David Vann: Legend of a Suicide

“He’s only twelve, Mom,” Rhoda was saying.

“He’s a good kid.” Her mother winked at me, then ground out her cigarette in an ashtray. “Hey, Billy!” she yelled down the hallway. “What’s so damn interesting about those guns? Come and meet the kid.”

She poured herself another.

“Dad loves you,” Rhoda said.

“Open your eyes, Rhoda.” Her mother stared at her. “Ha,” she said and laughed, then began coughing again. “You always have been much too pretty, Rhoda. It’s not good to show up your mother.” She looked at me and winked. “Don’t think I don’t know what I’m about.”

Rhoda’s father came in walking slowly, looking short and wide-chested beside my father. “I think you’ve probably had enough,” he said to his wife.

She winked at me again and downed her glass.

Rhoda’s father didn’t look so much angry as embarrassed and unsure. He rubbed his hand lightly over his balding head.

“What did you think of Dad’s collection?” Rhoda asked my father. She was standing closer to me now, away from her mother. I could see the fine, soft hair along her neck.

“It’s really something. Not every day you see a collection like that.”

“Please, Sharlene. Not in front of his son,” Rhoda’s father said.

“It’s okay, Daddy,” Rhoda said, stepping toward him now.

“We’re not staying long anyway.”

“Are you talking to me about shame?” Rhoda’s mother asked with her back to all of us. “Is the man who won’t be seen with his own wife in public talking to me about shame?” Prune started growling. He knew something was up, and he was crazy with it. “The man who will slink around with twats half his age?”

Rhoda’s mother swiveled on her stool and pointed at her husband. “Get out of my way, Rhoda,” she said, because now Rhoda was between them.

Rhoda’s father put up his hands in apology, then walked back alone down the hallway.

“Coward!” she yelled.

Later that night, as I listened to Rhoda weeping and my father comforting her, I wondered whether tears came out of her blank eye. The wall separating our rooms was thin, and I could hear everything: their sharp breaths, her weeping again, and Rhoda telling my father she loved him. The strangeness of it is what I remember.

The next day, Rhoda asked me to join her at the piano. I told her I didn’t know how to play, and she said it didn’t matter. So I sat beside her.

“Close your eyes,” she said.

“Are yours closed?”

“Yes,” she said. “Though my right eye never closes all the way.”

“Can you see through it?”

“Yes. Always.”

I closed my eyes.

“Put your hands up to the keys,” she said. “Just listen carefully and let your fingers play.”

We sat for a few minutes in silence. The space between us thickened and rolled in and out.

Her first note echoed down low. She played more notes, and they took up places in the air.

“This is great,” I said.

“Listen,” she whispered.

I listened until her notes all around me could have been my own, and soon a few of them were. They didn’t sound half bad: a disjointed song that all fit together because her breath was so close to my own.

I don’t know how long our playing went on, but I do know that I wanted it never to end and yet it ended somehow and my father clapped from somewhere behind us, a sound disagreeably sharp and loud.

“What’s she like, this Rhoda?” my mother wanted to know. She was cutting the fat off chicken breasts.

“She’s nice,” I said.

“What else?”

I poked at the strings of lumpy yellow fat set to one side of the cutting board. “She’s funny,” I said.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. And I don’t think she’s afraid of anyone. Except her mother, of course.”

My mother laughed. Then she ruffled my hair.

“Oops,” she said. “Sorry about that.” And she grabbed a dish towel to wipe away the chicken fat. “Is she pretty?” My mother’s voice quieted on this.

“No, she’s deformed,” I said, and my mother laughed again.

That entire week, I looked forward to when I would play piano again with Rhoda, but the moment I arrived at my father’s place Friday night, I was hustled into his car and he and Rhoda and I were rushing to her parents’ house. Her mother had called.

“What does she mean?” Rhoda kept asking. She had her coat on and both hands clenched between her knees.

“It’s okay,” my father said over and over, after each thing she said. “I’m sure it’s going to be okay.”

But when we got to her parents’ house, neither Rhoda nor my father could open the door. They knocked and knocked and there was no answer, only the sound of Prune growling, but neither of them would just turn the handle and open it.

So I did, finally. I let it swing wide.

“Come on in,” Rhoda’s mother yelled. “Billy, why don’t you answer the door?”

“Daddy?” Rhoda asked.

Rhoda’s father came padding down the hallway in sheepskin slippers. “Is something wrong, Rhoda?”

Rhoda turned back to my father. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Take me home, okay?”

“Well that was dumb,” my father said as we got back into the car. Rhoda didn’t say anything. She just drew her coat around her and stared at the road. I fiddled with the ashtray on the arm-rest of my door. I pulled all the gum wrappers out, then stuffed them back in. I swung the metal cover open and shut a million times.

“Cut the crap, Roy,” my father finally said. He gunned the motor to let me know this threat was real.

When we turned onto the gravel driveway and saw blackberry bushes lining both sides, the red bridge ahead in the lights, he asked, “What exactly did she say?”

“I’m not making things up, Jim.”

“So what did she say?”

Rhoda twisted around and readjusted her seat belt. “She said, ‘I love you, Rhoda. Everything is perfect here. Why don’t you bring the Happy Campers over for a drink.’”

“There’s no call for that, Rhoda.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Jim,” she said very quietly.

My father looked in the rearview to see if I had heard that. I had no idea what to do, so I gave him the thumbs-up.

“She’s going to kill him,” Rhoda said matter-of-factly at breakfast. She looked calmly into my father’s annoyance, his anger and fear. “Are you ready for that, Jim?”

An hour later, I failed my after-breakfast oral-hygiene exam.

“Numbers six and eleven still need work,” said my father the dentist. “And your gums are bleeding again. You know what that means.”

“Where’s Rhoda?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. He looked over his shoulder as if he expected her to be right behind him. When he called her name, there was no answer. When he looked through each room, there was no one.

Rhoda in the walnut orchard that afternoon piecing together her thousand-piece puzzle, wearing one of her great-grandmother’s long, pale-blue dresses, a sun hat, and dainty lace-up boots, never looked back to where my father sat utterly lost on the porch steps. He didn’t understand her. He had no idea how to comfort her.

“Nothing has even gone wrong yet,” he said to me.

Rhoda had walked far into the orchard, almost to the creek, before setting up her card table and folding chair. She was facing the valley, her left side to us. Wild mustard and baby’s breath grew all around her. Spider threads floating in the air above her head caught the sun, then disappeared.

“She’s just going to stay out there,” my father said. “No water, no word to me, not even a glance. As if any of whatever it is is any of my fault.”

How still Rhoda was made her unreal. Only the occasional slight movement of her hand fitting a piece into place.