Why the Tree Loves the Axe

Dedication

For Jack and Juliet, and Grace And their parents

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Sugartown

New York

Upstate

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

Sugartown

Why don’t you just begin?

I WAS TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD AND I HAD LOST MY WAY. I FOUND myself driving on an unlit highway through the middle of a black summer night: it wasn’t where I’d intended to be. Somewhere an hour or so back I’d missed a turnoff that I should have taken, or taken one that I should have missed, and I was hurrying through the Texas hills toward the next town, where I would stop and check my map. Ahead of me there was a great big truck, barreling through the darkness like a factory on a thousand wheels, burning its fuel and spoiling the stars. For ten miles or more I’d been following behind the thing, growing more and more impatient, until at last I decided to pass it. I remember looking down at the green glowing speedometer, and I remember the numbers, but I never did see how fast I was going: I pulled into the next lane, the road turned slightly and dropped suddenly, my car complained, the truck bellowed and vanished, and a sign that said

SUGARTOWN NEXT 3 EXITS

appeared out of the mist. There were high beams in my face, the asphalt was lit up with spotlights, road, shoulder, railing, sky … It was very quiet, and for a moment I thought that I’d driven onto the set of a film … Then the car left the ground and I was piloting breathlessly in the blackness, with the bright asteroids pricking my feet and the wheel turning freely in my hands. I knew right away that nothing I did would do anything. Nothing at all … I heard a voice on the radio, it wasn’t a man’s or a woman’s, it just spoke: Well, well, well, it said, and as soon as it was done we all went up and over …

A couple of books that had been in the backseat began flapping violently around my ears, or else a pair of angry birds had gotten in through the window and were trying to get out again; for a second I saw my face turning in the glass, wearing an expression that suggested I found it all a little frustrating, this commotion and this sudden buoyancy. So I didn’t want to fly; I wasn’t really driving, either. I was along for the ride. The voice on the radio said, You are going to go to heaven now. But instead of rising, the car was falling, and the difference was disturbing.

There were people standing over me, wearing costumes and waxy, blank-eyed tragedy masks; their mouths were round and red with lipstick, and they moved very slowly, swaying one way and then the other in the observance of some formality that was lost on me. A chorus: they shook their heads sternly from side to side, and I just lay there, caressing the ground with my hands. Young lady, look what you’ve done. This is very bad; the car won’t work at all, now. There were thousands of glimmering stars, like bits of safety glass scattered in the grass, which were like stars. I said to myself, Caroline, Caroline. Oh, you really fucked up this time.

For a long time I sat cross-legged by the side of the road, listening with my skin. A trickle of cold blood was making its way down my calf, but it didn’t seem to be bothering me very much; I was getting very comfortable, and really, I didn’t mind sitting there. I watched a line of red and white lights along the road, flashing like a clock ticking that tells no time, and I took two or three deep breaths. An airplane went by overhead, so far above the earth that it was silent and invisible. A woman came over to me; she was wearing an iridescent pearl grey shirt, then a pale blue shirt. Is there anyone else? she asked.

I thought she was testing me, to see how selfish I’d become. I wanted her to like me, but where was I supposed to begin? There were people all over the place. Well, for example, there’s the mailman, I replied.

She turned her head. Help! she said to someone else, and then she turned to me again. Was he driving?

No, no, no. I was driving.

Is he still in the car?

In the car? The idea that he was in the car seemed to be upsetting her, and I thought I could ease her mind. No, no, no, I said. He delivers mail. Where is the car?

There was a man standing by the side of a police cruiser with its lights on and its doors open. He walked over and addressed the woman: Hello, Fay, he said in a lighthearted voice. How’s she doing? I wondered why he didn’t just ask me; instead, he bent down so he could look in my eyes, then reached into his jacket pocket and removed a piece of cloth, which he used to wipe my forehead. By the time he was done the lights in the road had softened into blurry astral splinters. I thought he’d purposely tried to blind me so I wouldn’t know where I was. It didn’t seem very fair to me and I started to stand up and protest, but he put his hand on my shoulder and gently guided me down again. You just stay there, sitting on the ground, he said. Is there anyone we can call?

I said, No. I was in the hospital, and I saw a pair of twins staring at me, one boy and one girl, children. It’s not your fault, I said. I don’t know what I said. The nurse looked down at me in a curious, concerned way, her head bent slightly, her brow compressed. Over her shoulder I could see a long parade of infirm women shuffling up the hallway; then she shot me with something, in the same place on my upper arm where a boy I had known a long time previously used to punch me when he wanted to get my attention. A red-haired boy. What was his name? Brown-haired.—She told me I was going to be all right, and within a second or two, sure enough, I began to feel all right. That was strange. I was going to thank her, but before I could find the words a woman doctor came to me and started strumming on some sewing thread that was strung through the skin of my face, smiling nicely all the while. It was very fine cloth, I thought, but the doll was stuffed with sand, and the sand sifted, shifted, and the figure went to sleep.

When I woke I was lying in a blue hospital room, with my battered black suitcase on the floor beside my bed, and a pale pink nurse standing over me. A curtain had been pulled around us both; through it drifted light from beyond, a picture window, a television, but there was no sound. I looked up at the nurse’s face; she wore an expression of perfect candor and forgiveness, as if she knew exactly what I was feeling. So I thought I could trust her, and I asked her, Did I die?

She frowned. Die? she said softly, her voice full of wonder. Not at all. She bent down, attached a blood pressure cuff around my upper arm, and began to inflate it.

Oh. That’s nice, I said. My tongue was stubborn and slow.

Well, you’re very lucky, she said as she slowly let the air out again, read the dial, and wrote down the results. From what I heard, that was a terrible accident you had. And here you are, pretty much all right. She tucked in a loose corner of my sheets … Not without a scratch, mind you, she went on. Because you cut your forehead, and you bruised your knee, and you broke your nose just a little. But I don’t know, that’s almost nothing for what you went through. She spoke to me as if she’d known me since I was a little girl, and wanted me to understand that my wounds were just a few more of life’s rough spots. For a while at least, she was my favorite person, and I was going to ask her to stay with me, but I was afraid she’d say no. She gave me pills for the pain and some magazines to read, and just before she left she smiled down on me and stroked my forehead. But the doctor who came to see me an hour or so later was less tender: he looked me over quickly and then told me that I was going to have to stay in the hospital for another day or two, just in case something else went wrong.

As soon as he was gone I got up from my bed and limped on over to the mirror above my sink, to stare at myself and see what I’d become; and what I saw was a woman, poor, pale, and tired, who looked the way I would have looked, if I’d been hurt. Lucky? I didn’t look very lucky. My hair was still dark blond, my forehead still high, my eyes hazel, my mouth wide, but I had two black eyes, and beneath a small strip of white tape I could see that my nose was forever bent, just a tiny bit: the bone took a slight turn at its bridge, lending my face an out-of-kilter aspect. My features were a little bit battered, like a girl who’s gotten around. What a landing. I turned to one side and then the other, I watched myself from the corner of my eye, and I was unnerved. My looks had never been perfect, but they were mine, after all, I was used to them, I’d counted on them, and now they were changed. I reached up to touch my cheekbone and the reflection reached up to touch hers, staring intently back at me with an expression that I didn’t recognize, somewhere between shock and fascination; my own face was a rebus, and I stood there for a while trying to solve it. In time it became too much for me and I turned away, but later that afternoon I went down to the drug-store in the lobby and bought a compact, which I took out a dozen times that evening when I thought no one was around, pretending nonetheless to check my makeup, when in fact I was studying my face, like some broken Narcissus perpetually gazing into a portable pond.

My sleep that night was occupied by a dull dream of a dark highway; the next day dissolved in an endless succession of even duller dramas on the television. All afternoon the doctors and nurses trespassed on me with needles and tubes, soaked my skin with cotton pads, pricked me, tapped me, touched me with their hands, and came to me with their questions. And what’s your address? the pink nurse asked gently. And how should we bill you? I didn’t know, and I wished she wouldn’t ask; I had no insurance, the total was more money than I would have to spare in a decade, and even the payments were equal to a month’s rent and then some.

Out my darkening window that evening the streetlights came on, first some, then others and others, spattering across the city as it got ready for the night; and money was passing from one pocket to another, cars were being started, kisses granted, drinks lifted, windows opened to invite the evening in. I was a stranger there, anxious and impatient in my hospital bed, with no other soul to keep me; and I was too far away from the town to touch it. I thought everything that would ever count as my past was already behind me in time. Of course I was wrong, but how was I supposed to know that?

Two mornings later the pink nurse put me in a wheelchair and pushed me to the front door of the hospital. I signed some papers, and I was discharged.

So I found myself in Sugartown. To the rest of America, the city was just someplace south, a name found in a high school history book, because it was near a battlefield from the War with Mexico, or the birthplace of some half-forgotten Plains hero. Its reputation barely reached beyond the surrounding counties; God knows it had never reached me. I knew roughly where it was, I knew that three or four hundred thousand people lived there, but from the vantage of my own annals it was just Faraway, an equal remove from the town in California where I was raised and my ex-husband in New York City, and as distant from them both as I could be without leaving the country entirely.

I’d already been everywhere else: for three years I’d been looking for another place to live, I tried cities the way some women try lovers, but I hadn’t found the right one yet. One town was too clean, and another was too big; I didn’t like the weather in another, it never poured down rain; I didn’t like the people in a fourth, they were all white giants, and they walked the streets with dumb looks posted on their faces, buying bland trash in tasteless stores. Still, I’d tried to fit in each place: I cut my hair and changed what I ate, I adopted accents, I tried to live by local poetry, memorizing legends and visiting famous graves. I was studying how to want things, where to want them, and who to be.

My name was Caroline Harrison, but the name didn’t mean anything yet. I’d carried my days from city to city in a bucket with a hole at the bottom, and nothing had collected but a few inches of dirty water. It was just same water, and I wasn’t getting anywhere. Oh, I’d learned a few things: I knew how to make rice and beans, and I could dance to almost any music; I could work a crossword puzzle, and I knew how to smile when I said No. I could tell a lie, and keep telling it until it was true. But that wasn’t anywhere near enough to grow old on.

It was the end of the century, and I was alone. All across the heavens the constellations were coming apart, all across the ground there were fences that no one could maintain. The crest of the millennium was approaching, but somehow it seemed to be a private affair; no one would talk about it, no one had my hopes; where I saw opportunity, if only for escape from disappointment, they saw nothing but a big bright party followed by another decade. But I was ambitious and I dreamed I was better: I wanted china skin and a reputation for the ages, I wanted a revolution in my kitchen, I wanted my decisions to double the world’s qualities, absolutely. So I was vainglorious: I was young. I had little enough sense of myself to be vain about, and the glories I was looking for weren’t small. Every night I stared out my window, waiting for the bandit to come down from the mountains, the light in the clock tower, listening for the sound of the trumpet; every day I went out with the word Sure waiting on my lips.

There was no turn: I’d kept trying, and I’d moved again. At last I’d settled in Dallas, where I went to work for the Welfare Board, signed up for a few classes at SMU, and watched everyone carefully. As far as they were concerned, I was just another white woman trying to get by in the City of Hate: they didn’t know, but I was preparing myself, one more time, for some glamorous struggle. But one more time it wasn’t like that: my hands became as pale and dry as the pile of papers on my desk; the students in my sections believed in original sin and drank Diet Dr Pepper with their boyfriends on weekends; I got in the habit of guessing what everyone was going to say before they said it, and I was right almost all the time; and I couldn’t eat; and the land was so flat you could see a man coming with a smile on his face from miles away. After about nine months I began to feel that familiar combination of annoyance and distress, a sense that I was on the wrong side of the island, lonely and digging for laughing treasure in empty sand. I was tired of the sensation of tears running down my cheeks, so I quit my job, packed my things, and started for the Gulf of Mexico, with no one to answer to, and years to go. I was in the hills of south-central Texas when my car left the road, throwing me and my things in a ditch outside of town.

Sugartown. The isolation of the place meant a lot to me, and so did its name. My arrival there had been an accident, but I didn’t really believe in accidents. So that was where I began, before anything else, O.K. I thought it might be the city known as Home-for-simple-hearts, and I decided to stay. The day after I was discharged from the hospital I rented a cheap studio apartment in a building called Four Roses, near a mall that had been converted from a train station long ago. A few days after that I went to find a job.

I put on a dress and I walked down to an employment agency in one of the office buildings in the center of town. By then my black eyes had faded to faint charcoal-colored semicircles, and I wore my hair down over my forehead to hide my stitches as best I could. I was looking for work, I went with a department-store blush and a Cadillac smile.

There was a pale man in a brown suit sitting at the reception desk: he handed me a form and asked me to fill it out before I met with a counselor, and I took it back across the carpeting and sat on a green couch that seemed to have been stuffed with sawdust. Just one sheet of paper, they weren’t asking for much: they wanted to know what education I’d had, my skills, last few jobs, my references. But the printing was so neat, the lines were so straight, the pen they lent me wrote in such a boring blue. I don’t have any other excuse. The questions were so slow, and my heart began to itch.

—So I perjured myself all over the page: from the top to the bottom I filled in someone else’s story, sucking liar’s carbon from the tip of the pencil in between inspirations. I made up an entire life, right there in that shabby little office, in that strange little city: a better and more suitable life, one I thought they wanted. I said that I went to Catholic college in Chicago and worked in an office called Acme Prosthetics on the weekends, as a volunteer at a community center—pause, my breath quickened, I was becoming euphoric and I thought about the pink nurse—as an orderly in St. Sebastian Hospital the summer after I graduated. I listed references: a fictional professor in whose class I’d flourished and a project coordinator with an unpronounceable last name. The only truth I told was my name, my age, and my new phone number, and when I was done I held the paper in my lap as if it were the family Bible.

Cold air from a vent in a corner of the ceiling ruffled the posters on the wall. I crossed my legs and listened to the fluorescent light fixtures buzzing overhead. An imposing woman in a powder blue skirt and a white blouse with a big bow at the throat came through a door across the room; she stopped for a moment to gaze out the window, then came and stood above me. All right then, come on, she said, giving me a smile that barely made it past her coral-colored lipstick. Everything about her was enormous: her bare arms ballooned from her sleeves and her hips were as wide as the trunk of an oak; only her feet were small, and as we walked back toward her cubicle I wondered how she could stand a day’s worth of the pain she must have suffered from her cheap blue shoes. She lowered herself into an office chair; it seemed to sink into the carpeting. Well, you look employable, she said as she lifted her great, gaping purse off of a second chair and motioned for me to sit down beside her. We can be thankful for that. She peered over at me. But honey, I’ve got to ask you, before we even begin.—She gestured at my forehead. What happened?

For a moment I was startled; then I settled slowly back in my seat and gave up one more tall tale. It was the only thing I could do. Once upon a time … I started, pulling my hair back. The counselor gave me a get-out look … I was the Bride of Frankenstein, I concluded.

She paused, then let loose with a high-pitched giggle and said, Shit, honey, weren’t we all.

I had a little accident with my car, I said resignedly, and she nodded.

Well. Her hands were pink, her nails were crimson. She turned up the first sheet of my application, stared down at something I had written on the page below, and spoke without looking up. Well, O.K. I’m glad you came in. Most people we get in here can’t do anything at all, and if they can, then no one is going to trust them to do it. So what kind of thing are you looking for?

I had already decided and I didn’t hesitate. What else was there for me to do, in a world of blindness and injury? I want to work in the field of health care, I said.

The field of health care? Doesn’t that sound nice. I wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic, even when she said it a second time. The field of health care. She glanced down at my application again. You have some experience here …

I gestured toward Illinois. I studied nursing up north, I said. I never finished, but I interned in the hospital for a year, and when I was in high school I was a candy striper.

All right, then. She pulled a few tan-colored files out of a drawer by her side and began to flip through them, shaking her head. No, she said, and then stopped just long enough to stare at a sheet of paper that puzzled her. No. There’s a hospital—are you union?

I never had time to join, I replied.

No, she said. Well, then, you can go downtown and sign up, and wait three weeks for it to process through, and then I’ll have something for you. Or … Here she tempted me. Such a sympathetic woman, I never would have guessed she was working, from whatever distance, for the devil. There’s some nonunion work, she said, if you’re willing to be an orderly.

I’d like to start as soon as possible.

Of course you would, she said, and dug through her files some more. There’s this, Eden View. Can you work with old people? It’s just cleaning up, mostly, but it’s work.

I said that was fine, and she wrote out the name and address on a square of purple paper that she removed from a multicolored stack on the corner of her desk. If you can get out there this afternoon, I’ll call them.

I’ll go, I said. And I went, thinking nothing, just like a pebble that’s been dropped down a well.

Eden View: right away I decided it was a terrible name, it was insulting and embarrassing. No one was going to believe that you could see paradise from there, just because someone else said you could. They called it a rest home, a community. They would have called rape Love-in-springtime, and slander Legend. I thank God I won’t have to die in that kind of place.

It was an asylum for old people; I found it in a neighborhood of clapboard houses on the eastern edge of town, where the city began to thin out into tired and odd-shaped public parks that never received visitors, an area so homely and forgotten that as far as I ever knew, it had no name. At one in the afternoon, I arrived outside the front door.

The building was red brick, three stories high, with a white roof on top, and it was surrounded by small, neat grounds with benches placed here and there. I walked in from the midsummer heat to a shadowy, cool reception area. At the front desk a nurse was talking on the telephone, absently twisting the line around her index finger as she spoke. When I showed her my appointment slip, she took it, examined it, and wrote down a room number on the top margin, all the while listening to the voice in the receiver and occasionally saying, Yes it is … Yes it is.

I was interviewed by an old man in worn blue jeans and a cowboy shirt, and the entire hour was absurd: when I first found his open door and saw him standing awkwardly beside his bare desk, he seemed so helpless and out of place that I thought he was a patient under the delusion that he could hire me. I’m sorry, I said, and started to leave again, but he took hold of my arm high up by my shoulder, welcomed me in, and said he was Personnel. He asked me to sit and I took a hard wooden schoolhouse chair next to the door. There was a moment while he searched his desk drawers for a pencil, which turned out to be on the floor by his foot; with a groan he stooped down to retrieve it, and returned pallid and trembling from the effort. He was a puppet, and he made me feel bashful for having more blood than I could use. Now, he said. All right, then. He studied my application. I see you lived in Chicago.

That’s right, I said.

I’ve got a grandson living there. I guess he’s still in school.

He looked at me hopefully, but all I could do was nod and say, How nice.

Studying, what do you call it? The electric, the wires, and the … He made a motion with his hands as if he was threading a needle.