Here So Far Away(32)
“Is it . . . is it moonshine?”
He tried not to smile, but his whole face crinkled.
“You make moonshine?” I don’t know why I was whispering. Wilfred the Electively Mute Parakeet wasn’t going to talk.
“Used to bury it around the house. Used to be drunk when I buried it around the house. Never could remember where I put them all. Tell you what, you can keep that.”
I set the bottle down on the table. “I’m good, thanks.”
“Don’t you tell me that you and your friends don’t have a drink sometimes.”
“Isn’t moonshine supposed to make you go blind?”
“Doesn’t go bad. Maybe if it was off to begin with, but that’s good stuff. Now, you take it and give it to your boyfriend if you don’t want to drink it yourself. I bet you’ll have an easier time getting around the law in your house than I would in mine. Mind you, it’s better than closing up shop and living in a nursing home, like my daughter’s always telling me to do.”
He spat on the floor.
“Rupert!”
“I was demonstrating that I don’t like the idea of dying in one of them places.”
I took a tissue from my pocket and wiped up the gob. The floor was now cleaner in that one spot, the gold pattern of the linoleum coming through. “That’s what you call a spit shine,” Rupert said.
Next thing I knew, I was on my hands and knees scrubbing. Brushes and rags quickly turned soot black and I went again and again to the sink to rinse them in scalding water and vinegar. I couldn’t stop. The spreading gold was addictive.
“Rupert, do you mind if I ask how old you are?” I lifted up each of his feet and scoured the floor underneath.
“Old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.”
“And when did you stop farming?”
“After my heart attack. Ach, don’t look so alarmed. I was home from the hospital that same day. I was glad, even. Yes, glad to know I’ve got a bad ticker. Means the end could come quick. Matter fact, if you ever see me doing this . . .” He clutched his left arm. “You walk away, let nature take its course.”
“Most people want to go in their sleep or surrounded by loved ones. Like in a movie.”
“Now, that’s why I say that if I had less religion, I’d go by my own hand and be done with it. Imagine, people standing around your bed, staring at you, jumping every time they think your soul might have got sucked out of you, wishing it would already because they’ve got better things to do? I don’t want my last vision of this earth to be my daughter going . . .” He leapt to his feet, shaking grit from his shoes onto the clean floor.
“Rupert?”
“Yes, honey?”
“Before you get dramatic again, take off those shoes and let me give them a scrub.”
After I finished the floor, I set Rupert up with what he said was his favorite dinner—beans and wieners—and wandered through the fields and down the ridge toward the lighthouse.
The light was gray-tinged, the wind hurrying clouds across the darkening turquoise above, grass rustling in waves like the surf washing over a beach. And then, out of nowhere: something pure white and set ablaze. It looked like a small hot-air balloon, maybe two feet tall, its fire burning brightly against the dimming sky. Soon there were more, at least a dozen launching from the other side of the lighthouse, it appeared, and floating across the fields and up the mountain like ghosts. They flew higher and higher, spreading out and disappearing beyond the tree line.
It was nearly dark by the time the last balloon had vanished and I turned to go climb back to the farm. Someone was standing on the slope above me. Francis. Was he watching me too? I couldn’t tell. I felt the lake stone in my pocket, the one from Lake Victoria that he’d given me that night at the bar, smooth and warm against my palm.
After what seemed like a long time, he began to walk slowly toward the house, the soft gray of his uniform barely visible in the grass. When I got to my car, he was nowhere in sight.
Fifteen
And so it went for the first week or so, me running off to the farm after school on the days I had less homework, and beating it out of there before Francis got home, sometimes passing him on the driveway as he was turning in.
Until he arrived early one night. When he pulled in, I was outside feeding Shaggy kitchen scraps. I flipped the bucket over so Shaggy could snuffle the remnants out of the dirt, hung it on a peg at the side of the barn without rinsing it, and started for Abe.
“Hang on a sec so I can pay you,” he said, getting out of his car. “Unless you’d rather take Rupert to the bank so he can settle with you directly.”
I held out my hands, and he counted the money into my upturned palms. “Twenty-forty-sixty-touched-your-boob-one-hundred.”
Neither of us spoke, just stared at the small pile of bills. My left boob had a sort of Day-Glo feeling where he’d accidentally grazed it.
Finally, I said, “That’s worth at least another ten.”
“I pay you and then I have to arrest you for solicitation.”
Rupert stuck his head out the porch door. “Oh, look what the cat dragged in. You going already, George? Stay for dinner, why don’t you?”
“Thanks, but I’m not hungry,” I said.