The Calder Luck

That's going to be me is not a thought a sane man lets himself keep, and Owen didn't. He walked Maddie back down the Hollow with his arm around her and made a joke about needing to fix the gap in the wall before the baby was old enough to climb it, and by the time they got to the house she was talking paint colors again, and he let her, and he was glad. He didn't want it touching her. Whatever it was, the cold thing, he wanted it on his side of the bed only.

But it had its hooks in him now. He found he couldn't stop doing the arithmetic. He'd be planing a board and his hands would go on by themselves and his mind would be back in the burying ground counting ages. Thirty-three. Thirty-four. Thirty-one. He'd known those men were his blood. He had never once added them up.

So on Wednesday he drove down to his mother's.

He found her out back, taking the burlap off the rose canes, and he stood by the porch a minute watching her work before she knew he was there — a small straight-backed woman of sixty-six in her dead husband's barn coat, her hands sure in the cold dirt. He'd always thought of his mother as the steadiest person he knew. She'd raised him alone in that house and never once let him feel it as a lack. It was only now, looking at her with the new cold in him, that he wondered what it had cost her to be that steady, and what she'd been steady against.

"You'll let in the frost yet, taking that off so early," he said, and she didn't jump, she just went still the way Maddie had gone still, and he understood for the first time where his wife's stillness had taught itself to read.

"Owen." She sat back on her heels. "What is it. Is Maddie all right."

"Maddie's fine. Everybody's fine." He came and crouched beside her in the dirt, the way he had as a boy. "Ma. I want to ask you something, and I want you to not do the thing you do, where you answer a different question than the one I asked."

She looked at him. Her face didn't give anything. "What do you do, then. When you want to ask a person something."

"Granddad. Your husband's father. When did he die."

Ruth turned back to the rose cane and worked the burlap loose, slow. "Why would you ask me that."

"Just tell me."

"He died before I married your father. I never met him. You know that." Her hands kept moving. "It was his heart. He was a young man for it. It was a sadness."

"How young."

A pause, the burlap, the cold. "Young."

"Ma." Owen put his hand over her hands so she had to stop. "Was it when Dad was born. Was Granddad born— did Granddad die the night Dad was born."

His mother looked down at his big hand over her small dirt-black ones for a long moment. And then she did a thing he had never in his life seen her do. Her chin went, just slightly, the way a person's does right before they cry, and she pressed her lips together hard to stop it, and she won, she stopped it, but he had seen it. He had seen, for one second, all the way down into something she kept locked.

"Who's been talking to you," she said quietly.

"Nobody. Maddie and I were up at the burying ground Sunday." He kept his voice gentle. "She read the stones. She did the math before I did. Ma — they're all young. The men. Dad. Granddad. The old ones. And every one I can find out about, it was the same night. The night their first child came." He waited. She wouldn't look at him. "Ma. I'm about to have a first child."

"Don't," Ruth said.

"Don't what."

"Don't go counting. Don't go up there reading stones and counting. No good ever came to a Calder from counting." She pulled her hands out from under his and pressed them, dirt and all, flat against her own knees, and now she did look at him, and her eyes were dry and frightened and old. "I have spent thirty-three years not counting, Owen. I have spent thirty-three years getting up in the morning and being your mother and not letting that arithmetic into this house. And it was the hardest thing I ever did, and I did it for you, so you could grow up an ordinary boy and not a haunted one. And now you come in here with your wife expecting and you want me to sit in the dirt and count graves with you."

"I want you to tell me it's nothing," Owen said. "That's all. Tell me it's coincidence, Ma. Tell me men just died young in the old days, hard work, no doctors, bad hearts. Tell me that and I'll believe you and I'll go home and I'll never count another grave. I want you to tell me it's nothing."

His mother looked at him for a long time. Out at the bare garden, the cold light, the cane she'd half-uncovered.

"I can't tell you that," she said.

And there it was, the worst answer, the one he'd known under all the other ones was waiting, said plainly by the steadiest person he knew.

"Then what is it," he said, and his voice wasn't quite his own. "Ma. If it's not nothing. What is it."

"I don't know." She said it fast, and he believed her, and somehow that was worse than if she'd had an answer. "I don't know, Owen. That's the truth. Your father wouldn't speak of it. He'd get a look — the year I was carrying you, he got so he wouldn't talk about the baby at all, wouldn't pick a name, wouldn't let me buy a thing, and I thought it was him being a man about it, being scared the way men get, and I was so angry at him, I was so angry that he wouldn't be happy with me." She stopped. The next words came out cracked. "And then the night you came he went down that road in the ice and I never— I never got to tell him I was sorry for being angry. So no. Don't ask me what it is. I have spent my whole life not letting it have a shape. I won't give it one for you."

Owen knelt there in his mother's cold garden and understood that he had grown up inside a fear so big and so carefully kept that he'd never even seen its edges, the way a fish doesn't see water. His whole easy childhood. His mother's whole steady back. All of it built over a thing she would not name.

"Somebody knows," he said. "If Dad knew enough to be afraid. Somebody knows what it is. Who would know, Ma."

Ruth was quiet a long time. When she spoke it was almost too low to hear.

"Cora would know," she said.

"Aunt Cora's still—" Owen stopped. He hadn't thought of his great-aunt Cora in years. She was a name on Christmas cards, a fierce ancient woman who lived alone in the original family house up past the Hollow, the oldest Calder left living, the one nobody quite knew what to do with. "She's still alive?"

"She's eighty-eight and she's sharper than you and me put together," Ruth said. "She kept all of it. The old papers, the family book, whatever there is. The rest of us spent our lives running from it." She looked at her son, and the fear in her face had a kind of pleading in it now. "But Owen. Listen to me. Cora never married. Cora never had a child. She is the only Calder in living memory the luck never touched, and she paid for that, in a way I never understood and never asked about, because I didn't want to know. People who go to Cora's house come back changed. They come back knowing things." She gripped his wrist, hard, her dirt-cold fingers surprisingly strong. "You have a good life. You have a good wife and a baby coming and a happy house. You can still choose not to know. Some things, once you know them, you can't put back."

Owen looked at his mother's hand on his wrist, and past it, down the valley, toward the Hollow and the high land where the burying ground sat under the pines, and beyond it, where his great-aunt Cora was sitting alone at eighty-eight with whatever it was the rest of them had run from.

"I'm going to have a daughter or a son in October, Ma," he said. "I can't not know. If it's nothing, I'll come back and laugh with you about it. And if it's not nothing—" He turned his wrist gently and took his mother's hand in both of his, the way she used to take his when he was small and afraid of the dark. "If it's not nothing, then I'd rather face it knowing than do what Dad did, and be scared of a shape I can't see, and never get to say the things I'd want to say."

His mother started, finally, to cry — not hard, just two tears that went down the lines of her face and dropped off into the garden dirt — and she let him hold her hand, and she didn't argue with him anymore. She just said, after a while, "Go in the morning. Don't go at night. The road up there is bad, and—" she stopped, and gave a small terrible laugh that had no humor in it at all, "—and a Calder ought to be careful on a road. We always have been."

Owen drove home in the dark with his mother's warning sitting in the passenger seat beside him like a person. Some things, once you know them, you can't put back. He thought of Maddie at home with the lights on, picking paint colors for the spare room, free of all of it, and he thought he understood now why his mother had spent thirty-three years not counting.

But he also thought of his father, refusing to pick a name, getting that look, dying in the ice with an apology un-said between him and the woman he loved.

In the morning, Owen drove up to Cora's.