Miller's Valley

Chapter 1

I grew up to the sound of my parents talking in the kitchen on my mother’s nights off, and the sound of the sump pump when it rained. Sometimes, all these years later, I wake up in the middle of the night and think I hear one or the other, the faint pounding of the throttle or the murmur of those two low voices. On a wet night the best I could ever make out was a little muttering even if my mother and father were talking loud. If you properly maintain it, and my father did, a sump pump makes a throaty chug-a-chug noise, sort of like a train without the whistle. My brother Tommy always said he liked the sound, but I think it was because it meant he could sneak out at night without anyone hearing. My mother didn’t mind it because her shift work meant she was hardly ever at home at night, and so tired when she got home that nothing kept her awake.

My room was in the back corner of the house, right over where the sump pump sat on the cement basement floor two stories below. From the window in my room you could see the path up to the back end of the property and the lights through the trees of my aunt Ruth’s house. She kept at least one light on all night long. I liked looking out and seeing that light in the darkness, something that had always been there, that I could count on. It was real quiet most of the time around our house at night, so quiet that sometimes I could tell what Aunt Ruth was watching on television because I could hear the theme song of The Dick Van Dyke Show.

There was a heating vent right behind the head of my bed, and if you followed it down it stopped at the heating vent behind the kitchen table before it ended up at the old cast-iron furnace in the basement. When I was five I thought my room was haunted because just as I was dropping off to sleep I would hear a moaning sound underneath my bed. Years later my brother Eddie told me that Tommy had put his mouth to the vent and made the noise and Eddie made him stop when he caught him, and all of that made sense, including Eddie saying he hadn’t mentioned any of it to our parents.

The thing was, listening to my parents through that vent was like a bad radio broadcast, one of those where you’ve got a song on you really like but it’s from fifty miles away and it drifts in and out and you have to fill in the gaps by singing along. I was good at filling in the gaps when my parents talked, and I probably heard a lot I shouldn’t have. If it had been LaRhonda listening, the whole town would have known, too. You could close that heating vent with a little chain at one corner, and I always did when LaRhonda slept over. But the rest of the time I paid attention to whatever I managed to hear.

She’s got cancer in that breast, my mother might say.

That’ll be hard on Bernie, my father would say.

Bernie? It’ll be hard on her, is who it’ll be hard on. From what I hear Bernie has plenty of female companionship.

Gossip, my father would say. Then silence, and I would fall asleep.

Or, That baby is going right into the state hospital, no questions asked, my mother might say.

That’s a sad thing, my father would say.

Sadder to keep it at home, my mother would say.

Guess so, my father would say. She was always sure of things. He almost never was, except maybe about the government people and their plans for Miller’s Valley. Over the years there was a lot of talk about that at night in the kitchen.

Talked to Bob Anderson yesterday, my mother might say.

Got no business with a real estate agent, my father replied.

Asking for you, my mother said.

Fine right where I am, my father said.

Clattering pans in the sink. Tap running.

Why I even bother, my mother said.

“Meems, you up?” Tommy whispered, pushing open the door. When he wanted to he could move through the house like a ghost, even when he was drunk. Maybe especially when he was drunk.

“How come you’re home?” I said, sitting up against the headboard.

Not listening to one more word on the subject, said my father.

“Oh, man, not again,” said Tommy. He sat down on the edge of my bed and canted his head toward the vent so that a piece of hair fell down on his forehead. It was confusing, having a good-looking brother. I tried not to think of him that way, but LaRhonda wouldn’t shut up about it.

“What are they talking about?” I said. “Who’s Bob Anderson?”

“Did the water department guy stop by here today?”

“Who?”

“Did some guy in a Chevy sedan come by to see Pop?”

“There’s somebody who came by and had some kind of business card from the state. Donald says he talked to his grandfather, too. He says he went to the Langers’ house and some other places.”

“That’s what they’re talking about, then. The damn dam.”

“Mr. Langer says that all the time,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s the problem for sure. The old guys say that when they built the dam, when they were all kids, there was a big fight about it. They figure now they put it in the wrong place, or the water’s in the wrong place, or something. They want to flood the whole valley out.” And both of us looked out toward the light in Ruth’s window.

“What about us?” I said.

I knew about the dam. It was named after President Roosevelt, but the one with the mustache and the eyeglasses, not the one with the Scottie dog and the wife with the big teeth. We’d gone to the dam on a field trip. The guide told us it was made out of concrete and was for flood control, which didn’t make sense because we had flooding in the valley all the time. A lot of the kids were bored by the description of cubic feet and gallons, but we all perked right up when the guide said four workers had died building the dam. Our teacher said she wasn’t sure we needed to know that.

It was probably hard for people to believe, but we didn’t pay that much attention to the river, even though it was so big and so close and had a big strong arm that ran through the center of the valley. They called that Miller’s Creek because years ago it had been just a narrow little run of water, but once the dam went in it turned into something much bigger than that. I’d spent a lot of time around creeks when I was younger, looking for minnows and crayfish, and that was no creek.

It was mainly out-of-town people who went to the river. The current was too strong for swimming, and it was nicer at Pride’s Beach, which was a stretch of trucked-in sand on one side of the lake south of town. The fishing was better in the streams in the valley, although you had to be pretty good at fly casting to get around the overhanging branches.

There was a loud grinding sound through the vent, two wooden chairs pushed against the surface of my mother’s chapped linoleum. “Oh, man,” Tommy whispered. “You got matches?”

“Why would I have matches?”

Tommy sighed. “I had plenty of matches when I was your age.”

“Shut up!” I said, and “shhh,” Tommy said. My parents passed by on the way to their room. “I can’t ever keep track of where he is or what he’s doing,” my mother said, and in the moonlight I saw Tom waggle his eyebrows. Both of us knew our parents were talking about him.

Ever since he’d finished high school my brother had been at a loose end. At least that’s what my aunt Ruth called it, a loose end. It’s not like school had been so great, either: unlike Eddie, who was class valedictorian, Tommy had always been a rotten student. Maybe he had one of those problems they didn’t figure out until later, which I see now all the time, a learning disability or dyslexia or something. He had handwriting so bad that there was no one who could read it. Even he couldn’t make it out sometimes. The only tests in high school where he had a fighting chance were true and false, although even there he occasionally made an F that looked too much like a T. He’d squeaked by, but at the time it didn’t feel like it mattered much; when he strode across the gym and hoisted his diploma, the cheers were louder than they’d been at the end of the class president’s speech.

But then he was out in the world and found it hard to make a living with nothing but his easy ways. He would have been great at politics; instead he’d worked in a car repair place. But he lost his license for six months after he got popped on Main Street late one night speeding, with open beer cans in the car and a girl throwing up out the window; the police officer who stopped him was the father of the girl, and when he looked in the driver’s side window it was easy to see that his daughter wasn’t wearing any pants. Tommy’d met the girl because her uncle owned the car repair place, so he was twice cursed. A lot of what Tommy got into seemed like a story someone was telling, except that it was true.

He worked around the farm, too, but he made my father crazy. “He’s a careless person,” my father would say, not even checking whether Tommy was around to hear him. “I ask him to move some hay and two days later I find a pitchfork rusting by the rain barrel.”

“Tell the old man I went to get gas for the tractors,” Tommy’d say to me, and then he’d disappear for a couple of hours. “You seen your brother?” my father would say, and I’d open my mouth and he’d say, “Don’t tell me he’s out getting gas again because both those tractors are full.” I didn’t have a face for lying. “Just stand behind me,” LaRhonda always said when we had to lie to her mother.

“You got any money?” Tom whispered after he’d heard my mother go from the bathroom back into her bedroom.

“No,” I said, but he kept on staring at me, and finally I said, “Seven bucks.”

“I’ll pay you back,” Tommy said.

“You never pay me back.”

He shoved the bills in his pocket, pushed back the shock of hair on his forehead, slid around my door and was gone. I never even heard a car start up. The sump pump was thumping again. That always made it harder to hear Tommy’s getaway.

Chapter 2

I’d made that seven dollars selling corn. For an eleven-year-old girl it felt like real money. I sat behind a card table by the road on late summer days, sometimes alone, usually with LaRhonda and Donald. It was boring, but it was something to do, although pretty much every day was like the day before. A car stopped, and a woman waved out the window. “How much?” she asked. Her hair was set in pin curls. She had a scarf over them, but the row right around her face wasn’t covered and the bobby pins sparked in the harsh August light.

“A nickel an ear,” I said. “Thirteen in a dozen.”

“I think they’re cheaper down the road,” the woman said, rubbing at her head. I don’t know why pin curls make your head itch, but they do.

“Then go down the road,” LaRhonda said under her breath. She had a mouth on her almost from the time she learned to talk.

Donald carried the paper bag to the car. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said. The woman handed him a dollar and said, “Keep the change.” I gave him a dime from the can, gave LaRhonda another, and put twenty cents in the breast pocket of my plaid cotton shirt.

The shirt had been Tommy’s. I got a lot of Tommy and Eddie’s clothes, which was made even worse because they were so much older than I was and so the clothes weren’t just boys’ clothes, they weren’t even fashionable boys’ clothes. That summer Donald wore a kind of collarless shirt with three buttons in front that I’d never seen before and that I was sure was fashionable, although that was about the last thing Donald cared about. His mother lived in a halfway decent-size city. His father was a shadowy figure. Donald spent a lot of time in Miller’s Valley. Visiting, he always called it, but he did it so often and so long that it practically counted as living there. I always felt a little lonesome, the times when he went back home, if that’s what it was.

“Dump that poor boy on his grandparents whenever she cares to,” I’d heard my mother say through the heating vent. “Her carrying on.” I hoped her carrying on wasn’t what it sounded like.

LaRhonda was wearing white patent leather shoes with a strap and a very slight heel with her pink shorts and shirt. Her white feet were rubbed red all around, her heels swaddled in Band-Aids over blisters. Most days she was limping by nightfall and her mother would want to soak her feet in Epsom salts and she would say, “Like somebody’s grandmother?” and limp off to bed. LaRhonda’s mother had been wheedled into buying those shoes for her Easter outfit, and LaRhonda took them off only when she put on her flowered shorty pajamas.

I wore Tommy’s old pajamas, too. The worst thing was, all the boys’ old clothes fit because I was narrow and sharp-shouldered, more or less built like a boy. I was a straight person, legs, nose, hair, everything long and narrow, up and down. I more or less always would be. When I got older the way I looked came into fashion, but by that time I was past caring. But when I was a kid wearing my brothers’ clothes the way I looked was a trial, as my aunt Ruth called things that bothered her. “I won’t listen to complaining about what’s on your back, Mary Margaret,” my mother said. “There’s too many fences need mending around here.” I remember first finding the expression “mending fences” in a book and being confused because I couldn’t think of it as anything but literal. Cows get antsy, or randy, or just stumble sideways, and a section of fence comes tumbling down, and they trudge out onto the road, and you have to fix the fence fast or more cows will follow, and maybe get hit by a truck driven by someone not paying attention. Happens all the time.