The Driest Season Read online

  “It’s almost a full moon.”

  “It’s a lot of things.” He stopped, set the knife on his boot, and ran the leather strip over his thigh to dust it off. His hair was getting longer, his curls like coils of gold. Soon he’d have to cut it all off. He put the leather over his knee and lit a cigarette. He seemed older. More serious. Less afraid. As if he had nothing left to lose. How he and she both could change so quickly was something she could not understand. He took a drag off his cigarette and the smoke rose toward the barn light and swirled like a fog above them. She thought about how you never knew what change would come and what it might look like.

  “Did your mom make coconut cake for Helen’s birthday?” he asked.

  “As always.”

  “Does Helen know you’re here?”

  “No.”

  “I’d keep it that way,” he said. “Forget about me, Cielle. You and Helen are sisters for life, but once I’m gone I probably won’t come back. She’d be mad if she knew you were here.”

  “You don’t get to decide who can and can’t care about you. You don’t get to choose who loves you. And I think she’d understand why I’m here.”

  “Go home.”

  “No.”

  He shook his head back and forth.

  “You love us. We love you. I know that,” she said.

  He ran the knife over the leather strip that rested on his leg. The blade flashed silver in the barn light.

  “It’s not always enough,” Bodie said. He tapped the tip of his forefinger on the blade to test its sharpness.

  She finished her drink. “Give me another beer.”

  Bodie handed her a beer, then a bridle, a rag, and oil soap. “Make yourself useful and clean Ginger’s bridle.”

  She dipped the rag into the bucket of water and oil soap. It smelled rich and woody. She laid the bridle across her lap and ran the rag over each section—the headband, the noseband, the braided reins—and she lifted out the dirt and watched the leather turn dark brown as it soaked up the water and oil. It soaked it up as the land did rain. Boaz and all of Wisconsin needed relief, needed to be washed and cooled and nourished. Too much drought and everything died; not everything could be brought back to life.

  “I kissed Darren Olsen.”

  “First kiss?”

  “Yes.” Cielle touched her cheek with the back of her hand, and then held the cool beer to her cheek.

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s nice, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  They were quiet then for a bit, while they sat in the barn tending to sharpening knives and cleaning tack. She felt her body loosen from the alcohol.

  “You have the radio in here?” she asked.

  “It’s too late for that. It’ll wake them up.” He nodded toward the house, where his parents slept. “Besides, we should call it a night.”

  “Bodie, no one will know if you don’t go, so don’t go,” she said.

  “I’ll know. I could make a difference. I could change something.”

  “Something will change with or without you.”

  “I want to see what I’m made of.”

  “What do you think you’re made of?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She thought: I’m blood and tissue, brain and heart. I’m cells, water, night, day, stardust, barn dust, hay, and horse. She finished cleaning the bridle and hung it on its wall hook to dry, and took the saddle over her thigh to clean. The soft throaty call of a horned owl echoed outside.

  “That’s nice,” Cielle said.

  “He’s here every night,” Bodie said. “Asking who, who, who. I always tell him, I don’t know who.”

  Cielle smiled. “Have you seen him?”

  “Never seen him, just hear him. He’s always out there, somewhere.”

  “Like the dead.”

  “I guess. If you believe in that.”

  “How long do you suppose people grieve?” Cielle asked.

  “However long it takes.”

  “What if you can’t remember what normal felt like in the first place?”

  She felt the future wide open and unknown. A person started out with such high hopes, she thought, but never knew, could never know day to day, what might happen. They could be ripped and scattered like a barn after a tornado. And then. Then they had to put themselves back together. The living had to go on living.

  “You’ll remember it when you feel it,” he said.

  “I wish I knew what was real and what wasn’t.”

  “This knife is real.” He tapped the blade on the cement floor and it clinked. “This barn is real.” He stomped his foot on the floor, and loose bits of hay and dust scattered over the cement and rose in the air.

  “I mean about how people feel. If you can trust they won’t hurt you.” Cielle dipped the rag in the oil soap and rubbed it over the saddle seat, and there was the sound of Bodie running the knife’s blade over leather: shush shush, shush shush, shush shush.

  “Sometimes people hurt others on purpose and sometimes by accident, but no matter how good things get, there will always be something that will hurt. Like a little pin that gets stuck in your heart.”

  “I don’t want you to go.” She meant it more than she’d meant anything before.

  “I know you don’t,” he said. “And I’m sorry.”

  Bugs flew into the barn light and whipped around in crazy circles. They moved toward heat and the brightest place. Outside, the rolling call of the great horned owl bounced off the night. She knew Bodie was doing the best he could and what he thought was right. She guessed she was doing the same.

  “You still have that burn bin outside?” she asked.

  “Back there.” He tilted his head toward the back barn door.

  She walked to her bike, got the file out from its basket, and walked through the barn and stood in front of Bodie. “Matches?”

  He reached in his pocket and held them out. She leaned in to take them and he yanked them back. “First tell me what you’re burning.”

  “Paper.”

  He lurched fast and grabbed the file from her.

  “Give it back,” she said.

  He opened it, flipped through the photos, and then shut the file. “Jesus,” he said. He shut his eyes tightly and ran his hand through his hair. He stood and waved the file in front of him like a fan. “Jesus, Cielle.”

  She took the file and walked toward the burn bin, and he followed her. They stood in front of it.

  “Here,” he said, and handed her the matchbox. She lit a match and pulled out a photo at a time, there were five of them, and held the flame to the pointed edge of each one. As the fire melted away the edges of the photos and moved toward the centers, she dropped them, one by one, into the dark heart of the metal bin.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE NEXT MORNING THERE WERE men’s voices, the clomping of hooves, the neighing of horses, and the bang and clap of wood outside. Before Cielle even sat up in bed, Helen came into her room.

  “What’s going on? It’s loud,” Cielle said.

  “Look out the window.”

  Cielle got up. Close to two hundred men in blue and black clothes, straw hats, and beards carried wood and spread it around the foundation of where their barn used to be. Young girls with braids and boys with bowl cuts tended to the horses and buggies that lined their drive and the road. Women in dark dresses and bonnets carried food into their house. The Amish had come to build them a new barn.

  “How did they know?” Cielle asked.

  “This is what they do.”

  “Even for people who aren’t like them?”

  “We’re probably not that different.”

  The Amish lived down dirt roads without power lines in white clapboard homes that looked like any home, except at night they were dark save for the glow and flicker of candlelight, kerosene lamplight, and firelight. They kept the modern world at bay—no telephones, no distant voic
es or songs on radios, no hum of an oven or generator or auto-motor rattle. Instead, Cielle imagined the quiet of their lives, the poof of blowing out a flame, the creaking floors and breathing bodies, the hiss of wood in a burning stove, cows chewing grass, horses shifting hooves—the sounds of the immediate, known world.

  Cielle’s mother was on the lawn greeting the women who carried food. They hugged her mother. They wiped their own tears, and followed her mother into the house. Cielle looked in her closet for clothes, and Helen sat on her bed.

  “You look tired,” Helen said.

  Cielle looked in the mirror, and her eyes were puffy, with dark bags underneath. “I couldn’t sleep last night.”

  “I heard you sneak out. Your hair smells like smoke.”

  Cielle pulled a dress over her head, adjusted the straps, and slipped on her sandals. “Nothing fits right,” she said.

  “I can’t take all my clothes to Madison, so you can take what I leave behind.”

  Cielle brushed her hair and tied it into a low ponytail. She didn’t want to think about Helen leaving too. She walked to the window. “I can’t imagine wearing those clothes, living that life.”

  “Matthew wants to come visit me in Madison.”

  “What about Bodie?”

  “I love Bodie and I always will. But if he doesn’t want me, there’s nothing I can do.”

  She knew love wasn’t a weakness, but she didn’t think love came and went so fast. She didn’t understand how a person could let go of one person and move on to another so quickly. Maybe it was different for her sister and Bodie. Maybe they had more room for love, for different kinds of love. Maybe Cielle was afraid to get hurt, afraid someone else would come along and later tell her he was leaving, or leave without saying anything at all. She knew she wasn’t as resilient or quick to recover from that kind of loss.

  “I don’t know what you think I should do. You know, letting people care about you isn’t bad,” Helen said.

  “I never said it was,” Cielle said. “I think you should do what you want to do.”

  There was a knock on the door and her grandmother peeked in. “Girls, hurry and come down.”

  “Do they speak English?” Helen said.

  “Of course they speak English,” her grandmother said.

  “Do you know them?” Cielle asked.

  “Your mother and I know a few of them. Your father knew most. Get your manners in check,” her grandmother said, “and get yourselves downstairs. These good people are building you a barn.”

  The day was gray, overcast, and humid. The men wore cotton clothes and sweated through their blue and black shirts, smelled like raw onions and mildew, and smiled and nodded as they went about their business. They spoke little except for giving directions. Cielle wanted to know what their lives were like. Was it simpler being at a remove from modern life? Was life more joyful, or was it lonely and scary without an escape, knowing you could only stay in one place, among the same people, for the rest of your life?

  Pies and breads and casseroles lined the kitchen counter. The women’s bonnets were white linen and the girls’ bonnets were black.

  One of the men came to the door. It was the same man from her father’s wake.

  “Ms. Olive, if I could?” He took off his hat and held it in front of his chest. He waited behind the screen.

  “Of course,” her mother said. “John, you remember my girls?”

  He looked at Cielle and then at Helen and tilted his hat off his chest as if waving to them. “Pleased to see you.”

  Cielle thought him pleasant-looking. He was clean-shaven and his hair was cut short. She wondered if he was shy or if all Amish men spoke to females with a quiet distance. He shifted his gaze down at the door, and knocked his hat against his chest in small movements.

  “Girls, introduce yourselves to these nice women and girls who’ve brought us their food and prayers.” Her mother walked outside to speak with John.

  An older girl with hair as blond as corn silk stepped forward and said, “We made sun tea.” She handed a mason jar to Cielle. Her eyes had a brightness to them, like sunshine itself.

  “Thank you. I’m Cielle, and this is Helen.”

  “I’m Hannah, and this is Miriam and Sarah.”

  The girls’ eyes went from lamp to lamp, to the telephone and the radio.

  “You can fool with anything you like,” Cielle said. “You flip the switch or turn the knob.”

  “And just like that it works?” Hannah asked.

  “This is our first time in an English home,” Miriam said.

  “The wires connect the power lines which feed the electricity,” Cielle said.

  “Can you see it? The electricity?” Sarah asked.

  “It’s a current you can’t see,” Cielle said. “It’s dangerous like lightning, so it stays in the wires. You don’t want to touch it or it could kill you.”

  Miriam flipped the wall light switch on and off, on and off. Sarah held the telephone to her ear, then looked at it and hung up. “Someone was there,” she said. “Someone’s stuck inside that thing.”

  “No one’s stuck anywhere,” Cielle said.

  “Whoever was stuck inside said your name.”

  Cielle picked up the phone to listen.

  “Hello?” a woman asked.

  Cielle said nothing.

  “I heard the click, who’s there?” the woman asked.

  “It’s nothing,” a man’s voice said. “We have the line. Talk.”

  “I heard something,” she said. “I don’t want people listening. Hold on a minute.”

  Cielle held her fingers over her lips to shush the room. She covered the mouthpiece with the palm of her hand and pressed the earpiece to her ear. She heard breathing, a cough, and a dog barking. Helen widened her eyes for an answer. Cielle mouthed, Wait.

  “Anna?” The man said. “Are you still there?”

  It was Anna Olsen. Mrs. Olsen.

  “He killed himself,” she said. “I couldn’t save him. I couldn’t do anything.”

  “It had nothing to do with you.”

  “I didn’t see the signs.” Cielle heard Mrs. Olsen take a drag and exhale smoke. “But I should have known.”

  “Sometimes you can’t know,” the man said. “Sometimes there’s no way of knowing.”

  There was the clink of ice cubes on the other line and she imaged Mrs. Olsen drinking out of a tumbler full of ice and golden liquor, smoking her cigarette, drunk before breakfast.

  “Why do you think he did it?” the man asked.

  Cielle pressed the phone closer and plugged her other ear with her finger. Her heart pounded in her chest and she shut her eyes.

  “Why?” Mrs. Olsen asked.

  Why, Cielle thought, why. She shifted her weight from one leg to the other. She waited.

  “He had bad migraines,” she said. “And a melancholy he couldn’t explain.”

  Then Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell and Bodie walked up the drive. Mr. McMahon from the grocery store, Mr. Hammond from the farm down the road, and Darren and Matthew walked up behind them. They carried hammers and tool belts and levels.

  “I’ve seen that melancholy with others. It’s something we don’t know a lot about.”

  He was happy, Cielle thought. He was fine.

  Helen put her hands on her hips. Cielle held her hand out to stop her from talking, but it was too late.

  “Who is it?” Helen asked.

  “Shit,” Mrs. Olsen said. “Goddammit.”

  The line went dead.

  “Shit,” Cielle said. “Helen!” She clicked on the phone for a dial tone and the operator came on.

  “Mrs. Jacobson, how may I direct your call?”

  “This is Cielle. No call. I thought I heard it ring.”

  “There haven’t been any calls to your house this morning, Miss Cielle.”

  Helen still stood next to her. “What are you doing?”

  Cielle raised her hand again.

  “I must be hea
ring things,” Cielle said.

  The operator was silent.

  “You know how sometimes you think you hear something but you’re not sure what?” Cielle asked.

  Cielle heard shifting in the background, as if the operator were adjusting papers on a desk.

  “I heard my name,” Cielle said. “I heard someone say my name.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” the operator said.

  “Thank you.” Cielle twirled the phone cord around her wrist and waited.

  “I could lose my job,” the operator said.

  Cielle shut her eyes. The operator cleared her throat.

  “I’ve taken an oath,” she said.

  The Amish women brought in more food and then ushered the children outside when they saw her on the phone. Cielle watched them leave. They spoke a language she’d not heard before, a variation of the German she’d heard on the radio. They were harsh, angular, throaty words. Yet she knew from the women’s tone and gestures they were telling the girls it was rude to be in the house and to get outside. Cielle watched their bunned hair and bonnets as they scurried into the yard and drive, and beyond she caught sight of her mother and John standing behind a buggy.

  “If it was your father,” Cielle said.

  Cielle heard a clicking noise and turned. Hannah was still there, fooling with the light in the living room, listening.

  “Of course,” the operator said.

  “Wouldn’t you want to know why your father died?”

  Hannah looked at Cielle and didn’t take her eyes off her.

  “Okay, hang up,” Helen said. “Now.” The operator sniffled on the other end. Cielle’s palm sweated on the phone.

  Helen grabbed the butt of the phone and pulled. Cielle’s grip tightened.

  “Hang up.” Helen yanked the phone from her. “Enough of this.” The phone slipped from Cielle’s hand and Helen set it back in its cradle.

  Hannah stopped flipping the light switch.

  “There’s no secret answer, Cielle. There’s nothing that will make this anything but what it is,” Helen said.