Iona Moon Page 6

  Iona remembered that February morning, the hay in Angel’s stall damp with her water. Frank put his whole arm inside the cow. “She’s not ready,” he said, pulling himself free. He turned to piss in the gutter. Hannah whispered to Angel and held the cow’s head in her hands.

  The barn was cold. Wind cut through the cracks; the other cows moaned, but Angel only breathed, her whole body heaving.

  Iona’s father tried again. “I have it,” he said. He gripped the calf’s legs, tugged two hooves to the gaping mouth of the cow’s vagina. He slipped ropes around the legs and used his full weight. The hair of his arms was matted, dark with blood and mucus, like the hair of the calf’s legs. At last the head emerged, eyes already fluttering beneath the lids. Angel turned, anxious to use her great tongue, to lick the eyes open, to lick the calf’s genitals and know for herself.

  Only then did they see the flaw, the short fifth leg protruding from the calf’s belly, as if there had been twins and one calf had swallowed the other in their mother’s womb. “We’ll have to kill it,” Hannah Moon said. “Five-legged animal’s a curse.”

  “Waste not, want not,” Frank answered.

  By dawn, the calf had four legs and a bandage on its belly, but he was spindly and weak from the start. Two of his mother’s teats went rotten. The calf died and Angel’s milk was thin for months, not worth the milking.

  Cows have no God. Iona kept hearing the words. Angel rubbed herself raw, snared herself in barbed wire. Frank said he had no choice: he had to put her down. Cows don’t fear death. They’re terrified by fire, but not the idea of fire. Hannah said it was a blessing to live this way, to be able to look a man in the eye even as he raised the gun.

  But now Iona wondered.

  She took her time with the cows and still had fifteen minutes to sit alone in the kitchen, drinking her coffee with cream skimmed from the milk. She knew the exact moment she would hear her brothers on the stairs, so she was already on her feet, sliding biscuits in the oven, dropping sausages in the pan.

  Soon they sat at the table. Dale looked sleepy and dim. His hair was thick, but his eyebrows were wisps, so he always seemed surprised. Sometimes Iona wanted to put her arm around him, and sometimes she wanted to hit him. Rafe smiled to himself, remembering a dream or thinking up ways to steal Dale’s sausage. He was hard. A little tree, Iona thought, muscles tight as burls. Leon’s brow furrowed into three deep creases. He worried about the day ahead of him, and the one after that. He couldn’t sit still waiting for biscuits to bake, so he rolled a cigarette and took his coffee to the back steps. Iona watched him. He was built just like their father, thick through the chest and not too tall; his arms bulged, but his legs were skinny and his butt flat.

  Frank was the last to sit at the table. He wore a flannel shirt and blue jeans, just like Iona’s brothers. A matched set, Hannah called the four men, and for some reason this never failed to amuse her. Frank Moon had one wild eyebrow. A tuft of hair whipped up in rebellious glee over his right eye, silent mockery of a serious man. He slicked his dark hair straight back, exposing his high forehead and the blue vein that throbbed in his temple.

  Leon came inside, and Iona filled his plate. He grunted. She closed her eyes and turned back to the stove. What made Leon so afraid? She knew the answer: the rest of his life, all the mornings just like this one. He couldn’t imagine a wife or a child, a life that was his own. One day soon he would sit in his father’s chair, thinking his father’s thoughts. He saw himself old and he saw himself dead.

  When Iona turned around again, all the chairs were empty, as if the men had simply vanished. They’d left dirty plates and half-filled mugs, pans to scrub and food to put away. And it was late. Mama was awake by now, ready for her white coffee: one quarter coffee, three quarters milk. If Iona wasn’t standing on the road in half an hour, she’d miss the bus to school, and Mr. Fetterhoff would call again to remind her she had eight absences. The year’s hardly begun, Miss Moon, and already I wonder if you’ll graduate.

  “I’m glad they’re gone,” Hannah said to Iona. Frank had driven the boys to town and put them on the bus for Missoula. “Rafe will push his brother too far someday. The crazy thing is, Dale loves Rafe. Like part of himself. Like you love your own arm.”

  Iona sat on the edge of Hannah’s bed. She wouldn’t say she loved her own arm, but she thought she knew what Hannah meant about another person being part of herself. Sometimes when she slipped the bedpan under her mother, she felt the sting of the sores as if they were on her own rump.

  “Are you warm enough, Mama?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want another cup of milk?”

  “I’ll float away.”

  “Anything?”

  “Just keep talking.” Iona reached under the covers to hold her mother’s hand. “It’s quieter with them out of the house,” Hannah said.

  “Yes.”

  “But I worry about your father.”

  “Leon chopped enough wood to get us through two winters.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about,” Hannah said. “I saw your daddy chase a bear one night. He ran out of the house wearing nothing but his nightshirt and his boots. The bear was having a time for himself. He’d knocked over the garbage and was batting tin cans across the lawn. He was twice the size of your father, but he took one look at that crazy little man waving the flashlight and headed for the hills. Literally. I remember thinking, Frank Moon has the skinniest legs I ever saw, but he is brave.”

  Iona glanced at the wooden figures on the dresser, the ones Leon had carved for Hannah before Iona threw his knife in the river. There was a miniature farmer wearing a wide-brimmed hat, a farmer’s wife with a long braid, a stooped bear no bigger than the man, a rooster half the size of the woman.

  “Later people told me he’d done a stupid thing. You shoot a bear dead or stay in the house. I was sixteen, just married, and I already knew my husband was a fool in a nightshirt, a man with the legs of a chicken and the brains of a loon.”

  “He’s not a fool, Mama.”

  “No,” Hannah said, “he’s just a man who used to be lucky.”

  Pancreas. Hannah Moon mouthed the three soft syllables. Whoever thought of you? “It started in the pancreas,” the doctor said, “but it’s spread.”

  “I thought I had rheumatism.”

  “You do.” The whites of the doctor’s eyes were yellow. He doesn’t look so well himself. “And this too,” he said.

  “So take it out,” said Hannah.

  “That’s what I’m trying to explain to you, Mrs. Moon.” The doctor fingered his stethoscope. His hands were large and pale, freckled with deep brown spots. “It’s spread,” the doctor said again. “Metastasized, we say.” We say? Did you create it? Did you give it a name and call it into being? He wasn’t looking at her. What did he see across the room? Hannah turned her head. The bare wall. “I can’t take it out.”

  There were kidney stones and gallstones. Heartache, heartbreak, heart attack. It all came to the same thing. Blood clotted in the brain, appendixes burst, lungs collapsed, spleens ruptured.

  “You could see a specialist in Spokane.”

  “A specialist? And who would pay for that?”

  The doctor stuffed his stethoscope in his bag. Hannah could see he was anxious to leave. “I just want to go home,” she said.

  The young man pursed his lips and nodded. He thought it was a bad decision. “As you wish, Mrs. Moon.”

  Iona stood on the road, looking for the school bus. The wind whipped her hair across her face. Her brothers had been gone eight days, and Hannah was right: everything was quieter. It was seven-thirty, more dark than light; she wore her jeans under her skirt and a denim jacket with flannel lining, the collar turned up. She’d forgotten her gloves, so she blew on her hands then thrust them in her pockets.

  The bus was warm with bodies. Jeweldeen had saved a place on the inside, and Iona climbed over her legs. “You look like shit,” Jeweldeen said. “Your fat
her make you sleep with the cows last night?” Jeweldeen herself wore dark lipstick, ruby red, painted beyond the lines of her lips so her mouth looked full from a distance and smeared if you sat beside her.

  The bus was slow, behind schedule because of the icy roads, but Iona and Jeweldeen still had time to duck into the girls’ room for a smoke.

  Iona peered in the mirror as they passed the cigarette between them, wondering if she did look as if she’d slept in the barn. She saw her hair first, dark and wild, long but not thick, moss hanging from a tree, hair that brushes against your face and scares you when you walk through the woods at night.

  She hiked up her plaid skirt and pulled down her jeans. She was a tough girl in a denim jacket. Jeweldeen handed her the cigarette again, and Iona took a deep hit. They kept the ash on the butt as long as they could, hot-boxing the cigarette so the rush of nicotine was a good high that made Iona flushed and dizzy, a little sick to her stomach. She was skinny and yellow; her knees looked dirty, though she’d bathed last night. Yellow-skinned. A kinder person might have said golden. But she wasn’t kind and neither was Jeweldeen. Blond Jeweldeen. Plump, pretty darling of old men in candy stores and boys in Mustangs. You’ve been wearing that skirt since eighth grade, Iona. Nobody, I mean nobody, wears pleats anymore. Iona saw her mother bent over the sewing machine, measuring and tacking each pleat, basting the waistband. No one will ever know it didn’t come from the Mercantile. Except it was more beautiful than anything from the store downtown. Iona twirled through the living room, the skirt spinning around her legs, floating, the pleats opening and closing like an accordion. Yes, she heard the rustle of the cloth against her skin, and it was a kind of music, the sweet sound of fine wool, light and warm, the best skirt she’d ever owned.

  One glance at the face, Iona could bear that. But she looked at herself as a scolded dog looks at its mistress, quickly, afraid of the hand that might slap its head. Two eyes, one nose, not a freak. Crowded teeth but no overbite or underbite, thank God for small mercies.

  The long ash of the cigarette collapsed. “Light another one,” Iona said, though her throat burned. She moved toward the mirror.

  “What the hell are you doing?” said Jeweldeen.

  “Seeing if I look like shit.”

  “Jesus, Iona, it’s just an expression.”

  Iona leaned over the sink. “I have my father’s nose,” she said. She turned and reached for the cigarette. “Watch this.” She took a long drag. Smoke curled from her parted lips, and she breathed, slowly, evenly: it was easy if you had the patience. Now her nostrils flared and the smoke whirled up her nose.

  “You don’t look so bad,” Jeweldeen said.

  “Thank you. I really appreciate you saying that.” But sarcasm was wasted on Jeweldeen. Iona flicked the butt in the sink and was lighting another when Belinda Beller sashayed into the bathroom, arm in arm with Susie Endicott. They bounced as they walked, springing off their toes. Their breasts moved, but in a way that was oddly independent of their bodies. Iona thought they must stuff their bras with something heavier than Kleenex these days, packets of some dense, gelatinous fluid that could burst at any moment, leaving those perfect white blouses stained and damp, stuck flat to their chests.

  Belinda pinched her nose when she saw Iona and Jeweldeen. Iona wasn’t sure if she was trying to make a point about the smoke or something less specific. “Come on, Susie,” she said, “I can hold it.”

  “I can hold it,” Jeweldeen sang after them. They were such clean girls. In those seconds, Jeweldeen had realized that her own skirt was too tight, her stockings too dark. The makeup was wrong too, but it was too late to start again. “I hope she pees her pants in homeroom.”

  “No,” Iona said, “she most definitely can hold it.” She thought of that night down by the river, Belinda playing hunt and peck with poor Willy a week before she dumped him.

  The bell was ringing. “I’m going to Sharla’s after school,” Jeweldeen said. “She’s off tonight, so she can drive us home.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Shit, you’ve been running straight home every day since school started. You hiding a boyfriend in the barn?”

  “I just can’t,” Iona said.

  “Fine,” said Jeweldeen, “but I’m not asking again.”

  Iona stepped into a stall and flushed her cigarette. Jeweldeen waited by the door, but Iona stayed at the toilet, watching the butt swirl. She didn’t tell Jeweldeen that her mother’s hair came out by the fistful, that she had to hide the brush so Hannah wouldn’t see her yellow strands in the bristles. She didn’t say how Hannah hated the bedpan because her own urine burned her skin. Iona powdered her butt like a baby’s and tried to keep her clean. She could have told Jeweldeen’s sister. She could have said her mama didn’t even brush her teeth anymore because her gums bled. Sharla would understand. She wouldn’t be disgusted, wouldn’t say: How do you stand it? In her kitchen on Rosewood Drive, Sharla Wilder would pour two rum and Cokes; she and Iona would sit at the table till dusk filled the room; they’d listen to the refrigerator hum and watch the lights pop on in houses across the street. But this never happened, so no one knew.

  “We’ll be late,” Jeweldeen said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “You are a piece of work, Iona Moon. I’m not lying for you this morning in homeroom.”

  “I’m not asking.”

  “Fine.”

  Jeweldeen kicked the door open so it swung wide, flooding the bathroom with the jabbering and shuffling of the hallway. Iona closed the door of the stall and sat down on the toilet. Voices dimmed. One by one, doors shut, echoing down the empty corridors.

  Iona pulled off her skirt, stuffed it down her book bag, put on the jeans again. She glanced over her shoulder as she passed the mirror. The dark-eyed girl looked mean, a cornered dog about to bite. The face was small, sharp at the chin. The mouth drew into a clean line of resolution. Someone had asked a question and she had answered. Everything was decided.

  Iona Moon climbed out the window and sprinted across the frozen schoolyard.

  Iona lay in her bed, too weak to talk. Her mother sat in the chair, sewing by the dim light. The cloth was blue. Her hands white. Someone was playing the same note on a piano again and again. Iona closed her eyes and sank into a fever dream.

  She woke ten years later. She’d been dozing in the chair beside her mother’s bed. Hannah slept. The sun was almost white. All the blue had bled from the sky, leaving it white too. The last gray leaves flickered in the wind.

  Her mother’s hands clutched at the blankets like claws, the joints stiff, swollen into knots of bone.

  Her forehead was high and white, and her skin seemed translucent, blue-lighted, fragile as the wing of a moth.

  Her eyelids wrinkled, soft as crepe. Every day her eyes sank deeper in their sockets, her gaze turning slowly inward.

  Only her ears were unchanged, joyful and pink.

  Iona went to the window. This is my life, she thought, the foothills, the fields, the blank sky; a fence, a dirt road; the specks of distant animals, the smoke of distant chimneys. All day her father had been repairing fences. Dead cornstalks lay on the ground around him, a collapsed forest, pocked and rotting, gold gone to brown and gray. He gathered up his ax and hammer, a roll of wire. He didn’t know Iona watched him. If he had, he would have walked faster, carried his load with ease. But she saw how heavy it was, how it dragged him down. He favored his left leg. His spine curved under the weight.

  Now, in the fuzzy stillness of dusk, father and sky and ground blurred at their edges, each a part of the other. But soon the night air would turn hard as black glass. In the yard, the naked maple would stand sharp and solitary against the sky, a duller black. Iona’s father, sitting in his chair under the lamp, would be collected and solid, no bigger than himself.

  The morning began like any other. Iona milked the cows and drank coffee alone in the kitchen. She heard her father on the stairs and cracked two eggs on the side of the p
an. The whites bubbled in the hot grease. The bacon stayed warm in the oven; the biscuits were in a basket on the table, covered by a white cloth.

  “Raspberry or huckleberry?” Iona said as her father sat down.

  “Huckleberry.”

  She put the jam on the table. The smell of grease and bacon made her queasy. She ate a biscuit, thinking of her mother. Hannah ate only white food: warm milk and macaroni, biscuits and saltines, four bites of oatmeal if Iona held the spoon for her. She couldn’t weigh more than ninety pounds. Never lose more weight than you can carry. This was Hannah’s idea of a joke.

  “It’s late, Iona,” her father said.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll miss the bus.”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. “Just as well.”

  The phone rang three times the first week. The truant officer had a thin voice. She tried to threaten, but Iona knew a woman like that wore high heels and would never drive out to the Kila Flats in winter. Leon called to leave a phone number and address. He asked how much snow they had and if the wood was covered. Jeweldeen called. “I got three days’ detention for trying to cover your ass,” she said. Iona didn’t answer. “You sick or something?” said Jeweldeen.

  “No,” Iona said, “my mother.”

  After that the house was quiet. There were no visitors and no calls. Iona was not unhappy. Her days had order and sense, a clear purpose. Milking at five, her father’s breakfast at six-thirty. By seven, Hannah was awake, and Iona fed her too, or tried to make her eat. Hannah grew weary toward the middle of the morning, so Iona had time to wash the breakfast dishes before she started lunch. At noon she made a sandwich for her father, or heated leftovers. With some coaxing, Hannah might drink a bit of broth, but more often she said she was still full from breakfast.

  Every third day, Iona gave her mother a spit bath, wiping her frail arms and sore bottom, sponging her knobby back and sharp shoulders. Once a week, she changed the sheets, rolling Hannah from one side to the other so she never had to leave the bed.