field
HE WAS IN THE BLUE BIRD and eating something I think is called a horn. It was large and crescent-shaped and it seemed to have a great deal of shiny material on top of it. He wore a dark blue chamois shirt with frayed broad collars. It was opened several buttons, showing the mesh of the long-sleeved thermal undershirt that also showed beneath his sleeves rolled to the forearm. He had a lot of hair on his arms and wrists and it sprouted around the undershirt. The heat was high and wet in the Blue Bird, and the smokers were laying down a screen. Verna screeched her jokes; senior citizens laughed in what was probably among the pleasantest times of their day, since now they weren’t alone.
I wanted to be happy I was there, looking at Archie’s brilliant eyes in his ugly round face, but the heat was choking me and the smoke and lights made my eyes and forehead ache.
He said, “You look like a set of defective bowels.”
“It’s one of my favorite disguises.”
“At least you haven’t cut yourself shaving the last few days.”
“They took our razors away. Belts, shoelaces, you know the routine. Can you get out of here with me awhile?”
“I’m on my first pastry,” he said.
“I’m about on my last, Arch.”
He pointed a finger in the air. He performed a horror. He stabbed the horn into his coffee cup, brought up the dripping, shiny, melting cake, and, tipping his head back, stuffed it into his mouth. He didn’t swallow it, though. He did something like straining it, because although I saw him swallow, the cake clearly remained bunchy in his mouth. He got his coffee cup up and tipped the remaining coffee through his gritted teeth. It made the noise of a garbage-disposal unit in a sink.
Then he said, “Ah.” He put money on the table, slid sideways, and we went. I drove him out of town, past the frozen lake I’d gone to, and he didn’t talk. I didn’t look at him. We got to Johnnycake Hill and went up about a half a mile before I pulled off near a field where loggers deposited trimmed evergreen trunks for the local mill trucks to take with their huge oily grippers.
We walked. It used to be an empty road, and then, for years, an almost-empty road. Now there were new houses, all of them with those semicircular windows that look like winking eyes and don’t admit enough air to make a difference when it’s warm. The winds were gentle. I didn’t want to seem optimistic about anything, but it seemed possible that we might be approaching the end of winter.
He said, puffing a little, “Tell me.”
“You’ve been saying Fanny and I have to talk about our baby.”
“I’ve been saying so much, I decided not to tell you anything anymore. I can’t figure out whether you want to and can’t or you really just don’t give a flying fuck about it and you want something else out of this incredible analytic mind I keep serving you from for no additional charge.”
“You never charged me a penny.”
“You’re my friend. And you work for the school. I’m giving you the service you’re entitled to.”
“Sure.”
“And you’re my friend.”
I stopped. We were at a level part, where someone building a house had been caught by winter. The framing was done but not the roof, and they’d have damage to contend with. It didn’t seem to me that anybody capable of building a house ought not to be capable of understanding a little about weather.
“I know I am,” I said. “You’ve been great.”
“You leaving town?”
“No.”
“Good. You sounded a little valedictory there for a minute.”
I shook my head.
“Like you were saying good-bye?”
“That,” I said.
“Tell me, Jack.”
I felt the same hesitation as when I’d asked Fanny to come back home. But I pushed through it. I said, “I didn’t kill our little girl.”
His hand came up on its own, it looked like. He seemed to me surprised to find it on my face, just touching my cheek and part of the side of my neck. If he had pulled, I’d have stepped closer and set my head on his shoulder. He just touched me like that and then he dropped his hand.
“I didn’t think you did.”
“She died.”
“Dying doesn’t mean killed.”
I walked ahead, and I heard him follow. We went on to where the hill climbs again, and I stopped because I heard him breathing harshly. I didn’t mind not moving because of how my ribs felt. He stopped and caught his breath a little. I heard him open his mouth, then close it. I turned to look at him.
“You can kill a kid, sometimes, by shaking her. You don’t mean to. Your life’s crazy, or you’re sick, or you haven’t slept in — forever. However many nights.”
“I know,” he said. “It happens a lot.”
“You can be half dying because you’re worried about the kid, but she’s going on with that sick little tired little nagging kind of crying, over and over, and nothing you do does her any good. Nothing. Hold her, put her down, try to feed her, sing to her, turn on the radio, dance in the bedroom with her, sit and touch her so she knows you’re there.”
He said, “That’s right.”
I looked anyplace else. I couldn’t see. I felt the wind, I felt him very near, but I couldn’t see anymore.
He said, “Jack.”
I said, “That’s all right.”
“Fanny doesn’t remember?”
“She thinks she remembers me doing it. I went up. I heard something when they were up there. Then I went up. By the time I got there and got hold of Hannah because Fanny was crying and crying … by the time … by the time I got there, all I could do was breathe into her mouth. I held her and I breathed. I breathed and breathed. We drove to the hospital. They called it, I—”
“Sudden infant death syndrome,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Instead of shaken child syndrome.”
“Archie. She turned and found me. When she came out of it, or came to. Whatever happened. I think she went into this blackout so she wouldn’t see what had happened.”
“She saw you.”
“Holding her dead baby.”
“She thought you did it.”
“When she lets herself remember that much.”
“But nothing about herself.”
“Nothing.”
“That’s why you can’t talk to her about it,” he said. His hand came up again, and he put it again on my face. It wasn’t warm up there — the temperature was below freezing — but his face was running with sweat.
“I don’t want her remembering what happened.”
“So she remembers what didn’t happen.” He was very cold, I saw. I realized he’d been wearing sneakers, not boots, and they were soaked dark. Shifting his feet, he said, “God. She needs help, Jack.”
“Help? You think Fanny needs help? You think I do, Arch? You think I didn’t stumble onto that insight by myself? Yeah. I think we need some help. The thing of it is, I can’t come up with any ideas about help that don’t have to do with locking us both up for murder or craziness, or shooting us full of drugs and killing whatever’s left of us, which isn’t a fucking whole hell of a lot right now to begin with.”
He brought his other hand up, and he stood there with me, shorter and fatter and smarter by a dozen lifetimes. He couldn’t seem to think of anything to say.
So I told him, “I didn’t expect you to come up with a, you know, a miracle cure for her. Or something that maybe would freeze my memory up so I could be the same as her. That’s what I want. To remember the same as she does. I know she doesn’t want to hurt me. She knows I don’t want to hurt her. The way it is now, I know what she knows, and she has no idea of what I know. If we can even stay that way, that fucked and fouled, I’ll take it.”