Sugaring off, p.9
Sugaring Off, page 9
When Cody’s done in the john, he goes straight back outside, not talking to anyone or stopping for a plate, but Owl sees him palm two mini ham-and-Swiss sandwiches into a paper napkin on his way.
The day follows the same comfortable pattern it has in previous years: some friends leaving right after lunch, Holly sending them off with a gallon jug of syrup; the rest spreading out around the farm, some watching the cooking process in the sugarhouse, others bottling, the little kids mostly playing and chasing each other around the snowy center of the circular driveway. Micah unearths an old Nerf football of Owl’s and plays keep-away with the Boulier sisters.
Aida’s bound for disappointment—Owl knows Cody’s taken over the evaporator by the time the afternoon tap check rolls around—but Trini’s ready, anyway, telling her daughter, “Aid, walk with us,” when it’s time to head out to the sugarbush, tone leaving zero room for argument. For anyone but Aida, that is.
“Why can’t I ride with Owl?”
“Because it’s a beautiful day and I want you with me.” Thigh pat, head nod. “C’mon.” With a disgusted look, Aida follows.
Later, when Owl drives the final tankful back, Aida’s on the spot, making some show of helping drag the storage tank hose over before drifting toward the sugarhouse door, propped partially open, first putting her face in the gap, then easing her entire body in like a cat.
Owl turns on the suction and goes in after her. Aida’s found a spot on the outer edge of the small cluster of men, her gaze on Cody’s back as he checks the pans of bubbling sap. The background noise of the vacuum suction cancels out Owl’s hearing, but when Wallace stands from a chair and leans over his grandson’s shoulder, she reads: —want to add some more.
Nope. I don’t.
Gonna burn down to nothing in a minute, bub.
Cody doesn’t speak. Wallace’s stare, leaden.
Seth’s lips move: He’s got this, Wall. Cooked up the last two batches by himself. I just sat around being worthless.
We’re used to that, Gunnar says, and people laugh. Not Cody. His hard, detached expression remains unchanged.
Owl doesn’t know Trini’s there until Aida jerks around. Her mother stands in the open doorway. “Aida. Time to go.” Crooks her finger, lips pursed, gaze going to Cody. “Right now, please.”
Holly emerges from the sugar kitchen, a cardboard box under her arm. “Wait, Trini—syrup? And I’ve got two gallons of the dark stuff from last season if you can use it.”
“Oh—yes. Definitely.” Aida’s mom is one of the few who wants the intensely flavored, extra dark end-of-season syrup, using it in her baking throughout the year.
By the time Owl’s shut off the hose and gone to park the side-by-side next to the sugarhouse until tomorrow, the Jeep Wrangler is crawling down the driveway, Trini straining forward to watch for scrambling children, Aida staring back out the passenger window. Owl raises a hand, but her friend doesn’t see, her searching gaze meant for someone else entirely.
As Holly predicted, by six o’clock everyone has gone home but Wallace and Gunnar, now sitting around the kitchen table with glasses of hard cider or cans of Coors, Seth with the ice pack on his knee, as usual, Celtics versus Lakers on the small camping radio they keep on the windowsill. Cody’s finishing up the bottling on his own, quitting time coming a couple hours early thanks to the help with the tap checks.
Owl and Holly are on the couch together, Owl picking at leftovers, Holly alternately reading and resting her eyes with her feet propped on Owl’s lap. Above the silhouetted trees, daylight is a fiery pastel border, thumb-smudged, when Cody makes his way inside, the vibration of the closing door making Owl look over.
Take your coat off and stay awhile, Seth says, Owl reading the words from his lips for accuracy at this distance as Seth swirls a bit of sediment at the bottom of his glass, in the reflective haze Owl associates with the time after he’s taken his evening Percocet. Plenty to eat in the fridge.
Brewskis, Wallace puts in.
Cody goes straight over and pulls a can out, popping it and sipping as he pulls up the last empty chair, not seeming to notice Owl watching him over the corner of the couch’s back cushion.
Christ, you want to try something rugged? Wallace slides the bottle of cider over. Pour yourself a slug.
Gunnar flicks a look at Seth, neither man speaking, but Holly’s paying close attention as Cody turns the bottle, one corner of his mouth going up. Rotten apple juice. Right?
Don’t believe me, give it a go.
Cody fills his glass and downs it like he did the Coke the other night, two swallows. Seth straightens slightly in his seat but keeps his mouth shut. By the time the bottom of Cody’s glass touches the tabletop, the 12 percent ABV hits, and he sucks wind on a scalded throat, leaning forward to keep from coughing.
The older men laugh, Seth starting to get up—Let me grab you some coffee—but Wallace claps Cody on the back, the usual hard jostle, and nudges his Coors over.
Here’s your chaser. You’ll be okay.
Holly stands, unrolling the fleece blanket she’d had under her head to lay over the couch arm. “Too much excitement for me. Think I’ll turn in,” she says loud enough for the men to hear.
Wallace leans back. Nah, already? Pull up a seat with us, have a drink—we were just about to talk sense into Seth about how he ought to bid on that acreage next door.
Holly makes a sound in her throat. “We had an extra million to spare, I’m sure he would.”
Nah, it can’t be that much. Half of it’s marshland. Ain’t worth nothin’.
What’s he want it for, then? Gunnar’s smiling, familiar routine of winding Wallace up.
Well, shit, he don’t have to buy the whole thing! They’d probably be willing to sell you just the piece you border on. Plant yourself some more trees, expand your operation.
It takes something like sixty years for a maple to start producing well. Owl follows the motion of Seth’s lips. I don’t got that kind of time.
Yeah, but your girl does. Wallace heaves a hand in Owl’s direction. You’re always saying she wants to run the place after you hang it up. You’d be leaving her twice the legacy.
“O-kay, and I’m done. ’Night, gentlemen. Owlie.” Holly’s warm hand cups Owl’s cheek for a moment, a rare touch, and Owl leans into it, eyes closed, before her aunt draws off down the shadowed hallway to the bedroom.
Owl eases into the cushions, miming relaxation, when having Cody in her house has her senses on high alert. There was a time when Owl hid in the loft when Seth’s friends—inherited from Grandpa Dotrice, more his generation—came over, having learned to make herself scarce whenever men gathered and conversation grew overloud with drink. But those lessons came from her old life, Daddy’s best friends—until they weren’t, and some neighbor called the police because their fighting could be heard on the street. A sickening slice of memory strikes her: Daddy out of the room, and a man she only ever knew as Junior coming up behind her in the kitchen, grabbing her right butt cheek with a squeeze, and a shake so hard she’d struck the counter. For years, she thought it was some inexplicable spanking; now, she understands, and her mouth sours. Never told Daddy. He would’ve gone crazy on Junior, and the cops might’ve taken him away. Daddy had been put in lockup twice before, that Owl could remember, and she’d had to stay with the downstairs neighbor lady and her sons, where the bed Owl shared with the three-year-old smelled like dried pee, and it was made clear that she was a burden, until Daddy made bail and came back for her.
Owl both hears and feels the front door shut hard and glances over again, seeing all three older men watching where Cody just exited, the curtain panels over the glass panes in the door still swaying with force.
Kid hates me. Wallace’s lips.
We were smart-asses at that age, too. Gunnar pours another finger of cider.
No. That ain’t it. He blames me for his mother. Wallace sips. I should’ve done better.
Seth shifts in his seat, flipping the ice pack over to absorb the last of its coldness. His gaze trails to Owl peeking over the couch, knows she’s reading all this. Long time ago, Wall. Sounds like you did what you could.
Christ. She was always such a mess, Evie. Don’t know what the hell Rhetta and I did wrong. Worked my ass off at that concrete plant, thirty years, so we could get by. Rhetta tried to make things nice for her, do the stuff a mother does. Girl still got into drugs before she was sixteen.
Gunnar nods slowly; Owl gets the sense he’s heard this before. It’s a disease for some people. Just like booze.
We tried talking to her, getting her help. She ran off to Mass. Finally got herself knocked up with Cody, wouldn’t even let us see him. She got charged with possession, kid got dumped into the system. They crossed their wires somewhere, and nobody contacted us. I guess Evie jumped through hoops to prove she was getting clean, went through rehab like the court said so she wouldn’t lose custody for good. Rhetta met up with them at a playground once, wanted to at least see her grandbaby. Boy was something like six years old then. Rhetta really thought she was getting her daughter back. Then Evie and the boy fall off the face of the earth again, and we don’t hear nothing for like three years. Turned out she’d moved to Manchester, didn’t even let us know she was back in the state.
Seth eases out of his seat, goes to put the pack in the freezer, pour coffee. Wallace’s gaze, moist and faraway, drifts to Owl, and she lets her eyes go to the flickering TV screen, knowing he believes she can’t understand them from this distance. When she looks again, she picks up on the flow:
—bad. DHHS had to pull him out of one of those homes ’cause things got so ugly. Gives his glass a rough half turn, staring into it. I got no excuse for the second time. DHHS called us, told me the situation. Evie got caught with enough to be charged with intent to sell, Cody needed a place again. At that point, I’d never even met the kid, Rhetta just the once, and she was smack in the middle of her first round of chemo. Sick as a dog. She couldn’t have been taking care of a ten-year-old. I never told her they called us. She would’ve bent over backward for him and ended up killing herself. And I . . . Presses his lips together a moment, tight and dry. Couldn’t do it on my own. Didn’t want to try. So I didn’t take him.
Seth sets a mug in front of him. Times were hard. You got to let that go.
Well, the boy hasn’t. When I heard from Evie this time, looking for help with him, saying he needed work, a new start, I was all over it. Sweet Jesus. You should see her. Clean three years now, so she says, but she looks like an old woman. My little girl. Only thirty-nine, and she shakes like this. Holds up a tremoring hand. Destroyed herself with that poison. And she still says she’s doing her best just to hang on.
Lips stop. Wallace and Gunnar look at the table. Seth stands at the window above the sink, looking out as night deepens, flame ends.
Owl slips out the back door, the blanket from the couch wrapped around her shoulders, not wanting to tip off the men by grabbing her coat.
She circles the house, the only sound her chukkas in the snow. The ember of his cigarette hovers in the dimness of the deck, his faintly backlit shape only visible once her eyes have time to adjust.
“See? Keeping it to myself.” Ember lowers as he taps ash off the railing. “Just like you said.”
She goes up the front steps, looking into the kitchen from the outside, something she’s seldom done. Seth’s back in his seat, but Wallace is laughing now, conversation deliberately moved on to lighter things.
“What did you mean when you said this seems like a place people come to get buried?” She goes to the railing, close—reliant, in the dark, on hearing alone and not wanting to miss his answer.
Cody blows smoke, a cryptic spectral shape unfurling in the scant light. “I mean . . . it’s so dead here. Nothing to do. Everything’s a million miles away.” Drives his words home with a gesture of the Coors Light he’s brought out with him. “Everybody here’s hiding. Nobody would stay if they weren’t scared shitless of the world.”
“But not you.”
“Fuck no. Soon as I get my money, I’m gone. Get myself some cheap-ass car and start driving, see where it takes me. Stop any place that looks cool, take a thousand pictures nobody wants to see but me. Piss on a grizzly bear and share a brew with Abe Lincoln’s head, up on whatever mountain that is.”
“The Black Hills.”
“That’s not it.”
“Yes, it is. It’s sacred to the Lakota Sioux. White people stole it to carve the presidents’ heads into.”
“Sounds like something we’d do.” Fast gleam of his teeth as he nods. “What I’m saying is I’m going to blow my cash on what I want, go all the places I never thought I’d get a chance to. Till the money runs out or the car breaks down, whatever comes first.”
She smiles. “Don’t know if we can pay you enough to get all the way to South Dakota.”
“Yeah, well. That’s only one place I’m thinking about.” Leans forward on his elbows, gazing over at the woods to their left.
Owl glances at the house, making sure they don’t have an audience at the window, but no one seems to realize she’s out here instead of up in the loft. “You’re wrong about the mountain.” Her voice is low. “It can be a place to heal. That’s what it was for me.”
“Yeah?” He turns back, putting the cigarette in his lips. “You all better now?”
She tries to absorb the sarcasm, watches the ember devour itself, not willing to let this pass without a real answer. “Some things don’t get better. They change, turn into something else. And that’s the best you get.”
He says nothing, just looking at her, seconds sliding past.
“I can show you the stuff you don’t see about this place. What makes it special.” She shrugs. “Helps to have a guide. I did.”
Cody grips the post with one hand, leaning around it. “When are you thinking?”
“It’s supposed to snow overnight, get cold again. Sap won’t be running like it has been, so we’ll have more time.” He’s close enough now that she smells him beneath the smoke—some basic bar soap, Dial, maybe; heat from the concealed places of him, underarms, his core—imprinting him bodily in her senses in a way he hasn’t yet been. “We’ll go tomorrow.”
11
The letter is still where she stuffed it, between her bureau and the wall, crumpled from her fist.
Early morning Sunday, Owl pulls the ball of paper out, flattening it on the floor and resting back on her heels.
The idea of checking the postmark hadn’t occurred to her until the first cloudy moments of wakefulness, more a notion from books and TV than experience, since she’d never received much mail. But—she’s fairly certain—the stamp from the post office would tell her where he was when he mailed it. If he was moving closer to them. If it was possible he’d already been on the land. Watching.
A return address:
J. Dotrice
24 Market Street, Apt. B
Dover, NH 03820
So he was back there, had an apartment now. The postmark, a digital stamp across the top, reads only northern nh. But it was stamped with Monday’s date, didn’t reach them until Wednesday, and Seth hadn’t put it in her hands until the day after that. Plenty of time for Daddy to drive here. For him to be the presence in the woods, the reason Seth got his gun. Just like him, asking her permission to write, but unable—unwilling, even after a decade of not speaking—to wait for her to give it. The overwhelming, suffocating energy of him, it still lashes in her veins, sentient.
For an instant, the potential inside the envelope builds electrically, Owl’s fingers curling, mind’s eye coursing down the rows of words within (What could he say? How could he even begin?) before she crushes it again in her fist, slamming it into the bottom drawer, and dropping against the bureau, squeezing her eyes against the lightning flash afterimage of Daddy’s smiling face, so young, younger than anyone else’s dad she knew, and handsome—viewed through a child’s blind love, the most beautiful man in the world.
If there’s any justice, ten years in prison have at least stripped him of that.
Five inches of fresh powder fell during the night, coating the roofs and driveway in white again. Owl heads out after breakfast to do her usual chore of shoveling walkways and entrances while Holly warms up her car. Hopefully, she’ll be able to make it down to the valley. Owl’s already told her she won’t be helping out at the store today, saying she’s got stuff she should do here; Holly doesn’t question it, and Owl hopes her aunt will tell Aida what’s going on, since Owl really doesn’t want to call her friend this morning. Later. Maybe. No reason why Owl should have to be at Van’s for Aida to use the wireless while Trini gets a much-needed break.
Cody shows. Part of Owl had hoped maybe he’d beg off today, fake sick or something, and they’d both know he was avoiding her and could pretend the invitation never happened—but he walks up the driveway at the usual time, hood up over his cap, chin nestled into his collar. Since Cody drove Wallace home last night, the older man needing to be poured into the passenger side, it seems like Wallace would at least let his grandson borrow the truck this morning rather than making him troop through the snowbanks. Then again, Wallace might still be passed out in bed.
When Cody sees her scraping snow from the sugarhouse step, he comes over and bangs the side of his boots against the doorframe; his jeans are soaked to midcalf. “You people ever heard of plows?”
