Haven Kimmel - Something Rising

“What is it, Cassie, do you know?”

—been turned to liquid. There weren’t bones or organs to offer any resistance. The Pig Dogs had had a time with this one. She got the shovel under his back and tried to lift it; he was very heavy, in addition to being liquid, and he rolled off the end of the shovel and landed facedown.

“I’m going in, I’m not watching this. Take it across the road and over the fence. Drop it over the fence , Cassie, so those dogs can’t get to it and bring it right back. Do you hear me?”

Cassie got the shovel under his belly and tried to lift him. He rolled off and landed on his back, and that was about all it took for Cassie to see what she was up against. Her shoulders strained and her back began to sweat, It wasn’t his weight so much as the fact of him down at the end of the long shovel, and her up at the other end. She gripped the shovel in the middle of the handle, stuck it under the groundhog’s back, he was maybe easier to lift this way, but he rolled off and landed on his belly. Simply by turning him over repeatedly, she’d managed to get him a few feet across the yard, so she did that some more: turned him again and again, rolling him like a sausage in a pan. Belly up, belly down. They made it across the road and to the ditch, and putting him in the ditch was no good, Belle would know or the dogs would know. The sun was a violence against Cassie’s back, sweat ran toward her eyes. She took off her T-shirt, wiped her face with it, then covered her hands and grabbed him by his paws, his front two in her left hand, his back two in her right. She turned herself sideways, spun around twice, then let him fly, across the ditch and over the fence. At the peak of his flight his back arched like a high jumper’s, his chin tilted regally, his arms and legs were loose in surrender. Cassie was, at ten, a child who would have to learn to look away.

Thursday evening, after dinner and a visit with Edwin Meyer and Poppy, a game of Chinese checkers and a bowl of green sherbet, Cassie went out on the screened porch and waited, and Friday she got up very early and went outside and waited.

Saturday morning she woke up and listened; if he was still gone, this would be the longest in a while and would signal nothing good, but then she heard them, the voices that had awakened her. Jimmy and Laura didn’t fight about Everything, as some parents did. The tear and scramble of their lives centered around only two subjects, Money and the Prior Claim. The two could be mixed and matched and combined in novel ways. Cassie had hovered for years at the edge of the conversation and could reduce its complex elements to two sentences:

JIMMY: She has a prior claim.

LAURA: Prior to your children?

Cassie had written these sentences in her notebook: for her they were no less than Virgil in Translation. She and Belle both wanted to get to the bottom of something, and even if they ultimately knew what it was—lost cultures, Barbara Thompson in a trailer park in Hopwood—they would keep at it. Young scholars. Their parents were having the conversation in the bedroom next door, which was the marital bedroom and contained many mysteries. Laura complained that she hated every stick of furniture in there, the bed they slept in, the dressers and mirrored vanity that matched it, all won by Jimmy in a card game with the Minor Criminals of the Midwest, who were not famous for their taste. The queen-size headboard was tall, flat, and covered with quilted, yellowed vinyl, attached to the frame with brass buttons, brass mostly missing. The dresser and vanity were made of blond wood, perhaps for a blonde woman, which was the opposite of Laura but similar to Barbara Thompson, whose name so far had not been mentioned.

The voices weren’t much more than a murmur. Cassie had to get out of bed and creep like a cat across her floor in order to hear what she hoped were the sounds of Jimmy taking his change, his keys, and his breath mints out of his pocket and placing them carefully on his dresser, because this meant he was staying for some hours. Last summer he would sometimes drop in late at night or early in the morning, expecting the girls to be asleep, and deposit with Laura a handful of disputed Money and leave again, that went on for weeks. Cassie heard the loose change land on the dresser top, Jimmy say he was tired, Laura make a sound that was perhaps a word or a cry, and then Cassie knew it was okay to get back in bed awhile. Wherever it was he went—and she didn’t believe she’d ever know—her father got very little sleep, he loved to come home and slip into bed in the morning light. She slipped into bed and lay on her back; the sun was coming up on the other side of the house but would reach her soon enough. Her heart pounded, she could see the plaster on the ceiling very clearly, the crack that zigzagged like a fault line from one side of the room to the other. She tried to close her eyes, but they popped right back open.

Last summer Belle had crept into Cassie’s room late one night and gotten in bed with her, then wrapped her arms around Cassie from behind the way she had when they were small and whispered in Cassie’s ear Are you very very sad? In all the great wide world Cassie couldn’t imagine another soul who would ask a question like that one and not expect to get beaten up good. Cassie hadn’t answered, had just lay there feeling Belle’s breath on the back of her neck and trying to think of a true answer. Every day was a vaccination. She missed her grandmother, who had been old and soft, who said few words but who gave to them: she and Poppy had taken them in without a word so long ago, when they had nowhere to live. They’d opened up all the old bedrooms, Buena Vista had gathered up her sewing things and moved them to the attic, and Cassie remembered those years with Buena Vista like a long party where the party is going on inside and no one talks about it. Cassie could still imagine her grandmother so clearly, her white hair curled tight against her head in a permanent wave, the skin on her face that had fallen and kept falling, her watery blue eyes. Buena Vista had been heavy, especially in her legs, and she walked with a kind of back-and-forth Frankenstein gait, and unable to control the distribution of her weight, she had walked hard and made everything in the house shake, especially her animal figurines. She had been just an old woman in a faded housedress, sometimes she even wore her slippers to the grocery store, but something about her had been their hearts’ salvation.

Now, lying in bed, her father asleep in the next room, Cassie felt herself swaying back into sleep. Can you smell the water? Maybe someday she would tell Belle that she hadn’t been, she wasn’t sad, she was … she almost knew, and then began to dream, there was a wide field, pink and spongy, or maybe it was a desert, there was no sign of anything anywhere, only the vast pinkness all around her, and she guessed she had to cross it, so she started walking.

Laura smoked. Belle sat at the kitchen table doing homework and tearing at her cuticles, her fingernails were already so short they sometimes bled. Poppy came in through the mudroom, “Laurie, have you seen my level?,” and Laura said no, she hadn’t, and he left again. A few minutes later he popped back in with Roger, who made a mad dash around the kitchen table and back out the door. “Laurie, have you seen my old canvas camp stool?” No, she hadn’t. He left. Cassie wandered from the kitchen to the screened porch, drinking a soda that made her stomach burn, as she hadn’t eaten anything all day and here it was almost two in the afternoon. She sat in the rocker with splinters. Finally Belle stuck her head out the door and said, He’s up.

Cassie went into the kitchen and casually sat down at the table, picked up Belle’s history book, and opened it to the page on Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. Upstairs the shower was running, then it turned off. Jimmy hummed as he shaved. When he came downstairs he smelled sweet, had a swing in his step. Cassie wrote on her palm with her fingernail the things she wanted to talk to him about: a door for the shack, help fixing her bicycle chain, would he toss the football with her, would he figure out how to get a better fence around the garden—the deer were tearing it up. Poppy needed new propane tanks on the Airstream, and there was something else. She tapped her fingernail on the table.