Melanie Thon: Meteors in August

Mother squeezed my hand too tightly. I felt an unbearable weight that filled my shoes like stones until I could barely walk. When I was old enough to explain it, I realized this weight was my mother’s doubt: she did not believe God had the power to save my father.

I wanted to skip ahead, to feel Daddy’s huge, callused hand around my own. But I kept remembering him at the table with those men. I saw the blood on his pants. I thought about the dogs in the woods.

Soon Nina and my father were a block ahead of us. Mama clung to me as if she thought I might charge in front of a car to tease her. She didn’t know that I was just as scared as she was.

When I was as old as Nina was that day, I found myself trying to understand why she had to leave us. I kept thinking of the look on Daddy’s face when he said he would have killed the big Indian with his own hands. That was before he even knew what was going to become of Nina. But no matter how far back I went, I could never quite see how it all started, and I still haven’t figured out why Nina, who loved Daddy and always forgave him, was the one who had to go, while I was the one who stayed.

Two months later Mama caught Nina in the shed with Rafe Carson, the son of one of the men in Father’s gang. I’d been spying on the two of them for a good half hour, peering through a knothole in the side of the shed. Rafe’s hand was stuck down Nina’s bra, so Mama had time to give him one good swat on the head before he pulled himself free. He made a run for it and hit a stack of wood in the dark. Sprawled on the ground, he was an easy shot. But Mother had already forgotten him. She backed Nina into a corner, pinned her to the wall with one hand and slapped her with the other, four times, hard across the face, slaps that stung just to hear them. Mother who never struck, who only threatened us with Father’s fury, our mother waled on Nina, her blows all the more cruel because they were so unexpected, and so rare.

Mama got her voice back in time to say, “Aren’t things bad enough? Your daddy ever catches you like that, he’ll be a murderer for sure.”

Rafe Carson was on his feet again. He didn’t need to hear anything more.

Nina crumpled in the corner, sobbing, and Mama just left her that way. I sneaked into the shed and tried to comfort my sister, but she couldn’t stop crying. Her whole body heaved. I curled up, close as I could. I was small and warm. That’s all I had to offer. I stroked her blond hair with my clumsy hands. It was snarled from rolling around with that boy, and my fingers snagged in the knots. I kissed her wet cheeks, licking at the salt because it tasted good. But everything I did only made her shake harder.

Finally she shivered and fell asleep, all of a sudden, as if she’d cried herself to death. I felt her shallow breath and knew she was still alive. Her blouse was unbuttoned and one breast had been pulled free of her bra. Her chest flushed, speckled with a heat rash. I touched her skin, lightly, with just the tips of my fingers. She didn’t wake.

DAYS PASSED slowly in Willis, Montana, when I was a child. We had one movie theater and a musty library. The dust on the shelves revealed how seldom books were borrowed. Sunday service at the Lutheran church was the social event of the week. When the reverend had finally worn himself down and let us go, we gathered outside to catch up on the news. Women admired one another’s hats in false, girlish voices, then drew into tight clusters to whisper about daughters who stole their sleeping pills or husbands who stayed out all night and never explained. They touched their friends’ arms or their own mouths as they talked. The men stood in larger groups and maintained a dignified distance from one another as they debated the merits of clear-cutting or the best bait for rainbow trout. Now and then they eyed their wives impatiently, wondering why women always had so much to say.

Willis sprang up in the shadow of the Rockies. A glacier cut this valley, moving mountains by inches through the years, leaving everything in its path forever changed. But even the greatest force cannot escape time: the frozen blue sea turned to muddy water and seeped slowly into the earth.

The first white men slashed through the underbrush with the glint of silver in their eyes. They crouched in the forest, squatting like old men beneath the bristling pines. By instinct, they climbed toward the timberline, where the dwarf trees clung to brittle rock, wrapping their roots around the stony soil, growing twisted and gray, no taller than children.

When the men stood at last on bare rock and saw below them green slopes and glacial pools, glistening jade and turquoise under a blazing sun, they must have thought they were little gods. Not one of them could imagine the disappointments of the future: the shallow veins of silver, the barren mines closing, all the big-shouldered men condemned to labor among the trees, giving up their dreams of sudden wealth to lumber in the hills and live as mortals.

The town of Willis never boomed, but Main Street got busy enough to hang a traffic light in November of 1966. Our Main Street was actually a highway: anyone going to or from Canada had to pass through Willis; now they had to stop. The light was set to change so fast that almost no one could sneak through town without slamming on his brakes and taking a good look at the Last Chance Bar and the Lutheran church. A person on his way to the border wouldn’t realize, of course, that two years before we had a light this very corner had been the scene of one of the town’s most bitter disputes.

I was almost nine the summer Elliot Foot cleared out the shelves of Pike’s Grocery and replaced them with barstools. The Saturday afternoon he raised his sign, the men, women and children of Willis were split into two groups: on one side of the street, a rowdy band cheered on Elliot Foot and his two brothers; on the other side, an inspired mob shouted that a bar facing a church was an affront to God, and we were certain to bear His vengeance.

I preferred the excitement of the joyful crowd, but I watched the frenzy of the Lutherans and their leader, Freda Graves. I knew Mrs. Graves the way I knew most people in Willis. It wasn’t a town where a person could be a stranger, unless you were an Indian and folks made a deliberate effort not to learn your name or mind what you were doing.

Now I think that was the day Freda Graves got a hold on me. At the time, she seemed like a crazy woman. If not for her desperation, she would have looked just plain foolish. But later, when everything she said came true, I started thinking about her more and more, remembering how she saw the future. And I came to believe she was the one person in Willis who might help me understand what had happened to Nina, and to me.

Reverend Piggott was nowhere in sight. He couldn’t afford to get folks riled. The same ones who drank themselves silly on Saturday night might drop an extra dollar in the collection plate on Sunday morning. So he left Freda Graves to do his dirty work. She was the Lutheran church’s most active member. She pounded the organ with a passion that shook the rafters; she sang with the tremor of the saved. I had seen her at least once a month my whole life, but I had never seen her like this. She feared Elliot Foot would steal her thunder by securing his sign before dawn, so she’d slept all night on the steps of the church. beneath the great white arch of the door. Her hair was matted flat to one side of her head and stuck out in a sharp peak on the other. She rose to her full six feet, her chest swelling, her wide nostrils flaring.

Elliot Foot had no intention of raising his sign in the weak light before sunrise. He wanted an audience. He longed for the fierce glare of noon. Freda Graves was doing a fine job of whipping up more business.