“So—what’s new, honey? Tell me about school.”
School! Miriam couldn’t think of a thing.
For visiting Daddy she’d cultivated a childish personality not her own. Like auditioning for a play, reading lines with a phony forced enthusiasm and smiling with just your mouth. Bad acting and everyone knew, but it had to be done, for you could not read in your own flat, raw voice. To sound sincere you had to be insincere. Miriam told her father about school. Not the truth but other things. Not that this past year her teachers seemed to feel sorry for her, or that she hadn’t many friends now, in eighth grade; she’d lost her closest girlfriends, like Iris Petko, whom she’d known since first grade, guessed their mothers didn’t want them to be friendly with Miriam Orlander, whose father was incarcerated in a maximum-security prison. Miriam supposed that Les didn’t know what grade she was in or how old she was exactly, for he had other things on his mind of more importance. Still, he seemed to want to hear her news, leaning forward cupping his hand to his ear. In prison he’d become partially deaf in his right ear; the eardrum had burst when someone (guard? inmate?) had struck him on the side of the head shortly after he’d arrived at the prison. Les had not reported the injury, as he hadn’t reported other injuries and threats, saying that if he did, next time it would be his head that was busted, like a melon.
Miriam’s father was a stocky, compact man in his late forties. He’d had a hard-boned good-looking face, now battered, uncertain. Scars in both his eyebrows like slivers of glass. His dark hair had been razor-cut military style, leaving his head exposed and vulnerable, the tendons in his neck prominent. He was prone to moods, unpredictable. His eyes were often suspicious, guarded and watchful. Miriam loved him but also feared him, as her brothers did. So much of her life had been waiting for Daddy to smile at her, to single her out from the others in his sudden, tender way; as if Daddy’s feeling for Miriam overcame him, caught him by surprise.
Hey, sweetie—love ya!
He’d been wounded by life, Miriam knew. The hurt he’d done another man had rebounded to him, like shrapnel. Les had the look of a trapped creature. You never wanted to antagonize him; he had a way of striking out blindly.
At Ogdensburg, Les was assigned to the metal shop. Making license plates, dog tags. His pay was $1.75 an hour.
Again he was thanking Miriam for the Civil War book. The Civil War was one of Miriam’s father’s interests, or had been. Les had never been in the army, but his father, Miriam’s grandfather she’d never known, had been an army corporal who’d died in his second tour of Vietnam, long ago in 1969. Les’s feeling for his father was a confusion of pride and anger.
“We’ll go, baby. I promise. When I get out. I’ll be up for parole in . . .” Les tried to calculate when, how many months.
It was time for Ethel to talk to Les. Ethel’s hand on Miriam’s shoulder, to release her.
Miriam waved goodbye to her father, smiling hard to keep from crying. Les mouthed, Love ya, baby! as Miriam backed away.
In the visitors’ lounge there were vending machines, a scattering of vinyl chairs. Everyone who visited an inmate at Ogdensburg seemed to be hungry. Cheese Stix, potato chips, candy bars, doughnuts, soft drinks. Mothers were feeding children from the machines. Children sat hunched and eating like starving cats. Miriam was faint with hunger but couldn’t eat here.
She never wanted to hear what her parents talked about. Never wanted to hear that low quivering voice in which Ethel spoke of financial problems, mortgage payments, insurance, bills, work needing to be done on the house. How can I do this without you. How could you leave us. Why!
There was no answer to why. What Miriam’s father had done, in a blind rage: use an ax (the blunt edge, not the sharp: he had not killed the other man, only beaten him unconscious) against a man, a homeowner, who owed him money for a roof-repair job, and Les had been charged with attempted murder, which was dropped to aggravated assault, which was dropped to simple assault, to which he’d pleaded guilty. If Les had been convicted of attempted murder, he might have drawn a ten-to-fifteen-year sentence.
Everyone said, Les is damn lucky the bastard didn’t die.
“Hey—want some?”
A fattish boy of about seventeen surprised Miriam, thrusting out a bag of Cheese Stix at her, which Miriam declined. Out of nowhere the boy seemed to have stepped. He had a blemished skin, a silver ring clamped in his left nostril. He wore a jungle fatigue jumpsuit with camouflage spots that looked painted on the fabric, crude as cartoon spots. He was a head taller than Miriam, looming close. “Hey—where’re you from?” Miriam was too shy not to answer truthfully, “Star Lake.” The boy whistled, as if Miriam had said something remarkable. “Star Lake? Oh man, where’s it? Up by the moon? That’s where I’m headed.” Miriam laughed uneasily. She guessed this was meant to be funny. She hadn’t ever quite known how girls her age met boys outside of school, what sorts of things they said. Miriam knew from overhearing her brothers how cruel, crude, jeering, and dismissive boys could be about girls to whom they weren’t attracted or didn’t respect, and she wasn’t able to gauge others’ feelings for her. “. . . your name?” the fattish boy asked, and Miriam pretended not to hear, turning away.
Wishing she’d asked Ethel for the car key so that she could wait for her outside. She needed to get out of this place, fast.
“We could go outside, have a smoke. I got plenty.”
The fattish boy persisted, following Miriam. He seemed amused by her, as if he could see through her pretense of shyness to an avid interest in him. Asking again if she wanted a smoke, tapping his thumb against a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket with a suggestive leer. Miriam shook her head: no, she didn’t smoke. She was aware of the boy’s shiny eyes on her, a kind of exaggerated interest, like something on TV. Was he flirting with her? Was this what flirting was? Miriam was only thirteen, but already her body was warmly fleshy like her mother’s, her face roundly solid, not beautiful but attractive sometimes. When her skin wasn’t broken out in hives. The boy was saying, “I saw you in there, hon. Talking to who’s it, your old man?” Miriam backed away, smiling nervously. She was becoming confused, wondering if somehow the boy knew Les, or knew of him. He was saying, mysteriously, “There’s something nobody ever asks in here—who’s an inmate,” and Miriam said quickly, “I have to go now, I have to meet my mother.” Again the boy spoke mysteriously, “Not what you think, hon. What nobody ever asks.” Miriam was trying to avoid the boy, making her way along the wall of vending machines where people were dropping in coins, punching buttons, but the boy followed her, eating from his bag of Cheese Stix. “We’re up from Yonkers visiting my brother, he’s gonna max out at six years. Know what that is? ‘Max out’? Six years. What’s your old man in for? Involuntary manslaughter—that’s my brother.” The boy laughed, sputtering saliva. “Like my brother didn’t intend what happened, that’s the deal, only know what, hon? That’s bullshit. Bullshit he didn’t. You max out, you don’t get no fucking parole officer breathing down your neck.” Miriam was walking more quickly away, not looking back, trying not to be frightened. They were back at the entrance to the lounge, where another corridor led to restrooms. The boy loomed over her, panting into her face. “Hey, hon, nobody’s gonna hurt you. Why you walking away? Think somebody’s gonna rape you? Any guy tries to talk to you, think he’s gonna rape you? That is so sick, hon. What d’you think, Baby Tits? Your ass is so sweet, a guy is gonna jump you, the place crawling with guards?” The fattish boy spoke in a loud, mocking drawl. Miriam heard the anger beneath. She hadn’t understood; something was wrong with this boy. Like the special-ed students at school you tried to avoid because they could turn on you suddenly, like Lana Ochs.
A female guard approached them. “Miss, is this guy bothering you?” Miriam said quickly, “No.” She hurried to the women’s restroom, to escape.
Igneous. Sedimentary. Metamorphic.
Miriam was underlining words in her earth science workbook in green ink,
writing in the margin of the page. Beside her, driving, Ethel seemed upset. Wiping at her eyes, blowing her nose. Each time they visited Les at Ogdensburg, Ethel came away upset, distracted. But today seemed worse. Miriam pretended not to notice.
Miriam hadn’t told Ethel about the fattish boy in the camouflage jumpsuit. She would recast the experience, in her imagination, as a kind of flirtation. He’d called her hon. He’d seemed to like her.
Ethel said suddenly, as if the thought had just surfaced, in the way of something submerged beneath the surface of the water that suddenly emerges, “I wanted to go to nursing school at Plattsburgh. You know this, I’ve told you. Except that didn’t happen.” Ethel spoke haltingly, with an embarrassed laugh. “Seems like my life just skidded past. I loved Les so much. And you, and the boys. Except I’m not old.”
Miriam could make no sense of her mother’s words. She dreaded hearing more.
They were headed south on Route 58, nearing Black Lake. A windy November day, gray sky spitting snow. Ethel drove the old Cutlass at wavering speeds.
Miriam especially dreaded to hear why Ethel had dropped out of high school at seventeen to marry twenty-year-old Les Orlander.
“Miriam, I told him.”
Now Miriam glanced up from her textbook. “Told him— what?”
“That I’ve been seeing someone, and I’m going to keep seeing him. I have a friend now. Who respects me. In Tupper Lake.”
Ethel began to cry. A kind of crying-laughing, terrible to hear. She reached out to touch Miriam, groping for Miriam’s arm as she drove, but Miriam shrank away as if a snake had darted at her.
Ethel said, “Oh God. I can’t believe that I told him . . . and he knows now.” Repeating, as if her own words astonished her, “He knows.”
Miriam shrank into herself; she had nothing to say. She was stunned, disgusted, and frightened. Her brain was shutting off; she wasn’t a party to this. Maybe she’d known. Known something. Her brothers knew. Everyone knew. Les Orlander, whose relatives visited him at Ogdensburg, had probably known.
“. . . nothing to do with you, honey. Not with any of you. Only with him. Your father. What he did to us. ‘I don’t know what happened. What came over me,’ he said. My own life, I have to have my own life. I have to support us. I’m not going to lose the house. I’m not going down with him. I told him.”
A heavy logging truck had pulled up behind the Cutlass and was swinging out now to pass, at sixty-five miles an hour on the two-lane country highway. Ethel’s car began to shudder in the wake of the enormous truck. Miriam felt a sudden desire to grab the steering wheel, turn the car off the road.
I hate you. I love Daddy, and I hate you.
“Can’t you say something, Miriam? Please.”
“What’s there to say, Mom? You’ve said it.”
The rest of the drive to the house on Salt Isle Road passed in silence.
5.
. . . in silence for much of the drive to Gettysburg. And hiking in the hilly battlefield, and in the vast cemetery that was like no other cemetery Miriam had ever seen before. All these dead, Les marveled. Makes you see what life is worth, don’t it! He hadn’t seemed depressed or even angry, more bemused, shaking his head and smiling as if it were a joke, the grassy earth at his feet was a joke, so many graves of long-ago soldiers in the Union Army, dead after three days of being slaughtered at Gettysburg: a “decisive” battle in the War Between the States.
They would question Miriam about that day. Afterward.
The long drive in the car with Les, what sorts of things he’d said to her. What was his mood, had he been drinking. Had he given any hint of how unhappy he was, of wanting to hurt himself . . .
Wanting to hurt himself. The words they used. Investigating his death. Hurt, not kill. Les’s relatives, friends. Miriam’s brothers could hardly speak of it, what he’d done to himself. At least, not that Miriam heard. And Ethel could not; there were no words for her.
Les had been paroled five months when they’d made the trip to Gettysburg they’d been planning so long. Five months out of Ogdensburg and back in Star Lake picking up jobs where he could. The roofing contractor he’d worked for for years wasn’t so friendly to him now. There was a coolness between Les and his brother-in-law Harvey Schuller. Les had served three years, seven months of his sentence for assault. In Ogdensburg he’d been a model prisoner, paroled for good behavior, and this was good news, this was happy news, the family was happy for Les, the relatives. If they were angry with him for what he’d done, bringing shame to the family, still they were happy he’d been paroled, now his drinking was under control, his short temper. Though Ethel had her own life now, that was clear. Take it or leave it, she’d told Les; those were the terms he’d have to accept if he wanted to live with her and their daughter. I am not going to lie to you, I don’t lie to any man, ever again. By this time Ethel had been disappointed with her man friend in Tupper Lake. More than one man friend had disappointed her; she’d acquired a philosophical attitude at age forty-seven: You’re on your own, that’s the bottom line. No man is going to bail you out. Ethel had gained weight, her fleshy body a kind of armor. Her face was a girl’s face inside a fleshy mask through which Ethel’s eyes, flirty, insolent, yearning, still shone. Miriam loved her but was exasperated by her. Loved her but didn’t want to be anything like her. Though Ethel had a steady income now, comanaging a local catering service, no longer one of the uniformed employees. Ethel didn’t need a husband’s income, didn’t need a husband. Yet she’d taken Les in; how could she not take Les in, the property was half his, he’d built most of the house himself, they’d been married almost thirty years, poor bastard, where’s he going to live? Nowhere for Les to take his shame; his wife had been unfaithful to him and, worse yet, hadn’t kept it a secret, his wife barely tolerated him, felt pity for him, contempt. Maybe she loved him, maybe that was so—Ethel wasn’t sentimental any longer; all that was drained from her when Les lifted the ax to bring the blunt edge down on another man’s skull—but what kind of love was it, the kind of love you feel for a cripple; Ethel didn’t mince words. Take it or leave it, she’d told him, things are different in this house now. So far as the Ogdensburg parole board knew, Les Orlander was living at home with his family, P.O. Box 91, Salt Isle Road, Star Lake, NY. Makes you see what life is worth, Les said. Dying for a good cause.
It was early June. A few days after Memorial Day. Everywhere in Gettysburg Cemetery were small American flags, wind-whipped. Miriam had never seen so many graves. And such uniformity in the grave markers, in the rows of graves. Row upon row of small identical grave markers it made you dizzy to see. Miriam imagined a marching army. Ghost army of the doomed. She felt a shudder of physical revulsion. Why for so long had she and Les planned to come here?
For an hour, an hour and a half, they walked in the Civil War memorial. It was a cool bright windy day. Warmer in southern Pennsylvania than it would have been in Star Lake, in the Adirondacks. Of course there were other visitors to the memorial. There were families, children. Les was offended by their loud voices. A four-year-old boy clambering over graves, snatching at miniature flags. Les said something to the child’s father that Miriam didn’t hear, and the young father pulled at his son’s hand, rebuked. Miriam held her breath, but there was nothing more.
Stocky and muscled, in a hooded pullover, jaws unshaven, and a baseball cap pulled down low over his forehead, Les wasn’t a man another man would wish to antagonize, unless that man was very like Les himself. Was your father angry about anything, did he seem distracted, what was his mood that day, Miriam would be asked.
As if, after her father’s death, Miriam would betray him!
She did tell Ethel what was true: on the drive down, Les had been quiet. He’d brought tapes and cassettes and a few CDs of music he wanted to hear or thought he wanted to hear, rock bands with names new to Miriam, music of a long-ago time when Les had been a kid, a young guy in his twenties just growing up. Miriam was disappointed: some of
the songs Les listened to for only a few seconds, then became impatient, disgusted. Telling Miriam to try something else.
It was awkward in Les’s company. Just Les alone, not Ethel or one of Miriam’s brothers. She had to suppose it was the first time they’d ever been alone together in the car like this, though she could not have supposed it would be the last time. Somehow the trip to Gettysburg had come to mean too much. They’d planned it for so long. It seemed to have something to do, Miriam thought, with her father’s memory of his own father. Not that Les said much about this. Only a few times, in the way of a man thinking out loud. If Miriam asked Les what he’d said, he didn’t seem to hear. She was sitting beside his right ear, which was his bad ear. You didn’t dare to raise your voice to Les; he took offense if you did that. Even Ethel knew better than to provoke him, for sometimes he seemed to hear normally and other times he didn’t; you could not predict. And so sometimes he talked without hearing, without listening. In the cemetery at Gettysburg, the wind blew words away. Miriam saw how Les walked stiffly, like a man fearing pain. Maybe one of his knees. Maybe his back. His shoulders were set in a posture of labor; he’d done manual labor most of his adult life. Roofers are particularly prone to neck and spine strain. Miriam watched her father walk ahead of her, along the rows of grave markers, hands jammed into the deep pockets of his jersey pullover. He seemed to her a figure of mystery, still a good-looking man though his face was beginning to look ravaged, his skin sallow from prison. After he shot himself to death with his deer rifle a few weeks later, in a desolate stretch of pine woods beyond the property on Salt Isle Road where he’d used to hunt white-tailed deer and wild turkey with Miriam’s brothers, Miriam would be asked if he’d said much about the cemetery at Gettysburg, or about his father, or Gideon, who was stationed in Iraq, and Miriam said evasively she didn’t remember.