The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [58]
“I thought it was a snake,” he said, gesturing to the stick, shaking his head once more to try to clear away the past. “A rattlesnake. I was dreaming, I guess. I thought you needed help.”
She looked puzzled, and he shook his head to clear away the dream. He felt terribly foolish, suddenly. The stick was a stick, nothing more. The day seemed absurdly normal. Birds called out, and the leaves began to move again in the trees.
“Why were you dreaming of snakes?” she asked.
“I used to catch them,” he said. “For money.”
“For money?” she repeated, puzzled. “Money for what?”
The distance was back between them, a chasm of the past that he could not cross. Money for food, and for those trips into town. She came from a different world; she would never understand this.
“They helped to pay my way through school, those snakes,” he said.
She nodded and seemed about to ask more, but she did not.
“Let’s go,” she said, rubbing her shoulder. “Let’s just get Paul and go home.”
They walked back across the field and packed up their things. Norah carried Paul; he, the picnic basket.
As they walked, he remembered his father standing in the doctor’s office, green bills falling like leaves on the countertop. With each one, David remembered the snakes, the whipping of their rattles and their mouths opening in a futile V, the coolness of their skin beneath his fingers, and their weight. Snake money. He was a boy, eight or nine, and it was one thing he could do.
That and protect June. Watch your sister, his mother would caution, looking up from the stove. Feed the chickens and clean the coop and weed the garden. And watch June.
David did, though not well. He kept June in sight but did not stop her from digging in the dirt and rubbing it through her hair. He didn’t comfort her when she tripped over a rock and fell down, scraping her elbow. His love for her was so deeply woven with resentment that he could not untangle the two. She was sick all the time, from her weak heart and from the colds she got in every season, which made her wheeze and gasp for breath. Yet when he came up the path from school with his books slung over his back, it was June who was always waiting, June who looked into his face and understood what his day had been like, who wanted to know all about it. Her fingers were small and she liked to pat him, the breeze shifting her long lank hair.
And then one weekend he came home from school to find the cabin empty, still, a washrag hanging over the side of the tub and a chill in the air. He sat on the porch, hungry and cold, waiting. Very much later, near dusk, he glimpsed his mother walking down the hill with her arms folded. She did not speak until she reached the steps, and then she looked up at him and said, David, your sister died. June died. His mother’s hair was pulled back tautly and a vein was pulsing in her temple and her eyes were red-rimmed from crying. She wore a thin gray sweater, pulled close, and he said, David, she’s gone. And when he stood and hugged her she broke down, weeping, and he said, When, and she said, Three days ago, on Tuesday, it was early in the morning and I went outside to get some water, and when I came back the house was quiet and I knew right away. She was gone. Stopped breathing. He held his mother, and he could not think of anything more to say. The pain he felt was deep inside him, and above that was a numbness and he could not cry. He put a blanket around his mother’s shoulders. He made her a cup of tea and went out to the hens and found the eggs she had not collected, and he gathered them. He fed the chickens and milked the cow. He did these ordinary things, but when he went inside the house was still dim, the air still silent, and June was still gone.
Davey, his mother said, a long time later, from the shadows where she sat, You go off to school. Learn something that could help in the world. He felt a resentment at that; he wanted his life to be his own, unencumbered by