Samantha Hunt - Mr. Splitfoot

Outside the leaves on the trees are red and orange and gold. This is Ruth’s wedding day. They go to Hook’s to celebrate. Nat sits next to the bride. He toasts the newlyweds with a cup of coffee. “Your name is Carl?”

“Shhh.” Mr. Bell finds the sugar shaker empty and positions it at the edge of the table for a refill.

“What?” Nat looks behind him in the booth. “What’s wrong with Carl?”

“Carl Bell sounds like fast food. Plus, I’m trying to forget where I come from.”

“Where’s that?”

He scratches his chin. “Hmm. I already forgot.” Mr. Bell polishes off his coffee and smacks his lips. The three smile.

“Thank you,” Ruth says again.

“It was no trouble.”

Their place mats have a map of New York State printed in pale red ink. Niagara, Finger Lakes, Lady Liberty, the High Peaks, the racetrack at Saratoga, the Erie Canal.

“Never knew we had a state insect.” The waitress appears. “Pancakes?” Mr. Bell asks them. “Belgian waffles?”

Ruth nods.

“Two orders of waffles, please. Whipped cream.”

“I’ll have an egg sandwich with cheese,” Nat says.

The waitress takes note, sees the empty sugar shaker, and, leaving her pencil behind, disappears to refill the shaker.

Mr. Bell smiles again at Ruth. He uses the waitress’s pencil to doodle on his place mat. Ruth half imagines he’ll write R.S. + C.B. in a heart, the way he keeps smiling at her. Outside someone has potted decorative kale heads in Italianate concrete planters. Cars come and go in the parking lot.

“What’s that about?” Nat asks.

On the map of New York State, Mr. Bell has reproduced the same pattern they found in his sketchbook, connected points.

“Old habit. Something I like to draw.”

“But what is it?”

Mr. Bell lifts his brows twice. “Well.” He spins the map right side up to Nat and Ruth. He circles each point as he names them. “Scriba. Cambria. South Byron. Schenectady. Seneca Falls, go, Suffragettes. Bethlehem. Burlington. Mount Morris. Yorktown. Peekskill. And closer to home, Tomhannock and Lasher Creek. Meteorite landings in our fair state.”

Ruth is slightly disappointed.

“What about the lines between?”

“Ley lines,” Mr. Bell says. “That’s me trying to make some sense.”

“Of what?”

“Patterns, predictions.”

“Predicting what?”

“Where my mom went.”

They look at the map. “Where’d your mom go?”

“I don’t know. I lost her.”

“Why would your mom follow meteorites?”

“They used to be of interest to her.”

Mr. Bell studies the lines, his face pinched with figuring. “But I checked all those places already and didn’t find her.” He exhales, shaking his head. “So what I once read as the handiwork of God, now looks like a random mess.”

“I think it looks like Ruth’s scar,” Nat says.

Mr. Bell studies Ruth’s face. “My, yes.” He nods, smiles again. “Yes. I guess I can see that. Hmm. That’s odd.”

“Maybe Ruth is God.”

Mr. Bell winks. “Wouldn’t surprise me one bit.”

The waitress appears. She deposits their food, dropping a plate of hot waffles on top of the map and meteorites, and when her hands are once again empty, she notices that Mr. Bell has her pencil. She scowls, underpaid, full of furor. She reappropriates her forgotten item with a humph.

A week after the wedding, Nat and Ruth find an apartment in Troy above a veterinary hospital. They pay cash for six months’ rent. The first night there, they sleep half awake under coats. They have no sheets yet, just the mattress the last tenant left behind. Matthew 6:26: The birds of the air neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, yet Heavenly Father feeds them.

Ruth curls her head into the crook of Nat’s arm as one who’s bloodthirsty, a truth of twisted love. Fangs, claws, a matted tail. “Son,” she says into his elbow, pulling a hot wire through their hearts, though there’s been no adoption. The Father let Nat go for five hundred dollars cash, saying he’d deal with the State. The Father is disgusted. He wouldn’t even look at them. He wouldn’t give them a lift to town. He was furious because he’d had to return the cash Zeke had given him for Ruth.

“What about ‘Be fruitful and multiply’?” Ruth asked before she left.

“What about ‘Honor your Father’? I gave my consent so you could marry an upstanding member of our community, and you sneak off and marry someone else?”

Ruth kept Mr. Bell’s secret identity from the Father and the other kids. She didn’t want her problems to become Mr. Bell’s.

“I can find out who he is, Ruth. It would take me two seconds.”

“I know.” But she hoped he didn’t really care where she’d gone as long as she was gone.

Mr. Bell honked the horn twice and helped load what they had into the trunk of his car. After seventeen years, what Nat and Ruth had turned out to be very little outside of three plastic bags full of cash. All the children except Ceph came out to tell them goodbye. Raffaella put her flipper on the hood of Mr. Bell’s car. “Is he your husband?” she asked Ruth.

“Him?” Ruth acted shocked. “That would be weird.” Which wasn’t a lie.

Ruth slipped each child eighty dollars like a visiting grandma paying them off, expunging her guilt only slightly, the oldest girl walking away from the littler ones, as if being born a girl makes her responsible for everyone alive.

Nat and Ruth select new blankets and towels from the discount store. They shop as if they are the married couple. They even fill out a pharmacy-bought Last Will and Testament, leaving each other everything they own including a couple of shirts and a brand-new cheese grater. They buy groceries. It takes two hours to fill their cart the first time because so few things in the grocery store look like food. Ruth picks up a package of Twizzlers. “What is it?” she asks Nat. He shakes his head.

They tell people, “She is my sister, he is my brother,” because if they told people they were sisters, Nat would probably get beaten up. Nights when they are not working, they go downtown to be among other people. Ruth wears her new jeans. They find a restaurant or a park bench. Ruth sits on Nat’s lap, leaning into his chest, his hand between her thighs as a word wedged into the white space. Hard to read and not at all like a brother.

The other kids become phantoms. Love of Christ! is a bad dream Ruth had. Though at quiet times she misses things she’d never thought she’d miss: dipping candles, laundry, singing together, having something to do each day, Ceph, even Ceph.

Mr. Bell picks them up for work. He smiles at Ruth a bit longer, sometimes dazed as if watching fairies dance on a lily leaf. Ruth, his wife, is something he can’t believe.

“He won’t stop smiling at me,” she tells Nat.

“Yeah. What a jerk.” But he doesn’t mean it. They study Mr. Bell’s boots, his chin, his hair, as if these totems might explain where he came from, how he found them, and who he is.

The sun sets early now. Ruth does not enroll in public school as she was instructed to do. Instead she buys the newspaper every morning. She bakes a lot. Nat sometimes says, “I wish I were a poet,” but a week passes and the urge does too. Ruth builds new bird feeders.

Life in the apartment is quiet after the home. They buy a used couch, a Chesterfield according to the man at the Salvation Army. At night, after the doctors and techs have gone home, the dogs downstairs howl at being left alone.

In the day Nat and Ruth find people on their doorstep, most often a mother without her kids. The mothers sit on the curb, slumped over a pile of matted fur: an overweight German shepherd, a cat who’s lost its teeth, a mangy Newfoundland with flaking bald spots, a poodle with pus for eyes. The animals move in slow motion, looking off at something shiny beyond their owners’ shoulders, unaware. The mothers say goodbye. The mothers sob, stroking their pitiful creatures. “I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so sorry,” or “Mamma loves you. You know that, right?”