In Reach Read online

  “In Reach is a Winesburg, Ohio for the contemporary Great Plains. . . . Filled with complicated human stories, it is a joy to read and will stay with the reader for a long, long time.”

  —Dan O’Brien, author of A Wild Idea

  “In these glimpses of life as it is really lived, you will encounter your aunt Ella, your grandfather Leland, even the uncle no one mentions. . . . Searching for connections, you will find these folks in reach of your heart.”

  —Linda M. Hasselstrom, author of No Place Like Home and Dirt Song

  “In Reach is an elegant, pitch-perfect book. . . . Pamela Joern has once again demonstrated that she’s the real thing, a masterful writer capable of showing us the world through the passions, disappointments, secrets, losses, and small achievements of characters whose submerged lives are played out against the harsh beauty of the Nebraska plains. I loved this book.”

  —Ladette Randolph, author of Haven’s Wake

  Flyover Fiction

  Series editor: Ron Hansen

  In Reach

  Pamela Carter Joern

  University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln and London

  © 2014 by Pamela Carter Joern

  Acknowledgments for the use of copyrighted material appear in “Acknowledgments,” which constitutes an extension of the copyright page.

  All rights reserved

  Cover image © iStockphoto.com/tomeng

  Author photo by Pat and S. K. Doyle

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Joern, Pamela Carter, 1948–

  [Short stories. Selections]

  In reach / Pamela Carter Joern.

  pages cm—(Flyover fiction)

  ISBN 978-0-8032-5483-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-8032-5676-7 (pdf)

  ISBN 978-0-8032-5677-4 (epub)

  ISBN 978-0-8032-5678-1 (mobi)

  1. Nebraska—Fiction. 2. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3610.O25A6 2014

  813'.6—dc23

  2014001283

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  For Shannon and Raegan, with love and admiration

  Reach (rēch) n. an unbroken expanse of land or water

  The founder of Reach, Nebraska, was a British immigrant named Arthur Weston. Weston had grown up on the shores of Kent and made his way to America as an orphan aboard the Queen Mary in 1851. He homesteaded in the North Platte River valley, and when he saw the wide expanse of prairie grass undulating in the breeze, he said it reminded him of the open reach of the ocean.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Running in Place

  Judgment Day

  All the Wildness in Her

  Fire on His Mind

  Don’t Call Me Kid

  The Sky Is Falling

  Confessions

  Lessons at the PO

  After Death

  Redeeming the Time Being

  Harvest

  Solitary Confinements

  Normal

  Men of Steel

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  “So this is Nebraska,” Ted Kooser writes in a poem. Not being a poet, I set out to capture Nebraska in these stories. Of course, as is the nature of fiction, none of these stories happened. Out of a flash of memory here, an intriguing shadow there, I followed a path of wonder to see what it would reveal to me. This may not be your Nebraska, but it is mine, mingled with all the places I have been since, all the loves and losses I have known, all the thoughts that have crossed my mind, and all the dragonflies and sunflowers and prairie grasses that worked their enchantments on me. My intention is to pay tribute to the beauty and complexities of lives lived hard and well. To the people who did and still do make up the world of the western plains, thank you.

  This collection of stories was a long time in the making. Short of thanking the entire universe and at the risk of leaving someone out, I want to express my gratitude to the following: Sheila O’Connor and Mary Rockcastle, my mentors in the Hamline MFA program where some of these stories germinated; Mary Bednarowski, who read the most recent stories and never failed to believe in them; the writers’ group from Mallard Island; my Hamline writing buddies; the staff and my students at the Loft Literary Center, who inspire me with their dedication and love of writing; Kristen Elias Rowley, Kathryn Owens, Julie Gutin, and their colleagues at University of Nebraska Press, who have so beautifully offered my work to the reading public; our Judson Church community and all our friends, near and far, who have supported not only my writing, but also the life it engenders. Last, but never least, I wish to thank my family: my mother and my late mother-in-law, both longtime residents of small towns in Nebraska; my Aunt Dot and Uncle Ken, who have been waiting for this book; my aunts, uncles, and cousins who fanned out from Nebraska but never forgot the family ties; Bob and Norma, Kent and Leania, Linda and Bruce, Gayle and Jim, Don, my nieces and nephews and their children; my daughters and their husbands, Shannon and Matt, Raegan and Jacob; my own Fab Four—Nadine, Elijah, Henry, and Tyson—who remind me that life demands attention; and to Brad, for all and everything.

  Some of these stories were published elsewhere, and I am grateful to the editors who chose them. Three of them were published by Minnesota Monthly magazine: “Confessions” (Tamarack Award winner), November 2001; “Running in Place” (Tamarack Award finalist), January 2006; and “Fire on His Mind,” under the title “The Fireman” (Tamarack Award winner), November 2008. “Judgment Day” appeared in the Summer 2003 issue of the Red Rock Review; “After Death” in the South Dakota Review, Summer 2004; and “Lessons at the PO” in the Great River Review, Spring 2009.

  In Reach

  Running in Place

  Wayne McManus sits at the hospital bedside of his dying cousin. He’s reading Mary Oliver poems aloud, the poet lying on her stomach, studying a single blade of grass, a grasshopper’s wings. His own spindly legs are crossed knee over knee, bony silk-socked ankles nested in black wing-tipped shoes polished to mirror the sky, the laces new and waxy. His blue dress shirt snugs into the waistband of gray pleated trousers, belted with Italian leather. Glasses in small metal frames pinch a narrow nose, his eyes an icy blue. Blond hair, trimmed and tidy, shot through with gray. He looks like a character from Masterpiece Theatre, not a bank teller who’s lived all his life (save one indescribable summer) in Reach, Nebraska.

  The body on the bed shifts. The younger man is quiet now, morphine dripping into his arm, his skin translucent. Wayne has read about that. The lesions, too. One high on Mark’s forehead, another on his arm. Wayne helped the nurse turn him once. Put his hands under Mark’s body and lifted him while she tugged on the stained sheet. It was like lifting a skeleton, the bones loose and jangling. He feared that some part of Mark would break off, his leg, say, or a brittle arm that would shatter on the floor to be swept up by Hazel, the scowling cleaning woman.

  Mark strains to raise his head. Wayne lays the book of poetry, open and pages down, on the bedside table. The room smells of antiseptic, the walls white and sterile, but as he leans over Mark, his nostrils twitch at the foul odor emanating from Mark’s mouth.

  “Do you want water?” Wayne asks.

  Mark shakes his head. “What’s that?” he says, his voice whispery and coarse.

  “Water?” Wayne repeats.

  Mark rolls his head toward the book. “No, that.”

  “Mary Oliver,” Wayne says. Then, quoting from the poet, “‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’”

  “I like Bond,” Mark says.

  “Bond?”

  “James Bond.”<
br />
  “Oh, dear,” Wayne says.

  What do they have in common, really? Mark’s lived in San Francisco. He once personally met Jerry Garcia. Except for an occasional Christmas card, Wayne hasn’t heard from him in twenty years. He only found out that Mark was sick because Maude, the hospital receptionist, called him.

  Back at the bank, through a small window, Wayne smiles at his customers (he knows them all by name) and counts out tens, twenties, hundreds, bills creased and soiled from human hands. He wears gloves.

  Later, inside his house, he walks past leather upholstery, cases of books, watercolor paintings to a back bedroom where his hand slides along a pebbly plaster wall, flips a switch that lights 150 hurricane lamps crowded on shelves lining the room. More than half have been electrified, but the other 63, with their original oil wicks intact, are illuminated by lights recessed within the shelves. The lamps displayed here are his current favorites. Another 450 are boxed and labeled and tucked away in his basement. He runs his hand over the pink roses, the delicate fluted edges, hand-painted globes of exquisite little worlds.

  After supper (a meal of cold turkey and salad), he dons a light jacket to ward off the October chill and walks three blocks to the Albertsons’ house. He raps lightly on the door, stands patiently while Mary looks through the peephole. She lets him in, stands there in her black lace-up shoes, a gray crepe dress, her white hair mashed under a net. Her back is stooped, the only real change in her since she taught his fifth-grade class fifty-three years ago. Propped in an overstuffed chair, her brother Dave’s arms rest on long-necked swans crocheted into doilies, a needlepoint pillow of pansies behind his head. He doesn’t rise or speak when Wayne steps in. Wayne sits forward on the edge of the Edwardian couch, signaling that he won’t stay long.

  “How’s business?” Dave asks. The tube to Dave’s oxygen tank snakes across the floor, his breathing shallow and labored.

  “Not the same without you,” Wayne says, though Dave has been retired from the bank for twelve years.

  Mary seats herself in the rocking chair, pulls her knitting into her lap. Heavy brocade curtains veil the windows, the room spiked with shadows. No television, of course. A lamp with fringed shade. Antique tables, hand-carved. An oil painting grown dark with age, a bucolic landscape, sheep on hillsides, far from the Nebraska prairie. There’s nothing of tumbleweeds or windmills in this room. Wayne wonders, as he always does, what they do all day. They don’t allow any other visitors. Their groceries are delivered from the Jack & Jill to their back door. After the boy has gone, Mary retrieves the bags from the back porch. If they’re too heavy, she waits for Wayne and asks if he will carry them to her kitchen counter.

  Wayne first came here because Dave told him they had an old kerosene lamp that had belonged to their mother. The top globe broken. Worthless, Dave said. Wayne asked if he could take a look at it, and when he did, he could hardly conceal his excitement. Some unknown but gifted artist had painted a picnic by a river, two laughing young men against a backdrop of shimmering yellow and autumn gold. One extended his hand toward the other. Apart from them, seated on the ground, a woman wearing white clutched a parasol and looked off across the river, her face invisible. He bought it from them for $15.00. He took it to an antiques restorer down by Ogallala and had a top globe hand-made, painted with sky to make a roof over this perfect world. Whenever Mary asks about her mother’s lamp, he lies to her. Not much could be done. Packed away in my basement. Because he lies, he mows their lawn in the summer. Lights the pilot light on the furnace in the winter. When they need to go to the doctor in Scottsbluff, he drives them.

  “Any news?” Mary asks.

  Wayne clasps his hands, clears his throat. “My cousin Mark is in the hospital.”

  “Wilhelmina’s grandson?” Mary says.

  Wayne nods. “Truman’s boy.”

  Mary knits a row. She’s making socks, narrow cotton yarn, gray. She’ll wear them herself, bunched around her ankles above low-heeled shoes.

  “Truman was in my class,” she says.

  Wayne nods again.

  “Not much of a thinker,” she says.

  Wayne bristles and, at the same time, can’t fathom himself. Why should he, of all people, want to stick up for Tru?

  “Mark’s dying,” Wayne says, to punish her a little.

  Mary’s needles stop for a fraction of a second. He waits for her to ask him why. He’s decided he will say that it is cancer, which it is, by now. But she doesn’t ask. She goes on knitting.

  Back in his living room, it’s only 8:00 p.m. Not enough time used up. He pours himself a glass of red wine, settles into his leather recliner, adjusts the lamp, and lifts a book. He finds that he can’t concentrate, thinking instead that Mary could be a mean teacher, batting the backs of hands with rulers, raising red welts on knuckles, making big dumb kids—like Tru—cry out in pain.

  Wayne continues to sit with Mark. Every day when he enters the hospital room, he has to fight the urge to remove his shoes. Some old vestige of what one is supposed to do on holy ground, like Moses in the wilderness. He would not be surprised if the bed burst into flames. He keeps reading poetry, Whitman, even Yeats, trying to understand what is happening. When he is sure no nurse will come barging into the room, he speaks in gentle tones. “It’s all right,” he says, though clearly, it is not all right.

  He wants to know—things. What’s it like? Love?

  Sometimes Mark looks at him and speaks. “Where’s my momma?”

  “She died. With your daddy, in that old truck. You remember. You were seven years old.”

  “I want my momma.” Later, “Where’s Curtis?”

  Wayne scoots his chair close to the bed, bends his lips to Mark’s ear. “Tell me about Curtis,” he says. He wants to hear of candlelight, whispered words, limbs entwined, taut skin sliding.

  “Momma?” Mark says.

  “Shhh. Quiet, now. Momma wants you to rest.”

  At night, he thinks about that summer in Denver. Was that love? How could something that moved him so far outside himself be good for him? He came out of the two months he spent there like someone surfacing from a fever, dazed and disoriented. One morning, he woke and turned his head in the dim light of a hotel room. He heard sounds in the bathroom, smelled the heavy odors of sweat and semen. His glance fell on a naked light bulb dangling from the ceiling, a pair of pants thrown over the back of a chair, a cracked window repaired with yellowed tape. Before a thought could form in his head, he’d slipped on his shoes. I don’t know you, he was thinking, as his feet trod down the stairs. He tripped on the bottom step, something he would recall for years. He would relive the sharp stab in his ankle, but he would not remember the color of eyes or shape of jaw or the tremble in his own hand.

  On the day Mark slips into the final coma, he whispers a few words to Wayne. Wayne bends low to hear them.

  “I never wanted—I never wanted . . .” Mark stops, gasps for air.

  “It’s okay,” Wayne says. What does the past matter? Truman nearly beat him to death, tied him to a barbed wire fence with his pants down around his ankles. None of that was Mark’s fault. The boy wasn’t even born yet. Don’t apologize for that sorry sonofabitch, Wayne wants to say. But all he can manage is, “It’s okay.”

  “I never wanted—” Mark grasps him by the shirtfront, pulls him down to the bed. “To be like you,” he says.

  Afraid that he will start to cry, Wayne only nods. He understands completely. Who would choose this? He melts with gratitude. Transparent and relieved, like listening to Bach, his soul wrung out and connected and momentarily not alone.

  “I never wanted”—Mark’s hand still clenches the starched front of Wayne’s shirt—“to be afraid. Like you.”

  Wayne steps back. He raises his hand to quell the sting, as if he’s been slapped, thinks of a string of retorts—he’s not the one who ran away—but before he can shape his lips around his defense, Mark slides under, like someone who’s fallen through ice, and thou
gh Wayne comes every day and sits longer hours, though he holds Mark in his arms through the final shudder into death, Mark doesn’t waken.

  He attends Mark’s funeral, although Wilhelmina will not look at him. He does not sit with her. He stands in the back at the cemetery, not under the tarp that protects Wilhelmina and her friends from the November wind. She did not visit her grandson in the hospital; he knows that for a fact. She neither forgets nor forgives, and while he stares at her stiffened back, a flock of geese rises from the river a half mile north and honks across the sky.

  Two days later, Wayne is fired from his job at the bank. The banker’s son has taken over, moved back to Reach after Harvard and years of failure on the New York Stock Exchange. He cites change, more automation, redundancy. Wayne doesn’t even have a desk to clean out.

  He doesn’t tell Mary and Dave for another week. He doesn’t want them to connect the loss of his job to Mark’s funeral, to the fact that Wilhelmina has all the money from the sale of her ranch in that bank.

  He’s sitting in their living room, under the rosy glow of the lamp, when he lets them know that he’s decided to retire.

  “Oh?” Mary says. She rests her knitting in her lap.

  “Why?” Dave says. He rallies to ask this question, piercing eyes, then sinks back.

  “Time to do other things,” Wayne says, his voice upbeat and cheerful.

  They lapse into silence. Dave falls asleep, a thin line of drool spinning from the corner of his mouth to the needlepoint pillow. It must be filthy, that pillow, and Wayne reminds himself not to touch it. Mary resumes knitting, the click-click of the needles twanging Wayne’s nerves. He rubs his forehead with his hand. He despises people who have their hands on themselves all the time, grooming a mustache, pulling their ears, pushing their glasses up on their nose. He’s pondering the larger fate of humanity, how eventually we all become what we detest, when Mary speaks.