The Gypsy Man Paperback - 2003

Details

• Title The Gypsy Man
• Author Robert Bausch
• Binding Paperback
• Pages 495
• Volumes 1
• Language ENG
• Publisher Harvest Books
• Date 2003-11-15
• ISBN 9780156028738 / 0156028735
• Weight 1.16 lbs (0.53 kg)
• Dimensions 7.98 x 5.36 x 0.91 in (20.27 x 13.61 x 2.31 cm)
• Library of Congress subjects Mothers and daughters, Domestic fiction
• Library of Congress Catalog Number 2002005649
• Dewey Decimal Code FIC

Penny

At the top of this mountain, where clouds are neighbors, you can see everything clear-close up or miles and miles away. The air is colder somehow and don't get hazy too often. From the back porch of my cabin I can see the white stone all the way across the yard. Maybe it's always been there, but it never meant so much until now. It was just a stone for a long time. Yesterday, my little girl found lettering on it.

I didn't mind it when it was just a white stone. It looked like a small piece of paper, sticking up out of the brown dirt. I remember one time I pointed it out to John and I said, "Look, it's like the mountain has a broke bone sticking out of it."

And John says, "What's that my daddy's always saying? 'Ain't no Bone ever broke. We bend. We don't break.'" He smiled, give a short laugh. You see that was John's last name: Bone. He used to be my husband.

I always liked to sit next to him in the evening and just talk. That day I leaned my head on his shoulder and just concentrated on the smell of him, on the curve of his arm. I don't remember if I knew already he was going.

"Seems funny for my daddy to be saying that, don't it?" he says.

John's father was a drunkard. And still is. Nothing else. He's under the care of a bottle.

I said, "You worried about him again?"

"Worrying about a thing don't change it," he says. "But if there ever was a broke Bone, he's it."

We was married only a few months when John got taken off. It seems like just yesterday. But it was a long time ago. And even though he said that about no Bone ever being broke and all, I wonder sometimes what's happened to him. I never see him, never talk to him. But John was about as solid as anyone I've ever known. It took me a year or two to speak of him in the past tense. Tory don't even remember him, and she's six going on seven. He ain't dead or nothing, but he may as well be. Plain as day.

I try not to think about John, but I see the light of him in Tory's eyes. The way she flashes scorn or pity, or when she laughs or teases me, or gets stubborn and can't say nothing but no-it's John in her eyes.

But like I said, John is gone. When they took him away he says, "I'm dead to you, and you got to be dead to me."

"I can't," I said. I wasn't crying, but it took all I had. I couldn't resist his will, too. "I can't think of you dead when I know you're alive."

"I ain't alive," he says. "I ain't alive again, honey, for twenty years."

"I'll wait then," I said.

"No," he says. "You ain't."

He wanted me to divorce him, but I wouldn't do it. I said, "Why let the state in on that, too?"

"In on what?"

"On our vows. Our betrothment."

Now I was being stubborn. Tory just a baby in my arms, and the state takes John away from me, for twenty years. He spends all his days and nights at a place called Richard Bland. It's a prison, in case you don't know. I ain't seen him in almost six years. I miss him sometimes, but not nearly as bad as I did in the beginning. You might think I'm only saying that, but it's true. He's going to be there another fourteen years, so I don't see no point in pining over him. It is sad, though, because he was really innocent. Oh, he done what he done, but he didn't mean to. It was just an accident. But he got charged with manslaughter, anyway, and now my daughter is fatherless, as I was.

My father died in the war. Got killed in France, I'm told, although it might've been anywhere over there, as far as I know. I was eleven years old. When I was fifteen, I met John, and by the time I was seventeen I married him and give birth to Tory.

We been together, just her and me and my aunt Clare, since they took John away. We done all right, I guess. Clare runs the store and cooks for us-and sometimes I cook. I'm teaching Tory to cook a little bit, and she helps me with the wash, sometimes. On Saturdays I work in the Goodyear Tire and Auto Store. Just a clerk, you know, but sometimes I help with the ciphering and keeping the books and all. Mr. Henderson, the manager of the store, says one day he might send me to school to learn secretarial work. Or maybe even manager's school. Goodyear's got a program, he says. I don't know about being a manager, though. It's enough chasing Tory around.

We do all right. Clare says I got a big insurance check when my daddy died, and we're spending it in small pieces. "I pay us a little bit out of it every month or so," she says. "You'll still have most of that money when I'm dead and gone." It's supposed to be fifty thousand dollars. I ain't never seen the account but I know what the policy said. It's in a trust fund. And Clare makes a little at the store, and I bring home my checks from the Goodyear Company. It ain't like we're starving or nothing, but sometimes I wish Clare wanted more. More than just another man to run around with.

She's gone off again.

I was sitting out in the backyard after dinner last night when Tory found the lettering on the stone.

I asked her how she found it, and she says, "I seen it."

"But how?" I said.

She shrugged. "I don't know."

"Was you digging around it?"

"A little."

"And ain't I told you not to go digging in the mud around that stone and getting your hands dirty?"

She come up the steps and sat down next to me. "Look at my hands," she says. She held them out flat in front of me.

"Turn them over," I said. "Let me see your nails."

She clasped her hands together and put them between her knees. "My nails are fine," she says.

"Let me see."

"No."

"Well, you'll just have to wash them again before you go to bed."

"I ain't."

"We'll just see."

After a while, even with Tory sitting next to me and chattering about the stone, I felt kind of lonely and sad. It seemed like the air I inhaled could spread out anywhere in my body, and make me cold and afraid at the same time. I can't explain it. I wanted a car to come. Somebody I knew to get out and visit for a spell. Maybe a car with my aunt Clare in it. She's been gone this time for almost three weeks. Even for her, that's a long time without letting me know where she is, or when she might come back. Course, I don't blame her for wanting to get away from Crawford.

Crawford ain't much of a town-no bigger than a city park, even though it does have a sawmill, a post office, a fire station, and, of course, the brand-new Goodyear Tire and Auto Store where I work. I don't just work there, though. I always help my aunt Clare in her little grocery store. She's owned and operated that store all her life. I think she got it from her father. I don't know for sure. People say the store run a lot more smoothly before the war, and when Clare was younger and had the help of my father. Now, it runs when I'm there and when Clare feels like it.

Crawford's got a school, too. It's not a real school-it's a big house. Mr. Gault, the mayor, lives there with Myra, his wife, and does the town's business in a white room off his den. He's got a lot of flowers and tall, green umbrella plants and ferns in there for some reason-it looks like a funeral parlor most of the time. I like the smell in there, though. The school is in his basement. He's got five small rooms down there, with maps, blackboards, tables and chairs, like you'd see in any school. Tory goes there now, just like I did until a few years ago. Mr. Gault is the principal and his wife, Myra, teaches classes, too. And there always used to be another woman or two that he called the "faculty," but lately it's just him and his wife. Gault was my only teacher most of the time.

People might get the impression that this here's a lazy place, but it ain't. People work even whenever they don't feel like it and always if they can find work to do. We got no factories or department stores or auto dealers-although the tire store sometimes sells a used car or two if it becomes available. All we got is the mill and that don't provide near the work it used to. It's almost finished, too, I guess. My aunt Clare's tiny market does okay because folks don't like to drive down the mountain if they don't have to. She keeps bread and milk and butter and cheese and a few vegetables and such. Now and then she has dried meats or cured ham. I live with her across the way from the store and up the hill just before you get to the old Crawford place. Aunt Clare took in my daddy and me when my mother died, and we just stayed there until he went off to war. My mother died before I had any kind of memory of her, so I guess you could say that Clare's been like a mother to me, although it really don't feel like any such thing. Especially now, since she's gone off and disappeared again.

The old Crawford place used to be huge-and rich folks lived there. Like I said, that's how the town come to be called Crawford. People was always going up there looking for buried treasure or family valuables, digging up every square inch of the place just about. Or trying to. It's mostly rock up there, with just little dirt and moss growing over it. Ain't hardly nothing left of the place now. And Crawford itself? Nowadays, it ain't nothing but small farms in this part of Virginia. Small, poor farms. This ain't like the foothills. It's a mountain, high and rocky. You could stand on our front porch and shoot a .22 shell into West Virginia. If anybody could play the piano in that state, you could hear it. It snows three times more here than in Washington, D.C., which is where I come from. My father brought me here, and then when the war come he went off and died.

I guess Clare will come back, but I wonder sometimes what will happen if one day she don't. I mean, would the store and the cabin belong to me?

To be honest, I really don't want it.

I want Clare to come back. I shouldn't worry about her. She drinks a lot sometimes, and runs around with truckers and all. Just she never done it without telling me she was going to. "I'm going to be with this fella," she'll say. "I'll be seeing you soon." The longest she ever stayed away was two weeks. That was when I was in my last year at Gault's school, and she was beginning to notice that a lot of people she known and run with was getting old. That's what she said. "All my friends are getting old, honey." Like it wasn't happening to her. She's still a beautiful woman. She keeps her hair dyed jet-black, and lets it fall down her shoulders like I do. She don't look so young no more, but when she puts makeup on you might think she was a movie star. In the winter she was always fanning herself, complaining of the heat-even in the morning when the cabin had frost on the windows. The last time she disappeared, she was gone only three days, but I worried about her then, too, and she told me she was going.

I wouldn't worry this time except for two things. One is, she's been gone for almost a month now. I guess it was the end of July when she never come up the hill from the market, and I looked out the window and noticed she'd closed the door and put the CLOSED sign up. The second thing is Tory found that lettering on the stone in the back corner of the yard. When she told me about it, I was playing hide-and-seek with her in the twilight, you know, just having fun (we hide together-ain't nobody looking for us), when she turned to me and says, "Don't you want to know what the lettering says?"

"What lettering?"

She got down on her knees and brushed dirt and grass away from it.

"What you got there, Tory?"

"Lookit," she says. "Writing." She's right smart for six, and she wears jeans like me, but she is very serious for her age. She touched the stone. "It's so white."

"Come on now," I said. "Don't get yourself dirty."

She started digging around the edges of it.

"Don't be digging holes now," I said. "Look at your fingernails."

"I don't care about my fingernails," she says.

"Well, I do."

"Look," she says. "See the writing?"

"Get away from that old stone," I said. "I don't care what the writing says."

Sure enough, she had uncovered enough of the surface of the stone that I could see the letters I N M. Plain as day.

Tory got up and brushed her hands on her shorts. She got this look on her face, like she remembered something awful.

"What's the matter," I said. "Tory?"

She was looking at the stone, but then she turned her face to me and says, "Is this a gravestone?"

"I don't know," I said. "What if it is?" I couldn't tell if she was playing or if something really bothered her. I watched her face for a while, but she just stopped looking back at me. She studied the stone, then started picking around the edges of it again. She dug part of the dirt out of the way and she started pulling at it. It didn't move a single stitch. She may as well have been pulling the corner of a buried building.

"Come on, honey," I said. "Let's go on inside. It'll be dark soon."

"I can dig it up," she says. She pulled at it some more.

"Whatever that is, it's too big to dig up."

"Why can't I try?"

I leaned over and grabbed the sleeve of her T-shirt. "Up, girl. Up out of there."

She stamped her foot when she was upright. Then she folded her arms across the front of her, tucked her chin real close to her chest, and said, "Okay, then I'm just a tree."

She's always doing that. That's when I see the flash of her daddy's eyes and know even if I was his widow, I'd really still have a part of him. Sometimes when she gets mad at me, she just claims to be some solid thing that can't be moved. Or she'll say she's a small, fragile thing that will break if you touch it. One time she told me she was an egg. Sat in the kitchen chair, curled up with her arms wrapped around her knees, and didn't say nothing for one and a half hours. Swear to God. When I realized she was serious, I went in the bedroom and had myself a peaceful nap and thanked God for stubborn children. Eventually she moved, I asked her what happened, and she says, "I hatched." We both had a good laugh over that one. Then she had so much energy, you'd of thought I give her a whole bottle of Geritol, so I had to pay for my nap.

When she become a tree, I said, "You're going to have to be a tree inside," but she wouldn't speak to me or move.

"Come on, honey," I said. "The sun's starting to set. It's going to get awful chilly."

I waited there for a spell, then reached for her. She backed away. "You can't be a tree in a house," she says.

"You can be a child, though." I smacked her lightly on the behind, and she run to the back porch and up the steps. But she didn't go inside. She stood there looking sad. "It's still light out, Mommy."

I come up the steps in front of her. "Go on," I said. "Inside."

"It's still light out," she says. "The summer's almost over." I hated the sound of her voice when she whined like that.

"I can't stop that from happening," I said. "It's going to end no matter what we do tonight."

"It's still light out," she says again. I swear, sometimes her voice echoes in my sinuses.

"Quit whining," I said.

She folded her arms. She didn't have to announce that she was a tree again. I went in the house and come back out with a book and one of the folding chairs from the kitchen. "Well," I said. "I'm just going to make myself comfortable under the spreading branches of this here tree."

"I just want to stay out a little longer," she whimpered. I didn't actually hear those words, but I knew where the record was stuck.

I set the chair right in front of her and set down with my back to her. "Mmmm," I said. "It's so cool under this tree."

It was quiet for a spell. I pretended to read the book. Then she laughed. I stood up and she grabbed my legs and pretty soon I was laughing, too. We've always had fun like that, even when we're mad at each other. I sat down on the steps, pulled her down next to me. "We'll set here a spell," I said. I held onto her until it was almost dark, and she forgot about the stone.

But I didn't. I dreamed about it all night-dreams I can't even remember now. I just know it was there, in my sleep, floating around like something white under water.

Tory, though, she loves just setting on the porch with me, when the sun's about to sink behind the trees. We done it almost every night this past summer, so tonight, we go out there and sit down again, and she looks up at me and frowns.

"I ain't talking about that stone," I say.

She just stares at me, pouting.

"What?" I say.

"Tell me about Daddy."

She's always asking me about him. And I'm always trying not to lie to her. "Your daddy ain't here," I say.

"Why not?"

"He just ain't."

"Where is he?"

"He's someplace else." I look over at the stone again, the white tip jutting out of the dark earth in the shadow of the tree. With the sun dropping down between the peaks, the stone looks like it has its own light to give.

"Is he in jail?"

I search her serious eyes. "Who told you that?"

"Jail's someplace else, ain't it?"

"Who told you he was in jail?"

"Mr. Gault."

"He wouldn't do that," I say. "I asked him not to do that."

"I heard him talking," Tory says. "He didn't say it to me."

She looks out over the trees to the valley. The sun's weak evening light throws strange shadows against the far slopes and hillsides across from us. It's going to get much cooler soon. Tory has the most perfect skin and a lovely round little face. Her nose is small and tilted up slightly, like her daddy's nose. But her mouth is what stands out. A long, straight line from one cheek to the other when she's just thinking, and it looks like that's all there is, but then you see the lips, just as long and straight and almost white-like she put on lipstick or something. When she smiles her eyes change shape, and you just feel her happiness in your heart.

"Your daddy is in a place called Richard Bland," I tell her.

"What's that?"

"It's a place where men go when they're in trouble."

"Jail?"

"It's a correctional facility," I say. "Can you say that?"

She doesn't answer.

"Say it," I insist.

She looks at me briefly, frowning. Then she says, "I don't want to."

"Well, that's where he is. That's where he'll be until you're full grown. So you may as well forget about him. That's what I done."

A dark frown crosses her face.

"That's what he told me to do."

She won't meet my eyes. After a while she says, "Correxshin fussily."

"Facility," I say.

"Fussilty."

"That's close enough."

"Correxshin fussilty."

"You may as well call it a jail, hon. Everybody else does."

We sit there for a while, watching the sun weaken. Then she says, "Why can't we see him?"

"Because it would make him miserable."

"Don't he like us?"

"That ain't it." I put my arm around her, pull her against me. "You know what it's like when you're real hungry and Aunt Clare makes you them brownies you love?"

"Yeah."

"And you know how it feels when she says you can't have one until supper? When she lets you look at them, but you can't have none?"

"It ain't fair," she says.

"That's right, at least it don't seem fair. And don't you hate it?"

"I sure do."

"Well, that's what it's like when your daddy sees me and can't really touch me. How he feels when he sees you and can't hold you in his arms. You see?"

"Does he like the way we smell?"

"What?"

"I love the way the brownies smell," she says.

I laugh and squeeze her a bit. I kiss the top of her head, breathe in the fragrance of her hair, loving her, thinking of my man all the way down there in Richard Bland.

"It ain't fair," I say. "You know, honey?"

She leans over my legs and puts her head in my lap.

"It really ain't fair," I say.

Copyright © 2002 by Robert Bausch

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PRAISE FOR THE GYPSY MAN
"Has all the makings of a good bluegrass song; men in trouble with the law, lonesome women, hard times, tattered dreams."-The New York Times Book Review

"Being inside the minds of these characters is an experience so intimate that . . . [it] not only sees you through unbearable losses, it almost blinds you with love."-O Magazine

"Affecting. Moves smoothly and unpredictably. Bausch [writes] with consummate style."-The Washington Post Book World