Winfield, West Virginia

JULY 27, 1959

Lark

He starts moving the colors as soon as I give him the crayons, edging a perfect curve on the newsprint. Over and over, fast, then slow, like there’s one arc he can trace. He leans forward, starts and doesn’t stop, both hands. He presses darker and darker, like he’s been waiting to cover the words and the white, like he knows all his drawings are one picture I keep interrupting. I bring him to the basement on hot days. No matter how hot it is outside, it’s cool here. I can feel him listening while I walk back up the basement stairs to shut the kitchen door. He knows I’ll come back with my pencils and sketchbook, and he sits so still that I can hear what he hears. The give of the stairs, like an easing. My footsteps across the broken basement floor to the storm-cellar stairs, five stone slabs that open out into the yard. Even with the lilac bushes on one side, heat and light pour through like syrup. I remember when the storm doors were wooden. Now they’re steel, so heavy I have to shut them one at a time, pull them down from inside like I’m shutting us into a cave. Termite hears the storm doors pound into place when I let them fall.

I give him his big crayons. At first I taught him colors. He knows one color from another, like he smells or hears some difference, even if he can’t see. I tried to teach him shapes. I held his hands and traced shapes on the newsprint, like we were in school, but he would go rigid and tense, sink into himself. He wanted to move his arms, make the one shape he draws deeper and deeper.

Now he knows I’ll let him. I start to draw and I don’t think about him. I don’t think about the boxes piled against the wall or what’s inside them, or myself or anyone. I look at Termite and I draw, shading closer and closer to what I really see. I draw the way he moves, sitting so straight, focused so sharp and true there’s nothing else. He reminds me there’s a clear space inside the chores and the weather, inside cooking and cleaning up and taking him downtown or to the river, inside the books in my room and Win-field and the alley, and typing words on machines at Miss Barker’s. It’s quiet in that space.

In the quiet, I can hear.

“Termite,” I tell him, “I know you want the radio. We’ll listen later.”

His arm moves, coloring.

I’ll take him to Charlie’s for lunch, even though it’s so hot we’ll be alone on the bumpy sidewalks and the street leading downtown.

“Termite,” I say. “It’s too hot to sit by the alley.”

I draw his arm as a blur, an opening. The rest is outside. The stones and grass. Kanawha Hill and Main Street, unrolling past Nonie and the Formica counter at the restaurant. The field by Polish Town, so lush it lulls whatever moves in the tall grass. I sink shadings and shadow into the thick paper in my notebook. Everything else stops.

We get to the restaurant when the lunch rush is well over and the counter is empty. I never bring Termite until later, when his chair is always free. Charlie has one stool at the counter that’s actually a child-sized barber’s chair, with a leatherette-upholstered back and arms and a metal footrest. He got it years ago for Termite, from a barbershop that closed down and gave away its equipment. It’s the same height and distance from the counter as all the other stools, bolted into the floor like the rest, with a foot pedal that doesn’t work anymore. That chair is the first seat people take if they’re alone and thin enough to fit into it. It’s cushioned and comfy, ladies like it, and I’ve seen kids fight over it. I bring the wagon in through the wide restaurant door and park it in the space between the counter and the wall, where it’s not in anyone’s way. Nonie wipes down tables, resupplies condiments. Then she’ll start on the supper special. Charlie’s already doing prep. I hear him in the back, chopping on the broad butcher block beside the sink. I hear Gladdy running on at him.

“There’s just no sense in it.” Her reedy voice carries over any other sound. “The city’s hiking taxes. You’ve got to lower expenses, not raise them. Why use country sausage when you could use hamburger?”

If Gladdy finds out what they’re making up in bulk, she always gets after them to use cheaper ingredients. She gets after Charlie for hiring hard-luck cases as dishwashers or extra waitresses, even if they’re excellent workers, like this place is in danger of falling off the social register. She would have been after him long ago to fire Nonie, except she knows she couldn’t get the same amount of work out of anyone else. Gladdy, if she’s not in Florida, is here every day for lunch, and she comes just in the middle of the rush, sashays in and sits at her own little table. She’s exercising her rights as owner and checking up on everyone when it’s busiest. Then she hangs around until customers clear out so she can harangue Charlie. Funny how she’s always by herself. Meaning it’s no wonder. Nonie refuses to wait on her. Gladdy orders the special, like she’s testing it. She won’t address the help, but half the time she’ll send a note back to Charlie—“needs salt” or “too rich.” She never orders dessert, due to her diabetes, but she’ll send a note about a dessert she observes—“whipped cream unnec. on berry pie.” Nonie keeps all of Gladys’ notes in a drawer; she calls them Charlie’s fan mail. In twenty years, Nonie says, not a compliment. The food is actually pretty good at Charlie’s. Not fancy, but good, and the portions are big. Charlie says he’s got just the kind of place he wants: no liquor license, no problems. Good food, reasonable costs, dependable clientele. The tables are full every meal, but it’s slow enough between rushes that they get the prep and cooking and cleanup done. He closes at nine without fail, wraps up the supper special in a neat package, and takes it home. Nonie refers to this as Gladdy’s dog bag. And well worth the trouble, Charlie will say, keeps Gladdy out of the restaurant but once a day. A wonder that woman can make her own breakfast, Nonie will say, and a miracle she does.

I put Termite in his barber-chair stool and sit beside him. I order the tuna-salad plate and the kids’ mac and cheese for Termite. He loves it and it’s easy for him, he likes to feed himself at Charlie’s. Nonie’s got the napkin holders lined up on the counter, and a box of napkins bound a hundred to a bunch, so I start filling the holders.

Gladdy’s holding forth. Now she’s standing in the kitchen doorway and glances out and sees us. Knows she’s got an audience. “The kids’ mac and cheese you make with American cheese and your homemade sauce is good enough for any grown-up. Inexpensive to make and perfectly good. Just put some parsley on top. That should be your special.” She picks up her pocketbook, like she’s got a schedule to keep, but there’s always one more thing. “What about this storm they say’s coming? Did you patch the roof where it was leaking, out there by the back door?”

“I did,” Charlie says. “No need to worry.” Out of sight, by the sink, he’s chop chop chopping.

“You’d best stay here the night if we get the storm they’re expecting,” Gladdy calls over to him. “Keep an eye out. Insurance is so slow to pay if there’s damage.”

There’s a clatter of pans from the back. Charlie sleeps here once or twice a week when Gladdy’s in town, storm or no storm. The pullout couch in the office makes into a single bed. Elise jokes that Nonie can balance Charlie and the restaurant accounts in the same two hours, in a room the size of a freight elevator.

Now Gladdy ventures out among us, having finished her confidential chat with Charlie, and Charlie is right behind her with a bowl of the pureed soup he makes for Termite. “We have storms in Florida certainly,” Gladdy says, “but not the winters, the ice.” The idea of the storm reminds her of her second home, and the sacrifice she makes to be here with us more than half the year. “I know my place is here, but the sun is there.”

“Sure is,” Elise says. “Come January, maybe we’ll all come down and visit.”

“It’s a tiny place, but the porch gets the sun.” Gladdy sighs and goes on. “I’ve got all I can do to save the airfare by November, but it’s worth it to stay through the worst months of ice. At least Charlie can run things here without worrying about me falling on these icy sidewalks.”

“You’re a trouper,” Elise remarks.

“Gladdy,” I ask her, “is Coral Gables near Miami?”

“Surely,” says Gladdy. “I fly into Miami and take a bus right from the airport. Some would take a taxi a distance of thirty miles, especially at my age, but it’s not a way I’d spend money.” She sniffs. “I don’t tarry in Miami. Miami has a bad class of people.”

I decide to ask. “Did you know my mother, Gladdy?” Nonie shoots me a glance before the words are out of my mouth.

Gladdy doesn’t hesitate. “Well, no, not really. Not to speak to.” She looks into space. “I mean, I knew of her. Everyone in Win-field knows of everyone else.”

I’m thinking about the boxes in Nonie’s basement, the moving company logo. No street address. Just Miami, Florida, like that’s all anyone in Florida would need to know to call up Bekins Van Lines. We have a moment of silence and Gladdy stands there, smoothing her dress, one of those jersey old-lady dresses with buttons down the front and a patent-leather belt. Today it’s navy with white polka dots. On her way in the door, she’ll have hung her broad-brim white hat on the coatrack. As a resident of the Deep South, she’s always thinking about her skin. Which is funny, Nonie says, because Gladdy was as wrinkled as an old prune before she ever started going to Florida. She’s a thin little thing, all bones and hardness. “Parsimonious” is the word to describe her. I don’t picture my mother, I can’t see her, but I feel her as a warmth, all curves and movement, just the opposite of Gladdy.

I stand beside Termite and help him hold his bowl of soup while Charlie grates cheese over top. I like the restaurant after the rush. Despite Gladdy, it’s cozy, like something has just happened and now it’s over and everyone’s relieved, and the air is full of warm smells and the dishwasher is making its steady whoosh in the back. It’s a watery undercurrent sound Termite likes. Usually there are two or three customers at the tables, but today it’s just Elise, taking her lunch late. She often does, and refers to her presence as a visit. She’ll have the chicken noodle soup Charlie is famous for, three packets of crackers, and then two cigarettes while she talks to Nonie. She takes her full manager’s hour and sits at a table in the front, where she can see across the street into the window of the Coffee-Stop and make sure the girl she left in charge stays at the cash register. I like how Elise’s lipstick leaves a little pink smudge on the tips of her Camels, even after she’s had the soup. Elise has her own lunch rush over at the Coffee-Stop— workmen buy doughnuts and the hot dogs she cooks in one of those electric contraptions that rolls the wieners around on a slotted tray until they look sunburned. Elise gets a charge out of Gladdy. I think she’s secretly pleased when she meets up with her at the restaurant, which is the only place anyone ever meets up with Gladdy. Gladdy walks the ten or so blocks back and forth from her house at the east end of Main Street for exercise. Other than that, she doesn’t even go to church. A person would feel sorry for Gladdy if she wasn’t so hard to feel sorry for.

Now she sails toward the door. She’s on her way home, holding her pocketbook up to her chest like a shield, but she isn’t quite finished. She stops just opposite Termite and me, and says, over the lunch counter between us, “I suppose you look related, but then again who could tell.”

“Tell what?” I ask her.

“What he’d look like, if whatever happened to him hadn’t happened.”

Termite’s eating his soup, vegetables and meat ground up so fine he can swallow it, using the fat round spoon Charlie saves for him. I’m putting napkins in the holders lined up in front of me, and I don’t even look at her. “Nothing happened to him,” I say. “He was born just as he is. And he can hear every word you say.”

“Of course he can.” The pocketbook snaps open. “But he can’t tell what I mean. That’s all right, though. None of the rest of you ever seem to know what I mean either.”

Charlie’s standing in the kitchen doorway. “Are you still here, Mother? Thought you were going home.”

He has a harsh tone in his voice, but Gladdy’s got to have her say. She nods her head, very deliberate, unfolds the hankie she’s taken out of the purse. “It just seems he’d be better off where people trained to do it could take care of him.”

“I take care of him.” I turn full toward her, between Termite and her, to keep her eyes off him.

“Well, you’re used to him. That’s training of a kind.” She blows her nose. “Commendable, I always say, I tell everyone. How generous my son is to work around your needs. No matter what it costs us, it’s commendable.”

“Actually” Elise says, “the more it costs, the more commendable it is, wouldn’t you say, Gladdy?”

Gladdy ignores her and looks at me. “I don’t know how you’ll manage when he’s a man as big as Charlie.”

Elise says, “When he’s as big as Charlie he’ll be running this joint and you won’t be allowed in it.”

“I wouldn’t know why not.” Gladdy shuts her purse, the hankie balled up in her hand. She touches the hankie to her brow as though she’s wounded. “I’ve never been unkind, though I get no thanks for it. Be that as it may, he’s in here most days, isn’t he? I don’t object.”

Elise raises her penciled brows. “Aren’t you objecting right now?”

“We all have to make a living, partly for his sake,” Gladdy says. “Most customers are used to him, I suppose.”

I suppose, I suppose, I suppose, Termite chimes in and keeps chiming, louder and louder as Gladdy moves toward the door. She nods to herself as though considering, doffs her hankie over her shoulder like a wave good-bye. Then she’s gone.

Charlie’s walking toward us, chuckling and wiping his hands off on his cook’s apron. “You’re a sly one, Champ. I definitely want you in my corner. I believe I’ll make you a vanilla milkshake with chocolate syrup, blended smooth just the way you like it.”

Termite is quiet, listening, his ear tilted up at Charlie. He gives his sideways look and a corner of his mouth turns up in that quizzical movement that might be a smile.

Nonie reaches out and tousles Termite’s hair. “A milkshake sounds fine,” she says, “but not until he’s had that mac and cheese.”

Later, when Nonie gets home, I could ask her: What about that ? How can you say he doesn’t know what goes on? And she’ll look at me and shake her head. Lark, she’ll say, what about the other ninety-nine times out of a hundred, when he sounds off strictly according to his own rhyme and reason?

She doesn’t understand. That’s the point: he’s got a rhyme and reason. We only see the surface, like when you look at a river and all you see is a reflection of the sky.

Elise has gone back to the Coffee-Stop and the dishwasher is still running. Charlie says the storm will hit late this afternoon. The river is already high, though Main Street seldom floods. Our part of town, the water gets high every big rain. Nonie calls them grass floods because the water just covers the grass a few inches. She never moves a thing and brags her basement is tight except for where the floor slants. She says that’s water come up from underground where the cement’s cracked, not leaking in the walls or new storm doors. Gladdy’s basement floods two or three feet, any big storm. Nonie says it could be fixed, but Gladdy is too tight to spend the money. High water is a feature of river towns. When we were kids we watched the grass floods from Nonie’s back stoop or Tuccis’ porch. An inch or two of standing water on the alley and the yards looked magical. We made little boats from silver foil and set them moving. Sometimes they floated all the way up the alley and disappeared. When the water had gone down we’d find them two or three streets over, smashed and still glittery.

Nonie clears our lunch plates and pours the last of Termite’s milkshake into a paper cup. Charlie has taken Termite to the rest-room. He says Termite is old enough to use the Men’s, and when he’s at Charlie’s that’s what he’ll do. I don’t think Termite cares, but he likes it when Charlie picks him up and carries him off with such matter-of-fact certainty. I see Termite in Charlie’s arms and think of Nick Tucci last night, reaching to take the tray from me with the evening and the alley soft behind him.

“Charlie and Nick Tucci remind me of each other sometimes,” I tell Nonie. “Both dark haired and brawny, with furry arms.”

Nonie laughs. “You make them sound like bears.”

“They could be brothers,” I say.

She shakes her head. “They’re totally different. One’s a hotheaded Italian, tough as nails and built like a fireplug, and the other is a six-foot, fifty-plus Irishman, afraid of his mother and balding. All they’ve got in common is that they grew up Catholic, they work dawn to dusk, longer in Charlie’s case, and they love you kids.”

“And they love you,” I say.

“I suppose,” she says, like it’s just dawned on her. Then she adds, “For all the good it does me.”

I don’t know what good it does, but they really do love her, more, I think, than men love their wives. “They love us because they love you so much,” I tell her. It’s true. Nick looks up to Nonie, like she’s an older sister he adores, and Charlie depends on her for half of everything, even putting up with Gladdy “It’s like Nick and Charlie are family who don’t talk to one another. You make them family.”

Nonie smiles. “Don’t let’s tell them.”

Termite’s exiting the Men’s, slung in Charlie’s arms, crooning sounds. Tell them tell them tell them. He hears words, even soft ones, through walls. I don’t know how. It isn’t possible.

Charlie puts Termite in the wagon. “The man’s in his cockpit,” Charlie says, like Termite’s piloting a Spitfire, wedged in tight in his cushioned seat, the sides of the wagon shoulder high. “You get on home now,” Charlie tells me.

“Charlie, it’s not going to rain for hours. We’ll pick some wild-flowers, go by the rail yard.”

Rail yard rail yard rail yard. I’m pulling the wagon out the door and Termite makes his sounds, like we’re bidding everyone a civilized good-bye.

“I’ll be home by dark,” Nonie says. “You be there too.”

“Absolutely,” I say. “You know how he feels about the river in the dark.”

I’m joking, because Termite loves the river anytime, but I don’t hear Nonie’s answer. Main Street receives us with its usual afternoon sounds. Cars going by, the traffic light’s whir as it changes. I wave at Elise in the window of the Coffee-Stop and give Termite the rest of his milkshake in its paper cup. “Better drink it before it melts,” I tell him, and fix the straw so he’s got the end in his mouth. People who don’t know Termite get nervous around him. They look away, but everyone who does know him wants to give him something. The fact is, once they know he’s not the emergency he might appear to be, they find an excuse to be near him. He doesn’t demand anything or communicate in the usual ways, but he somehow includes them in the way he pays attention, in his stillness. It’s how people feel when they look at water big enough to calm them, a pond or a lake or a river. Or the ocean, of course. The first time I put my ear to a conch shell, it was as though I could finally hear the sound Termite lives in.

He’s one reason I think about Florida. Taking Termite to the ocean has always seemed to me like taking one full space to another. The ocean is the biggest sound I could ever show him, bigger than rivers or trains. The other reason is the address on my mother’s boxes. Taking him to Florida would be like taking him to her. Even if she isn’t there, she must have been there once. Maybe with him, or even with me. And Florida is warm. In winter, Termite hardly gets out. He loves the feel and sound of snow, but I can’t leave him in it long. Nonie says we have to be careful of his lungs, of his breathing. She worries about pneumonia, even though Termite’s never had it. When he has a cold, you can hear him from across the room, a ragged purring sound. Nonie gets worried. She coats his chest and throat with Vicks VapoRub and fits a paper bag onto the spout of a boiling teakettle, and makes him sit with his head in the steam. She’ll stand right with him and rub his back in slow circles, tell him to breathe, breathe, as though that’s not exactly what he’s doing.

People think Termite is delicate, but none of us kids ever thought so. I do what he needs, but I don’t worry about him. People could tease or neglect him, but I don’t let them. I don’t worry about germs or accidents or about him getting worse. The worst happened before he was even born, and he’s still here. In my book, he’s strong, strong as me or Nonie.

Your book is a strange book, Nonie would say.

The rail yard is quiet today. Something is different. There are almost no cars on the sidings. Just one engine sitting on the main track, with four boxcars linked behind it. Engines don’t usually stop in Winfield at all. They only idle and back up and slam forward to link onto cars stored here for pickup and transfer. This engine is dead stopped, like it’s been sitting here awhile. Then I see the engineer, standing to the side, and another man in the cab.

“Termite,” I say softly. “There’s an engine on the track, and an engineer.”

The engineer doesn’t see us. He’s looking at a pocket watch on a chain, just like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, but his uniform is dark, with piping down his jacket and cuffs and across his hat. The dark bill of the hat shades his face. He purses his lips as though the watch face is a serious matter.

I walk right up to him, pulling the wagon. Termite knows tramps ride the trains, but not that men drive them. I want him to hear this engineer talk, hear him climb into the engine, drive it away. “Excuse me,” I say, “why is the yard so empty?”

He looks at me, distracted. “Got some weather coming through, apparently. Everything’s shuttled south, out of the way. Not much stored at this siding now anyway.”

“I’ve never seen it this empty,” I say.

“Oh, this siding is slated for termination,” he says. “Not worth it to the railroad to repair the lines, especially on that bridge.” He nods in the direction of the river and the stone railroad bridge we glimpse through the trees. “Inside of three months, there won’t be a thing through here anymore, weather or no weather.”

“My brother won’t like that,” I say, but Termite is silent. The engineer is facing away from us and doesn’t seem to notice Termite in the wagon. “When do you expect to pull out today?” It’s a sensible question, but the engineer doesn’t answer. I start to wonder if he’s a mirage, if it’s not true this train is stopped here, not true there won’t be any more trains. I make my voice a little more insistent. “Where do these cars go?” I ask. “I mean, where’s the end of the line?”

Line, line, line, Termite says, each tone slow and pure and clear. The engineer registers mild surprise and looks behind me at Termite. He nods acknowledgment, man to man, like there’s nothing unusual about a boy in a deep wagon, eyes hard to the side and head tilted, fingers up and moving. He touches the watch in his pocket and turns toward the boxcars beside us. “These cars? The Long Islands switch off at Beckley and run east. The Chessies, now, they move straight south to Augusta, Georgia, and on to Jacksonville.”

“You mean Florida?”

“Surely. They’re loaded out of Fort Lauderdale and Miami. Cheaper to run them straight down there empty. Three, four days, depending.” He looks over at Termite. “To answer your question, Miami’s end of the line for the Chessies.”

The other engineer calls down to him then, from the cab. Our business is concluded. I nod and step away as he touches his cap to me and climbs up into the cab. I feel foolish, asking about Florida; if you’re in Georgia going south you’d hardly change direction to go to any other Jacksonville. I’m walking away and Termite doesn’t protest. I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want him to feel this train pull away.

It’s not far to the tunnel under the railroad bridge. We cover the distance fast, out of the rail yard into the cover of the woods, onto the broad dirt path through the trees. The path was a road once. Before the rail line, Nonie says, when freight moved by boat on the river. They widened an Indian trail that was already here, and horses hauled flatbeds of supplies and trade to a town we wouldn’t recognize now. A settlement, not a town, small and rough and new. There was someone like me in that place, and someone like Termite. There have always been people like us. And the river has been here too, for hundreds of years, for a thousand or tens of thousands. If I stood just here, I wonder how far back I would have to look to see the lines of the river change. The island is different. It’s temporary, a little hill in the river. Some say it’s earth layered year after year over a shelf on the river bottom. Others say it started as coal slag, mine refuse dumped illegally off the bridge at night. Companies skirting regulations before the deep mines shut down. Either way, the island is beautiful now. It gets green, then barren and snowy, like any other landscape, and buds out in the spring, though it’s no bigger than a city block. Sumac seedlings rooted by the water turn bright red in the autumn. The top of the island is naked grass, a green cone the scrub trees and bigger brush haven’t colonized.

“Termite? We’ll just stay a little while, before the storm.”

He hums at me in response, a quiet, tonal code that stops and starts. We move out of the cool of the tunnel onto the dark earth by the river. I pull the wagon up next to me and sit. I’m just beside Termite, our shoulders even. I don’t have to tell him we’re facing the water. He tilts his head to the side, and his eyes, like he’s sensing the river twice.

The light is changing fast. The sky has gone mauve, and the colors on the island look bathed in yellow. The grass top of the little hill glows like a lit stage. That’s when I see the deer. They walk straight up into the light from the other side, three dark forms that move higher until they gain the summit and turn to scent the air. I see the shapes of their legs and long necks, their flanks. The top of the island is no bigger round than an exercise circle where you might walk horses, and the deer move across it, raising and lowering their heads as though to smell or hear what’s wrong. One, a young buck, has two-point antlers. They’re lit from behind, black as silhouettes. The sky has lowered and gone greener, and the air stirs as though charged. Suddenly one of the deer, the male, plunges down the side of the island as though pursued and leaps into the water. It swims powerfully toward us, legs pumping under the surface, head straining forward. Termite is silent, completely still, his eyes closed as though to listen harder. I don’t move or breathe. The deer is gaining, gaining, more than halfway across, when it suddenly turns and begins swimming just as forcefully back. I stand up then, cold to the tips of my fingers, as though an icy core of me has blinked awake. The deer moves away from us, pumping hard to gain the island again, as though sensing there’s no point coming here, to this shore, to the shelter of the tunnel or the high cover of the field. It won’t help.

“A deer was swimming the river,” I tell Termite. “It must have smelled us. They smell people from a long way off.” I don’t know how though. There’s not a breath of air to carry a scent.

Termite has clenched his fingers. I realize I’m holding the handle of the wagon just as tight. Now he opens his hands as though to stop my voice, blows with his breath, a long sigh, but there’s no plastic ribbon, no blue to move.

I see the swimming deer clamber out of the water and crash frantically up the slope. There are three shapes again, but they stop moving. They’re still, looking downriver at what’s coming. The sky pulses dark blue behind them, veiled with cloud like a swaddled fist. One long jag of lightning opens through it and disappears. I don’t hear the train at first, then it blares its whistle, halfway across the bridge. The engineer can’t have seen us; maybe he’s signaling someone, somewhere. Such a short train ends before it starts. It disappears before I’ve even turned around and hauled the wagon up the slope. Then I bend down to Termite and put my eyes near his, our foreheads touching, where I know he can see me. “Everything is fine, Termite. We’ll go now, before the storm.”

The storm. He says it once, and I pull him away through the tunnel, under the railroad bridge. The tunnel is dark as dusk inside, and humming. I didn’t use to hear it but I’ve learned to. It’s more a vibration than a sound, like a remnant the trains leave in the stones. The tunnel used to seem so vast to me, like a cave all us kids could live in, big because of the weight and fit of the stones, and the volume of space it seemed to hold above our heads. Now I see how fast a woman pulling a wagon moves through it toward home, into the vacant lot between the tracks and Polish Town.

The lot is choked with weeds and flowers in summer, flowing waist high to the cracked pavement of Lumber Street and the leaning second-story porches of Polish Town. Nonie says Polish Town field was full of victory gardens during the war, neat and cultivated and fertilized, but the whole town was different then. The town has gone down, emptied out, but the soil of the field is still black and rich and dense. The weeds and wildflowers mix with lavender and dill and come back every year, tangled and fragrant. The field gets so high that the city mows the lot every August, to keep things from happening in the tall grass. Boys fight or drink here at night, fireflies blinking all around them in the dark, and lovers lie down where they can’t be seen. Mothers in Polish Town won’t let their girls near the field, but every summer there are some girls who don’t listen. Boys from all over Winfield come here to find them. The churchgoing Polish girls sit on their porches. Sometimes a boy from Dago Hill or even Country Club Road will court them and speak with their mothers and take them out of Polish Town. They’re mostly blond girls and their mothers are heavy, and they look at the field together and wait. The Queen Anne’s lace is shoulder high, white among purple joe-pye weed and bright pink echinacea.

I want to pick flowers for Termite, a huge bunch to pile in the wagon, but I move fast through the tall grass. The blades part like a crowd. Termite moves his hands to feel them like a sharp sea across his fingers, and the wagon cuts a narrow swath. Most days the field is full of sounds. Bees and insects on the tall stalks buzz and click. The dragonflies and jumping hoppers do a kamikaze zing and flirl through our hair, past our ears. Not today. There’s silence. Everything alive is huddled at the roots of the plants, or burrowed into the earth a few protective inches.

Thunder sounds high up as we walk into the alley beside the Tuccis’ house. It’s continual thunder, rumbling like muffled barrage, and a wind has picked up out of nowhere. Right away I see Stamble on Nonie’s front porch, waiting. He doesn’t see me. He probably can’t, if his eyes are as weak as Nonie says. He stands still in his dark suit, looking out at the street. He’s taken off his suit coat and hat and stands there in his shirtsleeves, cuffs buttoned tight and proper. He’s thin, so thin. His white shirt hangs off the sharp bones of his shoulders, and his sleeves blow back tight around his skinny arms. There’s no sun, I guess that’s why he doesn’t need the hat. His pale white hair is long, almost like a woman’s, long enough to blow and swirl back from his face and the steel frames of his glasses.

I tell Termite someone is here from Social Services. I see that Stamble glows a little in the strange light, and I do, and Termite does. My white blouse, Termite’s T-shirt. The afternoon has closed down, gone purple, coaxed and sucked dark by the storm. Pale things look bright. Even the pale gray insulbrick shingles on Nonie’s house look bright, like the house is floating on a patch of black grass. Rain has started, but it’s a strange rain, blows of needling spray that stop and start.

“Ah, there you are,” Stamble says, as though expecting us. “I’ve brought you something.”

Then I see the wheelchair beside him. It’s smaller, child-sized, the wheels thinner and higher than the ones on the chair we keep in the closet. The seat is a square cushion, like on a chair you might take to a beach. On the seat there’s a sheaf of wildflowers, long stemmed, bushy with grass blades, fresh enough they haven’t wilted. They seem to be the flowers I didn’t pick, and I feel so strange seeing them that I don’t say anything about the chair.

He leans down near Termite. “You remember me, Termite. That’s your name? My name is Robert, Robert Stamble.”

He puts the flowers in the wagon with Termite, like a gift, then touches the metal handles that come up behind the back of the chair, pushes a lever underneath with his foot. The chair folds up, the seat collapsed, and he pushes it with those handles to show it still rolls on its wheels, all skinny and compact.

“It’s different from any wheelchair I’ve seen,” I tell him.

He looks pleased. He’s different too. I wonder about him at Social Services, working in that warren of eight or nine desks in the main room. The gaggle of women I know by sight must disburse when he approaches a klatch of them at the water fountain. They consider Nonie uncooperative and difficult, Termite a terrible shame, and me a poor unfortunate. Maybe Stamble was assigned our case because no one else wanted it; he was new and had to take what they gave him. Stamble is strange, with his pale pink look and pressed suit and air of having appeared out of nowhere. Maybe he makes them uncomfortable, and they assigned him to us so they’d have an excuse to fire him or transfer him when he failed. Then again, maybe he’s not so incompetent. He’s brought us this wheelchair without Nonie signing a form or a voucher or writing up a request. We didn’t even make a request.

Rain is whipping down fast, then hesitating. We can see it stop and start just beyond the metal awning of Nonie’s narrow front porch, and the wind gusts harder, moving the flowers in Termite’s lap.

Stamble leans down next to him, between him and the wind like a shield. “Would you like to try sitting in the chair?”

Termite sits real still. Clearly a no. I could answer the question for him, but I don’t. Stamble seems comfortable enough with the silence, and he stays still too, his face near Termite’s, like he’s waiting, listening for another kind of answer. Stamble’s white blond hair is only a shade or two lighter than Termite’s, and his light eyes would seem as startling if they weren’t so pale and weak and narrow set. It’s almost as though Stamble and Termite are related versions of something, but Stamble walks around in the world and Termite doesn’t. Stamble’s invisible to people except as an oddity, like Termite, but he’s not so set apart that people don’t expect things of him. He has a job and a suit, but he stands and moves in his own peculiar, leaning-away stance. He keeps a distance. Like he’s careful, not used to himself. He’s got nothing to help him out but that suit, and the hat that covers his pale hair and shades his face. No holler-back protector like Nonie, no radio knob to fiddle with, no blue plastic ribbon to blow and blow. Everything is gone from Stamble, you can tell by looking. He’s passing through, he’s visiting.

“Where’s your family?” I ask him. “Where you from?” “Not from around here,” he says. He stays crouched down next to Termite and touches Termite’s head with his pale hand. “That wind is going to get stronger,” he tells Termite. “It’s going to blow all this heavy air to smithereens.” He says it like he’s thinking the way Termite thinks, that any storm is a good thing because he loves hearing them.

I’ve got a radar about anyone who might hurt Termite, make fun of him, take advantage. I’m realizing my first feeling about Stamble had to do with Social Services, and the surprise of him appearing so suddenly with that briefcase. They all have briefcases. But he’s not like them. He really is strange. I wonder if people know how strange.

“Looks like that storm they’ve been talking about is here,” I say.

“I’ve got to be going,” Stamble says. “You two had better get inside.” He stands up now, away from Termite, and grasps the briefcase he’s left sitting by the door.

“Don’t I need to sign anything, about the wheelchair?”

“Not at all. See if he likes it first. See if he’ll use it.”

Now the rain has turned hard and solid and steady, like a watery curtain falling straight from the edge of the porch roof. “You want me to lend you an umbrella?” I ask him.

“No need,” Stamble says. He steps off into the rain as I’m opening the front door, pushing the folded wheelchair in front of me, pulling Termite and the wagon behind. I look for him, walking away, but the rain is so dense I can’t even see the street. It’s as though Stamble has disappeared.

“You’ve got your storm,” I tell Termite.

He doesn’t say anything. He’s listening to rain on the roof, pouring off the gutters, running in little rivers, while I dry him off with a towel. We didn’t really get wet, but everything feels damp, cool, and the smell of the rain has filled the house. I put Termite in his soft upholstered chair and shut the windows except for a couple of inches, so the sound of the rain comes through, then I open a newspaper in a corner of the living room and steer the wagon onto it. The wheels are wet and dirty and I’ve got to clean up the tracks across the wooden floor. The wheelchair sits in the middle of the room, folded up, and I move the coffee table to one side so there’s more space. I like the rain, the sound and the way the pouring water turns the air a pale gray evening color. Thunder cracks and rolls and repeats. It’s raining hard and we’re closed into the sound.

I open up the wheelchair, flip the latch underneath to lock the seat steady, then I sit. It has cushioned straps that fit over the shoulders, and a waist strap, and a seat back thick as a pillow. It might work for Termite. It moves so easily, and turns and reverses. The wheels make a light ticking sound on the smooth floor. Termite wouldn’t use his hands on the wheels, though. He’d have to be pushed, at first, anyway. He’d still need help.

He’s turned his head. He hears the chair now, like it’s a sound timing the rain. I’m thinking I could ride him on my lap and he could rest his wrists on mine, feel how to steer and turn something lighter, quicker. Today I just want him to listen. I push his big chair into the middle of the room on its clunky refrigerator wheels and sit back down in the wheelchair. Then I close my eyes and try to feel the circle around him, the space cleared of furniture. I move up and back and around, reverse, turn backward and forward. I bump into the table and the piano, but only at first. The tick of the wheels gets faster and smoother, and when I’m just near Termite I can hear him, distinct from the pour of the rain, making his own sound in the back of his throat. I know he’s turning his head, listening, keeping track of me and the sound of the chair. He’s like the second hand of a windup clock ticking so smooth it blurs into another sound.

That’s how Nonie finds us when she comes home, drenched just running from Elise’s car to the back door. She turns on a lamp in the softly dark room and sees us, Termite in his chair, me in mine.

“Well, I never,” she says.

I don’t say anything for a minute. I have to get used to her, standing there stolid and wet, when the room felt so closed and pure before. “Stamble brought this wheelchair by,” I tell her. “It’s smaller, easier to use.”

“I didn’t ask Social Services for any wheelchair.”

“We’re just trying it out.”

“Who’s trying it out?” She shakes her head at me. “I suppose you can use it if he won’t, if it entertains you so. But I can’t imagine Social Services will allow us two wheelchairs. They’ll have to come back here and get the other one. Right now I’d like you to heat up the chili I brought from the restaurant. Tomorrow, with the Flood-Relief people coming in, we’ll sell a lot of chili—it offsets the damp.” She steps out of her wet shoes and nudges them with her foot, onto the newspaper I unfolded in the corner. Her white waitress shoes sit empty near the wagon like they belong there. She gives me a wry smile. “They say half the town will flood, but they’ve been wrong before.”

I stay still. I want to get out of the wheelchair, fold it up and tuck it away, but not in front of her. It’s like Stamble convinced me the chair is secret. It has the feeling of him all over it, and his whispery sound I’m just starting to hear. But Nonie doesn’t look at me. She’s standing, quiet, looking at Termite. “What do you think, Termite? Are they wrong?”

Termite doesn’t answer, doesn’t say. He turns his head away, tilts his head up, listening, like the answer is in the air, and anyone should be able to hear it.