Cloven Hooves. Megan Lindholm

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СКАЧАТЬ He’s like that to everyone, just to see how far they’ll push. Draw a line.” He sees the doubt in my face, offers an alternative. “But there are other ways to get around him. Hell, look at Steffie’s way. Be Daddy’s little girl when he’s looking, and do what you please later.” He chuckles fondly at how well Steffie gets around their dad.

      It is all so simple for him. Tom is like that. People are easy for him. He meets them, he sizes them up, he knows just how to handle them. And they always like him. Instantly, the first time they meet him. And they go on liking him, always. When we were in college, all the girls had crushes on him and all the guys thought he was a helluva friend. The freaks and the bikers, the druggies and the straights, the profs and the frat guys: they’d all liked him. He shifts gears effortlessly, is never out of place. I have always envied him that talent; he is able to be anything that anyone needs, as required.

      And to me, he is everything. Husband, lover, best friend. There are very few people in my life, but I have never felt alone since Tom came to me, he fills all the niches for me. I look at him and a wave of tenderness breaks over me. After all he has done for me, surely I can do this simple thing for him. Live near his family for a month, make them like me, be pleasant to them. It won’t be hard. Make Tom proud of me. In a way, it is a thing I owe them. And whenever things get hard, I’ll just remind myself that these people are Tom’s family, that without them, he wouldn’t exist.

      For a moment, I flash back to the fact that without Tom, I wouldn’t exist. Not as I am now. He had taken a horribly introverted, socially hostile girl and made her over into a competent woman who was satisfied with her life. I think of our little cabin and ten acres of woods, of my job at Annie’s Organic Foods and Teas. I have friends now, real friends, something I’d never had when I was growing up. Annie and our regular customers, and Pete and Beth down the road, and Caleb our mail carrier and all the others that Tom had so effortlessly befriended for me. I’d ridden into those friendships on his coattails, learned to socialize by watching him. I should be past all these stupid doubts, should set them aside with the old scalding memories of grade school and high school and all the failed efforts of those times.

      But still I hear myself say, “It’s just that the way they live and do things is so different from, well, from the way I was brought up and the way we do things. I mean, Mother Maurie’s house looks like something out of a magazine, and Steffie always looks like she’s going out to tea with Queen Elizabeth.”

      Tom snorts a chuckle. “Yeah, well. I know what you mean. Sometimes it gets to me, too. But it wasn’t always like that. When Steffie and Ellie and I were kids, the money was a lot tighter. I remember plenty of hand-me-down clothes from the cousins, and lots of secondhand furniture. I remember when Mom’s end tables were wire spools with cloths over them. But in the last ten years, since the equipment dealership took off, Dad’s been able to do better for the family. And he likes that. He likes giving Mom and the girls nice things, likes living good with new furniture, and indulging Steffie and stuff. Hell, I know he can remember enough hard times for us. He’s worked damn hard to get the family where it is; don’t look down on him for liking to flash around that money isn’t so tight for them anymore. It’s a point of pride for him. But it doesn’t mean he’s going to look down on us for being broke, and having to keep things simple and cheap. He knows where that is, too.” Tom sounds a little hurt that I would find his family’s prosperity daunting.

      “I know, but …” This time even I can hear the whine in my voice, and I stop a fraction of a second before Tom says, “Hush. Stop it, now. You’re just working yourself up over nothing. Relax. They’re going to love you. All you have to do is just relax and be yourself.”

      “Okay,” I concede. I can hear his unspoken hope that I’ll stop chewing on my worries, and let him doze again. So I lean back in my own seat and close my eyes. I pretend to sleep.

       TWO

      Fairbanks, Alaska,

      1963

      Eleven. Betwixt and between. Two pigtails, the color of dirty straw. Fuzzy pigtails, down past my shoulders, the hair pulling free of the braid like strands breaking loose in old hemp rope. They have not been taken down, brushed, and rebraided in days, perhaps weeks. It doesn’t matter; no one scolds. My mother has six children, and her two older daughters are at a much more dangerous age than I am. They are the ones who demand all her watching. What is it to her if my hair has not been brushed and combed, the stubborn snarls jerked from my tender scalp, the long hair rebound so tightly it strains at my temples? It is summer, school is out, and we live in an aggressively rural area. There is no one to see her youngest daughter running wild as a meadow colt.

      And I do. Both knees are out of my jeans, and my shirt has belonged to two older siblings before me. Boy’s shirt, girl’s shirt, only the buttons know. It lies flat down the front of my androgynous chest. There are holes in my sneakers, too, and my socks puddle around my ankles. Yes, that is me, eyes the color of copper ore, hard and green, a scatter of freckles across my nose. Unkempt, neglected child? Hardly. Free child, unwatched, unhindered, unaware of being free, as it is the only thing I have ever known. Free child in the deep heat of July, the forest baking around me in the seventy-some degrees of the Fairbanks summer sun.

      I am where I should not be, but I do not even know it, nor would I care if I did. I am between the FAA tower on Davis Road and what will eventually be the Fairbanks International Airport. It is supposed to be a restricted area, but no one really cares about that. Not at this moment in time. If I want, I can follow the surveyor cuts through the forest until I’d come out to the small plane tie-downs. A bit farther, and I’d come to wide pavements of the airport, where the airplanes let people down right on the asphalt of the runways. There would be people and noise and traffic. All the things I hate. Where I am is much better. I am sitting on the bank of the slough and thinking it is the most beautiful place in the world.

      The slough varies with the seasons, like a snowshoe hare varying its coat, but it is always beautiful to me. During winter it is a wide white expanse of snow, broken only by the protruding heads of the tallest grasses. The snow humps strangely over the mounds and hummocks of coarse grasses. Owls hunt over it, watching for tiny scurrying shrews and mice to break to the surface and brave the flat whiteness. If I walk cautiously, I can move across the frozen crust without breaking it, standing tall above the earth, my feet supported by millions of tiny ice crystals. Treacherous trickling sunlight sometimes softens my floor, and then I break through it and wallow up to my hips in snow that infallibly finds every opening in my clothing. That is the winter.

      Then comes spring and breakup, when the slough fills with water that reflects the sky and the tangled branches of the trees on its banks and the tiny leaves budding on them. The white snow sinks down to isolated hummocks cowering in the narrow tree shadows, bleeds to death as seeping water that fills the slough. The slough flows with a perceptible current then, carrying off the melted snow to the Chena River, and birds cry above it, ravens black against the transparent blue sky. The wind of breakup reddens my cheeks, and my old socks wad down inside my battered boots. During the spring thaw, the slough is deep, how deep I do not know, for it is much too cold to think of wading in it. I jump from tuft to hummock to clump of grass to cross it, and at its highest flow I cannot cross it at all. I go home wet, my hands red-cracked claws of hands, my nose dripping, my eyes green with spring.

      But that is not now. It is summer now. The early greenness has passed. There are tall yellow grasses, higher than my head, with waving tasseled heads of wild grains. The water has hidden itself beneath the living earth, only appearing in secret pools of shallow water banked with green mosses and ferns and squirming with mosquito larvae. Low-bush cranberries, tender little plants with tiny round leaves, no taller than my hand-span, coat the bank where I sit. Behind me, closer to the edge СКАЧАТЬ