Juliet in August Read online

  Shiloh doesn’t know what to think. He doesn’t know what the cost of a loaf of bread in Toronto has to do with anything and, except for Vicki’s reassurances, what he hears, he hears on the TV news like everyone else in the country. Maybe there’s too much wheat in the world and Blaine hasn’t figured that out, although Shiloh does remember him growing canary seed a few years ago and swearing he’d never do it again because of the full-body protection he’d had to wear to harvest the damned stuff, complaining to Vicki about the itching and chafing he’d had to put up with to grow feed for canaries in New York City. But maybe the canary seed experiment failed because Blaine is a bad farmer. Maybe it is all Blaine’s fault.

  There’s another possibility. Maybe, and this is what Shiloh would rather believe, it’s Vicki’s fault. Vicki who, according to Blaine, is “bloody useless” on a farm. Sometimes Blaine calls her this in a teasing way, as though it’s endearing, but if he’s desperate for another set of hands and sends one of the kids to the house for Vicki and then she sends a wrench clanging through the frame of a piece of machinery, or lays a bolt on the ground to get lost forever, or fails to hold her ground and lets a yearling calf escape through an open gate, he’ll say something like, “For Christ’s sake, you grew up on a farm; how can you be so bloody useless?” The way he says “bloody useless” in these circumstances leads Shiloh to believe that his mother actually is. Vicki never gets mad in return, or defends herself, and Shiloh takes this to mean she knows Blaine is right. Shiloh is too young to understand Vicki’s brand of diplomacy, which involves keeping your mouth shut until things blow over. Of course, the need for Vicki’s help on the farm is now a thing of the past because there’s no farming left to do, but Blaine still finds the odd occasion when the word useless seems appropriate, or at least easy.

  On this first night in his new room, Shiloh wakes up, and Blaine and Vicki are not arguing about land or cattle or money. At three in the morning, they’re fighting about green beans. Shiloh thinks he must be hearing things, he must have it wrong, but no, Blaine says, quite clearly, “When I get home from work tomorrow I want those beans in the freezer, Vicki.”

  “I’m planning to do the beans tomorrow, I told you that. Or do you want me to do them now? Would that make you happy, if I clattered around the kitchen right now and woke everybody up? Come on, Blaine. Be reasonable.”

  Shiloh hears Blaine’s footsteps on the floor above. Back and forth.

  “I don’t want the only thing we grow on this place to end up molding in the basement.”

  The beans in question, Shiloh knows, are in plastic tubs in the cold room, which is a misnomer at this time of year. He helped pick them two days ago.

  “They aren’t molding,” he hears his mother say. “There’s plenty of time. But tomorrow. I promise.”

  “And I know how much that promise is worth,” Blaine says. “You’ll wake up with a big plan to get them done, but you’ll be off to town before you’ve got a pot of water boiling. You’ll be gone for the day, and I’ll get home and you won’t have done a damned thing and the beans will look like a compost heap.”

  “That’s not fair,” Vicki says, “that part about me not doing a damned thing. We have six kids. It takes a lot of time, looking after six kids.”

  Shiloh is resentful that he’s included in the category of “kids.” He doesn’t need looking after. He tosses back the covers and swings his feet over the side of the bed, thinking he might get up and throw his two cents in. He knows Blaine will agree with him. There are only five kids that need looking after. He wants to say this and be on Blaine’s side.

  “My mother raised three kids and grew a garden and worked like a man on top of that,” Blaine says.

  “I know about your mother,” Vicki says. “She was amazing. I’m not. I don’t want to fight.” Then she says, as though she’s just remembered, “Shiloh is right underneath us. Let’s not wake him.”

  Shiloh is just about to part the bedspread curtains and head for the stairs when he hears Blaine say, “If it weren’t for that bedroom idea—another one of your big plans—you could have had the beans done.”

  Vicki says something Shiloh can’t hear, and then Blaine says, “To hell with Shiloh.”

  Shiloh stops. To hell with Shiloh? Did he hear correctly?

  “Blaine,” Vicki says.

  “Don’t Blaine me.”

  There’s a long silence, and then Shiloh hears Vicki’s footsteps going down the hall, and a few minutes later Blaine follows.

  Once they’re in their bedroom, Shiloh can’t hear what they’re saying. Nothing, he thinks. He doesn’t know that when Vicki asks Blaine what he means by “To hell with Shiloh,” Blaine seems exhausted and answers that he didn’t mean anything, he just said it. Shiloh doesn’t hear Vicki swear to do the beans and not let them go to waste, and Blaine say, “Well, we both know it’s not the beans that are stuck in my craw.” Shiloh doesn’t know that in spite of the arguing, his parents get into bed together and Blaine says, “How can you wear flannelette in the summer?” and Vicki says, “You never mind my flannelette.”

  Shiloh lies there most of the night, worrying. He’s twelve years old and he’s worrying about things he can’t understand, not the least of which is why the words “To hell with Shiloh” slipped so easily from his father’s tongue, just as easily as “bloody useless.” He wants to cry, but he won’t—he’s too old to cry—and he reaches over and turns on the lamp, and the light falls on the cowboy in the rodeo poster, a bull rider wearing purple chaps with gold fringes. His hand is wrapped tight into his bull rope and the fringes on his chaps are suspended as he gets set for the bull’s next jarring contact with the earth. Shiloh wonders if he could be a bull rider, and then remembers that the steers he could practice on are gone.

  Who should he blame? Maybe, somehow, this is his fault, and that’s why his father said what he did. Or maybe not his fault alone, but the six kids, too many, and the name Shiloh came out first because he’s the oldest. He wonders how much money it costs to feed and clothe six kids. It must cost a lot. He wonders how they could save money, and makes a pact with himself not to ask for Big Gulps or rented movies. Or school things. When the teacher gives them notes about money for field trips or extracurricular activities, he’ll tear them up and not even show them to his mother. He won’t ask for new running shoes or jeans or T-shirts. He won’t, he vows, ask for anything, and his father will notice this and realize that he isn’t a kid anymore, and when he needs a hand he’ll ask for Shiloh and leave Vicki alone because she’s bloody useless anyway.

  Shiloh lies awake and thinks of all the ways he can save money and not be like the younger kids, who are asleep upstairs and don’t even know what’s going on. He thinks and worries and tries to solve problems that his parents haven’t been able to solve, and eventually he falls asleep, the light still on, the bull rider still suspended, waiting for the buzzer that will tell him he lasted the eight seconds and he can now begin the perilous task of getting off.

  Upstairs, his mother—way too hot in her flannelette nightie—hears the droning sound of a small plane overhead, the same plane that she has dreamed about again and again since childhood. In her dream, the drone turns to a sputter, then a stall, and she witnesses the plane’s death spiral from sky to earth, its disappearance behind trees or buildings, after which she reluctantly and never successfully searches for the wreckage. In variations of the dream she strikes out, always alone, down a blacktop highway, or a country road, or a path of nothing more than tire tracks through a field. Once, she got into a canoe (she’d never in real life been in one) and paddled across an open lake. In the way of dreams, her anxious journey turned into a pleasant, although confusing, paddle.

  When Vicki hears the plane hiccup and then drone its way to earth, she thinks she is still awake. She sits up in bed, then stands and feels the floor beneath her bare feet.

&nbs
p; “Blaine,” she says.

  He groans in his sleep and rolls over, away from her.

  She can still hear the plane. The sound is real, she’s sure of it. She grabs a pair of jeans off the floor and pulls them on under her nightie, but then the sound of the plane stops. No crash. She listens. Nothing. A dream. So she wasn’t awake. She just thought she was awake.

  She gets back into bed, still in her jeans, and pulls the sheet up even though she doesn’t need it. She rolls against Blaine’s warm back, but he mumbles “too hot” and pushes her away. She rolls to her own side of the bed and drops off to sleep.

  No falling planes in her dreams this time. Just one endless, obsessive dream about shelling bright green peas and sweating in the hot, hot sun.

  Home Invasion

  There’s barely a breeze, but it doesn’t take much to get a creak out of the ancient, probably half-dead and therefore unstable evergreen tree outside of Norval and Lila Birch’s bedroom window in Juliet. As Norval half listens to his wife recite what she expects him to do the next day, he resolves, once again, to cut the tree down before it falls through the roof of their split-level house and lands right on top of them. Thinking about the tree leads him to think about his lawn, and then the hardware store and the new lawn mower he’s been eyeing. It’s not a riding mower, but it is a shiny green electric with many special features. Norval gets great pleasure from the act of mowing grass, which he’s been unable to do since his old gas mower died on him a few weeks ago. It bothers him when he gets home from work and sees that his grass is too long, but he just hasn’t had the time to stop at the hardware store. You’d think the overgrown lawn would bother his house-proud wife, too, but it doesn’t seem to.

  From two blocks away, he hears Mrs. Baxter’s rooster. The rooster has a defective cock-a-doodle-doo that makes him more irritating than a fully functioning rooster would be. He’s not even useful as an alarm clock because he has no sense of night and day. His feeble half-crow reminds Norval of the imperfections in everything.

  “I’d like to kill that rooster,” he says. “A rooster that doesn’t know the difference between night and day deserves to die.”

  His wife says, “You’re not listening to me, Norval,” and he turns his attention back to the list. All of the items on it have something to do with renovations to the church, which Lila sees as necessary for the wedding she is planning for their only daughter, Rachelle. Lila seems to have forgotten altogether their daughter’s age (eighteen), along with the fact that she’s just graduated from high school and has no plans to get an education that will be of use in earning her a decent living, and since she’s marrying Kyle Hoffert, she really ought to have a backup plan. The Hofferts earned their living until recently off their contract to collect pregnant mares’ urine for the hormone replacement industry. Those contracts were canceled when science decided the practice of replacing women’s hormones was not such a good idea after all, and the farms quickly became a thing of the past. The Hofferts run a few hundred head of cattle and are trying to maintain their horse-breeding program, but the mares’ urine had been a lot more valuable than either the cattle or the horses are now.

  And in addition to the worry about Rachelle’s financial security, there’s the notable fact that the bride is pregnant. Lila has decided to ignore this detail until after the wedding, at which time she’ll make an announcement as though it’s news, when everyone in Juliet already knows, and if they don’t they will when they see Rachelle in her wedding dress.

  “Can’t you take care of some of these things?” Norval asks in the dark.

  “I have my own list,” Lila says. “One person can’t plan a wedding.”

  “What about the blushing bride?” Norval asks. “Perhaps there are one or two things she might do to help out.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic,” Lila says. “She has a job. She’s busy. Anyway, you know how tired she is. Or maybe you don’t. Maybe you have to be a woman to know just how tired pregnancy can make you.”

  “I thought we were ignoring her ‘condition,’” Norval says.

  “We’re not ignoring it within these walls. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Well, she didn’t seem that tired yesterday,” Norval says. “I walked by the swimming pool and there she was, prancing around in a string bikini, her little belly on display. Don’t they have rules of conduct for lifeguards? A dress code of some kind?”

  “They’re not called string bikinis anymore,” Lila says. “You’re so old-fashioned. Anyway, she’s not showing yet. She has no ‘little belly,’ as you put it.”

  “You’re in denial, Lila. One look and a blind man could tell.” Without realizing he’s doing it, Norval pulls the sheet up to his chin. It has something to do with the idea of his daughter showing. “So what about Kyle’s mother?” he asks. “Can’t she lend a hand?”

  “Mrs. Hoffert is lovely, but this is the bride’s family’s responsibility. You can’t weasel out that way, Norval.”

  Lila’s acting like this wedding is the most important event in the history of the town, Norval thinks, when in fact he sees it, well, not so much as a disaster—nothing is final these days—but as a mistake that will be evident before the guests have eaten their good-luck slivers of wedding cake. He wants to suggest again that the marriage take place cheaply and quietly, and that they spend the money to celebrate in a year’s time if the future looks promising then. When he suggested this the first time, his wife and daughter in unison called him a tightwad and dismissed the idea without consideration.

  Norval sighs audibly, tucking the sheet around his neck as though he’s in a body bag with his head sticking out.

  “In case you hadn’t noticed,” he says, “I too have a job. I too have a list, and a rather long one.” He tries to picture his desk calendar, the one he’s refused to replace with an electronic version, and wonders who will be the first to enter his office at the bank in the morning, playing a sympathy card and asking for more money or more time. And he’s pretty sure he has school board business sometime after lunch, the interview of the only qualified applicant for the job of home economics teacher. Waiting in the wings is the righteous Mrs. Baxter, owner of Norval’s favorite rooster, who has been trying to get her hands on the job for the last ten years even though she doesn’t have a teaching certificate. He can only hope the qualified applicant isn’t covered in tattoos. If she’s at all acceptable, they’ll have to hire her or face the teachers’ union.

  Lila says, “I want you to talk to someone at the church. The foyer absolutely must be redecorated, and I don’t just mean a coat of paint. They’ll listen to you, Norval. You’re an important person in the community and, besides, you’re a man.”

  Important, hah, Norval thinks to himself. Important, when his job description includes foreclosure on properties that have been in the family for over a hundred years. Tolling the death knell for people like Blaine Dolson—who has found work on the road crew, thank God for that; he has a half dozen kids to support.

  What would happen, Norval wonders, if he just stayed in bed, didn’t go to the bank on Main Street, just pulled the sheets over his head and stayed in bed until noon, and then got up in his pajamas and watched whatever was on TV, whatever appeared on the screen when he hit the power button on the remote—music videos, football or golf, some reality show about redecorating houses or ballroom dancing—and when the day was over he’d go back to bed and sleep with a free conscience. He wonders whether this is possible, if he could ever, at his age, close enough to retirement that the word has entered his vocabulary, quit his job?

  And then he reminds himself that he’s considering just the thing that he fears for his daughter—poverty resulting from a rash act—and he knows that if it gets too bad he’ll apply for a transfer to another town and he’ll start all over with new clients who will trust him, or give him the benefit of the doubt, for a few year
s at least.

  Lila sits up in bed. “Did you hear that?” she asks.

  “The wind?” Norval asks.

  “Not the wind,” she says. “There is no wind. I think it was the front door.”

  Now Norval hears something, too. Footsteps.

  “Rachelle’s been home all night,” says Lila. “I’m sure of it.”

  “I wouldn’t bet your life savings,” Norval says, throwing the covers aside and stepping onto the plush wall-to-wall carpet.

  “Be careful,” his wife whispers. “You hear stories. It could be a home invasion.”

  “It’s not a home invasion,” says Norval, reaching for his pants, which Lila has neatly folded over the back of a chair. “Rachelle,” he calls, “where the hell have you been?”

  No answer.

  Norval pulls his pants on over his cotton pajama bottoms and steps into the hallway. He descends the four carpeted steps to the landing, another six to the main level of the house, and finds Rachelle in the kitchen, her head in the fridge. She’s wearing cutoff shorts and what they call a tank top, which means to Norval that she’s only half dressed—or more to the point, she’s half naked.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he asks again.

  “Out,” says Rachelle.

  “With Kyle,” says Norval.

  “With the girls,” she says, closing the fridge door and turning to face him.

  Her eyes are bloodshot and he’s pretty sure she’s been drinking. He tries to keep his eyes from her belly but they keep drifting there. Maybe Lila is right. You can’t yet tell.