All Things Cease to Appear

  The room was cold without much heat and they all three of them got into one bed with all their clothes on and lay with their arms and legs touching and their eyes on the ceiling. Wade fell asleep first, as he always did. He wasn’t a worrier like their older brother, Eddy. Worrying kept Eddy up at night. He’d open the window and climb out on the roof and sit there and smoke, and when he came back he brought the cold in with him and the stink of cigarettes.

  In the morning, Mrs. Lawton came over with her boy, Travis Jr. Cole’s mother had washed her face and brushed her hair and put on lipstick. She stood at the mirror buttoning her sweater. She had yellow hair and little baby teeth, and people smiled at her like they do at babies or cupcakes or butterflies. Even with nothing she’d made cookies, and the whole house smelled good and sweet, like it always used to when he was little.

  Why don’t you boys go for a walk, Mrs. Lawton said. Your mother and I want to talk.

  Travis was a year younger than Cole and went to St. Anthony’s and had to wear a uniform. St. Anthony’s was around the corner from the middle school, and sometimes Cole would walk over and watch the St. Anthony’s kids behind the fence in their blue shirts and gray trousers, the girls in plaid skirts. He knew one of those girls, Patrice, and was in love with her.

  They went down to the creek, getting their sneakers wet, and started throwing rocks. Cole’s went the farthest, which was no surprise. He was tall for his age and had big hands and feet like his father and would grow up to be as big and tall as him, that’s what everybody always said. People always compared him to his father, but they didn’t know anything. For one thing, he didn’t plan on being poor, and he’d never hurt a woman or use a belt on his children, and when he thought about these things his chest went on fire and his eyes prickled, but he wouldn’t say a word. How he really felt about his father was nobody’s business.

  Travis Jr.’s father was the county sheriff. One time Wade got caught stealing something in Hack’s and Sheriff Lawton walked him into the parking lot and put his hand on his back to talk some sense into him. They stood there with their heads bowed like two men praying, but it made no impact on Cole’s brother, who was always figuring a scheme.

  He fished one of his mother’s butts out of his pocket and lit it, aware of Travis Jr.’s eyes on him. His mother smoked Pall Malls. He dragged on it hard and it hurt a little bit and an ugly taste covered his tongue. How many guns your father got?

  Couple.

  He let you hold ’em?

  One time I did.

  They threw some more rocks, and Travis said, Sorry about your farm.

  Cole threw a rock and it made an arc through the sky and disappeared, almost like a shooting star.

  You can’t tell, Travis said ominously. In life. One minute to the next. You don’t know, you just can’t predict it.

  Cole looked off at the hills, waiting for them to blur. If you looked at anything long enough it would start to become something else, or even completely undefined, and no matter what it was, you thought about it differently than you had before, and usually it was less important. This was a philosophy he’d been developing in his own mind. He had an interest in philosophy, about how people thought. And physics, too, how one thing influenced another, and he was a good student and really good at science. But there were mysteries in life that could not be explained.

  Travis touched his arm. You okay?

  He shrugged him off.

  They walked through the woods, the cold darkness of the trees. When they got back from the creek his mother put out cookies and they ate them and drank the milk of their lost cows on the steps outside in the bitter sun. The air still smelled of the cows, of the sweet manure-smell that he’d known all his life and that always made him happy, but when he remembered the long white barns and empty stanchions, the milk suddenly tasted sour. He used to complain about his chores—his father’s hand on his back to wake him, being pulled from the warm bed, shuffling half dressed out into the pitch-black to milk and feed the cows and clean the barn before school. Too lazy to put on socks, his feet always freezing in his old boots, and his brothers shoving him across the dirt yard into the warm light of the barn, where the cows yearned for him and stamped their feet. He had hated every minute of it, but now missed it so much his guts hurt.

  The women came outside. His mother buttoned her coat, sniffling, her eyes watery in the bright sunlight. She was clutching a yellow tissue like a trapped warbler, and in his mind’s eye he saw the crumpled wad unfold itself and fly away.

  You okay, hon? Mrs. Lawton asked. I know you’re worried.

  He looked at her wormy forehead, her wide orange mouth.

  You just go about your business, she said.

  I will.

  Thanks for coming, Mary, his mother said. Goodbye, Travis.

  Bye.

  Travis climbed into the car. His cheeks looked clammy and pink, and when the car pulled slowly down the road, he pushed his face against the window like a retard, and just before they turned the corner he waved. Cole raised his hand and kept it up even after the car had disappeared out of sight.

  He stood there a minute, listening to the sounds moving through the air. They were familiar to him. He could hear the train; it came loud at first, then went on through the woods and grew quiet. He could hear Mrs. Pratt’s dogs. Inside, his mother was sitting at the table with a ledger book and a pile of bills. He could tell she’d been crying even though she smiled at him like a girl who’d just won something. He made her tea and brought it to her on a saucer, spilling it a little, the spoon tinkling. Then he took her hand tenderly, sheltering it in his own, closing his eyes very tight and trying to send something from himself into her that would keep her going, because he sensed her distance, that she was fading out, becoming some quiet figure in the background who nobody noticed. In her old pink sweater, she stared at the tabletop where the bills were laid out like a game of solitaire. He would watch his mother very closely, noting the changes in her face. She was like a warning sound in the distance. You knew something was coming, something bad, and it would hurt.

  Then she got up and brought the empty teacup and saucer to the sink and washed them and set them each in the dish rack, and watching her do this made him feel a little better. His father came in with mud on his boots and shuffled across the floor and lay on the couch, and she stood there looking at him, her face so pale. She went and untied his boots and pulled them off, and like a small child he let her do it. She covered him with the blanket and put her hand on his forehead like she did to Cole when he had a fever, and she looked into his eyes and his father looked back. She told Cole to go outside and make good use of the day, but he said he didn’t feel like it and she didn’t make him. While his father slept and some stupid thing played on TV, she pushed the mop across the wrecked boards, her eyes fierce. She cleaned the bedrooms and the bathrooms and then pulled the twisted sheets from the wash and took them outside in the wood basket to hang on the line. It was cold and Cole helped, and the wet sheets slapped against their bodies and made him think of the chill of death and of the shadows he sometimes saw out in the fields, the men who rose out of the dirt in their cavalry uniforms. They had done the Revolutionary War in school and he knew about how the battles had played out on the fields behind their house. His grandpa used to say you could dig up their brass buttons and claimed to have a jar full of them somewhere. When they came back inside she started collecting all the junk nobody ever used, piling it up on an old horse blanket—a half-busted toaster, roller skates that didn’t fit, an old music toy from when he was a baby—and when the blanket was full she pulled the corners taut like Santa’s bundle and hauled it out to the truck, and they brought it into town and gave it all to the church. Cole waited in the truck while she talked to Father Geary in the courtyard. The morning had gotten cloudy but now sunlight poured out of the sky and splashed on their backs. Father Geary put his hand on her shoulder and she nodded as he spoke to her, her hand over her eyes like a
salute, and it came to Cole that his mother wasn’t used to being touched so gently and maybe didn’t like it.

  Driving home, they stopped at Tasty Treat and she bought him an ice-cream cone with all the change she’d found around the house, and they sat there while he ate it with the sun bright on the windshield. His mother watched him closely and smoothed his hair with her cold fingers. You need a haircut, she said.

  His father was up eating toast when they got home. Cole could see his brothers out back trying to fix the tractor. There were parts strewn on the ground and a mess of greasy rags. His father swallowed his tea and put on his coat and went out. Cole watched him as he stood on the step, lighting a cigarette. He said something to Wade and Eddy, his voice sharp. His mother wiped off the table, glancing up through the smudged glass of the door, and when his father got into the truck a look came over her face, like she was glad.

  Later, after dark, they went to get him. It was a bar called Blake’s. She made Cole go in. Walls like pea soup, and a smell you didn’t find anyplace else. He stepped over the sleeping dogs. The bartender said, You got company, Cal. You better get on.

  What for? his father muttered.

  Cole pulled on the greasy rim of his coat sleeve. Come on, Pop.

  She out there?

  Yes, sir.

  Well, goddamn her.

  They left him there and drove home. His mother didn’t look at him. It was just the dark road, her cigarette, the wind through his butterfly window. Don’t turn into someone like him, she told Cole.

  While his brothers slept, Cole lay there thinking about how to save the farm, but he couldn’t come up with anything good. He fell asleep, and a little while later he heard her downstairs, the clatter of plates and silver, and he got up and went down the cold hall and looked over the banister. He could see her setting the table with her good china, one plate after another, as if for a party, and then she sat down at the end of it and looked out at her imaginary company with a dull fire in her eyes.

  He was woken later by the rattling diesel of his father’s truck, then the kitchen door banging open, his keys hitting the old china plate and his staggering footsteps up the stairs. Cole faked sleep as his father shuffled down the hall to their room and shut the door; he could vaguely hear them talking, but he was drowsy and glad they were talking at least, and he thought maybe things would be all right.

  —

  HIS MOTHER WOKE HIM the next morning before church to cut his hair. Even in the cold she made him sit outside on the stepstool with a dish towel across his shoulders and as she moved around behind him he could feel the itchy wool of her coat brushing against his neck. Wade was making a wreath out of sticks. His brother wasn’t much good at school but he had a knack for making one thing out of another. He could make a rose out of hay, twisting the strands into a pretty knot, and he could cane a chair.

  Not too short, Cole said.

  She didn’t answer, but she’d do what she wanted anyway. When she finished she looked at him with her hands on his shoulders. He was taller than her now, and she gave him a funny smile and went inside. Cole looked in the hand mirror. His hair was far too short. His face had thinned down and his eyes were hard and blue. His shoulders had gone rigid. He could hear them inside, fighting about the piano she’d inherited, his father threatening to sell it, his mother crying and a disruption of chairs. Then his mother left the house, climbing up to the ridge in her church dress and muck boots and baggy old coat. In her fist a hunk of wild daisies. She walked in the way of a pony, her bony knees, her long neck, her hair hanging down, and he wished she would just turn around and come home.

  —

  SMALL FARMS LIKE THEIRS were going broke. You’d hear sad stories about this family or that one. His father organized a rally and people came from all over the state. Cole and his brothers set up picnic tables in a row and covered them with oilcloths. They butchered a pig and roasted it in a barrel, and the air smelled of it and he was hungry all day, waiting for it to cook. His mother made baked beans and cornbread and coleslaw and everybody ate their fill. After they finished they tossed their paper plates into the fire. The women handed out coffee in paper cups while the men stood in the field, hunkering in their plaid coats, their faces smacked red by the cold. His father stood on an upside-down barrel with a megaphone. You couldn’t see his mouth but words came out the other end and carried across the yard. They made a banner out of a white sheet and broom handles that said THIS IS AG PROFIT! and stuck it in a manure spreader heaped with dung and drove it down to City Hall. Eddy and Wade got to go and the next morning they had their picture in the paper. They showed the truck down in Albany with all the men standing around it. The headline read: NY FARMS IN CRISIS: DAIRY FARMERS UNITE. For a couple weeks everyone was a little happier, but then they saw it was a trick. Not a thing had changed.

  She had to sell her pretty things. They packed the good china and the special porcelain figures from his grandmother that she kept in a glass-front cabinet in the living room that trembled a little whenever anyone walked into the room. His favorite was of a blond-haired girl with a ponytail, holding apples in her apron. His second-favorite was a boy in coveralls with a puppy in his arms. When he was younger he used to try to make up stories about them. His mother had explained they were from Spain and were very fine. She told Cole that he took after her father, who had died when Cole was a baby, and she described him as a self-made man and said that’s what she expected from Cole, to be the kind of man who makes up his own mind and does things his own way. She said he was the most careful of her children and the smartest, and that’s why she let him handle her nice things.

  They loaded the boxes into her car, an old green Cadillac that had been her mother’s, and drove to the pawnshop in Troy. He guessed she didn’t want anyone knowing she was a farmer’s wife, and when he gazed over at her across the seat in her butter-yellow dress and camel-hair coat, he saw the life she could have had, away from the farm, someplace easier, married to somebody else, someone who was nicer than his father and gave her special things.

  It was a long drive on back roads. The countryside dropped away, replaced by neighborhoods with curlicue streets and houses lined up one after another. They got on the highway and went along the river, past the old shirt factory, and then over the bridge into Troy, with its narrow cobblestone streets and red brick buildings. You could hear the church bells ringing. He saw a one-legged man in a wheelchair with a little American flag stuck to it. He saw a huddle of nurses outside the hospital, their sweaters like capes over their shoulders. Slowly, they drove past the ladies’ college behind its high black fence, the marble buildings lined up around a square like the pieces on a chessboard.

  I went there, she said so softly he almost couldn’t hear. I was going to be a nurse.

  The pawnshop was on River Street, the word spelled out in gold letters on the window. Cole helped his mother with the boxes, but she wouldn’t let him go in and made him wait outside. For a while he sat on the bench under the window. A group of girls in school uniforms came up the sidewalk, noisy as ducks, followed by two nuns. Cole got back into the car and played the radio and smoked one of his mother’s butts, and a little while later she came out, clutching her purse. The man from the shop stepped out as well and lit a cigar. He had a napkin tucked into his collar, like he’d just finished lunch and had forgotten all about it, and he was big and fat. He squinted hard at Cole as they pulled away.

  After that the days went into each other and they wore him down. He couldn’t count on anything like he used to, not even supper, and he was always a little relieved when she came into their room to get them up for school.

  That Friday morning she even made breakfast, her back keeping a secret as she worked the frying pan. His father sat at the table in his one church suit and a bolo tie he’d carved himself in the shape of a horse head. In his hand was the bank ledger where he wrote down his numbers. Cole heard him tell her, I’ll get on my knees if that’s what it takes
.

  There’s your bus, boys, she said.

  It was just him and Wade. Eddy had been out for two years. He’d wanted to go to music school but their father said no. Eddy filled out the application anyway, putting in twenty bucks he’d stolen from their mother’s wallet, but the old man found it and ripped the papers to pieces. Now it didn’t even matter, since they wouldn’t need him on the farm anymore. The stupid fight had been for nothing.

  The bus came to a stop and they climbed up into the noise. Their mother stood watching from the doorway, her pale hand like a flag of surrender. He thought about the word surrender and didn’t like it. The bus rocked over the pitted road. Rain on the windows like spit. He looked out at horses, sheep. They passed the plastics factory and the park nobody ever went to and the electrical substation with the chain-link fence. The sign on the fence said High Voltage and had a skull and crossbones on it, which got him thinking how the world was set up and how your life could depend on other people’s mistakes.

  The bus turned into Chosen, past the crummy houses on Main Street, with their Beware of Dog signs and Holy Virgin statues, before stopping at the light. Out his window he saw Patrice standing on the curb, clutching her notebook. Last year, at the town fair, they rode the roller coaster together. It was just how the line worked out, the two of them ushered up together and strapped in. The whole time, they held hands in the screaming dark. Seeing her now, standing there in her uniform and baggy knee socks, made his insides go sharp. As the bus turned into the parking lot she looked up for a second and met his eyes. He put his hand up on the window as if to secure some imaginary pact, but she had already looked away and was crossing the street.

  The last thing he could remember about that week was on Saturday, when their father took down the kites. All winter they stayed in the barn, stretched across the old beams next to the skis and fishing poles. He could remember his father’s face as he worked the string, winding it around his elbow to the crook of his hand, a dreamy light in his eyes. They carried their kites like rifles up to the ridge, where the wind was fast. You could hear the wind rattling the thin paper, which was adorned with snakes. The kites were from Tokyo, from when their father was stationed with the air force, back before he’d had kids. He said he’d gotten to know the city pretty well and had liked it. He’d been there a whole year. One time they found some pictures in a cardboard box. There was one of his father in his uniform and a canoe-shaped hat, and another of a strange woman in her undergarments, her skin marshmallow-white, her smile pointy in the shadow-filled room.