The Driest Season Page 15

  The three of them drove home without saying a word.

  One week later they unloaded Helen’s car in Madison. The dorm room was a tiny double with a twin bed against each wall and dressers at the foot of the beds. Helen’s roommate was a girl from Milwaukee named Clara. She wore a string of pearls, had perfect teeth straight and white as a picket fence, and kept saying, I’m so happy to meet you, I’m so excited to be here. Can you believe it?

  “I can,” Helen said more than once. “I can believe it.”

  “Is that your car out there?” Clara pointed down below out the window.

  “It is,” Helen said.

  “That’s some car. You know how to drive it?”

  “Where we live, you can’t get far unless you drive.”

  “I can’t drive.”

  Cielle’s mother looked at Cielle and widened her eyes as she took clothes out of Helen’s suitcase and neatly folded them into dresser drawers.

  “My daddy thinks ladies don’t drive,” Clara said, and fingered her pearls, one by one, then put her necklace in her mouth and rolled it between her lips.

  “My father gave me that car,” Helen said, and walked to the window next to Clara and leaned over to look down.

  “It’s a great car,” Cielle said, and admired its shiny sloping hood and bright hubcaps. “I can drive too.”

  “I took the train here, by myself. My parents had an event to attend,” Clara said.

  “So ladies can take trains by themselves but they can’t drive?” Helen asked.

  “I guess so,” Clara said. She reached for her purse, opened the window, and lit a cigarette.

  “And they smoke?” Cielle asked.

  “When they’re out of their father’s watchful eye, they do. Will you teach me how to drive?” Clara asked.

  “Sure,” Helen said.

  Cielle unpacked one of Helen’s paintings and hung it on a hook over her bed.

  “Your farm?” Clara asked.

  “Something like it,” Helen said.

  “That looks like our new barn,” Cielle said.

  Cielle’s mother stepped closer to look at the painting. She flung one of Helen’s dresses over her shoulder and crossed her arms. “It does look like our new barn.”

  “I painted that a year ago,” Helen said.

  “Maybe you had a vision of what was to come,” her mother said.

  The painting, of the red barn set in green grass with a blue sky, was how Cielle wanted to remember their barn over time, as if that had always been their barn: a dreamy dot of red in a sea of rich vegetation. Vibrant. Intact. A beating heart. A swell of love in the middle of nowhere. An arrow that pointed to a red dot that marked the spot of home. You are here. This is where you belong.

  Helen stood on the train platform in her white eyelet dress, her blond hair falling over her shoulders. Helen wore the same dress she wore the day Cielle walked into the barn and found their father. The same dress that moved toward Cielle six weeks ago now stood still as Cielle moved away on the train. Helen was such a pretty girl. Cielle wondered if she’d always recognize her sister if she saw her on a platform, or in a crowded station. She wondered when she’d see Helen next and if she’d be different. If she’d smoke cigarettes, wear pearls, swim at night in Lake Mendota, be dating Matthew, know more about the physics of time and space, loneliness and love. The train moved slowly out of the station and rumbled over the tracks.

  Helen waved. Cielle opened the window, stuck her head out, and waved back. Helen blew kisses and Cielle blew them back. Her eyes filled with tears and everything blurred. The train gained speed and Cielle’s hair whipped in her face. Helen became smaller and smaller. Her white dress a ghost, a distant cloud, a snowflake, and then the train curved around a bend and she was gone.

  Cielle and her mother rode the train from Madison back to Richland Center. Some train cars had old wicker seats, open windows for air, and were filled with soldiers on the move and sometimes drunk. She couldn’t blame them. Every young man seemed to have joined the forces.

  In Boaz, their grandmother would be gone, back to her own life. Bodie was gone to places she couldn’t imagine. He would be one of the soldiers in uniform, one of so many men putting their lives on the line for strangers, leaving their families at the risk of never coming home again.

  Cielle already missed what was gone of her childhood, and what was leaving little by little every day. She already missed her years at home with the soft living and loving words. She missed all that was and would be left unsaid. When things changed, they were never the same again. And they kept changing. They never stopped changing.

  The swamp maples were beginning to turn—their red leaves flashed here and there as the world sped by. She kept the window open, and the late afternoon air smelled thinner, cooler, and papery. The smells marked the end of summer and the coming of autumn. Life into death into life, again and again and again.

  She envisioned mastodons—brown woolly beasts moving slowly through the hills and fields, or lying about just as common as the cows and horses of the present day. She thought about how, back then or even now, no one imagined a whole species could become extinct. Maybe no one understood disappearance, but only knew its acute ache—the ache of missing, memory, and mystery that maybe dulls over time or maybe doesn’t.

  The train hurled toward the bruise of night. Wheels spun. It was the sound of, Shush shush shhhhhhhhh, be quiet, don’t say a word. It was the sound of, Hush. Hush, little darling, don’t you cry. It was the sound of something sliding out of reach, the sound of their lives passing by. She felt a longing deep inside. A need to search for something, someplace, someone. There were so many things yet to know, and so much she would never know. Could never know. People survive all sorts of things, Cielle thought, and love is one of them. There is no simple straight answer in life. There is no single cause for anything. People survive all sorts of things, she thought, and loss is one of them.

  As fields and farmland passed outside, a definitive line separated sky from land, separated blue from green, yellow, tan, and brown. It was the horizon line, and it seemed within reach, that narrow space where day begins and ends, that separation between heaven and earth.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The first chapter of this novel originally appeared in a slightly different form as a short story in The Iowa Review, and was awarded the 2005 Iowa Review Prize; I’m grateful to Chris Offutt for choosing my story that year.

  With thanks to the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Tickner Writing Fellowship for time and support; to Crystal Foley at the Richland Center Historical Room at the Brewer Public Library, and to Don Goplin and Mike Jacobson for help with research on the region and time period; to Heather Dermott for reading early pages; to Alyssum Wier for always listening; to Jenniffer Gray and Alvaro Salcedo for being constant and true; to my dear friends who know who they are; and to my writing communities near and far, for support and inspiration.

  To PJ Mark, for believing in this novel first.

  To Starling Lawrence, for saying yes, and for his smart and generous editing and guidance.

  With appreciation for the team at W. W. Norton, for their care and hard work in making beautiful books.

  Thank you to my family, particularly my mother, for traveling back to Boaz with me; to my father, for being my trusted reader, and a champion of my writing; to my sister; to the Jacobsons, Bredahls, and Calverts; and to my grandmother, who was known as Jake, who was loved by all, who made the best pies, and from whom we all learned kindness, strength, and resilience.

  Also by Meghan Kenny

  LOVE IS NO SMALL THING: STORIES

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Meghan Kenny

  A version of the first ch
apter of this book was published in The Iowa Review 35, no. 3 (Winter 2005/2006) as “The Driest Season.”

  “How Long Did You Sleep?” by Olav H. Hauge, translated by Robert Hedin, is reprinted from The Dream We Carry: Selected and Last Poems of Olav H. Hauge (Copper Canyon Press, 2008). Reprinted by permission of Robert Hedin.

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

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  JACKET DESIGN BY GABRIELLE BORDWIN JACKET PHOTOGRAPHS: (FRONT) © SUSAN FOX / ARCANGEL; (BACK) © SYBILLE STERK / ARCANGEL

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Kenny, Meghan, 1974– author.

  Title: Driest season : a novel / Meghan Kenny.

  Description: First edition. | New York, NY : W. W. Norton & Company, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017033689 | ISBN 9780393634594 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Life change events—Fiction. | Family secrets—Fiction. | Teenage girls—Fiction. | Domestic fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3611.E6687 D75 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017033689

  ISBN 978-0-393-63460-0 (e-book)

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