After the Plague: And Other Stories Read online

  “That’s all right,” he croons, his voice flowing like sugar water into a child’s cup, “I’m just glad to help out. Now, is this address on your driver’s license still current?”

  My widow is waiting at the door for him when he steps through the front gate, a pair of legs like chopsticks in motion, his hair a dyed fluff of nothing combed straight up on his head as if he were one of those long-pants comedians of her father’s era, a face gouged with wrinkles and a smile that makes his eyes all but disappear into two sinkholes of flesh. He wouldn’t have got any farther than the gate if I was around, and I don’t care how old I might have been, or how frail—this man is trouble, and my widow doesn’t know it. Look out, honey, I want to say. Watch out for this one.

  But she’s smiling her beautiful smile, the smile that even after all these years has the two puckered dimples in it, her face shining and serene, and “Hello, hello, Mr. Smith,” she’s saying, “won’t you come in?”

  He will. He ducks reflexively on stepping through the door, as if his head would crack the doorframe, a tall man with dangling hands, a grubby white shirt and a tie that looks as if it’d been used to swab out the deep fryer at McDonald’s. In his left hand, a plain brown shopping bag, and as she shuts the door behind him and six or seven cats glance up suspiciously from their perch on the mantel, he holds it out to her. “Here it is,” he says, and sure enough, her purse is inside, soft black leather with a silver clasp and the ponzu sauce stain etched into the right panel like an abstract design. She fumbles through the purse for her wallet, thinking to offer him a reward, but then she remembers that there’s no money in it—hadn’t he said on the phone that the money was gone? “I wanted to—” she begins, “I mean, you’ve been so nice, and I—”

  Bob Smith is not listening. He’s wandered out into the arena of the grand room, hands clasped behind his back, dodging mounds of discarded magazines, balled-up skeins of yarn, toppled lamps and a cat-gutted ottoman. He has the look of a prospective buyer, interested, but not yet committed. “Pretty old place,” he says, taking his time.

  My widow, plumped with gratitude, is eager to accommodate him. “Nineteen-oh-nine,” she says, working the purse between her hands. “It’s the only Prairie style—”

  “The rugs and all,” he says, “they must be worth something. And all this pottery and brass stuff—you must have jewelry too.”

  “Oh, yes,” my widow says, “I’ve been collecting antique jewelry for, well, since before I was an antique myself,” and she appends a little laugh. What a nice man, she’s thinking, and how many out there today would return a lady’s purse? Or anything, for that matter? They’d stolen the lawn mower right out of the garage, stripped the tires off the car that time she’d broken down in Oxnard. She’s feeling giddy, ready to dial Inge the minute he leaves and crow about the purse that’s come back to her as if it had wings.

  “Your husband here?” Bob Smith asks, picking his way back to her like a man on the pitching deck of a ship. There seems to be something stuck to the bottom of his left shoe.

  “My husband?” Another laugh, muted, caught deep in her throat. “He’s been gone twenty years now. Twenty-one. Or no, twenty-two.”

  “Kids?”

  “Our son, Philip, lives in Calcutta, India. He’s a doctor.”

  “So there’s nobody here but you,” Bob Smith says, and that’s when my widow feels the first faint stirring of alarm. A cat rises slowly on the periphery of her vision, stretching itself. The sun slants through the windows, irradiating the skeleton of the dead palm in the big pot in the corner. Everything is still. She just nods her head in response to the question and clutches the purse to her, thinking, It’s all right, just show him to the door now, and thank him, tell him the reward’s coming, in the mail, just leave an address …

  But Bob Smith isn’t ready to leave. In fact, he’s hovering over her now, his face as rucked and seamed as an old mailbag, his eyes glittering like something that’s been crushed in the street. “So where’s the jewelry then?” he says, and there’s nothing of the good Samaritan left in his voice now, no bonhomie, no fellow feeling or even civility. “Can you even find it in this shithole? Huh?”

  My widow doesn’t say a word.

  He has a hand on her wrist suddenly, clamped there like a manacle, and he’s tugging at her, shouting in her face. “You stupid old bitch! You’re going to pay—shit, yes, you’re going to pay. Any cash? Huh? Cash? You know what that is?” And then, before she has time to answer, he snakes out his other hand, the right one, and slaps her till she jerks back from the grip of him like an animal caught in the jaws of a trap.

  My widow hasn’t been slapped in seventy-odd years, not since she got into a fight with her sister over a pan of brownies when their mother stepped out of the kitchen to answer the phone. She’s in shock, of course—everything’s happened so fast—but she’s tough, my widow, as tough in the core of her as anybody on earth. Nobody slaps her. Nobody comes into her house on false pretenses and—well, you get the picture. And in the next instant her free hand comes up out of the purse with an ancient can of Mace clutched in it, and because this is a good and fitting universe I’m constructing here, the aerosol spray still works despite an expiration date ten years past, and before she can think, Bob Smith is writhing on the floor in a riot of cat feces, dust balls and lint, cursing and rubbing at his eyes. And more: when my widow turns for the door, ready to scurry out onto that brick porch and scream till her dried-up old lungs give out, who should be standing there at the door but Megan Capaldi, screaming herself.

  IN HER OWN WORDS

  As I say, my widow doesn’t get the newspaper, not anymore. But Megan Capaldi brings her two copies the next day, because her picture is on the front page under the caption, “FEISTY OCTOGENARIAN THWARTS BURGLARY.” There she is, hunched and squinting into the camera, arm in arm with Megan Capaldi, who dialed 911 on her cell phone and escorted my widow to safety while the San Roque Municipal Police handcuffed Bob Smith and secured him in the back of their cruiser. In the photograph, which shows off the front of the house to real advantage, I think, the windows especially, with their intricate design and the wooden frames I scraped, sanded and painted at least three times in the course of my tenure here, my widow is smiling. So too is Megan Capaldi, who wouldn’t be bad-looking at all if only she’d stand up straight. Posed there, with the house mushrooming over them in grainy black and white, you can hardly tell them apart.

  On page 2, at the end of the article, my widow is given an opportunity to reflect on her ordeal. “It’s a shame, is what it is,” she is quoted as saying, “the way people like this prey on the elderly—and don’t forget the telemarketers, they’re just as bad. It didn’t used to be this way, before everybody got so suspicious of everybody else, and you didn’t have to triple-lock your doors at night, either.”

  There was more, much more, because the young woman reporter they sent out to the house had been so sympathetic—a cat person herself—but there were space limitations, and the story, while novel, didn’t have the sort of grit and horror the paper’s readers had come to expect. Any number of times during the interview, for instance, my widow had begun with the phrase “When my husband was alive,” but none of that made the cut.

  NIGHT

  It is Christmas, a clear cold night, the sky above the house staggering under the weight of the stars. My widow doesn’t know about the stars—or if she does, it’s only theoretically. She doesn’t leave the house much, except for shopping, of course, and shopping is almost exclusively a daytime activity. At the moment, she is sitting in the grand room, on the cherrywood couch in front of the fireplace, where the ashes lie heaped, twenty-two years cold. She has been knitting, and the electric blue needles and balls of yarn lie in her lap, along with three or four cats. Her head is thrown back, resting on the broad wooden plane of the couch, and she is staring up at the high sloping ceiling above her, oblivious to the sky beyond and the cold pinpoints of light crowding the plane
of the ecliptic. She’s not thinking about the roof, or the roofer, or rain. She’s not thinking about anything.

  There is little evidence of the holidays here—a few Christmas cards scattered across the end table, a wreath of artificial pine she draped over one of the light sconces six years ago. She doesn’t bother anymore with the handcrafted elves and angels from Gstaad, the crèche made of mopane wood, or even the colored lights and bangles. All that was peerless in its time, the magic of the season, our son coming down the stairs in his pajamas, year after year, growing taller and warier, the angels tarnished, the pile of gift-wrapped presents growing in proportion, but that time is past. She and Inge had planned to get together and exchange gifts in the afternoon, but neither of them had felt much enthusiasm for it, and besides, Inge’s car wouldn’t start. What I’d wanted here was for our son to pull up front in a cab, having flown in all the way from the subcontinent to be with his mother for Christmas—and he’d been planning on it too, planning to surprise her, but a new and cruelly virulent strain of cholera swept through the refugee camps, and he couldn’t get away.

  So she sits there by the ashes of the cold fire, listening to the furtive groans and thumps of the old house. The night deepens, the stars draw back, higher and higher, arching into the backbone of the sky. She is waiting for something she can’t name, a beautiful old lady clothed in cats, my widow, just waiting. It is very still.

  The Underground Gardens

  But you do not know me if you think I am afraid… .

  —Franz Kafka, “The Burrow”

  All he knew, really, was digging. He dug to eat, to breathe, to live and sleep. He dug because the earth was there beneath his feet, and men paid him to move it. He dug because it was a sacrament, because it was honorable and holy. As a boy in Sicily he stood beside his brothers under the sun that was like a hammer and day after day stabbed his shovel into the skin of the ancient venerable earth of their father’s orchards. As a young man in Boston and New York he burrowed like a rodent beneath streets and rivers, scouring the walls of subway tubes and aqueducts, dropping his pick, lifting his shovel, mining dirt. And now, thirty-two years old and with the deed to seventy bleak and hard-baked acres in his back pocket, he was in California. Digging.

  FRIENDS! COME TO THE LAND OF FERTILITY WHERE THE

  SUN SHINES THE YEAR ROUND AND THE EARTH NEVER

  SUBMITS TO FROST! COME TO THE LAND THE ANGELS

  BLESSED! COME TO CALIFORNIA! WRITE NOW, C/O

  EUPHRATES MEAD, Box 9, Fresno, California.

  Yes, the land never froze, that was true and incontrovertible. But the sun scorched it till it was like stone, till it was as hard and impenetrable as the adobe brick the Indians and Mexicans piled up to make their shabby, dusty houses. This much Baldasare discovered in the torporific summer of 1905, within days of disembarking from the train with his pick and shovel, his cardboard suitcase, and his meager supply of dried pasta, flour, and beans. He’d come all the way across the country to redeem the land that would bloom with the serrate leaves and sweetly curling tendrils of his own grapes, the grapes of the Baldasare Forestiere Vineyards.

  When he got down off the train, the air hot and sweet with the scent of things growing and multiplying, he was so filled with hope it was a kind of ecstasy. There were olive trees in California, orange and lemon and lime, spreading palms, fields of grapes and cotton that had filled the rushing windows of the train with every kind of promise. No more sleet and snow for him, no more wet feet and overshoes or the grippe that took all the muscle out of your back and arms, but heat, good Sicilian heat, heat that baked you right down to the grateful marrow of your happy Sicilian bones.

  The first thing he did was ask directions at the station, his English a labyrinth of looming verbs and truncated squawks that sounded strange in his ears, but was serviceable for all that, and he soon found himself walking back in the direction he’d come, following the crucified grid of the tracks. Three miles south, then up a dry wash where two fire-scarred oaks came together like a pair of clasped arms, he couldn’t miss it. At least that was what the man on the platform had told him. He was a farmer, this man, unmistakably a farmer, in faded coveralls and a straw hat, long of nose and with two blue flecks for eyes in a blasted face. “That’s where all the Guineas are,” he said, “that’s where Mead sold ’em. Seventy acres, isn’t it? That’s what I figured. Same as the rest.”

  When he got there and set his cardboard suitcase in the dust, he couldn’t help but pace off the whole seventy acres with the surveyor’s map Euphrates Mead had sent in the mail held out before him like a dowsing stick. The land was pale in a hundred shades of brown and a sere gray-green, and there was Russian thistle everywhere, the decayed thorny bones of it already crushed to chaff in his tracks. It crept down the open neck of his shirt and into his socks and shoes and the waist of his trousers, an itch of the land, abrasive and unforgiving. Overhead, vultures rose on the air currents like bits of winged ash. Lizards scuttered underfoot.

  That night he ate sardines from a tin, licking the oil from his fingers and dipping soda crackers in the residue that collected in the corners, and then he spread a blanket under one of his new oak trees and slept as if he’d been knocked unconscious. In the morning he walked into town and bought a wheelbarrow. He filled the wheelbarrow with provisions and two five-gallon cans that had once held olive oil and now contained water—albeit an oleaginous and tinny-tasting variant of what he knew water to be. Then he hefted the twin handles of the new wheelbarrow till he felt the familiar flex of the muscles of his lower back, and he guided it all the long way back out to the future site of the Baldasare Forestiere Vineyards.

  He’d always thought big, even when he was a boy wandering his father’s orchards, the orchards that would never be his because of a simple confluence of biology and fate—his brothers had been born before him. If, God forbid, either Pietro or Domenico should die or emigrate to Argentina or Australia, there was always the other one to stand in his way. But Baldasare wasn’t discouraged—he knew he was destined for greatness. Unlike his brothers, he had the gift of seeing things as they would one day be, of seeing himself in America, right here in Fresno, his seventy acres buried in grapes, the huge oak fermenting barrels rising above the cool cellar floors, his house of four rooms and a porch set on a hill and his wife on the porch, his four sons and three daughters sprinting like colts across the yard.

  He didn’t even stop to eat, that first day. Sweating till his eyes burned with the sting of salt, his hands molded to the shape of the wheelbarrow’s polished handles, he made three more trips into town and back—twelve miles in all, and half of them pushing the overladen wheelbarrow. People saw him there as they went about their business in carriages and farm wagons, a sun-seared little man in slept-in clothes following the tread of a single sagging tire along the shoulder of the broad dirt road. Even if he’d looked up, they probably wouldn’t have nodded a greeting, but he never took his eyes off the unwavering line the tire cut in the dirt.

  By the end of the week a one-room shanty stood beneath the oak, a place not much bigger than the bed he constructed of planks. It was a shelter, that was all, a space that separated him from the animals, that reminded him he was a man and not a beast. Men are upright, his father had told him when he was a boy, and they have dominion over the beasts. Men live in houses, don’t they? And where do the beasts live, mio figlio? In the ground, no? In a hole.

  It was some day of the following week when Baldasare began digging (he didn’t have a calendar and he didn’t know Sunday from Monday, and even if he did, where was the church and the priest to guide him?). He wanted the well to be right in front of the shack beneath the tree where his house would one day stand, but he knew enough about water to know that it wouldn’t be as easy as that. He spent a whole morning searching the immediate area, tracing dry watercourses, observing the way the hill of his shack and the one beside it abutted each other like the buttocks of a robust and fecund woman, until fin
ally, right there, right in the cleft of the fundament, he pitched his shovel into the soil.

  Two feet down he hit the hardpan. It didn’t disconcert him, not at all—he never dreamed it would extend over all of the seventy acres—and he attacked the rocky substrate with his pick until he was through it. As he dug deeper, he squared up the sides of his excavation with mortared rock and devised a pulley system to haul the buckets of superfluous earth clear of the hole. By the close of the second day, he needed a ladder. A week later, at thirty-two feet, he hit water, a pure sweet seep of it that got his shoes wet and climbed up the bottom rungs of his homemade ladder to a depth of four feet. And even as he set up the hand pump and exulted over the flow of shimmering sun-struck water, he was contriving his irrigation system, his pipes, conduits, and channels, a water tank, a reservoir. Yes. And then, with trembling hands, he dug into the earth in the place where the first long row of canes would take root, and his new life, his life of disillusionment, began.

  Three months later, when his savings began to dwindle down to nothing, Baldasare became a laboring man all over again. He plowed another man’s fields, planted another man’s trees, dug irrigation channels and set grape canes for one stranger after another. And on his own property, after those first few weeks of feverish activity, all he’d managed, after working the soil continuously and amending it with every scrap of leaf-mold and bolus of chicken manure he could scrounge, was a vegetable garden so puny and circumscribed a housewife would have been ashamed of it. He’d dreamed of independence—from his father and brothers, from the hard-nosed Yankee construction bosses of Boston and Manhattan Island—and what had he gotten but wage slavery all over again?

  He was depressed. Gloomy. Brooding and morose. It wasn’t so much Mr. Euphrates Mead who’d betrayed him, but the earth, the earth itself. Plying his shovel, sweating in a long row of sweating men, he thought of suicide in all its gaudy and elaborate guises, his eyes closed forever on his worthless land and his worthless life. And then one rainy afternoon, sitting at the counter in Siagris’ Drugstore with a cup of coffee and a hamburger sandwich, he had a vision that changed all that. The vision was concrete, as palpable as flesh, and it moved with the grace and fluidity of a living woman, a woman he could almost reach out and … “Can I get you anything else?” she asked.