Iona Moon Read online

  They found Sharla in the living room. All the shades had been pulled down, and the place smelled musty. She lay on the couch, wrapped in a white sheet, wide awake. The cold bath had brought her temperature down. Her face was bloodless, pale as always. In fact, she seemed a lot more like herself than the last time Iona had seen her.

  Sharla’s eyes looked red and sore, but she didn’t blink. “Don’t you stare at me,” Jeweldeen said. “I didn’t do nothing.”

  Sharla breathed hard. Iona thought she had something to say, but all of a sudden she was wailing instead, punching and kicking at the sheet from inside till she’d beaten it away from her. She clawed at her white breasts and her white belly as if she wanted to tear off her skin too. Iona tried to grab her wrists, but Sharla was quick. She slapped at the air and kicked Iona in the stomach. The sheet was stained underneath Sharla’s rump, and her thighs were streaked with dried blood. “You better get some towels,” Iona said to Jeweldeen. The sight of her naked sister startled Jeweldeen enough to do what Iona asked.

  “Look at her,” Sharla said. She pointed to the picture of Maywood Wilder above the television. Iona did look. The head floated, bigger than life, cut off at the shoulders. She wore glasses that magnified her eyes but left them out of focus. Someone had erased all the wrinkles, leaving her face unnaturally smooth, unmotherly in a way Iona couldn’t define. The picture had no color, and the woman’s lips looked almost black; Maywood Wilder smiled without enjoying herself.

  “She’s watching me,” Sharla said. “Daddy told me—just like God.” She laughed. Her cheeks didn’t seem swollen anymore; she was shrinking back to her normal size, and her voice was tight and clear. “He’s glad I took care of it.” She swallowed hard. “He was afraid it might look too much like him.” Her throat was dry but she didn’t whisper. “He kept tryin’ to make me say somebody else did it. Ain’t nobody gonna know now. ’Cept my mama. She knows what he did. I told him so too. She knows.”

  Jeweldeen had come back in the room in time to hear the last three sentences. “Get out o’ here,” she said to Iona. She dropped the pile of towels on the floor. Iona wanted to push Sharla’s damp hair off her face. She wanted to promise that everything would be all right. She wanted to hold Sharla’s hand or at least help Jeweldeen get those towels underneath her. But there wasn’t time for any of that, before Jeweldeen said, “I mean it, Iona—now.”

  Sharla’s eyes opened wide, but she didn’t move, didn’t make a sound. Iona walked out into the yard and Jeweldeen followed. It was drizzling again. Rust-colored rivulets cut the muddy drive. Jack Wilder knelt by the cellar window, nailing a board over the broken glass. He glanced at Iona and Jeweldeen but didn’t stop pounding. Iona thought of his short, fat fingers.

  “My sister’s crazy,” Jeweldeen said. “She’s just trying to get back at Daddy, telling you those lies.”

  Iona nodded.

  “You don’t believe her, do you?”

  Iona shook her head.

  “My daddy’s not like that.”

  Jack Wilder stood and wiped his bald head with a handkerchief. He was too far away to hear them. He dumped the bucket of water he’d used to wash the cellar floor. It trickled down the drive, the same color as the red brown mud.

  “Don’t you dare tell anybody what she said or I’ll swear you got lice again. Nobody’ll touch you. Nobody’ll even talk to you.” Jeweldeen took a deep breath and waited. “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “What Sharla said—are you gonna tell?”

  “No.”

  “Cross your heart?”

  Iona drew an X over her heart with her finger.

  “And hope to die?”

  “Yes,” Iona said, “I hope to die.”

  She didn’t tell, not that summer and not that fall when Sharla disappeared. Who would she tell? Jeweldeen Wilder was her only friend. She wanted to tell her mother, but she remembered overhearing Hannah’s words on the phone one night: I can’t stand one more thing. Iona considered her mother’s afflictions—surely there would always be one more thing: a hard rain in August to destroy the corn; a blight to pock every potato in the field; a husband sitting in the dark drinking whiskey, breaking glasses in the middle of the night; a calf with five legs and a brooding cow tangled in barbed wire; three sons who guzzled beer and drove to the dump at dusk to plug rats, who seemed bound to shoot off their own toes—sooner or later; the shame of a daughter sent home from school with a head full of lice. One more thing, and one more. Iona was afraid and always wondered: What will be the last thing, and will I be to blame?

  3

  Willy Hamilton never did like Iona Moon, not when they were kids and not now that they were sophomores in high school. 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 his wrist was caught by the elastic and his hand was squished against her breast. She said, “Here, baby, let me help you,” then reached around behind her back to release the hooks. One hand on each breast, Jay whistled through his teeth. “Sweet Jesus,” he said. He’d had plenty of girls in the backseat of Willy’s Chevy, 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 gold, her breasts small but warm. 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 be frightened and disappear. He pressed his lips to the hard bones of Iona’s chest, rested his head in the hollow between her breasts and whispered words no boy had ever spoken to her.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Oh God, thank you.” His voice was hushed and amazed, the voice of a drowning man just pulled from the river. As his mouth found her nipple, he closed his eyes so tight she thought he wanted to be blind.

  Iona believed that the distance from the Kila Flats to White Falls depended on age more than miles. For a kid on a bike it took an hour of hard pedaling, but a teenager in a pickup could make the trip in twenty minutes. You were in town before the muck on your shoes dried. If you rolled all the windows down, you got there with grit in your teeth and dust in your hair, but the warm smell of the pregnant sow who brushed up against your leg in the yard never blew away. You saw her in your mind as she tottered on her short, ridiculous legs, her wavering bulk too much for her small feet. You could stay in town all night, but the Kila Flats were close as your own breath.

  She knew Willy was right about her shoes. No way to avoid it—in the field, in the barn, before school every day. She couldn’t recall exactly when her mother had stopped milking the cows and the duty had become her own. One morning after a storm, Iona had to shovel her way to the barn. Waves of blue snow fluttered across the yard. A drift blocked the door, and she bent over, dug like a dog. The first stall was empty. She ran to the next, shining her flashlight in every corner, trying to imagine a cow could hide in a shadow, small as a cat, but she knew, even as she ran in circles, she knew they were in the fields, that her brothers had just assumed an animal would head for shelter on its own. They didn’t understand cows the way she and Hannah did. A cow’s hardly any smarter than a chicken; 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 cows huddled together, standing up past their knees in the drifts. Snow had piled in ridge
s 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 were: they’d 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 Hannah 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. Hannah laughed, breathless, holding her stomach; the milk sloshed in the cup and Iona had to take it. Hannah had a bad time hanging on to things. Her fingers were stiff and twisted, and that winter her knees swelled up so big she couldn’t walk.

  Iona told Jay how it was in 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 get lost just walking to that little hut twenty-five yards behind the house. Her brothers tied ropes from the back door to the outhouse and the barn so they could feel their way. She told Jay she kept a thunder mug under her bed in case she had to pee in the night. But she didn’t tell him Hannah’s arthritis was so bad she couldn’t get to the end of the hall, didn’t say her mother had to use a bedpan all the time now, and Iona was the one who slid it under her bony butt because Mama thought it wasn’t right for a husband to see you that way.

  Jay and Iona parked down by the river with Willy and Belinda. Willy Hamilton liked girls who accidentally brushed their hands against a guy’s crotch, girls who flipped their hair 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.

  That’s why he liked Belinda Beller, a good girl who wore braces and stuffed her bra with toilet paper. She was in the front seat saying, “No, honey, please—I don’t want to.” Jay slid his knee between Iona’s legs and kissed her hard to keep her quiet. Willy said, “I’m sorry.” He stopped pawing at Belinda and sat with his hands in his lap, pretending they were tied, remembering how his father cuffed Matt Fry, talking all the time, his hand on the gun, using the low rumble of his voice to hold the skittery 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. Then the snap of metal, cold on the wrist.

  Belinda leaned over to peck Willy’s cheek and whisper, “It’s all right now, honey.”

  But it wasn’t.

  Matt Fry had been home four years and still slept in the shed by the tracks. If you saw him by the river and said, “Hey,” he didn’t look at you.

  Belinda started sweet-talking, stroking Willy’s neck, messing his hair, calling him baby; but when he kissed her again, his lips were dry and his heart chaste.

  Iona 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 off if his tongue in your ear makes you arch your back and grab his hair?

  Iona thought, You hang on to something too long, you start to think it’s worth more than it is. She knew enough to be careful; you could end up like Sharla Wilder. But she was never tight with the boys, on account of having three brothers and being the youngest. When she was nine, they took her to the barn and gave her pennies to dance for them. Later they gave her nickels to lift her shirt and let them touch the buds that weren’t breasts yet. And that one time, when she and Leon 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 said, “You’re hurting yourself.” He clamped his dirty hand over her mouth. Finally he made a terrible sound, like the sound a cow makes when her calf is halfway out of her. His eyes bulged and his face turned red, as if Iona had choked him. He collapsed, a dead man, and she lay there, pinned, clutching fistfuls of straw, wondering how she was going to explain to Mama and Daddy that she’d killed her brother.

  Hannah Moon knew Iona had a guy. She made Iona tell her that Jay Tyler was on the diving team. 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. 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 practice with his dad. Iona said it like 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 Jay Tyler. I’d rather have you hate me than see some boy from town break your heart.”

  “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—even if all he wants her to do is serve afternoon tea.”

  Willy thought that just listening to Jay Tyler and his father might be dangerous, a bad thing that took him too far from home and made his stomach thump like a second heart.

  White Falls stretched down the north side of the river for two miles but was only twelve blocks wide. Some people—like Willy Hamilton—lived on numbered streets, and others—like Jay Tyler—lived on roads named after trees: Elm and Spruce and Willow Glen. If you crossed the bridge to the south side of the river, the street was Route 2 and led to a trailer park, an eyesore, Horton Hamilton said, and Willy agreed: the lime green and brilliant silver of the little box houses could make your eyes smart on a sunny day. Route 3 was a dirt road to the Flats. There was no Route I.

  Everything was close, but on nights like this one, Willy believed that the distance between his own table and the Tylers’ front porch was unfathomable. Willy’s father had been late for dinner—which was why the peas were mushy and the roast overdone, which was why Flo stood at the stove and muttered, “Everything’s ruined,” softly, so only Willy heard.

  “Got a call at the last minute,” Horton said. “Woman and her son strollin’ out of Pick-n-Pay with their groceries stuffed under their shirts.” He smiled. It was the worst crime of the week. “Said they were hungry—that was their excuse: they were hungry.”

  “Maybe they were,” Flo said.

  “Woman had two cartons of cigarettes and six batteries.”

  “What about the boy?”

  “Bag of Fig Newtons and a box of pretzels.”

  “So he was hungry.” Flo looked at Willy as if to ask: Would you steal for me?

  Now, sitting on the Tylers’ porch, Willy was having the same conversation with Jay and his father. When he told them 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 stroked his beard and said, “Well, Willy, I tell you, it’s hard for a medical man to believe in God.” Jay nodded, understanding what Willy did not, the secret reverence of the words medical man.

  Jay’s mother floated across the veranda, her footsteps so soft that Willy had to glance at her feet to be sure they touched wood. The folds of her speckled dress fell forward and back, and he saw the outline of her thighs before he looked away. “All this talk,” she said. “How about some lemonade? I swear I don’t remember another May as warm as this one.” 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 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, a woman’s laughter rippling from the cool shadows of the house.

  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 back seat with Iona Moon, time to unhook her bra, time to unzip his pants. Willy kept looking in his rearview mirror; he’d dropped Belinda Beller off hours ago. He imagined his father cruising Main and Woodvale Park, looking for him. He thought of his mother at the window, parting the drapes with one hand, pressing her nose to the glass. She worried. He knew she saw a metal bumper twisted around a tree, a wheel spinning a foot above the ground, headlights blasting into the dark 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 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, and he’s a good boy, a careful boy, but I can’t help my worrying: he’s my only son.” 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.

  Jay said, “Shit, Willy, you took the wrong turn back there. I told you right at the fork.” And Willy said he did go right, and Jay answered, “We’d be in front of Iona’s house if you went right.” There was something in Jay’s voice—a crack, one high word that gave him away. Willy slammed the brakes and sent the Chevy into a quarter spin. “What the hell?” said Jay.

  “Get out,” Willy said.

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  Jay zipped his pants and opened the door; Iona started to climb out after him. “Just Jay,” Willy said, and he got out too. The front window was open far enough for Iona to hear Willy say, “You’re gonna get me grounded because you wanna fool around with that little slut.” Jay shoved Willy over the hood of the car, and Iona watched the dust curl in the streams of yellow light, waiting for the blow. But Jay didn’t hit him; he held him there, leaning on top of him, ten seconds, twenty; and when he let Willy up, Jay clapped him on the shoulder, said, “Sorry, buddy, I’ll make it up to you.”