Labrador Read online

  Did her fingers touch his as she took the box? Of course not! Miss Kern had a fiancé to whom she was devoted; his picture was on her desk, positioned so that she could see it whenever she looked up: a man with a horse-like face wearing a soldier’s hat. He was stationed in Germany and sent Miss Kern letters, which she would read to us—she would pause, deciding which parts to keep to herself, and during those pauses we would see her face light up in a way that made us feel embarrassed.

  “Here,” Peter said. He reached into the back pocket of his dungarees and took out a pack of matches. We’d all seen this gesture before, through the towering windows of our classroom: Peter lighting a cigarette as he slouched against the jungle gym, and then that first plume of smoke floating across the playground.

  “I don’t know,” Miss Kern said. She set her red lips primly. “We have rules about playing with matches.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Peter said, “I’m not suggesting that you play with them.” And then he turned, quickly, on his long stork-like legs; for a fraction of an instant I felt his eyes on my face, fixing me with a look of pity and amusement.

  “Please go,” Miss Kern said, but he was already out the door, walking casually, as if he didn’t know that the Devil’s long red tail twitched with glee to have won another soul. Would we get to see it? The Devil’s scaly arms breaking through the concrete playground, dragging Peter down to hell? “Children,” Miss Kern said, laying a polished red fingertip against her lips. But the name of the Lord, spoken in vain, was like the sparrow that had gotten into the room one day, flying from wall to wall and hitting against the windows—we could feel the wind of its passage across our faces, dangerous and thrilling.

  In darkness we drank our milk and ate saltines. Miss Kern told us a story, but I wasn’t listening—I was thinking about the long brown corridor at the other end of which, in room 8, you were sitting at your desk—the front desk near the window which Raymond Naples had told me was the pet’s desk—and I wondered whether room 8 was filled with candlelight and whether you were worried about me, your little sister, so far away in such a quiet and unfriendly building. The milk tasted sour. I looked over to see if Becky Fine was drinking it and, as I did, Raymond Naples’s legs knocked against mine, enhancing my sense of loneliness.

  Lemma, that the man puts his penis in the woman, I heard. Lemma, that the man puts—and then an exhalation of breath, a falling away of sound, leaving a silence that was filled, in the next instant, with the distant wailing of sirens.

  I waited, then, for Miss Kern to say the word at which we would all spring into action; I strained my ears to hear the sound of the approaching planes with their deadly cargo. I knew from your description, Willie, that we’d be alerted by sirens. But Miss Kern remained transfixed by her story, the round blossom of her face yearning towards us, as if the story alone might forestall disaster.

  “Shouldn’t we go outside?” I asked.

  “Whatever for?” Miss Kern lifted her eyebrows, warning me to hold my tongue.

  I understood the predicament of Chicken Little, as the blue sky fell in shards into the barnyard. I looked at the huge jars of poster paint arranged on the shelves in the back of the room and, as I looked, I saw them shattering, the reds and blues and yellows mixing together across the walls and floor into the mud of aftermath.

  “Kitty Mowbrey!” Miss Kern yelled. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Outside,” I said. I was halfway across the room, making my way to the door.

  “You come right back here, young lady,” Miss Kern instructed.

  And so, for the rest of that dark morning, I sat on a chair in the principal’s office, in the company of the large snapping turtle, a masterpiece of taxidermy, which we all knew was not really dead but had been frozen stiff by Miss Mullen, as punishment for having bitten off her ears. This was why she coiled her gray hair on each side of her head, like earmuffs—she had to hide the scars. From time to time Miss Mullen would look up from her desk and smile at me the smile of a bad fairy devising a new spell. You’ll be sorry, I would think, until the terror rose like mercury along my spine, filling my brain. Outside, the sleet began to let up, and through the small window in the far wall I could see a sky as weary and crumpled as an old piece of folding money. A truck passed by, salting the road that wound down the hill and into the woods that surrounded our house. The planes never came. Still, I could not believe that the world’s fate had been consigned into such unreliable hands as those of the Misses Kern and Mullen. This was the spell cast down upon me in that office, Willie: how watchful I became, checking for the consequences of adult stupidity; I could not stop looking through that small window, hoping to catch out of the corner of my eye the edge of a hem or a shoelace, as the dead drifted past its panes on their way to heaven.

  I rode the bus home with my schoolmates; I rode next to Bobby Hallenbach, who confided in me that his sister bled regularly and mysteriously from between her legs—that there was nothing she could do to stop it. “It’ll happen to you, too,” he said. “It happens to girls.” I saw myself as flat as a glove from which the hand had been suddenly removed; I saw myself in a box among other gloves, and this was called a cemetery.

  “The world might end first,” I told him.

  “No, it won’t,” he said seriously. “Because of God.”

  When I got home Daddy was sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl of tomato soup, talking to his boss on the phone. This was during one of his periods of employment, working as a stringer for the local paper. “Where?” he said into the phone. “Are you sure?” The soup steamed up his glasses so that I couldn’t see his eyes; I could hear, far off in the house, the sound of the vacuum cleaner. “I’ll be right there.” He hung up the phone and then looked at me, spooning soup into his mouth. “Kitty?” he said, and removed his glasses, wiping the lenses on the sleeve of the heavy sweater he wore all the time once the weather got cold—the sweater Mama had knitted for him in the first year of their marriage, while you were growing inside her. “Thank heavens you’re home,” he said.

  He opened his arms and I ran to him, feeling his long arms close around me like tongs, burying my nose in the chickeny smell of his armpit. “Kathleen, stringbean,” he said.

  “Daddy,” I whispered into his armpit.

  Then he let go of me and I stood back, smiling stupidly into his face. “I had to go to Miss Mullen’s office today,” I announced.

  “Miss Mullen? The nurse? The short one with the red nose?”

  “No,” I said, “she’s the principal. Miss Kern sent me there after the janitor came.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  I wasn’t sure how to answer this. “Well,” I said, “I think I was bad.”

  “Does your mother know about this?”

  I paused. “Daddy,” I asked, “is it true that the sirens mean the bombs are coming? And then we have to catch them?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Willie,” I said.

  He frowned. “A siren means lots of things, Kathleen. An ambulance has a siren, so does a fire engine. There’s a siren that goes off every day at noon in Conway. And as for catching bombs—if we’re ever big enough fools to start a war, that’ll be it. Not even Willie Mays could catch one of those things.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  He peered at me over his glasses. “The janitor,” he said. “Isn’t Peter Mygatz the janitor at your school?”

  “His name’s Peter,” I said.

  “Right.” Daddy stood up and pulled on an enormous canvas coat, of the sort I’d seen in pictures of ladies and gentlemen riding old-fashioned automobiles. “The letter writer,” he said, stroking my hair back from my forehead and kissing my nose. “A wasted life, Kathleen.”

  “What do you mean?” And I held my breath, Willie, waiting for that evidence of parental omniscience we’d always wished for and dreaded—waiting to hear that Daddy already knew about the janitor’s perdition.

  “Peter My
gatz,” Daddy said, “has a Ph.D. from Harvard. He has a Ph.D. from Harvard and now, when he isn’t mopping the floors at your school, he’s sitting in that bread truck he calls a home—you know, that eyesore near the cranberry bog—writing letters to the paper.” He walked over to the door and stood looking at me sadly. “You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, Kathleen. Remember that.”

  I didn’t want him to leave. “Willie,” I said, “is in love with him.”

  “What?”

  “Well,” I amended, “the kids say she’s got a crush on him.”

  “Great.” His gaze floated up to the corner of the room above the plate rail, and then his gray eyes narrowed, as if in consultation with an invisible deity. “Your sister, I’m sorry to say, is a lousy judge of character.”

  “Bobby Hallenbach says Willie’s a heartbreaker,” I said.

  He was almost out the door now, his feet straddling the threshold. “Listen to me, Kathleen,” he said. “When I get home I’ll personally show you a picture of the human heart. It’s a muscle, nothing more. Okay?”

  And then he was gone, although he left behind emotional yardage I couldn’t understand—great sheets of it that settled slowly over everything in the room, as if we were in transit, preparing to lock up, wary of dust. I guess he knew how it would happen: the little crack running up the heart’s center and the two halves falling apart like an eggshell, out of which nothing would hatch. You fell in love with the janitor so effortlessly while, for the rest of us, you made it so difficult: we piled our offerings around your feet and learned to settle for acknowledgment. That’s why Daddy got you the pony for your birthday, only to hear you christen it “Peter.” Admit it, Peter was a ridiculous name for that moody creature whose greatest pleasure was gnawing on the barn. Do you remember? That was the November of the pony, of the janitor, of Mrs. Naples’s death on the county road, of Rogni. Of course you didn’t know about Rogni. Not then. I kept Rogni to myself.

  In the room, in the small gray room, I sat in the corner on the floor eating a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, while Mama continued pushing her vacuum cleaner around and around downstairs. Then I heard the car start up in the driveway and I went over to the window and watched it disappear. I’d wrapped myself in a blanket because I felt as isolate and sad as a child lost in the woods.

  Lemma, I heard. Lemma, that the man puts his penis in the woman. That it spreads out everywhere inside of her, that it makes her rattle and rattle until the pieces begin to fall off, the long pieces and the short pieces and the pieces shaped like cups and bowls and the pieces that have no shape but are like moisture.

  I turned and saw a figure printed on the air, its delineation recognizable yet wrong, like a photographic negative held up to a window. The figure occupied the whole center of the room, extending from floor to ceiling and, while it didn’t move from that place, within its contours it shifted and seethed, as if bringing itself into focus; no matter how intently I tried to stare at what seemed to be a face, all I could see was a teeming pool through which eyes swam like dark fish, within which the oval light of a mouth opened and closed.

  I pulled the blanket up over my head and the voice began again, louder this time: Lemma, that all matter is blasphemy. There was a pause and then the voice exploded into a single ball of noise. The noise was everywhere and it went on and on, suggesting that there had never been anything else—that the great noise of our world’s ending was our daily bread, our home and family, our green pastures.

  “Kathleen,” a voice whispered. “Kathleen.” The explosion poured out of the room, swallowed back down into that whispering throat. I felt a hand draw away the blanket, gently, cautiously, as if I were the most fearful thing in the universe. I still held on to the remainder of my sandwich, which I’d squashed into a lump; it was like a souvenir from a foreign country. There was a person crouched down in front of me, looking at me warily—a man with eyes as startling as the eyes of a friend who has always worn glasses and suddenly removes them for the first time in your presence. “Kathleen,” he said, enunciating carefully. He looked so sorrowful that I reached out to touch his arm, but he drew back. “Not yet,” he said. “I’m too new and dangerous, and so are you. We have to be very careful, do you understand?”

  I nodded my head, even though I understood nothing. The man stood up and I saw that he wasn’t very tall, but that the upper part of his body was full and muscular, like that of Vern Hawkings, the farrier, whose proportions only seemed correct when he was riding a horse. “Where did you come from?” I asked.

  He looked all around the room, swiveling his head on the strong column of his neck, and when he saw the two pink bowls he smiled. “There’s another of you, isn’t there? Willie?” The lids of his eyes fell a notch, so that I became aware of his lashes—each lash as thick and black as if I was looking at it through a magnifying glass, set against the deep blue field of his gaze.

  “Willie’s my sister,” I said. “She’s in school now. She’s older than me.”

  “I know,” he said. “But she’s going to be back here soon, and then you’ll have to go downstairs. You must keep her away from me, Kathleen.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t have any explanations,” he said, walking over to look through the west window. “Those are the rules, Kathleen. As this world is made, I might weaken.” He extended one arm and motioned for me to join him at the window, which I did, reluctantly. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “You are, aren’t you?”

  I nodded my head. The skin of his hands, where they rested on the pitted wood of the windowsill, was white and perfectly smooth, like polished stone, and I thought that if I could see his palms they would be unmarked by those lines with which the superstitious content themselves about their destinies. I was afraid, Willie. I was afraid of my own body, with its cuts and scabs, like a thing coming apart at its seams. Through the window I watched the bright yellow capsule of the school bus, bringing you home.

  “I’d never hurt you, Kathleen,” he said. “You have to believe me. See, the sun’s coming out now. And then it will go down, over there behind those hills, and this day will be finished. That’s how it works here. You measure time’s passage, don’t you? You count days and you consult clocks—and so you live with desire. I’m just beginning to understand that.”

  The school bus pulled up at the end of our driveway, and I saw, for a moment, a blue spark—your jacket—before you vanished into the pines. “Desire?” I asked.

  He touched his chest. “Here,” he said. “I think you feel it here. Something like a ball of glass filled with air? Like the instant before creation. Is that what desire is like?” He ran one finger down the pane of the window. “It isn’t fair,” he said. “It isn’t fair that it should be the ending as well.” And then he looked down at me.

  He looked down at me, Willie, and as he did I saw his whole body speeding upwards, growing to a great height. His fingers laced through mine—the skin cool and supple, gloving fire—to yank me loose from the pocket of our house. Briefly, I felt myself snag on the intricate webbing of laundry hung out to dry, sheets and pillowcases, shirts and trousers—the temporal extrusions—then I was free. The house no longer contained me; I passed through layer after layer of color: the green of a world filled with leaves and scarves of lively air, jittering against my legs as my face and shoulders pressed upwards like a prow through the paling blues of sky, where the wetness of clouds coated me over, making my body slippery and fluent. I couldn’t see a thing, as if my eyes were closed; but they weren’t, I know: I reached my hand up to make sure, and I could feel the open place behind the lashes.

  So I entered the language of the angels, the dangerous territory through which quills shot—where the heart of a human child is most vulnerable. A wing folded around me; I was bound in by pinions, the hooks and barbs of enormous feathers; the other wing rose and fell, beating a dark chord, and we flew, higher, through the thick yellow rapture of souls stewing in heaven’s pot. And t
hen there was the silver and judgmental silence.

  “Look, Kathleen,” said Rogni, pointing to where I could see myself standing on a silver and empty plateau under a silver sky. “An event is taking shape here,” he said, “if only you knew how to recognize it.” Wind blew at me from all directions, and in the distance I could see great white bears, reared up on their hind legs, dancing across the horizon. But this wasn’t a real horizon—it was the edge of all created things—it was the place where God’s desire faltered. The music to which the bears danced was inaudible and ran through my bones like a chinging, as if I was a hoop being tapped across a schoolyard by a metal wand. I was alone.

  Willie, I heard. It ought to have been my voice. I was, after all, a five-year-old girl, carried suddenly away from her home—from the scratchy chair where Daddy would hold me on his lap each night and read me stories about friendly and loquacious animals—it ought to have been me who called out to you. And I could see, through all those plates of color, piled one on top of another to make a crystal, like the lens of a miraculous telescope, you. I could see you stooping down beside the place where the stream that ran along the edge of our property pooled; you were stooping down to pick up a pebble and I could see the white shapes of your fingers closing around that greenish-brown egg; you put it in your mouth and sucked on it. I could taste it: like sucking the flavor from a coin, elemental and sharp.

  Then the angels—among them the one called Rogni, who thought you were his—gathered in a nest of hot spokes and anguish, wondering. Who were you? You tilted your head forward; you listened. This was the place where the orphans came to wash each other’s face. The water was the color of Coca-Cola, but perfectly clean. The grit in it was bits of dissolved rock, bits of shining mica. You made your eyes into slits, because you were always suspicious. Could you hear them? I could see the blue of your jacket moving up and down, slightly, with your breathing. Your lips were parted and I felt each breath: soft, soft, softer—a breathing out, a breathing in, a gathering of breath, a gathering of the smallest silver particles into walls, ceiling, floor.