house we rented seemed so empty. It was not a big house; Willis was not making a great salary those early years. But it felt big when I was rattling around in it on my own. You clean up, you maybe listen to the radio a little bit, and the time slips by. So it was natural to think about children and how there would at least be company, even if it was only a little baby. The neighbors had kids and that woman, Ellen Conklin, she would come by in the afternoons and just drink one cup of coffee after another and complain about her life. Had a little brat named, I think, Emilia who never left her in peace. I mean a truly nasty child. But I envied her even that. A child— it would be something.

  “But we didn’t have any.

  “We waited for five years.

  “I didn’t know to see a doctor or anything. I just thought you waited. And it would happen or it would not as God preferred. We went to an Assembly church there and one time I asked the pastor about it, privately. Well, he turned so red he could hardly talk. A young man. ‘God willing,’ he said—he used those words. Tray,’ he told me.

  “So I prayed. But nothing happened.

  “I didn’t know about fertility or about how it worked, except that the man and the woman were together in bed and that was how it happened. I wondered if we were doing something wrong. Because in those days nobody talked about it. Nobody I knew ever talked about it. I finally worked up the nerve to mention how we never had babies to Ellen Conklin and she said, ‘Why, shoot, Jeanne, I thought you were doing it on purpose.’ And it was news to me that there was a way to not have kids on purpose. It was confusing to me… why would anybody not want to? Which made Ellen Conklin laugh, of course.

  “She said to see a doctor. It might be me, she said, or it could be Willis. And maybe it could be fixed.

  “Well, I saw the doctor by myself. Willis wouldn’t go. He just wouldn’t hear of it. It wasn’t the kind of thing Willis could talk about. So I went by myself, and in the end it didn’t matter that Willis didn’t go because as it turned out it was me—I was the one who couldn’t bear children.”

  She looked at Karen and Laura, back and forth between them. “You know what I’m saying?”

  Karen was trembling; she did not speak. Laura said coolly, “We were adopted?” Added, “I looked in the family Bible, Mama … I know we’re not in there.”

  Karen felt suddenly adrift, a ship cast loose from its moorings.

  Mama said, “Not adopted exactly. But I will tell you the story. What I know of it.”

  They were a strange couple (Mama said). They had been going to the Assembly church for almost two years, and they were immigrants.

  DPs, most people thought, refugees from what was left of Europe after the war. No one could place exactly what country they might have fled. They spoke good English but in an odd way, as if a Dutch accent had mingled with a French. They looked alike. He was tall and she was short, but they had similar eyes.

  They just moved into town one day and took up residence in a shack out on the access road. Obviously they’d been through hard times. They gave then-name as Williams, so people were thinking, Well, here’s somebody without papers, somebody maybe who came into the country through the back door—it was possible.

  But they were not drifters. The man—he called himself Ben—had no skills but he was willing to work and he was a hard worker. You would see him sometimes at the back of the hardware store, pushing a broom or shelving stock. People said he never complained. And he had a family.

  Three little babies.

  The oldest was four. The youngest was a newborn.

  I see you know what I mean. But wait—don’t jump ahead.

  People took pity on them because of this haggard look, a hunted look. In the Depression you might have mistaken them for criminals or hobos, but these were prosperous times and there was nothing criminal about them. And we were reading all the terrible stories then about the war—this was when the truth about the death camps came out. They weren’t Jews but they might have been gypsies or Poles or who knows what. None of us really understood what had happened over there, only that a lot of innocent people had been hunted down and killed.

  Ben seemed very serious about the church. I don’t know if it was ever honest conviction, however, or just the urge to fit in. Sometimes at church I would see him a pew or three in front of me, standing there with the hymnal in his hand, not really singing but just mouthing the words. And he would have this utterly lost look, the way you or I might look if we’d stumbled into a synagogue or something by mistake and couldn’t politely leave. I think he liked the processional best. He would always close his eyes and smile a little when the organ played. And he always put money in the plate—for a man in his circumstances he gave very generously.

  I never thought he would abandon those children.

  He seemed to like it well enough in Burleigh—and he loved those kids. You could just tell.

  But this is the part I don’t know much about. Willis never talked about it.

  All I know is that there was trouble one night at the shack where they lived. Willis got a phone call and went out with some church people. He came back looking very pale and, you know, shaking. But he never talked about it. Couple of police cars were out there that night, people said, and some stories circulated but no two alike, so I don’t know. Finally it was let out that Ben and his wife had left town, or maybe he had murdered his wife and run away—but I never believed that.

  The pastor of our church took charge of the three children. There was a county orphanage two towns away but it had a very bad reputation—and these weren’t registered children; they had no birth or baptismal certificates. In those days, in that place, people were more casual about such things. Well, the pastor thought of us.

  He talked to Willis about it.

  I don’t know how much Willis liked
the idea. But he knew I wanted kids and that I couldn’t have any. Maybe the pastor or some of the deacons leaned on him. Anyway, he agreed. And I think that was a brave thing to do.

  He brought you three home.

  “I don’t remember any of that,” Karen said dazedly.

  “Well,” Mama said, “you were only just four years old—a young four at that. It’s hardly surprising. And Laura was still in diapers and Timmy was just newborn.”

  “At least it makes sense,” Laura said. “It puts some order into things.” “Does it?”

  “There must be a reason we’re the way we are.”

  Mama said, “You shouldn’t even talk about that.”

  “But we are talking about it,” Laura said. “Isn’t that what we’ve been talking about all along? Mama, that’s why we’re here.”

  Karen watched her mother stand up, pace nervously to the sink.

  Mama said—faintly—“It frightened your father.”

  She turned to the window.

  “I saw you do it once. I mean you, Karen. I remember that. It didn’t seem like such a bad thing. You showed me. You were proud of it. You drew a circle in the air and there was a nice place in that circle—a lake, some trees, a flight of birds. Like a postcard picture. It was pretty and it was the sort of thing a child might try to draw with crayons. I wasn’t frightened of it, not at that moment. Later I guess I was, because it was a miracle, you know, and frightening when you think about what it might mean. But you were so proud of it. Maybe somebody had showed you how, back before we got you. Or maybe you just knew. When I calmed down I said it was nice but don’t do it again and especially don’t show Daddy … I knew how he’d take it.”

  Karen thought, I remember that! So long ago, but the memory popped right back up. How it had felt, making that circle, feeling the power in her… she had been proud.

  She thought, It’s been so long! Once I was young and I could hear that song inside me, even when I didn’t want to. Now I’m empty. Drained, she thought, like a bottle.

  “It was always Daddy,” Mama said, “who decided when we would move.”