“That’s what they’re talking about, then. The damn dam.”
“Mr. Langer says that all the time,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s the problem for sure. The old guys say that when they built the dam, when they were all kids, there was a big fight about it. They figure now they put it in the wrong place, or the water’s in the wrong place, or something. They want to flood the whole valley out.” And both of us looked out toward the light in Ruth’s window.
“What about us?” I said.
I knew about the dam. It was named after President Roosevelt, but the one with the mustache and the eyeglasses, not the one with the Scottie dog and the wife with the big teeth. We’d gone to the dam on a field trip. The guide told us it was made out of concrete and was for flood control, which didn’t make sense because we had flooding in the valley all the time. A lot of the kids were bored by the description of cubic feet and gallons, but we all perked right up when the guide said four workers had died building the dam. Our teacher said she wasn’t sure we needed to know that.
It was probably hard for people to believe, but we didn’t pay that much attention to the river, even though it was so big and so close and had a big strong arm that ran through the center of the valley. They called that Miller’s Creek because years ago it had been just a narrow little run of water, but once the dam went in it turned into something much bigger than that. I’d spent a lot of time around creeks when I was younger, looking for minnows and crayfish, and that was no creek.
It was mainly out-of-town people who went to the river. The current was too strong for swimming, and it was nicer at Pride’s Beach, which was a stretch of trucked-in sand on one side of the lake south of town. The fishing was better in the streams in the valley, although you had to be pretty good at fly casting to get around the overhanging branches.
There was a loud grinding sound through the vent, two wooden chairs pushed against the surface of my mother’s chapped linoleum. “Oh, man,” Tommy whispered. “You got matches?”
“Why would I have matches?”
Tommy sighed. “I had plenty of matches when I was your age.”
“Shut up!” I said, and “shhh,” Tommy said. My parents passed by on the way to their room. “I can’t ever keep track of where he is or what he’s doing,” my mother said, and in the moonlight I saw Tom waggle his eyebrows. Both of us knew our parents were talking about him.
Ever since he’d finished high school my brother had been at a loose end. At least that’s what my aunt Ruth called it, a loose end. It’s not like school had been so great, either: unlike Eddie, who was class valedictorian, Tommy had always been a rotten student. Maybe he had one of those problems they didn’t figure out until later, which I see now all the time, a learning disability or dyslexia or something. He had handwriting so bad that there was no one who could read it. Even he couldn’t make it out sometimes. The only tests in high school where he had a fighting chance were true and false, although even there he occasionally made an F that looked too much like a T. He’d squeaked by, but at the time it didn’t feel like it mattered much; when he strode across the gym and hoisted his diploma, the cheers were louder than they’d been at the end of the class president’s speech.
But then he was out in the world and found it hard to make a living with nothing but his easy ways. He would have been great at politics; instead he’d worked in a car repair place. But he lost his license for six months after he got popped on Main Street late one night speeding, with open beer cans in the car and a girl throwing up out the window; the police officer who stopped him was the father of the girl, and when he looked in the driver’s side window it was easy to see that his daughter wasn’t wearing any pants. Tommy’d met the girl because her uncle owned the car repair place, so he was twice cursed. A lot of what Tommy got into seemed like a story someone was telling, except that it was true.
He worked around the farm, too, but he made my father crazy. “He’s a careless person,” my father would say, not even checking whether Tommy was around to hear him. “I ask him to move some hay and two days later I find a pitchfork rusting by the rain barrel.”
“Tell the old man I went to get gas for the tractors,” Tommy’d say to me, and then he’d disappear for a couple of hours. “You seen your brother?” my father would say, and I’d open my mouth and he’d say, “Don’t tell me he’s out getting gas again because both those tractors are full.” I didn’t have a face for lying. “Just stand behind me,” LaRhonda always said when we had to lie to her mother.
“You got any money?” Tom whispered after he’d heard my mother go from the bathroom back into her bedroom.
“No,” I said, but he kept on staring at me, and finally I said, “Seven bucks.”
“I’ll pay you back,” Tommy said.
“You never pay me back.”
He shoved the bills in his pocket, pushed back the shock of hair on his forehead, slid around my door and was gone. I never even heard a car start up. The sump pump was thumping again. That always made it harder to hear Tommy’s getaway.
I’d made that seven dollars selling corn. For an eleven-year-old girl it felt like real money. I sat behind a card table by the road on late summer days, sometimes alone, usually with LaRhonda and Donald. It was boring, but it was something to do, although pretty much every day was like the day before. A car stopped, and a woman waved out the window. “How much?” she asked. Her hair was set in pin curls. She had a scarf over them, but the row right around her face wasn’t covered and the bobby pins sparked in the harsh August light.
“A nickel an ear,” I said. “Thirteen in a dozen.”
“I think they’re cheaper down the road,” the woman said, rubbing at her head. I don’t know why pin curls make your head itch, but they do.
“Then go down the road,” LaRhonda said under her breath. She had a mouth on her almost from the time she learned to talk.
Donald carried the paper bag to the car. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said. The woman handed him a dollar and said, “Keep the change.” I gave him a dime from the can, gave LaRhonda another, and put twenty cents in the breast pocket of my plaid cotton shirt.
The shirt had been Tommy’s. I got a lot of Tommy and Eddie’s clothes, which was made even worse because they were so much older than I was and so the clothes weren’t just boys’ clothes, they weren’t even fashionable boys’ clothes. That summer Donald wore a kind of collarless shirt with three buttons in front that I’d never seen before and that I was sure was fashionable, although that was about the last thing Donald cared about. His mother lived in a halfway decent-size city. His father was a shadowy figure. Donald spent a lot of time in Miller’s Valley. Visiting, he always called it, but he did it so often and so long that it practically counted as living there. I always felt a little lonesome, the times when he went back home, if that’s what it was.
“Dump that poor boy on his grandparents whenever she cares to,” I’d heard my mother say through the heating vent. “Her carrying on.” I hoped her carrying on wasn’t what it sounded like.
LaRhonda was wearing white patent leather shoes with a strap and a very slight heel with her pink shorts and shirt. Her white feet were rubbed red all around, her heels swaddled in Band-Aids over blisters. Most days she was limping by nightfall and her mother would want to soak her feet in Epsom salts and she would say, “Like somebody’s grandmother?” and limp off to bed. LaRhonda’s mother had been wheedled into buying those shoes for her Easter outfit, and LaRhonda took them off only when she put on her flowered shorty pajamas.
I wore Tommy’s old pajamas, too. The worst thing was, all the boys’ old clothes fit because I was narrow and sharp-shouldered, more or less built like a boy. I was a straight person, legs, nose, hair, everything long and narrow, up and down. I more or less always would be. When I got older the way I looked came into fashion, but by that time I was past caring. But when I was a kid wearing my brothers’ clothes the way I looked was a trial, as my aunt Ruth c
alled things that bothered her. “I won’t listen to complaining about what’s on your back, Mary Margaret,” my mother said. “There’s too many fences need mending around here.” I remember first finding the expression “mending fences” in a book and being confused because I couldn’t think of it as anything but literal. Cows get antsy, or randy, or just stumble sideways, and a section of fence comes tumbling down, and they trudge out onto the road, and you have to fix the fence fast or more cows will follow, and maybe get hit by a truck driven by someone not paying attention. Happens all the time.
My father was a farmer, although I guess that’s not what the neighbors would tell you. They would have told you that Bud Miller fixed things for a living. A fix-it man, they used to call it, when things still got fixed instead of just junked. If you had a radio that stopped working, or a fan that didn’t turn anymore, you brought it to the little square lean-to stuck like an afterthought to one side of the smaller barn, the one where we kept the feed corn, and you left it with my dad. If he wasn’t there you just put it on the workbench with a note. I was always pretty amazed that my father could work out the problem from those notes. They usually said things like “Buzzing noise.” If your problem was too big to be portable, a washing machine, say, or even a front-end loader, my dad would come to you, climbing out of the truck slowly because his knees had hurt ever since high school football and only got worse as he got older.
My mother was a nurse. When I was a kid she would leave after dinner and be back in the morning just in time to make sure my brothers and me got on the bus for school, especially Tommy, who usually had a bunch of ideas for the day better than sitting through geometry and civics. She wore a white uniform with a name tag that said MIRIAM MILLER RN. Her name had been Miriam Kostovich, and she was happy to become Miriam Miller, which made her sound a little like she was a movie star. Most of her shift we were asleep, so it was like she hardly left at all.
“You think your mom will take us to town for Popsicles?” LaRhonda asked, rubbing her thumb over Franklin D. Roosevelt’s profile on the dime, but she was just winding me up. She knew the answer was no. My mother was thrifty. I wouldn’t be getting any white patent shoes until I had a job and could pay for them myself, and even then she would say it was a waste and I should put it all in a passbook account. There was nothing my mother liked more than a passbook account.
My mother was a nurse and my father was a fix-it man. But if they’d ever applied for passports, which they never did, where it asked for profession they probably would have written “farmer,” or at least he would have. There were 160 acres of flat, sometimes wet land around our house; it had belonged to my father’s father, and his mother’s family before that, bouncing back and forth from one side of the family tree to the other. When my father put in a new stove for my mother, when I was eight, he found a limestone lintel in one corner of the wall that had 1822 carved into it as crude as a kid’s printing.
My parents had some beef cattle, black and white, and one field planted with hay to feed them, and another planted with feed corn to feed them, too, and another planted with bicolor corn that we sold from the card table in front of the barn, mid-July to September.
“There’s no money in it,” my father used to say about farming, mainly to get my brothers to stay in school, although he wanted at least one of them to take the place over when he was done. Every once in a while the cows got sold while I sat on a hay bale in the barn, sobbing—“How many times do I have to tell you not to name them?” my father always said—and the sale price barely covered the cost of feed, never mind the hours my father put in in a dark frigid barn before sunrise, filling the troughs while the barn kittens scattered before his boots like dandelion fluff. Our bills got paid with the paycheck from the hospital and the creased dollars a housewife would take out of her expenses tin after my father replaced a part in her old refrigerator. The money in the rusty Maxwell House can where I put the bills after people paid for corn never made much of a contribution, and half the time Tommy would take it, passing by on the way to his rotting convertible and one-handing the can onto his palm, like he was in a big city and stealing a wallet from a tourist.
“I’m telling,” I would yell, but he’d wink and rev his engine so the tailpipe made a sound like a wet tuba. He’d always loved the summer. The principal never called the house in summer to say Tom Miller hadn’t bothered to show up for school.
“Your brothers are cute,” LaRhonda said, and Donald made a retching noise. He didn’t like LaRhonda much more than she liked him, but he wasn’t as mean about it.
“Both of them?” I said.
“Well, Tommy. Eddie’s pretty good-looking, but he always looks at me like I’m in trouble.”
“You’re in trouble a lot of the time,” Donald said.
“You don’t even really live around here, so how would you know, Duckface?”
My mother said LaRhonda was jealous of Donald, because she thought of herself as my best friend but could tell I liked Donald, too, and maybe more. My mother said LaRhonda was the kind of girl who wouldn’t understand having a boy as a friend. But I thought it was more that LaRhonda didn’t know what to make of Donald. Donald’s personality was like vanilla ice cream, and LaRhonda was like that weird Neapolitan kind, with the layers of strawberry and vanilla and chocolate, that turned a tan color when it melted in your bowl and you made ice cream soup. Sometimes Donald lived around us and sometimes he didn’t. He’d be at school with us for a year or two, living with his grandparents at the far end of the valley, and then he’d go back to living with his mother and disappear for a while and I’d almost forget his face. But I’d always feel like something was missing. Sometimes I thought of him and LaRhonda as sort of like the angel and devil that sat on someone’s shoulder in the cartoons. She was always talking and always picking at me, and he was mostly quiet but nice when he did say something. I was working away at the corn table, coloring in the raised flowers on my mother’s paper napkins with crayons. LaRhonda said, “That’s dumb.” Donald said, “That’s pretty.” That was those two in a nutshell, as my aunt Ruth liked to say.
“I wish I had a brother,” LaRhonda added as Tommy pulled away with the squeal of tires that was his trademark. It wasn’t true. If Donald had said he wanted a brother I would have believed it, but I’d never known anyone as cut out to be an only child as LaRhonda. “Or a sister,” she added. I said nothing. I figured I was never going to get a sister, but I’d never wanted one after seeing my mother and her sister Ruth together or, more often, apart. There didn’t seem to be any upside.
Another car pulled over. A man in a seersucker suit got out. We all three knew he was not from around here, since we’d never seen him before and because he got out of the car. People who came for corn asked for it through the window, and people who needed things fixed took the gravel drive back to my dad’s shed.
“Hello, ladies,” said the man. He was bald and his head glistened with beads of sweat. We were so quiet you could hear the big insects and small birds. The year before there’d been a man in town who drove around asking girls for directions with a map on his lap. When they got close to the car he lifted the map. “Hello, Mr. Pickle,” I heard Tommy saying when he talked about it to two of his friends, all three of them laughing, but my mother just told me if a man asked for directions to send him to the nearest filling station and not to get too near the car. I said I was going to have to get close enough for him to hear me. “Everything’s an argument with you,” my mother said, ironing my father’s church shirt. Which wasn’t really fair, or true. I was just a person who stated the facts.
“I don’t know if my mom’s home,” I said. LaRhonda stepped on the toe of my Keds. “Mimi,” she said, on the lookout for perverts.
“I’m sure your mother is a lovely lady, but I’m here to see Mr. Miller,” he said. “Maybe you can give him this.” He took a card from his wallet. It said his name was Winston Bally, and he worked for some state office with a long
name.
“Not this again,” my father said when he looked at it, but he came out and led the man back to his shed.
“He came to see my grandfather, too,” Donald said. “About the water.”
“What about the water?” said LaRhonda, who didn’t live in Miller’s Valley, or not really. The town was called Miller’s Valley but the real valley was just outside it, a deep pocket with steep stony hills rising around it and a divot at one end that led to the winding road that led to the town itself.
“My grandfather says there’s a problem with the aquifer.” Donald said the word aquifer as though he liked saying it but might not really know what it meant.
LaRhonda spun her dime on the card table. You could tell she didn’t think much of the water as an issue. Neither did I. Sometimes mud oozed down the hill during a downpour and wound up on our porch and my mother had to chase it out again with a push broom, and sometimes the basement flooded, which was why we had kept all the important old stuff, like my mother’s nursing school diploma and my father’s Army uniform, in the attic. Sometimes our water was brown and my mother boiled it and put it in an old Hi-C bottle in the refrigerator, and twice our well had failed and the well diggers had to go farther down. My brother Eddie stood there the first time, saying to our father again and again, “How can there be so much water sometimes, and then not enough?”
Eddie was the glory of Miller’s Valley. He was at the state university, on a Rotary scholarship, studying to be an engineer. He wanted to be called Ed now. He belonged to the national science honor society and had a girlfriend named Debbie, whose father was a lawyer in Philadelphia. When she came to stay I got the couch and she got my room. It smelled of Jean Naté bath oil after she was gone, like warm lemonade. Eddie was ten years older than me, and he didn’t exactly seem like a brother, not like Tommy did. He was more like a friendly visitor.