In This Light Read online

  IN THIS LIGHT

  Also by Melanie Rae Thon

  The Voice of the River

  Sweet Hearts

  First, Body

  Iona Moon

  Girls in the Grass

  Meteors in August

  IN THIS LIGHT

  NEW AND SELECTED STORIES

  Melanie Rae Thon

  GRAYWOLF PRESS

  Copyright © 2011 by Melanie Rae Thon

  This publication is made possible by funding provided in part by a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and private funders. Significant support has also been provided by Target; the McKnight Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-55597-585-2

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-031-4

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2011

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011922712

  Cover design: Christa Schoenbrodt, Studio Haus

  Cover photo: Boarded Window. Photo © Bradford Dunlop,

  www.bradforddunlop.com.

  for my mother and brother and sisters

  for our beautiful children

  for the ones who have joined us by marriage

  and for all who shall come in the future

  for our father who loved this life—and who taught us to love one another

  Does the light descend from the sky or rise out of us? That instant of trapped light … reveals to us what is unseen, what is seen but unnoticed… . It shows us that concealed within the pain of living and the tragedy of dying there is a potent magic, a luminous mystery that redeems the human adventure in the world.

  —Eduardo Galeano,

  from the introduction to An Uncertain Grace:

  Photographs by Sebastião Salgado

  Contents

  FROM Girls in the Grass

  (1991)

  Iona Moon

  Punishment

  FROM First, Body

  (1997)

  Nobody’s Daughters

  In These Woods

  Xmas, Jamaica Plain

  Home

  First, Body

  Father, Lover, Deadman, Dreamer

  Necessary Angels

  New Stories

  (2002–2010)

  Heavenly Creatures: for wandering children and their delinquent mother

  Confession for Raymond Good Bird

  Tu B’Shvat: for the drowned and the saved

  FROM Girls in the Grass

  (1991)

  Iona Moon

  WILLY HAMILTON NEVER DID LIKE Iona Moon. He said country girls always had shit on their shoes and he could smell her after she’d been in his car. Jay Tyler said his choice of women was nobody’s business, and if Willy didn’t like it, he should keep his back doors locked.

  Choice of women, Jay said that so nice. He thought Iona was a woman because the first night they were together he put his hand under her shirt and she didn’t stop kissing him. He inched his fingers under her brassiere, like some five-legged animal, until elastic caught his wrist and squished his hand against her breast. She said, “Here, baby, let me help you,” and she reached around behind her back and released the hooks. One hand on each breast, Jay Tyler whistled through his teeth. “Sweet Jesus,” he said, and unbuttoned her blouse, his fingers clumsy and stiff with the fear that she might change her mind. Jay Tyler had known plenty of girls, girls who let him do whatever he wanted as long as he could take what he was after without any assistance on their part, without ever saying, “Yes, Jay,” the way Iona did, just a murmur, “yes,” soft as snow on water.

  In the moonlight, her skin was pale, her breasts small but warm, something a boy couldn’t resist. Jay cupped them in his palms, touching the nipples with the very tips of his fingers, as if they were precious and alive, something separate from the girl, something that could still be frightened and disappear. He pressed his lips to the hard bones of Iona Moon’s chest, rested his head in the hollow between her breasts and whispered words no boy had ever spoken to her.

  “Thank you, oh, God, thank you,” his voice hushed and amazed, the voice of a drowning man just pulled from the river. As his mouth found her nipple, Jay Tyler closed his eyes tight, as if he wanted to be blind, and Iona Moon almost laughed to see his sweet face wrinkle that way; she couldn’t help thinking of the newborn pigs, their little eyes glued shut, scrambling for a place at their mother’s teats.

  Iona supposed Willy Hamilton was right about her shoes, but she was past noticing it herself. Every morning, she got up early to milk the four cows. Mama had always done it before Iona and her brothers were awake. Even in winter, Hannah Moon trudged to the barn while it was still dark, slogged through the mud and slush, wearing her rubber boots and Daddy’s fur-lined coat that she could have wrapped around herself twice. Waves of blue snow across the fields fluttered, each drift a breast heaving, giving up its last breath.

  Mama said she liked starting the day that way, in the lightless peace God made before he made the day, sitting with your cheek pressed against the cow’s warm flank, your hands on her udder, understanding your pull has to be strong and steady but not too hard, knowing she likes you there and she feels grateful in the way cows do, so she makes a sleepy sound like a moan or a hum, the same sound Iona heard herself make at the edge of a dream.

  Willy had a girl, Belinda Beller. She wore braces, and after gym class, Iona saw her stuff her bra with toilet paper. Willy and Belinda, Iona and Jay, parked down by the river in Willy’s Chevy. Belinda kept saying, “No, honey, please, I don’t want to.” Jay panted over Iona, licking her neck, slipping his tongue as far in her ear as it would go; her bare back stuck to the vinyl seat, and Willy said, “I’m sorry,” his voice serious and small, “sorry.”

  He thought of his father handcuffing that boy who stole the floodlights from the funeral home. Willy was twelve and liked cruising with his dad, pretending they might get lucky and find some trouble. They caught up with the boy down by the old Miller Creek bridge. His white face rose like a moon above his dark clothes, eyes enchanted to stone by the twin beams of the headlights.

  Horton Hamilton climbed out of the patrol car, one hand on his hip. The thick fingers unsnapped the leather band that held the pistol safe in the holster. Willy’s father said, “Don’t you be gettin’ any ideas of makin’ like a jackrabbit, boy; I got a gun.” He padded toward the skittery, long-legged kid, talking all the time, using the low rumble of his voice to hold the boy in one place, like a farmer trying to mesmerize a dog that’s gone mad, so he can put a bullet through its head.

  Willy recognized the kid. His name was Matt Fry and he lived out west of town on the Kila Flats, a country boy. Horton Hamilton believed you could scare the mischief out of a child. He cuffed Matt Fry as if he were a grown man who’d done a lot worse. He said stealing those lights was no petty crime: they were worth a lot of money, enough to make the theft a felony even though Matt Fry was only fifteen years old.

  A policeman didn’t get much action in White Falls, Idaho, so Horton Hamilton took what business he had seriously. He’d drawn his gun any number of times, or put his hand on it at least, but he’d had cause to shoot only once in nineteen years, and that was to kill a badger that had taken up residence on poor Mrs. Griswold’s porch and refused to be driven away by more peaceable means.

  Fear of God, fear of the devil, that was good for a boy, but Willy heard later that Matt Fry’s parents had had enough of his shenanigans and that a felony was the limit, the very limit. They told the county judge they’d lost control of their boy and it would be best for everyone to lock him up and set him straight. Until then, Willy didn’t know that if you did a bad enough thing, your parents could decide they didn’t want you anymore.

  When Matt Fry came back from the boys’ home, he smelled like he forgot sometimes and pissed his own pants; he didn’t look at you if you saw him on the street and said, “Hey.” His parents still wouldn’t let him come home and he slept in a burned-out barn down in the gully. People said Matt Fry got caught fighting his first day at the state home. They threw him in the hole for eighteen days, all by himself, without any light, and when they dragged him out he was like this: lame in one foot, mumbling syllables that didn’t add up to words, skinny as a coyote at the end of winter.

  Willy stopped pawing at Belinda and sat with his hands in his lap until she leaned over to peck his cheek and say, “It’s all right now, honey.” Iona Moon had no sympathy for Belinda Beller’s point of view. What sense was there in saving everything up for some special occasion that might not ever come? How do you hold a boy back if it feels good when he slides his knee between your legs? How do you say no when his tongue in your ear makes you arch your back and grab his hair?

  Willy liked nice girls, girls who accidentally brushed their hands against a guy’s crotch, girls who wiggled their butts when they walked past you in the hall, threw their shoulders back and almost closed their eyes when they said hello. Girls who could pull you right up to the edge and still always, always say no.

  Iona thought, you hang on to somethi
ng too long, you start to think it’s worth more than it is. She was never that way on account of having three brothers and being the youngest. When she was nine, her oldest brother gave her a penny to dance for him. Before long, they made it regular. Night after night Iona twirled around the barn for Leon, spun in the circle of light from the lantern hanging off the rafter. Dale and Rafe started coming too; she earned three cents a night from her brothers and saved every penny till she had more than four dollars. Later they gave her nickels for lifting her shirt and letting them touch the buds that weren’t breasts yet. And one time, when Leon and Iona were alone in the loft, he paid her a dime for lying down and letting him rub against her. She was scared, all that grunting and groaning, and when she looked down she saw that his little prick wasn’t little anymore: it was swollen and dark and she yelled, “You’re hurting yourself.” He clamped his dirty hand over her mouth and hissed. Finally he made a terrible sound, like the wail a cow makes when her calf is halfway out of her; his mouth twisted and his face turned red, as if Iona had choked him. But she hadn’t; her arms were flung straight out from her sides; her hands clutched fistfuls of straw. Leon collapsed on his sister like a dead man, and she lay there wondering how she was going to explain to Mama and Daddy that she’d killed her brother. He crushed the breath out of her; sweat from his face trickled onto hers, and she felt something damp and sticky soaking through her jeans. When she tried to wriggle out from under him, he sprang back to life. He pinched her face with one hand. Squeezing her cheeks with his big fingers, he said, “Don’t you ever tell, Iona. Mama will hate you if you ever tell.”

  After that her brothers stopped paying her to dance for them, and Leon made Rafe and Dale cut their thumbs with his hunting knife and swear by their own blood that they’d never tell anyone what they did in the barn that year.

  You can’t make my brothers do much of anything unless you force them to swear in blood, Iona thought.

  One morning after a storm, she tramped out to the barn to do her milking. The wind howled, cutting through her jeans. Snow had drifted against the door; she bent over and dug like a dog. The first stall was empty. She ran to the next, shining her flashlight in every corner, trying to believe a cow could hide in a shadow like a cat, but she knew, even as she ran in circles, she knew that all four cows were out in the fields, that her brothers had just assumed an animal will head for shelter on its own. They didn’t know cows the way Iona and her mama did. A cow’s hardly any smarter than a chicken; a cow has half the brains of a pig; a cow’s like an overgrown child, like the Wilkerson boy, who grew tall and fat but never got smart.

  She heard them. As she ran across the fields, stumbling in the snow, falling on her face more than once and snorting ice through her nose, she heard them crying like old women. The four of them huddled together, standing up past their knees in the drifts. Snow had piled in ridges down their backs; they hadn’t moved all night. They let out that sound, that awful wail, as if their souls were being torn out of them. Iona had to whip them with her belt to get them going; that’s how cows are: they’ll drop to their knees and freeze to death with their eyes wide open and the barn door barely a hundred feet in front of them.

  Later, Iona took Mama her aspirin and hot milk, sat on the edge of her bed and moaned like the cows, closing her eyes and stretching her mouth wide as it would go. Mama breathed deep with laughter, holding her stomach; the milk sloshed in the cup and Iona had to hold it. Mama had a bad time holding on to things. Her fingers were stiff and twisted, and that winter, her knees swelled up so big she couldn’t walk.

  Iona Moon told Jay Tyler how it was in the winter on the Kila Flats, how the wind had nothing to stand in its way, how the water froze in the pipes and you had to use the outhouse, how you held it just as long as you could because the snow didn’t fall, it blew straight in your face; splinters of ice pierced your skin and you could go blind or lose your way just walking to that little hut twenty-five yards behind the house. She told him she kept a thunder mug under her bed in case she had to pee in the night. But she didn’t tell him her mama had to use a bedpan all the time, and Iona was the one who slid it under her bony butt because Mama said it wasn’t right for the man you love to see you that way.

  Mama knew Iona had a guy. She made Iona tell her that Jay Tyler was on the diving team in the summer. He could fly off the high board backward, do two somersaults and half a twist; he seemed to open the water with his hands, and his body made a sound like a flat stone you spin sideways so it cuts without a splash: blurp, that’s all. Mama worked the rest of it out of Iona too. Jay’s father was a dentist with a pointed gray beard and no hair. Jay was going to college so he could come back to White Falls and go into business with his dad. Iona said it as if she was proud, but Mama shook her head and blinked hard at her gnarled hands, trying to make something go away. She said, “If I was a strong woman, Iona, I’d lock you in this house till you got over that boy. I’d rather have you hate me than see your heart be broke.”

  “Jay’s not like that,” Iona said.

  “Every boy’s like that in the end. Dentists don’t marry the daughters of potato farmers. He’ll be lookin’ for a girl with an education.” She didn’t talk that way to be mean. Iona knew Mama loved her more than anyone alive.

  Willy thought that just listening to Jay Tyler and his father might be dangerous, a bad thing that made his stomach thump like a second heart. Horton Hamilton had raised his son to believe there was one way that was right and one way that was wrong and nothing, absolutely nothing, in between. Willy said, “What if someone steals food because he’s hungry?” And his father said, “Stealing’s wrong.” Willy said, “If a man’s dying, if he feels his whole body filling up with pain, would the Lord blame him for taking his own life?” Horton Hamilton rubbed his chin. “The Lord would forgive him, Willy, because that’s the good Lord’s way, but no man has the right to choose his time of death, or any other man’s time of death.” Willy thought he had him now: “Why do you carry a gun?” His father said his gun was to warn and to wound, but only if there was no other way. He liked talking better.

  Willy remembered the way his father talked to Matt Fry. He saw Matt Fry hobbling down the middle of the street, his head bobbing, his pants crusted with dirt, smelling of piss. He thought maybe Matt Fry would have been better off if his father had shot him dead at Miller Creek. And he bowed his head with the shame of letting himself imagine it.

  Jay Tyler’s dad wanted to be a lawyer but became a dentist like his own father instead. He taught Jay to argue both sides of every question with equal passion. When Willy told him there was one right and one wrong and all you had to do was look in the Bible to see which was which, Andrew Johnson Tyler scratched his bald head and said, “Well, Willy, I tell you, it’s hard for a medical man to believe in God.” Willy couldn’t figure out why, but there was something about the way Dr. Tyler said “medical man,” some secret reverence, that made Willy afraid to question him.

  Jay’s mother floated across the veranda, her footsteps so soft that Willy glanced at her feet to be sure they touched wood. The folds of her speckled dress fell forward and back; Willy saw the outline of her thighs and had to look away. “All this talk, all this talk,” she said. “How about some lemonade? I’m so dry I could choke.” Everything about her was pale: her cheeks, flushed from the heat; the sweep of yellow hair, wound in a bun but not too tight; a few blond tendrils swirling at the nape of her neck, damp with her own sweat; the white dress with tiny pink roses, cut low in front so that when she leaned forward and said, “Why don’t you help me, Willy,” he saw the curve of her breasts.

  In the kitchen she brushed his hair from his eyes, touched his hand, almost as if she didn’t mean to do it, but he knew. He scurried out to the porch with the lemonade on a tray, ice rattling against glass. From the cool shadows of the house, he swore he heard a woman holding her laughter in her throat.

  Willy lost his way on the Kila Flats. All those dirt roads looked the same. Jay told him: “Turn left, turn right, take another right at the fork”; he sent Willy halfway around the county so he’d have time in the backseat with Iona Moon, time to unhook her bra, time to unzip his pants. Willy kept looking in the rearview mirror; he’d dropped Belinda Beller off hours ago. He imagined his father cruising Main and Woodvale Park, looking for him. He imagined his mother at the window, parting the drapes with one hand, pressing her nose to the glass. She worried. She saw a metal bumper twisted around a tree, a wheel spinning a foot above the ground, headlights blasting into the black woods. She washed the blood off the faces of the four teenagers, combed their hair, dabbed their bruises with flesh-colored powder, painted their blue lips a fresh, bright pink. That was back in ’57, but she saw their open eyes and surprised mouths every time Willy was late. “Forgive me, Lord, for not trusting you. I know my thoughts are a curse. I know he’s safe with you, Lord, and he’s a good boy, a careful boy, but I can’t help my worrying, Lord: he’s my only son. I love my girls, but he’s special, you see, in that way.” She unlaced her fingers and hissed, “I’ll thrash his hide when he walks in that door.” She said it out loud because God only listened to prayers and silence. He was too busy to pay attention to all the clatter of words spoken in ordinary tones.