Unspeakable Things(4)
I was jelly-bone tired, but my copy of Nellie Bly’s Trust It or Don’t guilted me from the top of my treasure shelves. Aunt Jin had sent it to me as an early birthday present. The book was full of the most fantastical stories and drawings, like the account of Martin J. Spalding, who was a professor of mathematics at age fourteen, or Beautiful Antonia, “the Unhappy Woman to Whom Love Always Brought Death!”
I’d been savoring the stories, reading only one a night so they’d last. I’d confided to Jin that I was going to be a writer someday. Attaining such a goal required practice and discipline. Didn’t matter how tired I was. I needed to study the night’s Nellie.
I flipped the book open to a random page, drawn instantly to the sketch of a proud German shepherd.
I smiled, satisfied. I could write that. My plan was to begin drafting one Nellie a week as soon as school was out. I’d already written a contract, which I’d called Cassie’s Summer Writing Duties. It included a plan for getting my portfolio to Nellie Bly International Limited before Labor Day and a penalty (no television for a week) if I did not fulfill the terms of my contract. I’d had Sephie witness me signing it.
I set the huge yellow-covered book on my treasure shelf and stretched, checking my muscles. Did they want to sleep stretched out long underneath my bed or curled up short in my closet?
Long, they said.
All right, then. I grabbed a pillow and the top quilt off my bed and slid the pillow under the box springs first. I followed on my back, dragging the quilt behind. I had to squish to reach the farthest corner. The moon spilled enough light into my room that I could make out the black coils overhead.
They were the last thing I saw before drifting off to sleep.
CHAPTER 2
“Your dad’s still asleep,” Mom said when I stepped into the kitchen the next morning. “Don’t make too much noise.”
That was code for cereal for breakfast.
I scowled. “You think it’s fair he gets to sleep in?”
Mom was rushing around the kitchen, taking out meat to thaw for dinner, making sure Dad knew what leftovers to eat for lunch, packing her own midday meal. “If life were fair, there’d be no starving children,” she said, not even glancing my way.
I wasn’t in the mood. “Maybe when I’m old I can sleep in all day.”
Mom stiffened, and I worried for a second that I’d pushed too far. She tolerated a lot, but when she flipped, she was gone. “He’s keeping artist’s hours,” she finally said, dipping back into the refrigerator. “He’s got a new project.”
That explained why he’d been extra weird all weekend.
Donny McDowell was an artist and a soldier, that’s what he told people. One he chose and the other he didn’t, he’d say. After his discharge, he and Mom tried to make a go of it in St. Cloud, but the city was too busy for him. He declared that the future was to be found in the country, where he could return to his roots and live like a pioneer, natural and free.
Mom and Dad pulled up stakes and headed to Lilydale when I was four. My only memory of living in St. Cloud was coming home early from a friend’s down the block to find Dad naked in bed with Mom’s best friend. Mom’s friend was naked, too. I ran out looking for Mom and found her biking around the block, crying. She wouldn’t talk to me. I’d never asked her about that again, not like I asked her about Grandpa turning away from her at Uncle Richard’s funeral.
Other than that, I didn’t remember much about that house. For me, this was home, not a place we’d moved to. I had no recollection of Dad and Mom planting the row of lilacs that now shielded the house from the road, thick like fairy-tale briars. By the time they converted the granary to Dad’s studio, I was walking. When they remodeled the red barn into a billowy Arabian den, I was old enough to help paint the interior, though Sephie complained that I spilled too much.
Dad, he liked to be outside, at least during the day. At night he’d grab a bottle and head to his studio or the basement to do “private work.” Or he’d plop down in front of the television, drinking, and in either case getting tense quiet or super talky and telling us all about swallowing a bellyful of lead in some jungle and never being able to smell fish again because it was the last meal he’d eaten and he had to watch it pour out with the rest of his guts. If he kept drinking—this didn’t happen very often, but it happened—he’d look at me or Sephie in a way that felt like a monster had found your hiding spot, and Mom would say it was just best if we went to bed early and stayed there until the next morning.
Game nights like last night were rare, more of Dad’s weekend weirdness.
A new project explained it. He was always bragging that he could sell his work for big money but that he didn’t want to be a cog in the capitalist machine. His sculptures were impressive, even if he didn’t move many. He’d cut, bend, and weld the prettiest creatures and flowers out of sharp metal. The contrast slayed me, how he could craft a ten-foot-tall bleeding heart out of steel and colored tin, so real, so soft looking, that you had to touch it to make sure it wasn’t a true flower, you an ant on its stem. But it was metal you’d feel, cold in the winter, burning hot in the summer.
He’d created a Willy Wonka wonderland on our thirteen-acre hobby farm, one that only he knew the scope of. He’d reclaimed much of the wildness, forging paths through the woods with our help, twisting secret routes where you could stumble across a soaring metal bumblebee flashing wrought-iron eyelashes or play hide-and-seek through a metal daisy garden. People were impressed when they visited, which my dad made sure they did at least twice a year during his legendary (his word) parties.