Vinegar Hill by A. Manette Ansay Page B

the blankets pulled up to his neck, bunched under his chin. But if he lies awake for long, his mind will wander and he’ll find himself stretched out on hard, cool pine, hearing the buzz of flies and the beating of wings. The smell of vanilla. His mother’s fierce scream.
    He opens his eyes. In the kitchen, Ellen says something sharp to the children; one of them answers back, Wait . No one answered back in his grandmother’s kitchen. Children were to be seen and not heard. He ate whatever was set before him. If he didn’t clean his plate, it meant he must be ill, and his grandmother gave him tablespoons of cod-liver oil. He remembers the oily taste, its slow,thick descent into his belly. His grandmother always watched him for signs of illness because his lungs were weak. In winter, he caught colds that lingered on for months. Feverish, he’d lie in bed, staring at the blankets his mother hung over the windows because light was dangerous to sick people. He tried not to fall asleep because he believed that was when people died.
    Plates clatter, jackets rattle, quick footsteps brush the floor. James struggles not to listen, but it’s too late, he’s awake now, and the day stretching out in front of him like a field of snow, the distant fence posts frail as shadows, unable to contain him.
    The front door slams. James is relieved. Now he hears Fritz rumble, Mary-Margaret moan. There are footsteps in the hall, the sound of the shower kicking in; once, twice. Mary-Margaret scratches at the door and pokes her head into the room. He can smell the salve she rubs into her joints.
    â€œJimmy,” she says. “Are you sick?”
    â€œNo, Mother. I’m resting.”
    â€œHe wants us to play cards at Senior Citizens’.”
    She means Fritz.
    â€œGood, Mother,” James says. “Go.”
    â€œI could stay home, if you wanted. You can ask him.”
    â€œNo, Mother,” James says. “I just need to rest.” He closes his eyes, waits until he hears the click of the door. The way she fusses over him makes him feel unmanly. It embarrasses him to think that he came from inside her body, his face pushing out through her woman’s parts, his mouth clamped to her woman’s nipple.
    It is only after they leave for Senior Citizens’ that James finally gets up, moving slowly down the hall to the bathroom as if he were floating there. He has one more day at home before he goes back on the road, this time a familiar route near Rochester, driving fast in the company car, stopping to eat at diners with names like Sal’sand the Eggery and Dew Drop Inn. He no longer notices the flat land twisting into hills along the Mississippi, doesn’t taste the bacon and hash and toast gleaming with oil. His mind swallows him whole, and he lives in its belly for days. It’s the driving that does it, and the lull of the road and the steadiness of the engine like a heartbeat. He shakes men’s hands, smiles briefly at waitresses in coffee shops, but he is cocooned, invisible, serene.
    Returning home is being torn from all that. Returning home is waking up at four-thirty on a winter morning, his grandmother’s hand in his hair, and breaking ice in the basin to wash his face and neck. They milked thirty-six cows between them: James, Mitch, and Fritz, while Ann got breakfast in the house and Mary-Margaret sat wrapped in a shawl by the stove, sickly like James, never much help.
    He brushes his teeth, shaves, steps into the shower, feeling as though he is not actually doing any of these things, but is watching himself, or someone like himself, from a window that’s too small for him to see the entire picture. He has had that feeling before; it is how he imagines a dead person feels. Once, when he was eight or nine, Mitch invented a game called Dead . He took James out to the barn, to one of the small rooms under the haymow where the bins of grain were stored. It was August.