By Laura Legere '03
Illustrations by Tim Zeltner
Mr. Jerkins's cows were grazing on the tufts of salt-marsh needle grass on the
morning Nancy resigned herself to running away. She had exited the dining room the night before yelling, "I can't wait to leave here and never come back," and now, for maximum effect, she
knew she had to follow through. She saw the cows from the window in the front door after she stuffed a throw pillow and a flashlight in a canvas bag and slipped sideways between her four sleeping sisters in their beds in the one room they shared, down the stairs, skipping the creaky third step with a long, stocking-footed lunge. The cows spilled from the woods into the marsh when the water leaked out with low tide. Mr. Jerkins had long ago given up trying to keep them in the pasture by his barn; they preferred stumps and soggy ground with wandering, fence-breaking determination. The woods in front of the O'Connell house were cow haunted. The dead ones left their skulls in the soil.
Nancy took her wide-brimmed straw hat from a hook in the kitchen. As soon as she was old enough to pick strawberries, her father had bought her a straw hat like the ones her sisters all wore, meant as a canopy to keep the sun off their fair skin as they crouched in Spiller's field, picking. Hers, too, was worn-in now, loose and slightly unbound, the straw sticking out in all directions, and baby Dan, three years old, had his own new hat waiting as a surprise in the closet —Nancy could see it if she stood on the kitchen chair—waiting for a few more summers.
Before dinner last night, Sharon had pulled Nancy into the bathroom and swore she saw their mother set Nancy's potato aside as she washed all the others, then baked it with the dirt on. Nancy couldn't be certain if Sharon was lying; she hid high up in a pine tree until the very last minute to avoid dinner preparations. When her mother took the plates to the oven and rolled the hot potatoes off the rack, one by one, she seemed to pick Nancy's with particular care. She always insisted that they eat the peel. As the other girls cut and chewed, Nancy blanched and gagged. "That's where all the nutrients are," her father said, pointing with his fork. Nancy cut hers open, eating only the soft center, and was discovered attempting to slide the peel into her palm. Her mother said she resented Nancy's accusation of dirtiness, even though Nancy knew she was capable of it, had seen her dirty knees in secret, hidden under the folds of the long skirt that she bunched up when she gardened, preferring to kneel right in the earth. Nancy had been banished from the table. Which was just fine with Nancy, she said, stomping. She thought they were all dumb. She had only been waiting for an excuse to leave.
Nancy closed the door behind her and sat on the front steps to tie on shoes that used to be Carol's but were sturdy enough to be passed along. Nancy was the youngest of five girls; most of her wardrobe came secondhand. She walked across the lawn with a bulb-headed shadow long behind her, wearing Susan's shorts, socks up her calves, and Sharon's blue shirt with three buttons and a rounded collar. She pulled her hat down in front against the rising sun.
Susan woke first after dawn and found the note on Nancy's pillow that said, "I won't be back" and the other note on the kitchen table that Nancy wrote at the last minute in case no one found the first one. Susan sat at the table in her yellow long-sleeved nightgown eating cornflakes and milk and read Nancy's seven-year-old scrawl. It said, "Don't try to find me." Susan sipped the milk from the bottom of the bowl in spoonfuls, then went to wake her parents. Dan had slipped between them in the middle of the night and was sleeping with his face in the wedge of the pillows, his blond head sprouting in a tangle from the gap. Susan cleared her throat in the doorway until her father rolled over and blinked at her. "Nancy left," she said.
"How do you know?" he said.
"She ran away," Susan said and showed him the notes.
"Where?" he asked, leaning onto one elbow and pulling the covers halfway off his wife.
"She didn't say," Susan said and her mother, tucking her feet back under the blanket said, "What?"
Her father sat up and rubbed the thin laurel crown of hair around his scalp and said, "You better go get your sisters and try to find her."
Of course, Nancy would go east, toward the woods and eventually to the ocean if she walked the half mile through the pines. To head west, over the hill, toward the main street and the train tracks and the interstate highway would be to yield to a strangeness approached only with adult supervision or from the back seats of the Rambler wagon.
The four girls, armed with Shirley's plastic bugle, followed the serpentine route of the stream that wrapped around the property before it met the marsh, leaving the dirt driveway and the open field for the half-light under the trees. Carol had recently found the bugle in a drawer, abandoned at Christmas when Shirley got a doll and a record player, and, after forgetting it in the house and returning to retrieve it, she reminded her sisters that the horn would be helpful for scaring off Mr. Jerkins's cows when they inevitably tried to eat her. The cows wouldn't cross the river that intersected this stream, even at the shortest jump between steep, muddy embankments where the girls themselves knew they could make the brief flight if they ran and leapt. Carol walked slowly at the back of the group, prolonging her safety.
They were headed to the woods on the far side of the marsh, to the tree fort they built into a wide-limbed oak with branches starting low enough to make a ladder unnecessary. The O'Connell girls were all accomplished climbers. Each December, the oldest girls would set out with sturdy gloves and a saw to cut down the best Christmas tree in the forest, even if it meant trudging through the snow for hours, even if it meant climbing up an adolescent Douglas fir and sawing off the top. Only Sharon failed to camouflage well against the dusty-colored bark in the day time, her checked red shirts and umber hair mixing with the branches like bits of colored yarn in a robin's nest. The tree fort was better to build than play on, the soft give of the wood under the hammer stroke and the nails more satisfying than the resulting view. But the elevated boards would entice any runaway, promising homemade stability and a brief buffer from the ground.
Shirley picked her way through the marsh and the others followed her footsteps, Carol having merged into the line in front of Sharon for protection from the cows lingering on the periphery of the trees. The earth squelched, with missteps, into mud. Even the firmest ground was tricky, dry but mounded unpredictably and toupeed with grass that drank away the moisture. Shirley, the eldest at 13, walked assuredly, skipping as if strolling on level ground, scanning five or six steps in the future, looking for gaps or shallow ponds that froze only to slush in the winter, warmed by the salt in the brackish water. The other heads bobbed in sequence behind her, Carol sometimes stepping on Susan's heels, trying to stay close, Sharon humming the chorus of an Elvis song, over and over. Even if they had looked back then, they wouldn't have been able to see their mother in the living room window, holding Dan up to where he could see, and, seeing, put his hands out against the glass, as if to propel himself forward, squinting against sleep and the sun, as if to pull back the four dots—three blond and one brown—from moving out of view.
But Nancy hadn't settled anywhere, yet. Instead, she flattened herself against one tree and then another in the woods past the marsh, stalking Mr. Jerkins's cows as they shrugged and rambled in the shadows. She waited and pounced, yelling "Hey! Hey! Hey!" and waving her arms as they scattered. She was surprised at how quickly they swerved between tree trunks, although the woods were sparse here, and the cows kept the underbrush trimmed. The spring-moist ground made Nancy's steps sound like a shuffle; the occasional dollops of cow manure barely quickened the decay around the spongy scatter of leaves. Her hair, in its shaggy trim, fell in her face as she tiptoed. She had left her hat and her bag somewhere by a raspberry bush and an old fence post stripped of barbed wire.
Nancy wished she could scare Sharon like this. As she crept and paused, she had visions of leaping out from behind a bureau or from under the table at the exact moment when Sharon was attempting to skewer a green bean at dinner, so that accidentally, deservedly, she would slip and stab herself with the fork. Someone had to teach her. She abused her elder-sibling role in the vicious age hierarchy of the family, one of the privileged S-named sisters who fell into the alliterative pattern before their parents evidently ran out of ideas. Of course, Sharon turned this insult, too, into a crueler joke, pushing Nancy over the edge when she was already on the verge of tears, calling her "Spanky."
In a quiet moment, as Nancy pressed herself up against the bark, she heard a cow chewing, just comfortable enough to eat after the last scare, and then, in the narrowing distance, a squeaked trumpet call and the crash of bushes breaking. She stepped around the tree and saw Carol charging into the woods without seeing her, looking for some low tree to climb and running as if she were chased. She heard more rustling, out of view, then Susan's voice behind the wall of woods calling, "Carol, come back! They only eat grass!" The cows were mooing and bothered, sidestepping because they didn't know which way to run. Suddenly, they were all there in a clearing, Shirley, Sharon and Susan and Carol, in the trees, with her leg half-hoisted over a branch. Shirley said, "There you are, Nance," but Nancy, jarred by the disturbance and not yet ready to be found, was already running away.
Rather than staying stranded with the cows, Carol jumped from the tree and followed her sisters as they chased after Nancy. They ran in a line with their forearms shielding their faces from the whip of branches lashing back after each sister pushed ahead. Brambles caught their socks and tore their bare legs, but Nancy, way ahead, wasn't stopping, was, instead, swerving and ducking and gaining ground. No one called out to tell Nancy she was being stupid, that she would starve if she stayed in the forest, and that she would be scared and come home by midnight whether they caught her or not. They breathed heavily. They kicked mud up their backs in splatter trails of brown dots. When they burst through the trees into the open space of the second marsh beyond the woods, the sisters stopped and watched Nancy run, watched her trip and fall and get up again, covered in mud, then run on, slower, hopping diagonally onto dunes, turning to look back once, then twice, and suddenly, like a dish detergent soap bubble popping as it floats, they saw Nancy disappear. The sisters watched this with their hands on their knees, grabbing in breaths, and without speaking, they were running again.
Nancy didn't feel the slip or the fall and couldn't comprehend being mired knee-deep in a six-foot hole, far below the surface of the marsh, looking up steep mud walls at the sky partially blocked by the needle grass bending and bowing. She thought only of yelling and heard her own echoed yells. Her arms were stretched straight up. When she saw a hand push the grass back and saw Susan's face, she gave up yelling for crying.
Sharon said, "I'm not doing it."
"Yes, you are," Shirley said. "You're the only one strong enough to hold on to Nancy while the rest of us pull you out."
"There's no way I'm putting my head in that hole," Sharon said.
Carol was sitting in the grass, weeping and snotty. "Please, Sharon. She could die!"
"Let's just get Dad," Sharon said. "He could reach her himself."
"We'll just do it without you," Susan said, turning to Shirley. "If she won't help, we'll just do it without her."
"It's not safe," Shirley said, then peered into the hole and said, softer. "Hold on, Nancy." Shirley let the grass drop back and pivoted on her heel, blindly reaching for and grasping a fist full of Sharon's hair then twisted it tighter and lead Sharon's face toward her own. "If you don't help, I'm going to shove you in that hole with her."
Susan and Carol had their hands on Sharon's ankles even as she was kneeling by the hole, preparing to drop in. "Okay," Shirley said, putting one hand on each of Sharon's calves, "Hands first, then head." Sharon rubbed her hands around the edge of the hole, then let them slip down the mud sides, slowing them with quick digs of her fingernails into the dirt. "Don't drop me," she said, looking back at her feet, then ducked her head into the dark. "Reach your hands up, Nancy," she said.
Nancy, on tiptoes, sniffled a response. She closed her eyes and stretched, waving her hands around to try to grab Sharon, whose body, coming closer, had eclipsed the sky. Their fingers touched. "Stop," Sharon yelled and hung in place, rubbing her fingers along her palms, trying to dry the mud, then flailed and grabbed Nancy around the wrists. "Lift me up," she yelled. Shirley, Susan and Carol dug their heels in and backed away, pulling Sharon, stiff and sweating, horizontal across the grass while Nancy, blinking the new light away, let herself be dragged.
Susan told Nancy to swing her arms as they walked the road home, to keep the mud from stiffening on her shirt, but Nancy, staring at the white line on the pavement, hunched her shoulders and shivered. The road, they decided, was safer than the marshes, even with the threat of an occasional car. It was not yet midday. Sharon walked with long strides, trying to keep her wet pants from rubbing her legs. She said, "Mom cleaned your potato off the same as all the others." She let the comment sit, unanswered. She added, "You're lucky the tide wasn't in."
"Shut up, Sharon," Carol said. But Nancy wasn't listening. She was still deep in the hole, flailing her arms, sifting the mud with her shoes, smelling the salty rot of the earth, looking up. It was a blue day, but from the hole the sky was only light, colorless and cloudless. She didn't worry about drowning or being smothered if the ground collapsed around her. She worried about waiting. She was sure she was being absorbed into the earth every second she stood still, so she shook and shivered, moved her arms and slid her feet. She yelled for vibration as much as sound.
Shirley put her arm around Nancy and guided her around the fence and onto their front lawn. "Look," she said. Their mother and Dan were in the driveway, in the spot where the Rambler was parked when their Dad wasn't at work. Nancy looked. They were waving and walking toward her, onto the grass, under two pine trees and past a Dutch elm sapling planted next to a skinny birch. Her mother's smile dropped; she stopped waving and started running, close enough now to see how dirty she was.
It was Nancy's Dutch elm, the one that sprouted at school from a seed in a Styrofoam cup last year, the one her mother helped her replant. It had lasted, somehow, through the winter and now it was stretching in the sun, meager but growing, until someday, years later, the elm would spread wide and shady, taking up the soil under the birch until its white bark shriveled and the grass grew long where the elm's low limbs made it impossible to mow.
Nancy watched her mother cross the lawn, watched her skirt tangle and unfold. She saw Dan smiling in her mother's arms, as if enjoying the ride, as if, with his hands stretched forward, he moved through space by will alone, by reaching.
About the Author
The winner of the Magazine's first annual Fiction Contest, Laura Legere '03 graduated from Middlebury this spring with a B.A. degree in English. This summer, she returns for her second year of study at the Bread Loaf School of English.
About the Judges
Robert Cohen, a recipient of the 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship, has taught writing and modern literature courses at Middlebury since 1997. He is the author of three novels, The Organ Builder, The Here and Now, and Inspired Sleep, as well as a collection of short fiction, The Varieties of Romantic Experience. His work has received numerous awards, including a Whiting Writers' Award, a Lila Wallace Writers' Award, and a Pushcart Prize.
Kathryn Kramer has taught at Middlebury since 1997. She is the author of three novels, A Handbook for Visitors from Outer Space, Rattlesnake Farming, and Sweet Water. Kramer has received numerous grants and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Grant, and a Vermont Arts Council grant.