Suburbs of Heaven by Merle Drown

From the Publisher

Jim Hutchins is holding a twelve gauge shotgun on his sworn enemy, his well-to-do brother-in-law, Emory Holler. What has made Jim snap?. "Well, Emory is rich because he's collected the insurance money for the supposedly accidental death of his wife, Jim's only sister. Pauline, Jim's wife, spends her spare time dancing naked for Emory. And Jim's best - his only - friend has suddenly died of an embolism.. "In addition, the IRS is dunning Jim for back taxes; the town is about to seize the land on which the Hutchins have been living, in a trailer, since their house burned down; and each of his living children - two sons and a daughter - is in some sort of bizarre difficulty. Besides this, there is a panty thief roaming the area.. "You might think this is enough for any man to confront but there is more, much more. Jim, an indomitable hero, shows us the hidden side of his small New Hampshire town with humor and penetrating insight into human frailty.

Publishers Weekly

The Hutchins family, a smalltown New Hampshire clan, has suffered more than its fair share of tragedy as Drown's antic, tender and bittersweet second novel (after Ploughing Up a Snake) opens. Jim Hutchins's sister, Helen, died after a fall down the cellar stairs, and Jim and Pauline Hutchins's youngest daughter, Elizabeth, drowned in their neighbors' cow pond. Financially strapped, Jim hopes that once he can get his three surviving, wayward children out of trouble, he can live in "the suburbs of heaven," but with "enough grief to go twice around," this family also has the same amount of bad luck. Sorrow has pushed the older son, Gregory, into paranoia, until he feels a snake eating his brain. The younger son, Tommy--always attracted to the wrong woman and always spoiling for a fight--beats up his girlfriend and lands in jail. Daughter Lisa marries a deadbeat, abusive back-woodsman who believes God's righteousness inspires every cruel thing he does. Meanwhile, Pauline, who bails Tommy out and doles out money to desperate Lisa, shares a strange, erotic relationship with Emory Holler, Helen's widower, who inherited a sizable sum from his dead wife's insurance. Emory, whom everyone suspects of killing Helen, gives Pauline money while she dances naked for him, and eventually everyone in town knows about it (thanks to a misplaced videotape), inciting Jim to vengeful violence. Most of the community, including cop B.B. Eyes, is suspicious of the hardscrabble Hutchinses, with Jim and Pauline burdened with tax debt, Lisa turning tricks for liquor, Tommy a known thief and a "panty pervert" on the loose. Narrated in the convincing voices of the five Hutchinses, the story veers from ribald to tragic, with consistently amazing plot twists: guns are lost and found; intimate moments are spied upon; revenge is swift, creative and nasty. Throughout, Drown's language shines, and even her most misguided characters are fully alive, resonant, and original, speaking with quiet, piercing wisdom. Author tour. (Feb.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

If there is a heavenly suburbia, Jim and Pauline Hutchins don't live there. Neither is permanently employed, they've lived in a trailer since their house burned down, their New Hampshire land is about to be sold for unpaid taxes, and the IRS is going to jail Jim. Their children are Tommy (always drunk and disorderly), Gregory (mentally ill), Lisa (sexually overactive and frequently drunk), and Elizabeth (dead by drowning). Since Elizabeth's death, grief and blame are the new family members whom no one cares to discuss. Grinding poverty and the increasing stacks of trouble lead the ever-patient Jim to a crisis. He intends to shoot his brother-in-law, whom he thinks is having an affair with Pauline. On the brink of this final disaster, a moment of understanding between Jim and Pauline puts them back on track. Brown's (Plowing Up a Snake. o.p.) story is graphic and depressingly believable. Characters are captivating in all their human frailty. Recommended.--Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Providence Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Author of The Car Thief - Ted Weesner

Our language has some words which are wonderful in their veracity and Anglo-Saxon punch. The words play like poetry, however, in Merle Drown's The Suburbs of Heaven, a dog patch state of mind in Penacook County, New Hampshire, where Tobacco Road hooks up to feud and fornicate with the Beans of Egypt, Maine. Chaucer would weep a little, laugh a lot, and inquire if Mr. Drown might not like to sit on the tailgate and split a twelve-pack of Stroh's. A funny, gritty book.

Novemberfest - Theodore Weesner

Our language has some words which are wonderful in their voracity and Anglo—Saxon punch. They play like poetry in Merle Drown's Suburbs of Heaven, a Dog Patch state of mind in Penacook County, New Hampshire, where Tobacco Road hooks up to feud and fornicate with The Beans of Egypt, Maine. Chaucer would weep a little, laugh a lot, and inquire if Mr. Drown might not like to sit on the tailgate and split a twelve—pack of Stroh's. A gritty, funny, book.

What People Are Saying

John Dufresne
At last, New Hampshire has her Faulkner. Merle Drown knows that what's important is the exploration of the human heart in conflict with itself. You may read a dozen novels this month—but this is the one that will count.
—(John Dufresne, Love Warps the Mind a Little)

Richard Rhodes
Exploring the violence—tangled love that runs in families, with a saving grace of down—east black humor, Merle Drown achieves compelling mastery in this riveting, eloquent novel.
—(Richard Rhodes, winner of the Pulitzer Prize)

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Chapter One

Penacook County, New Hampshire, 199.

Here I am, Jim Hutchins, fifty years old, holding a shotgun so long tendinitis is tearing right into my elbow like a starving dog after raw meat. I feel like I've crept along on dark ground far enough to wear out both knees. I'd rather tell a joke or swallow a forbidden beer with my enemy than be standing here ready to shoot, because killing just ain't in my nature. But when it comes down to it, there ain't no enemy like your own, especially when you find them right in the family. Only when you got the round chambered and the hammer cocked will you find out what you'll do. Course it ain't usual you can get your sworn enemy in your sights. Most of the time you can go along and be satisfied cursing the tire that blew on the road. But one day I woke up and said I ain't living in most of the time anymore, I've got a sworn enemy to kill. And that's when I grabbed a gun.

    Life makes you eat the thorns. Smell the roses if you can, but don't forget, you're going to eat the thorns. Course I ain't so smart. If I were smart, I'd've hunted up a pistol, then my elbow wouldn't hurt so.

* * *

JIM

Call me a dreamer, but walking along my old familiar road helps me to think and sort things out. I'm walking a good clip. In my lifetime I been up and down this road enough times to wear out my feet about halfway to the knees. Long ago Emory Holler and I used to skip school and trot out here and down Two Captains Road to the river. Never thought we'd be living out here.Course, he married my sister Helen, got rich, and bought a house. Me, I quit school after eighth grade and ended up in a trailer. But I don't hold that against nobody. Just the way things worked out.

    It's a fine summer's day, with the sun high and proud as a boy with a new truck, the only sound a strong V-8 somewhere behind me. I'm burping the sandwich I wolfed into me, sweet burps, flavored with gherkins. If I could get Pauline to see daylight, get my kids settled, and pay off my debts, why, we could be living in the suburbs of heaven.

    Up on me comes Emory's blue, one-ton Ford with a light rack big enough to illuminate airplane runways. High in the cab he sits, with no more smile to him than there is on a hammer. His right wheel carries my name. His air horns blat. Then I'm rolling in the ditch feeling a spray of gravel from his rear tire. When I stand, my left thigh stabs me right back to earth. Emory skids the truck to a halt and laughs.

    "Come on," he yells. "I'll give you a ride."

    When I hobble up the ditch, he pulls ahead a few yards and laughs again. "You got to move faster than that if we're going to make any money in Florida," he says. Off across the field in an old pine tree a crow caws. I pick up a stone and wing it, not at the crow, but at Emory's prize blue Ford. It dings off that fender like a perfect metal chord.

    "You like to make enemies, don't you, Jim," he says. He's a solid six-footer, with long black hair, who likes to talk tough. "You know man was put on this earth for just one reason, to pull his own weight. Lately you ain't pulling enough to start one of those talking dolls."

    A man can't take care of his family, what's he worth? I've asked myself that question every night. "Running me down on the open road ain't going to improve my earning power."

    "Don't you carry life insurance?" he asks, and like a fool I start to answer him before I catch the smile behind his whiskers. "Maybe you're trying too hard. No one wins races by running all the time." Emory wants me to fly down to Florida and earn a lot of money roofing. I tell him that nobody goes to Florida to work. "Exactly my point," he says. "People'll throw money at you." He claims in a month I can earn enough money to pay maybe half what I owe. "I'll take good care of Pauline while you're gone."

    "It ain't everything money can buy, Emory." Since Helen died, Emory can't get it up. That's what he told me.

    "If sticking your dick in a woman would keep them happy," he says, "there wouldn't be a smileless female walking the face of the earth. There ain't ever been a shortage of dicks."

    "Keeps me happy, Emory," I say, and head back to my trailer.

    If Emory did kill Helen, like some say he did, it wa'n't with kindness.

    I'm wearing debts like a second skin. I may have to turn snake to get shut of them. Dust rises under my feet, and every blade of weed in New Hampshire casts a shadow across my path. Even without wind I keep seeing movement out the corners of my eyes, like something's creeping up on me. Emory, a man with a savings account, says it's the damn $6.99 reading glasses I bought at the discount. He's always saying he wouldn't need any glasses at all to enjoy the sight of beauty I got sitting across from my breakfast every morning. Pauline—she's the beauty I've sat across from every morning for twenty-five years—says Emory's a joker.

    Two years ago, Pauline wouldn't go anywhere except up to the graveyard every day, Emory, he could cheer her up. Now she's seen trees blossom twice, she has her happy days, but mostly she worries. know she worries I'll die and leave her stranded in a trailer owing three years' back taxes. It ain't only gravity holding me down.

    I don't set both feet inside my trailer before the telephone starts ringing its head off. That right there is the curse of modern man. An electric wire reaches right into your home and grabs you by the throat anytime it wants.

    "Mr. Hutchins," a woman says.

    "Ain't no handle on my name," I tell her. "I answer to Jim."

    "Mr. Hutchins, this is Agent Roberta Emerson of the Internal Revenue Service."

    "Hey, I ain't no stranger down there, you know. We used to be on a first-name basis." They garnisheed my pay a few years back, and I want to tell you it hurt, first name or no first name. They were snatching the meat from our plates before we could even set a fork to our food. Those people down to that office put me in mind of my son-in-law, Fesmire, in his younger, grabbier days.

    "You owe us two hundred dollars," Agent Emerson says, like she might just be telling me the special of the day. "Now to correct your mistake, we want you to mail us a check."

    "I can do that." I want Roberta Emerson to know I'm an agreeable kind of guy. "I can write a check for two hundred dollars and send it, but it'll bounce back so fast you might not get to see if I've spelled your name right."

    Course I didn't make a mistake on my taxes. I just didn't have two hundred dollars. The calculator my daughter Lisa leaned me couldn't turn those numbers into cash money, any more than I can write a check right now. Just for starters, I don't have a checking account. Maybe Agent Emerson thinks she can attach my bank account.

    With one son near to jail, and the other closing in on the asylum, a daughter keeping the gossips away from their TV shows, and poor Pauline so deep in grief the only things she cares about are the kids' troubles and Emory Holler ('cause she says he understands mourning), I speak right up to Ms. Roberta Emerson. "Now you've hassled me and threatened me and attached my wages, and it's not getting us anywhere. Now, what I'd like to do is pay by the month. Stores let you pay by the month. Could be time for you people to catch up with us working people."

    "You send us a check for one hundred dollars next week," she says. "if you don't, we can come and put you in jail."

    "For one hundred dollars you'll put me in jail?" I'm shouting loud enough for the Glebes across the street to call out the army to handle the riot in my trailer. "Ms. Emerson, you don't understand, you're talking to a loser," I laugh. "For one hundred dollars you'll feed me and clothe me and house me. From where I'm sitting, that looks like the wheel stopped at my number"

    "You send us fifty dollars, Mr. Hutchins."

"Don't answer that phone," I tell Pauline, "We've had a nice fish supper, and we're going to take a walk. Bad news can wait." I shake a Camel from the pack white Pauline eves the phone as if she can read its crying message.

    "It's probably somebody selling something," she says in a kind of surrender.

    Me at fifty, her at forty-five, we might make life a little easier if we step right into the sunshiny evening and for a few minutes allow a warm yellow hope that things will get back to normal. Walking keeps Pauline's legs and back limber. Still, limber or not, she tells me to slow down. "I'm not some young heifer you're hurrying home to the barn."

    "You're young enough for any practical purpose," I say, running my fingers down her spine and letting them linger slyly below the small of her back. If the phone hadn't stopped, Pauline would have run right back across the yard, scattering peacock and guinea fowl on her way. She must know the caller wasn't one of the kids. They never hang up so soon.

    Patting my lean stomach, I ponder the fine fish dinner, haddock with a dusting of olive oil and bread crumbs, that Bernice Hurd showed me how to fix. "A supper like that takes a gunnysackful of woe off my back," I say. I pick up the pace a little until we get past the Glebe farm. No need for Pauline to go tight-faced with tragedy tonight. Fifty feet beyond the Glebe place, the road curves broadly to the right. I slow to the stroll I know Pauline prefers. She takes my hand, making me wonder how much is thanks for getting her past the Glebe's pond and how much is for the pleasure the two of us used to take in touch. We stroll along the road edge, heading for summer's late sunset.

    I tell Pauline about Florida. At first Emory laid it out like we'd be starting a reconstruction business, with him, his boy Scooter, and my boys replacing roofs and what not and me keeping the vehicles and engines in good shape. When I asked him about permits and licenses and all, he told me I would go down there first and set it up.

    "Six hundred a week, Jim. Aren't you interested?" she asks.

    "I ain't ever bid on a job," I says. "Nor has Emory."

    "It'd give the boys a chance to work together. I hope you're not refusing this because it was Emory offered it."

    "It wouldn't matter if Mr. Goodwrench offered it," I says. "Besides, Emory ain't an enemy of mine." I never hanker after enemies the way some people do, as if having an enemy caulks cracks in their soul seams. I just let the wind blow through mine.

    Don't talk to me about Mother, Gregory, my oldest, told me last week. She's my sworn enemy. It's getting so that having a sworn enemy is one of life's necessities, though I'm confounded to see why a twenty-eight-year-old guy like Gregory should lose the fit in his soul seams. If I thought going to Florida would seal him tight again, I'd jump on the first flight south.

    Another turn in the road brings us to a meadow where town people pasture their horses for the summer, just like they send their kids to camp. A pair of chestnut mares walk from the watering trough to the rough stone wall by the road. I hold Pauline's hand to steady her footing as she reaches out to rub the horses' heads.

    "Here comes our little friend," Pauline says, showing her heart's affection for anything young or small.

    The gray, spotted pony sidles shyly beside the mares. Pauline holds out to the pony the sugar cube she brought from home. When the pony lips the sugar from her palm, she smiles as if she herself tastes the sudden sweetness.

     I have to agree with Emory. Pauline is a beautiful woman. Her skin keeps the creamy glow of her young days while her gray eyes have widened, as if she sees more of the world. Sometimes at the Shaw's supermarket up in the city, I'll spot some man, often a younger guy, giving Pauline a smile that lingers beyond "hello." A beautiful woman she is and blown by with grief.

    "Come along, now," I tease, "or we'll go soft in the legs from lack of exercise."

    Pauline answers right back. "You think I'm an old field horse. I'm lucky you haven't hitched a plow onto me."

    "I don't own a plow."

    We return to our "ramble," as Pauline calls it, a mile and a half out, a mile and a half back. "You're a pretty woman, Pauline," I tell her.

    "I'm sweaty as a racehorse."

    I wonder why women see themselves only in the right now but men see themselves in some forever place, either handsome or ordinary. I notice she compared herself to a racehorse this time. Not a field horse. At the big curve, we turn onto the nameless dirt road, strewn with rocks as big as your hand, that becomes soft, rutted grass. We follow the path to the clearing that looks out over meanders in the river. Swallows fly in and out of their nesting holes, so busy, they might be human.

    The sinking sun sends violet rays across the sky, improving my health more than walking. I lay my arm across Pauline's back, careful not to put weight on her bad shoulder. To the west violet deepens to red. Down in the valley, where the cut bank has made a beach, people come out of the water to put on shirts and jeans.

    Pauline says, "What are you going to tell Emory?"

    I strain my focus to the beach where a woman standing by a black four-by-four is pulling off her bathing-suit bottom. Half-hidden by the truck's open door, she tugs a tong T-shirt below her hips, steps out of a bikini, and slips on a pair of shorts, pulling them up over the round curve of her behind. My groin begins to blossom like those slow-motion films of desert flowers. The woman is Karl Reed, my boss's twenty-five-year-old daughter. I recognize the truck. I recognize more of Kari than I should.

    Hitching my jeans and resettling my crowded crotch, I say, "I'll smash Emory if he ever tries to run me over again."

    When I make threats, Pauline usually sputters at me like a cold chain saw's first start. This time, she squeezes the corners of her mouth and turns her eyes to the ground. She is too worried to scold me, worried about the children, like we might step on one right here in the matted grass, like at any moment another one will stop walking the face of the earth. Though I'm a miserable bastard for thinking it, I'm hoping she'll quit her worry so we can cap the evening with romance. As it sinks, the sun bands the sky scarlet. There is nothing grieving about its beauty.

    Walking back, Pauline talks about her day at work, talk I favor to keep her mind from skidding into the ditch of worry. Pauline works as a housekeeper at a motel twenty minutes south on the interstate.

    "Elaine's finding it too hard to bend to make the beds," she tells me. "Pretty soon she'll be sitting to home waiting for her new baby. Lucky for me because with tourist season near over they'd've cut back our hours."

    I say, "I'm glad you'll keep that job awhile longer, I don't long to move to the village of hunger and starvation."

    "Making up beds starts my shoulder to aching," Pauline says. We grip hands and swing our arms playfully as we walk back on Two Captains Road. "If she'd move me to laundry permanently, I could manage, but there's not that much business."

    As we walk into our half-dark yard, the motion-detector light switches on, flooding my pickup, her Tempo, and the trailer doorway with a quick shot of daytime. Inside, the telephone rings again. I jump in to answer it myself. I guess it's Tommy, our youngest, who causes more trouble than a loose pair of billy goats.

    "Hello?" I say. "Hello?" I hang up.

    Disappointment on her face like spoiled milk, she says, "Maybe it's the underwear thief, seeing if anybody's home."

    "We could take the phone off the hook."

    "I pay for that phone," Pauline says, "and I want it working."

    She drapes the parakeet cage to set the bird sleeping while I lock the door, something I used to do only when we left the trailer. That was before this guy started stealing women's underwear all over town. Down the hall we walk, past the bathroom and the locked door of Elizabeth's room, to our bedroom. In our old place we had no bedroom. The four kids slept in the two bedrooms, and we used the couch.

    Privacy aids what I call the good sense of an old dog. I keep a package of rubbers right on the built-in bureau under the VFW hat I never wear. Neither me nor Pauline being fixed, I say the old dog knows when to stop breeding pupsa, though at the rate we're going lately, this box will last me a couple of lifetimes. "Old dog!" Pauline says. "Old dog! If you're an old dog, what does that make me?"

    "Safe."

    In the soft grip of our embraces, we swim under the sheet and light blanket. Pauline starts a silky moaning, a sound like crooning. Crooning and swimming, the soft taste of her breast, the pushing, stiff, giving nipple against my tongue, giving little, then no thought to the telephone or the weirdo underwear thief or heart-snatching grief.

    It's been so long, it seems new.

    Linked, we move against each other, our sweat easing our way. Somewhere in the woods behind the trailer a little screech owl sets up his soft and rhythmic call like our soft and rhythmic rocking. Warmth and sweat glide between us. I reach back to toss the blanket and top sheet off us. In the glow of the dresser lamp moisture shines at Pauline's temples and on her upper lip. As she opens her eyes, their stunning gray holds a joy as old and wild as wet stones. I kiss her lips, tongues slithering. We rock each other. Pounding, reaching then falling into a gliding place that passes peacefully into sleep.

    The telephone rings. I, without a watch to my name, know it's two o'clock. Out of habit I check the kitchen clock; I'm congratulating myself on being right about the time, and the phone's still ringing.

    "Who was it." Pauline asks.

    It was BB Eyes, the local cop. He said our younger boy, Tommy, and his girlfriend, Penny, are in a hell of a fight. Pauline says, "I've got to work in the morning."

    Of course I know Pauline can't bear to hear Penny—Squatty Body I calls her—curse Tommy when they're in a row.

    In a row they are. When I get to their apartment building, Tommy has Squatty Body by the ankles, dangling her out the third-story window. Even drunk, Tommy's got the strength of a wild horse, but BB Eyes is worried he'll drop her and Cream of Wheat her brains in the parking lot. BB Eyes, he's moving around the parking lot like he's afraid she'll land on his head. I tell BB Eyes that Tommy won't drop her, not accidentally anyway, With her dark, curly hair hanging and her shirt fallen past her breasts, she looks like upside-down broccoli.

    "Crawl back up the cunt that spit you out!" she screams at Tommy. "Get a lite, you goddamned half-footer!"

    "Now we best worry about Tommy letting go of her," I tell BB Eyes. "Tommy!"

    Not words, but growls and roars come from Tommy's throat. I tell BB Eyes to call the fire department to bring the life net. He laughs and says they haven't had one of those in twenty years.

    "I called them for a ladder," he says, "but it's damn hard to sneak up on someone with a ladder."

    I start up the stairs. Even inside the building I can hear Penny screaming, like rasping a file on sheet metal. To be honest I like it better than hearing her words. Tommy's still roaring. I unlock the apartment door with the key Frank was smart enough to give me back when he rented the place to Tommy. A storm has crashed through this room, tossing chairs and table and ashtrays, leaving upright only the couch like a raggedy old man in the corner.

    "Tommy," I say, just loud enough to carry over his bellowing. "Tommy, hear your name for Christ sakes!" His growls shift up an octave, giving me hope he'll start talking. "You don't want to go to jail for her."

    "Fucking bitch" Words start spilling out his mouth, but I don't ponder what he says. I bear-hug him and grapple her legs just beyond his hands. Thank God they're skinnier than the rest of her. Then I fall over backward, pulling Tommy and Penny right on top of me.

    From the ground, BB Eyes says, it looked like Penny disappeared up into the air. "I thought maybe she'd flown off to heaven."

    "Ain't likely," I tell him.

    At the station BB Eyes puts Tommy under restraint from going near Penny. "Domestic violence gets you ninety-six hours restraint automatically," BB Eyes says when I take Tommy out to the truck. "You see you stay away from Penny and the apartment."

    "Why don't you call it four days," Tommy says, "or didn't anybody teach you numbers?"

    Back at the trailer Pauline says, "That's why BB Eyes always picks on Tommy, because the boy is smarter than he is."

    "Tommy don't always have to point it out to him," I say.

    "Penny frightened Tommy. I know that with a mother's certainty."

    "Frightened!" I say. "Blind, mad, roaring drunk is more like it" I look to him for an answer, but he's passed out on the sofa.

    "Emory called while you were gone," says Pauline. "Said if you needed help to call him."

    She's trying to calm me, I suppose, but this is just poking me in the armpit. "How'd he know about it?"

    "Scanner," she says. "He'll put Tommy up if you want."

    "Maybe he ought to take Tommy to Florida."

Gregory

It was hot that day, June 20, two years back, I wonder why I always remember the weather. Momma remembers that the week before the twentieth, Elizabeth had turned woman. Elizabeth, smart as always, figured that things might have changed since Momma had become a woman, so she called our sister, Lisa. Or called the store up there and had them go get Lisa, because her husband, Fesmire, had ripped the phone out of the wall. He said he wasn't going to make it easier for Lisa to talk to her boyfriends, I don't remember the weather the day Lisa came, but I remember the weather on the twentieth. A Fesmire kind of day, so warm that when I saw Fesmire himself at the hospital the evening of the twentieth, he was stripped to just a T-shirt. At noon I'd bought a six-pack of Coke, and we sat outside in the shade drinking out of the cans like cannibals, Momma, Father, Elizabeth, and me. It was past black-fly, season, and the mosquitoes hadn't swarmed yet, so it was nice out there. Elizabeth in her jeans and new shirt looked like a teenager the way she titled back that Coke and swallowed big gulps. Of course she wasn't a teenager, only just turned eleven. She hogged that Coke down before the rest of us had half finished ours. Then with a "Look, Momma," she grabbed her baton, which always seemed to be near her like a dog hanging around a kid, and jumped onto the grass in front of us. After three years of baton lessons she'd learned to show off.

    Elizabeth pranced around the yard, twirling and tossing that baton until she set Buffy to barking and drove the guinea hens to roost in the trees and start their calling. Right in the middle of all that noise, she was the happiest child you might hope to see. Lime dust coated my hands chalky and off-flavored the Coke so I might've thought Tommy had slipped booze in my can if he were around, which he wa'n't. Funny how I can remember the heat and the bitter tang lent to the Coke without remembering where Tommy was. I know he wa'n't in school. He was long past when school would allow him inside. In those days the snake hadn't hatched in my head. I was happier. I could remember more things, though I didn't know as much. Now I know everything. I think the hateful snake sneaks hatfuls of wisdom into my brain.

    Those little slow kids from over to the Glebes' place came across the field and hollered for Elizabeth to play with them. I guess only one of them is real slow, though I can never tell which one it is. They were little, only one started school. The Glebe kids, both blond, wore their hair so that from the distance of our yard, they looked like big flowers. When Elizabeth joined them, she became a bigger flower, the three of them a bouquet moving through the weeds to the old cow pond across the Glebes' field. Hot as it was, the rains had fallen steady the week before, brimming up the cow pond, which would have been handy had the Glebes owned cows or even leased out the land for grazing. No cows grazed or lapped water or stood in their stupid way waving flies away with their tails. Instead three children walked to the slippery bank of the cow pond to play.

    Father and I talked about the land I'd bought from Uncle Emory, a ten-acre plot, some field land and better than half the rest in hardwoods, so firewood wouldn't ever be a problem. And, Father pointed out, I could always sell some of the wood for ready cash. Uncle Emory had let me have it for five hundred dollars down. Emory Holler, my sworn enemy. Not then. Then I trusted him like the heft of a good ax.

    Momma had just said, "I'm glad you're not moving far away," when we heard the children. At first not a one of us so much as turned a head because the squeaks sounded like the jolts little voices give to air for no reason other than they're there. Then, when Momma told me, "I couldn't bear to lose track of you," we all turned our heads, and Father and I stood because the children had walked clear back across the field. Their near voices blotted loud like crows, blatting sounds I couldn't turn into words, nor could Father until Momma said, "Where's Elizabeth?"

    "Jesus Christ," Father said. Only the two Glebe children stood there, still cawing.

    As we ran across the road, their words came together into human talk. Now, ahead of Father in the field, I could hear him panting and praying, "Jesus Christ, oh, Jesus, oh, no, Jesus."

    At the pond's edge was nothing. The sun beat down hot on the raspy grass and the drying mud as if to preserve this empty time, like drying meat. No towel, no shoes, no clothes. Just that wide cow pond, rippleless under the hot, old sun. Then Father, still panting, arrived, and quickly I put my hand on his arm and squeezed hard and reminded him he couldn't swim.

    "Here," he said as he pointed. He was so glad to do something, he almost smiled. He pointed to a wide, wet trough in the steep bank's mud showing where she'd slid in.

    How long can you hold your breath? I thought, kicking off my boots and ripping off my shirt. The sun suddenly hot on my bare back, I wondered, how long can you hold your breath? I tried to walk into the water, but the slippery bank gave way so steeply I had to dive out to keep from falling. I couldn't tell how deep the pond was. I didn't know. How long can you hold your breath? The water was warm and dark. When I dove under, I couldn't see except for a little light at the surface and the tiny pieces of dirt floating in front of my eyes. How long can you hold your breath? I kicked straight down until I reached the bottom, mucky and still slanting toward the center, like a bowl. I followed the curve, moving my hands through the mud, cooler here than on the top. How long can you? I looked up, but I couldn't see light. Where is she? How long can? I turned to swim along the bottom, back to the shore, but my ears started screaming. How long? I pushed off the bottom, letting dead air out of my mouth as I screamed for the surface. How? Into the air, gasping air, hot air.

    "Did you—?"

    "No," I told Father, and I dove again.

    Down into the dark deep I searched with my chest aching and my mind racing for a clue, a direction. Already she'd been down here three of my breaths plus whatever time it took the Glebe children to cross the field and yell us into the fearful scene. The center of the pond. I swam down. I swam to the center, reaching, always reaching and swimming, while my poor lungs asked their dreadful question. She must be in the center. I knew she was in the center. She had to be in the center. Only she wasn't.

    At the surface, I had to turn to find Father. He was pointing back to the road. From there I could hear the sirens. Father pointed down at his feet, so I knew he stood where Elizabeth had gone in. He must have thought I was looking too far away. Again I dove and swam toward him as best I could. When I came up, the divers were sliding into the pond.

    Fast, I thought. I wondered if they came from the city or Fish and Game or the State Police. I knew our little rescue squad didn't have trained scuba divers or equipment. Once more I kicked down into the darkness holding my breath against hope. Without knowing where I was, I found Elizabeth, her hair floating between my fingers, but I couldn't close on it. I lost it. Ferns? Pond grass? No, it was her hair. Forcing myself back and waving my arms to catch the hair whose light red I couldn't see, I ran out of air. My lungs emptied. I pulled for the top. Pain in my lungs. Water in my nose. My throat coughing. No light. No light. I broke the surface in a gasp.

    "She's under me," I said, but they couldn't understand me. I didn't know I was crying. "She's under me."

    A diver swam over and made to pull me out until I swung my fist at him. "Not me. My sister. Under me!" My throat hurt from crying and coughing and screaming. And my lungs.

    The diver called the other divers, and they waved me away. I swam to the shore, where Father had to give me a pull to help me crawl up the muddy bank. I gasped and cried. I couldn't stand. They hadn't come up yet. How long can you hold your breath? I coughed sour water. Father grabbed my shoulder and pounded my back. I puked a little more sour water. I stopped crying. The divers, two of them, brought Elizabeth up.

    "How long," I started to ask, then coughed up some more sour water, "how long can—"

    "It took them a half hour to get here," Father said. "One's Fish and Game, the other's from over to Lake Franklin. They said that's about as fast as they've ever arrived at a scene."

    "No, I couldn't have been out there all that time."

    "You've been diving and diving," he said. "I thought---"

    He stopped. We could see her clearly as the divers handed her up to the paramedics on the bank, She wasn't breathing. She looked shiny, like a fish. Only when Father grabbed my arm did I realize I'd started to go to her. One of the dark-uniformed men said, "CPR." They fitted the oxygen mask to her face, her small face. She was the youngest, the littlest, of us all. "Heartbeat," the guy said, making my heart jump right up and down like it was half fool, like a pleated paper heart they have at Valentine parties. Elizabeth, the party girl, always a costume for school, a Pilgrim, an elf, queen of the May, she marked the holidays and seasons for us so well I scarce can remember her going off to the bus in regular school clothes. There was nothing regular about her.

    That's what I said at the hospital. "There was nothing regular about her."

    "Shh," said Father. We were in the downstairs lobby, where he could smoke. In those days I didn't smoke. Outside, the dark grew.

    "What?" I asked.

    He pulled me over to the windows, away from Momma. "You're talking like's she's already died."

    It grew darker outside. Shadows swelled among the trees, and the nice old houses. I wondered if they always built hospitals in nice neighborhoods so people would feel safe or comfortable going there. I knew Elizabeth was going to die. I couldn't understand why Father didn't know it too. The shadows along the streets lengthened and lengthened, pulling darkness in long lines into the nice neighborhood. Momma's cheeks turned chafey and red from her crying. She twisted her ring round and round her finger and bit her knuckles until Father stubbed his cigarette and held her hand. I'd never seen him hold her hand before. I used to put Elizabeth in my lap after supper so we could watch a TV animal show together, and while she sat there, she'd wrap her fingers around my hand. Tonight she would die.

    The next day my chain saw chewed through a shade tree in the nice neighborhood I would leave all the houses naked. The raw cut stumps would stand dumb when the next parade came along without Elizabeth twirling her baton, her skinny legs pumping up and down and flashing the sparkling white boots, her face swiveling her smile. But when BB Eyes stopped me, I'd only cut down one tree.

    I used to see her in her room practicing her smile in front of the little mirror she'd set on her bureau, standing there and stretching her lips until she could see her gums. The kids from the grade school marched in the Memorial Day parade with the Cub Scouts and the high school bands and only three baton twirlers from the grade school, including Elizabeth. Momma took a whole roll of pictures.

    By the third or fourth day her pet turtle started to smell bad enough to send its scent through the closed door of her room. We'd all forgot the turtle Elizabeth changed every other day, a little pond turtle crawling around the sink while she washed out the fishbowl he lived in. She liked to turn him on his back and scrub his yellow belly shell with a toothbrush, tracing the dark lines as if she were drawing a picture. Father cleaned the turtle once. Then, after the funeral, when the smell started again, he took the turtle out to the lake to release it because he'd already put the lock on Elizabeth's bedroom door. He said we'd always be forgetting the little turtle.

    Talk. All the talk. Not about her turtle, which she'd brought up from the Lake the year before, not about her baton twirling, not even about her smile. Talk about the cow pond, because it was a great mystery that Elizabeth never woke up to explain. "If she even knew the answer herself," Tommy said in his smart-alecky way. I said I'd cuff him if he kept acting smart-alecky. Momma said he wasn't acting smart-alecky. I'd cuffed him before so he got cagey and kept his smart-alecky comments to himself.

    We didn't even know how she came to be in the pond. Those Glebe children were too little or too slow to tell us what happened. We all knew the bank was slippery. I heard that word slippery so often before the funeral it made me want to throw up. I couldn't eat much anyway, but what I did eat slid down my gullet and turned all wet and slooshy in my insides, making me feel sick even after I ate. Tommy ate okay. Nothing slippery bothered him because he's slippery himself. And Father kept saying, "The thing that gets me is she could swim. Swim better than I ever could."

    She had taken swimming lessons at the Parks and Recreation Department pool, much as she had taken baton lessons and joined the Brownies and done all those things Lisa and Tommy and I never did because Elizabeth, once she got to school, always felt part of everything. Momma got out all those little white cards with the red crosses on them that Elizabeth had earned in the swimming program and sat with them in her Lap and counted them as if the one that might solve the puzzle must be missing. "She could swim," Momma too said, echoing Father, but with some sense that if she said it often enough, Elizabeth would swim up out of the cow pond and not be dead anymore. And I tried all by myself, speaking so softly no one, not even me, could hear the words, "She could swim," over and over, one hundred times.

    Talk. About how slippery were the edges of the pond. How she must have slid in. I pictured her walking the edge of the pond, legs lifted high and arms aiming for the sky as if she were marching in the parade only without her baton, but I didn't say it. I listened. Tommy thought maybe in roughhousing with the Glebe children she'd taken a push or shove and lost her balance. But Momma said those children—she'd seen them a thousand times!—never roughhoused. She thought Elizabeth'd leaned over to get something, maybe something she'd dropped—Father interrupted and said that none of her things were missing.

    "Well, maybe it was something she'd just made," Momma said, half-sniffling, half-shouting, "like a flower bracelet or something."

    "And hit her head on some rock? Lisa said. She stayed a couple of days after the funeral, looking for something to do the whole time, making coffee or washing dishes, washing the coffee cups before you'd even taken the last swallow.

    "The mucky bottom of the pond sucked her down," I said, "and locked her there in its suction."

    "She could swim, though," Momma said, and kept sobbing.

    I dreamed of the muck. Every night muck started at my feet, crawling over the sheet, past my ankles and knees, filling in my crotch, crowding my chest and arms, catching my breath and smothering me as it covered my face, warm, dark, slippery-slidey muck. Muck seeped in my ears, up my nose, sluicing into my mouth. All that muck.

    And talk. Talk talk. Until I couldn't stand it anymore, With my chain saw dangling from my arm, I took off into the woods, and still above the cracking and snorting of the mufflerless McCulloch and the falling trees, I heard the talk. I would have gone back to the hospital for more trees, but BB Eyes told me he'd have to jail me. I would have gone across the field, but you can't chainsaw a cow pond.

    Then came the burial.

    Father told me, "At least the grave will be too small to jump into," I knew he had started worrying about what I might want to do, He made like he was talking about Momma or maybe himself, but I knew he meant me. I could hear all the talk.

    Momma talked about the tombstone. She wanted it carved in the shape of a doll, a Cabbage Patch doll like Elizabeth loved. Her Cabbage Patch dolls and teddy bears and the long-legged, gangly, striped Yon-ey she used to drag everywhere through the house, all sat on her bedroom shelf along with the stopped pendulum clock Aunt Helen had given her, behind the closed and locked door. The only Cabbage Patch doll of hers anyone would see would be her grave marker.

    "It will cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars," Father said to us, to me and Tommy and Lisa, not to Momma. And to me alone he said, "Just meeting the taxes ain't easy."

    "Don't be scrinchy, Father," Lisa said. "Momma needs for that stone to be there."

    Tommy said, "It don't matter what's there. We know where the grave is, Momma ain't going to see it but about once a week, and Elizabeth ain't ever going to see it." He looked at me real quick, his hand going to the table fast like he might have to hoist himself out of his chair and run out of the trailer. I bore down on him with my eyes to seal and sear and seam his fear up inside him. It kept him watching, like I have to watch.

(Continues...)