A Knot in the Grain and Other Stories Read online

  But by then Coral was pregnant with their second child, and Merry was two and a half, and Pos had not wanted Coral to ride in the race, but she had only laughed and said that she was glad she was no more than three months along, for she did not want to weigh enough to slow Feyling down. “Not that anything could,” she added, and Pos knew that there was no point in arguing with her.

  Their farm had been called Buttercup Farm from that first grim but surprising autumn, and while they had taken no joy from the name initially, they let it stand, not wishing to disturb what it was they had involuntarily set in motion, or set free, or roused, whatever it was that, as Thwan had said, did not in fact wish them to starve, and when anyone asked if they were from Buttercup Farm, they said with only a momentary pause, “Yes.” The momentary pause had disappeared by the time the year had come around to harvest again, and Thwan had come to Pos, much embarrassed, and said that he wished to marry too, and Pos had said with real feeling that he did not wish to lose him but would try to put together the money he was certainly owed, that they might make a beginning toward their own farm. And Thwan said, after a pause, in his slow way, that all they really wanted was enough to build a little house, on the edge of Buttercup Farm, if Pos and Coral would allow it, and he go on working as he had done for so long, and perhaps there would be work for his wife too; she was raised on a farm. They had met over Buttercup Farm cheeses, because people had begun to come in from the next counties to buy them, and she knew something about cheeses.

  A year after Thwan married Nai, they increased their cow and sheep herds by almost a half, to keep up with the demand for their cheeses; but there they stopped it, for they were happy with their work, and the size of their farm, and each other, and they tried not to make too many plans for Merry, and for Thwan and Nai’s Orly, and for the baby Coral was carrying when Feyling won the gold cup. But when they built the house for Thwan to bring Nai home to, they shook buttercup pollen over it, and the vines obligingly grew up their porch railings the next year too, but politely left room for Nai’s pansies. And when Pos and Coral repainted their house, white as it had always been, they stripped the black shutters down to bare wood so they could repaint them a pale yellow, as they painted the railings around the porch the same color, and it gleamed against the darker buttercups. They had never had time, that first year, to uproot the vines that grew around their house, although Pos at least had wished to; but neither of them now would think of it (although Coral took cuttings from Nai, and planted pansies), and the vines just around the house went on bearing flowers nine or ten months of the year, an occasional yellow spangle showing even when all else was dry and brown and cold.

  After Feyling won the gold cup, he was much in demand at stud, though no one knew who his father was, and no one was greedy or stupid enough to claim a stolen stud fee. And Pos learned to ride, first on the good-natured Moly and later on the less patient Feyling, and so Coral took her husband with her now on her afternoon rides, when there was time and peace for them again. But they did not ride on Buttercup Hill.

  After Dhwa was born, and that spring was more glorious even than the last four springtimes had been, the four of them, Pos and Coral and Merry and Dhwa went, one night under a full moon, to walk on Buttercup Hill. They had not set foot there since Bel had walked shoeless over it; but over the years they no longer felt a chill as they passed it, and began to seek it out with their eyes, and feel as if it were a friendly presence, and to be pleased when their work took them near it.

  They walked up to the little crest, Dhwa in Coral’s arms and Merry set down to toddle around her father’s feet, the children’s hair no less yellow than the untouched tangle of buttercups in the hollow before them, golden even in the moonlight. There was a tiny breeze, and a wonderful smell of green growing things, and a distant whiff of clean barn and animals and their fodder. Pos and Coral gave long sighs, and leaned against each other, carefully, for Dhwa was asleep. Pos it was who at last spoke aloud what they were both thinking.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  A Knot in the Grain

  They moved upstate ten days after the end of school, a week after her sixteenth birthday. It had been the worst party of her life, because it was supposed to be a birthday party, but it was really a farewell party, and all the presents were good-byes. The music was as loud as ever, and everybody danced and shouted and ate chips and cookies the way they always did. She and Bridget ate most of the carrot and red- and green-pepper sticks to make her mother happy. Annabelle’s mom insisted there be good-for-you munchies at her daughter’s parties, but Bridget was usually on a diet and really appreciated them, and Annabelle had developed a taste for pepper sticks on potato chips, like a kind of misguided taco. But nothing tasted good that night. It wasn’t the same and everybody knew it. Polly burst into tears when she left, and then all the girls started crying, and the boys stood around looking awkward and patting their girls’ shoulders in that way boys have when they want to look as if they’re being sympathetic but what they really want is for you to stop whatever it is you’re doing, like crying, or having a serious conversation. She’d both cried and tried to have serious conversations with Bill several times in the last weeks.

  Bill stuck around after everyone else had left, in spite of the probability of more tears. He helped her clean up and stack dishes in the dishwasher, and that he also ate the last four brownies without asking, assuming that it was part of the deal that if he helped with the work, he could do pretty much whatever else he liked, was just Bill. She knew he was a good guy basically, and that he liked her. She knew that he didn’t just like her because her parents let her have parties in their big living room with any kind of music they wanted, and never objected to how much they ate.

  She didn’t herself understand why she couldn’t appreciate it more that he was a good guy. He never teased her about certain things that her girlfriends seemed to think boys always teased you about. Like having sex with him. (A nasty little voice in her mind had once suggested to her that that would have given her an excuse to break up with him. But she didn’t want that kind of excuse. Did she?) Or having beer at her parties, which her parents wouldn’t allow, although if one or two friends were over for supper with the family, they were offered a glass of beer or wine. He liked that. He liked it so much that they’d had to talk about it. What was there to talk about? Rules were rules, and parents sometimes knew what they were talking about. She wasn’t sorry not to have alcohol at her parties because some of the kids who wouldn’t come because of that were the ones she didn’t want to come anyway. But Bill had really gotten into what he called the difference between freedom and responsibility, and she’d seen him suddenly at about forty-five, with a bald spot and a second chin, still going on about rules.

  She’d known Bill since fifth grade, and they would have been going together for a year in August—except she wouldn’t be here in August. And she knew that if she hadn’t had the excuse that they were moving, she would have had to find some other reason to break up with him. It was the only even marginally okay thing about their moving. So she watched Bill eating the last brownies and decided not to say anything. Her head felt heavy and swollen with unshed tears; it was as if the tear reservoir had opened, but then some of the tears were dammed up again by an unexpected sluice gate partway downstream, the sluice gate of Bill’s discomfort. She felt sloshy and stupid, as if her brain were soggy, squelching like a wrung sponge under the pressure of thinking.

  By this August Susan would probably have got Bill, and then he and Susan would write her these half-phony, half-sincere apologetic letters about how they hoped she didn’t mind too much. It might be Milly, who wouldn’t feel she owed Annabelle any letters, but Annabelle was betting on Susan.

  The things you found yourself thinking at one o’clock in the morning after the last party you were ever going to have with all your friends. She came back to herself with a tea-towel in her hand, drying off her mother’s blue glass bowl, which
wouldn’t fit in the dishwasher. Bill was smiling at her fondly; he thought he knew what she was thinking, and he was almost right. Her eyes filled with tears involuntarily, and he put his arms around her (after taking the bowl away from her and carefully setting it down on the counter) and said, “There, there,” without any implication that he would rather she didn’t. She was so grateful she didn’t cry after all, but snuffled violently for a minute, choking the tears back down again. And so in the end she kissed Bill quietly good-bye, and watched him walking down the sidewalk till he disappeared under the trees.

  She thought about her birthday party again the day the movers came. The living room was full of cardboard boxes, which had been stacked in the hall for the party. Most of her friends came around at some point that day to say good-bye again, more officially, more briefly, more helplessly. There really wasn’t anything left to say except “good-bye,” and “I’ll miss you,” and “I’ll write.” A few of them would write: Bill, for example, faithfully, till August and Susan. She’d know when he skipped a week for the first time. She told herself she didn’t care. She didn’t—not about Bill; but she cared about herself, and she was lonesome. She was already lonely without all her friends, and they hadn’t even left yet.

  Her parents were impatient to be gone, so they closed up the house Annabelle had lived in for fourteen years at five o’clock that afternoon, as soon as the movers had gone, and drove out of town. Annabelle tried not to turn and look down her old street for the last time, but at the last she failed, whirling around just before they reached the corner, staring at the double row of maples lining the street and the enormous oak tree in their front yard, the first tree she’d ever climbed, and the first tree she’d ever fallen out of. They caught up with the movers’ truck shortly after they reached the highway.

  They ate supper at a highway-side fast-food restaurant, so Annabelle didn’t miss much by having no appetite. And they arrived at their new home a few minutes before midnight, and all three of them were almost too tired to stagger up the steep walk, find bedrooms, unpack sheets and toothbrushes, and fall into proper beds, instead of staying slumped in the car. “You’re right, Annabelle,” said her father, although she hadn’t said anything; “it would have been easier to stay in a motel.” Annabelle was too tired to smile.

  She knew where she was before she woke up; it was as if some portion of her mind had stayed guard while the rest of her slept, and it warned her that she was no longer at home, or in any of the semi-familiar other beds she had occasionally woken up in: in her grandmother’s spare room, or Uncle Tim and Aunt Rita’s, or the other bed in Bridget’s room or Polly’s. This was a strange bed in a strange room in a strange place. She opened her eyes.

  After they’d bought the house last summer, knowing that Dad was retiring and they would move up here this summer, they’d bought a few things for the extra rooms that their old house didn’t have, her mother, in her usual sensible way, pointing out that this would make moving in much easier as well, since the movers would (in the mysterious way of movers) take two days to cover the same miles it took the family six hours to travel. And then there would be the days and weeks of unpacking, and the absolutely vital boxes that would have gone missing.… You’d think Mom had spent most of her life moving house, Annabelle had said to Polly. “Nah,” said Polly. “It’s just that once you’ve been an executive secretary your mind can’t stop thinking that way.”

  Annabelle had tried to be grateful for the two extra years she knew she’d had in her old town: two years for Mom to get her quilting business set up so she could run it by mail, two years that Dad had spent teaching only half time so he could spend the other half doing research for two or three of the six or ten books he wanted to get written. (He had gotten three written while teaching full-time, while Annabelle was growing up; it was just the sound of Saturday and Sunday mornings, Dad’s typewriter going in the study off the kitchen, when Annabelle came downstairs for weekend breakfasts after as late a night as she could keep her eyes open for, reading or watching TV or later going to quadruple features at the mall cinema.) But he said the really interesting books wouldn’t come while half his mind was still preoccupied with students. Annabelle couldn’t tell if his books were interesting or not; they all began with self-deprecating introductions that only other Ph.D.’s in American intellectual history could understand, and went on from there.

  Annabelle had liked having a mother who wasn’t an executive secretary any more; it had always taken her an hour or two in the evenings to turn back into Mom from a kind of sharp-edged walking Filofax that told you a little too briskly that the table needed to be laid and why hadn’t the floor gotten vacuumed as promised? (She got after Dad in the same voice she got after Annabelle, so it wasn’t too bad.) But Annabelle also knew what the mounting piles of swatches and order forms spilling out of the little room under the stairs and taking over one end of the dining room table meant: They meant that her mother was making a success of putting her mail-order soft toys and quilts and silly-cloth-portraiture business together. (It was the ad that had the photo of the portrait she’d done of the president that really got the thing going; there were more people out there with a sense of humor about their government than Annabelle would have expected or, really, entirely, approved of. If the president was the pits, why did they elect him?)

  She’d known that privately Mom and Dad had agreed they would give themselves up to three years, although they hoped to do it in two. They’d started house-hunting two years ago—farther and farther south and inland, in smaller and smaller towns, as they discovered the facts about what their savings would buy—because two years was the official number in the family. The family was Mom and Dad and Annabelle, and also Averil and Ted and Sylvia, all of them married now and Averil and Sylvia with kids of their own. Sylvia had warned Annabelle that Mom did what she set out to and that if she said two years and not three, it was going to be two years. Annabelle didn’t need the warning; it was the sort of thing Sylvia did, telling people, especially her little sister, stuff they already knew.

  But Annabelle hadn’t been able not to hope, at least a little, secretly, because if it had been three years, surely they wouldn’t have made her leave and go to a new school for just her senior year? That would have been cruel. Rationally she knew that that was a significant part of why Mom said two years: so that Annabelle would have two years in a new school. But Annabelle had been surprised at how strong that small private hope had gotten, squeezed away in its dark corner, when she’d had to give it up.

  Annabelle sat up cautiously in the unfamiliar bed in the unfamiliar room and looked out the unfamiliar window. She was opposite the one dormer window in a long narrow attic room; when she’d chosen this room last summer as where she’d spend her first few nights, until her bed and bedroom gear arrived and she could unpack into her real bedroom downstairs, her mother had protested: “You’ll just scare yourself up there, in a big old empty strange house. I’m not going to stand around and let you set yourself up to dislike it here.”

  “I’m not,” said Annabelle. “I’ll be okay. I like the view.” Her mother, not convinced, but not wanting to make too many issues of things when she knew how Annabelle felt about having to move at all, let it go.

  Annabelle knew that her mother was not entirely wrong about her choosing the attic perversely, deliberately accentuating her feeling of alienation about the whole business of the move; but it was also true that she did like the view, and the flicker of weak pleasure it gave her was about the only pleasure she’d felt about any of it so far. Her bedroom downstairs faced the same direction, but the extra two floors of height made it much more dramatic.

  The house had been built originally by one of the smallish local railroad barons, who, with his railroad, had shortly thereafter gone bust; and the house had been bought by an enterprising farmer who had planted an orchard behind it, built on a long two-storey wing for his increasing family, and grown hay and wheat and corn in
the fields beyond, some of which were now meadow and some of which were now streets with newer, smaller houses on them. But this house had stood empty for most of the last fifteen years; it had been rented out in the summers occasionally while the heirs quarrelled over the terms of the will; but while they were quarrelling, they were not willing to fix the roof or put in modern plumbing, and so none of this had been done till even summer visitors had balked. Annabelle’s family, four months after the remaining heirs had come to terms, bought the house and ten acres for, as her father put it, a song. “Not even a song. A sort of warm-up exercise, like Czerny before you tackle the Beethoven sonata.”

  “The Beethoven sonata is what it’ll cost us to fix it up,” Mom had replied, half grimly and half with that lilt of challenge in her voice that her family knew well.

  “Yup,” said Dad, not the least repentant. They both liked challenges.

  “Why else would they have had the four of us?” said Ted, the one with no children. Ted was the easy-going one, surrounded by people who liked challenges, including his wife, Rebecca, who was a social worker specializing in schizophrenic adolescents and reform school escapees. Annabelle thought, clutching the bedclothes to her chin, that maybe she was more like Ted than the rest of the family.

  But the view was terrific. A lot of the orchard was still there, but the trees were set well apart, and Annabelle was high enough up, in the peak of the oldest part of the house, to look straight over their heads besides. There was a long low grassy meadow slope to the river, which she could see even at this distance twinkle and flash with speed in the sunlight. It was a beautiful day. The movers wouldn’t get here till tomorrow afternoon, and Annabelle thought probably her parents would let her alone today so long as she didn’t let herself be seen hanging around moping. She’d get up, have breakfast, and wander—no, walk purposefully—down to the river.