“So did the spirit move you to agree with your dad?” she asked Cub. “About cutting our mountain down to the stumps?”
“You act like we have a choice. We need the money.”
“He needs the money. Bear didn’t ask us before he took out that equipment loan. Why is this balloon payment our problem?”
“He didn’t know he’d lose all his contracts when this economy crap hit the fan.”
“Well, but it was his risk.”
“And it’s his land.”
“And we have nothing? Whatever gets done on that farm, we help do it. Cub, look at me. Will you just look at me when I’m talking to you?”
He stopped and turned with exaggerated annoyance, looking at her with tired, flat, loveless eyes, as sick of this story as she was. She wanted what could not be. She wanted him to choose his team. Not mother and son. Man and wife.
“You know I’m right,” she said fiercely. “We work that farm, we’re raising our children to call it home, and we don’t even get a vote? What am I saying? We don’t even get any g-d Christmas ornaments! We just beg for your mother and daddy’s handouts. Damn it, Cub. When are you going to potty-train yourself?”
People were staring. The checkout lady in the red turtleneck looked ready to call someone. Having a marital knock-down-drag-out in public was the trashiest kind of humiliation. The whole tired tangle of her life disgusted her. Suddenly, like the flush in the back of her throat she always felt before a virus came on, she had it back: the bizarre detachment that had pulled her in October and November to run away from her marriage. Riding the crest of that wave that shut out everything but the thrill of forward motion. In this moment, here, she was sane enough to be terrified. That whole almost-affair had been like a dream. In real life there were no clean getaways. In this life, she had to line up a sitter just to have a fight.
Cub picked up a sippy cup shaped like a frog, two dollars. She grabbed it from him and tossed it into the cart. So the cashiers wouldn’t think they were here to shoplift.
“What did he say, on Sunday?” Cub asked.
“Who?”
“Pastor Ogle. About the mountain.”
Cub would go with the prevailing wind, whether it was Bobby Ogle or his mother. He wanted an ally. So did Hester, her ferocity notwithstanding. Everyone wanted to be inside the fold rather than out; maybe life was that simple. “Would that settle it for you,” she asked, “if Bobby came out against the logging?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would it make a difference if Hester did? Or anybody else on the planet, other than me?”
“Everybody on the planet doesn’t know about it,” Cub said.
“Well, just about. You can’t keep a tattoo on your butt a secret in this town. If Bear even wanted to keep it quiet, which he doesn’t.”
“He’s got nothing to be ashamed of. He says it’s wrong to break a contract.”
“Are we speaking of Bear Turnbow’s morals? Oh, just a minute. Let me wave some money in the air and see which way his morals turn.”
Cub picked up something called a “whip-around sound wand,” just to look at it, but she yanked it from his hand and threw it back at the shelf. A toy whose sole purpose was to drive mothers insane.
Cub was starting to shrink from her temper, the predictable course of things. Whipped, she knew what men called it. All roads in her marriage led to this, the feeling she’d stepped into Cub’s life to take over where Hester left off, and that was the most wretched thought of her day. “I’m sorry,” she said, handing the wand back to him. He waved it around with no real enthusiasm, and put it back.
“So what does Pastor Ogle think?” Cub asked her again. “About what we should do up there.”
“Why should Bobby Ogle decide what we do with our own land?”
Of course she knew why. Why did people ask Dear Abby how to behave, or take Johnny Midgeon’s word on which men in D.C. were crooks? It was the same on all sides, the yuppies watched smart-mouthed comedians who mocked people living in double-wides who listened to country music. The very word Tennessee made those audiences burst into laughter, she’d heard it. They would never come see what Tennessee was like, any more than she would get a degree in science and figure out the climate things Dr. Byron described. Nobody truly decided for themselves. There was too much information. What they actually did was scope around, decide who was looking out for their clan, and sign on for the memos on a wide array of topics.
Cub had left the toy aisle but returned carrying the ugliest object she’d ever seen in her life. A big planter box shaped like a swan. “Should we get this for Mother?”
She looked it up and down. The shiny orange beak, the cheap molded white plastic that would fall apart in a season. The seam that ran up the neck and down the middle of its hateful, beady-eyed face. “Sure,” she said. “Hester will love it.”
He vanished again, leaving her to push that blooming swan in her cart for all to see. The close-set eyes made it look like that killer in Psycho. A gift that would go on giving, she realized, after Hester filled it with petunias on her porch, and she’d meet that evil gaze every time she pulled in their drive. She felt guilty about despising Hester. Even that was getting complicated. They were allies in some sense, given the new backbiting in the flock. Bobby himself might be on the fence. Last Sunday he’d spoken of a throwaway society and things of this world taking on too much importance, and naturally she thought of Bear and his logging, though she could have been reading into it. He said the Old and New Testaments together had over a thousand passages about respecting God’s earth, which seemed pretty direct. But later he blessed all those present in the hope of many things including prosperity, which kind of undermined his point. It made her feel hopeless. Not even Bobby Ogle could read those thousand passages and figure things out on a case-by-case basis. In a world of wars and religious fracas, prosperity might be the sole point of general agreement. Honestly, if you waved a handful of money, whose head didn’t turn toward it? Only those who’d already paid off their houses, was her guess.
Cub had abandoned her in the toy aisle, still having found nothing that would please Preston. Cordie was easy, she would make wrapping paper a festivity, but Preston was another story. She felt haunted by her son’s hopeful gaze and inevitable disenchantment as she looked down the row of married Potato Heads and knock-off Barbies. Her eye landed on a set of green plastic binoculars, shrink-wrapped onto a bright cardboard backing. “Funtastic!” it said. Explore, discover, get close to nature, all for $1.50, carry strap included. Made in China. She held the plastic package sideways up to her eye, trying to peer through, and couldn’t even make out the items in her own shopping cart. The quality was exactly what you’d expect for a buck-fifty. It was so tempting to buy a horrible thing you could afford, just because the package said “Explore nature.” You could pretend it actually worked, and make your kids shut up and do the same. Child-rearing in the underprivileged lane. She put back the binoculars, feeling so desperate for a cigarette she considered lighting up right there in front of Mrs. Potato Head. She could get in a few good hits before someone made her stop. She knew they wouldn’t kick her out of the store. They wanted her damn fifty dollars.