Split

Libby Creelman

• Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780864927255
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

In the aftermath of the 1960s, tensions simmer beneath the surface of a small town in rural Massachusetts. Watergate and the war in Vietnam have shaken Americans' faith in their government, the energy crisis clouds the future, and the civil rights movement has given way to uneasy race relations. But identical twin sisters April and Pilgrim live happily on their parents' farm, sharing a secret language and uncanny closeness. The twins shelter each other from the wider world, until adolescence and the hard realities of adult life catch up to them.

In 1975, when the girls are sixteen years old, their father single handedly recruits a young Bahamian doctor to minister to the town's residents. While racial prejudice keeps patients away from his door, the idle "Dr. Panama, " as April and Pilgrim refer to him, spends much of his time with the family. While the relationship between the girls and the young doctor begins to strain the bounds of propriety and comes to light, the family is torn apart.

Years later, on the eve of the 2008 election that would sweep Barack Obama into the White House, the adult Pilgrim, long estranged from her family, learns her father has died and her mother, now suffering the ravages of Alzheimer's disease, is living in homecare. When she returns to Massachusetts to see her mother, Pilgrim discovers a country in financial crisis and her bucolic childhood home in shambles. It is in the midst of this decay that Pilgrim picks up the threads of her past and finds herself finishing what was begun three decades earlier.

ONE

To my astonishment, I fall asleep on the flight from Halifax to Boston. I can’t remember when I last felt so relaxed. My decision — which Ethan called rash — to make this trip seems to have done me a world of good. Other than a couple behind me, I’m alone in executive class. I drift in and out while they argue cordially, if not very quietly. She has a British accent and is of the opinion the banks should not be rescued. The man is more sympathetic. “The global economy is falling off a cliff, Fiona.” He’s either Canadian or American. I open and close my eyes while she laughs at him. “Falling off a cliff? Is that the official word, then?” But after we land at Logan, I can’t remember what they were saying earlier. When I turn to look at them, they smile tensely and I wonder if I was snoring. My face has the soft, collapsed feeling that follows unexpected rest.

We wait on the tarmac an hour and a half for a gate to open. “Sorry, folks, shouldn’t be much longer,” the pilot tells us every fifteen minutes without a trace of apology.

When I get to Customs and Immigration, the official seems affronted I’ve not been back to the US in thirty years.

“Not even a stopover on your way south?” he asks suspiciously. He is a small man with incongruously wide shoulders. Maybe the hiring committee thought he looked intimidating. That people would hesitate before lying to him.

But I am not easy to bully and I stare blankly as he flips back and forth through my passport with mounting disapproval, as though he would like to deny me entrance for having been gone so long, but we both know that in the end he will have no choice but to wave me through.

I rent a Honda Civic. The freckled girl at the rent-a-car asks how long I’ll be needing it and my eyes wander to the calendar propped on the counter. It’s early October. A week? Several weeks?

“A month, to be safe,” I tell her.

As I insert the credit card, I joke, “I hope my husband hasn’t cancelled this card.”

The girl doesn’t respond. She avoids eye contact as we await the machine’s decision.

But Ethan is not a spiteful man, as it turns out.

“I’ll need to see another piece of ID,” the girl says, as though she is just remembering this.

I locate the Honda in the rental lot. A hubcap is missing and the power windows are sluggish. I consider returning to that freckled girl and demanding a worthier car, but I’m anxious to get on the road. I make my way to the Southeast Expressway and out of Boston.

——

It was several weeks ago that Mrs. McNadden first began calling and urging me to make a visit to Cranfield. It felt as though she were calling me every day.

“I’m trying to locate a Pilgrim Wheeler,” she said the first time.

I recognized her voice immediately. “Speaking.”

“This is Lois McNadden. Do you remember me, Pilgrim?”

“Who?” I asked, stalling. I was alone in the house, upstairs. I can’t remember now what I’d been doing.

“Is that you, Pilgrim?”

“Mrs. McNadden?”

I slipped into my daughter’s bedroom and closed the door, stunned by the familiarity of this woman’s unique jumpiness, as though I was only ten years old and had just come down the stairs and caught her snooping around our kitchen.

Mrs. McNadden was our nearest neighbour, half a mile up the road. She liked being in our house, roaming our property and inquiring after my father’s projects, despite the terror he playfully set out to arouse in her. My father teased and drove her off, but like the dogs, as soon as she was out of the house she wanted back in.

“I found your number through directory assistance,” she said. “I had to search your father’s things to get your last name.”

Katie’s bed was unmade. The sheets were stained. Candy, drool, juice, jam?

“I’d been looking for a Pilgrim Bell. Silly me. Of course you’ve married.”

“What’s happened?” I asked.

“Your father has passed on, dear. That’s the reason for my call, in a nutshell.”

“Was it sudden?” The stains would come out with the Spray ’n Wash. I prayed it was sudden.

“Yes. Sudden. He was in the barn, fiddling with one of the scoops. There was something broke on it. That’s all I know. Those things are ancient. Rodney was there.”

I didn’t know any Rodney, but why would I? There were always a couple of boys hired by my father and paid peanuts to sweep the barn, clean the tools, follow at his heels just in case he came across some wood that needed to be stacked, fence mended, brush cleared.

“Scoops?” I asked. “You don’t mean to say he was still trying to harvest cranberries?”

Mrs. McNadden laughed. A laugh of fondness. For my father?

“How is my mother taking it?”

“Marsha is not much changed, I dare say.”

I thought about that for a minute. “I’m not sure I know what you mean. Have you spoken with my sister?”

“April?” she said lightly. “April disappeared off the face of the earth, dear. You were there.”

I had a crushing desire to hang up.

“It hasn’t been easy for us keeping track of you two,” she went on. “At least you sent a few Christmas cards.”

What was this us?

“You moved to Canada. My recollection is that Montreal —”

I interrupted. “I’m in Newfoundland now. A city called St. John’s. What about you? Still living in Cranfield, Mrs. McNadden?”

“Good heavens, what a question. But I had to get rid of my hens, Pilgrim. The air has gone queer and the pastures are being invaded by trees. Your father was always so helpful. I thought we might have the service on Sunday.”

We?

I could hear Fred sniffling and snuffling on the other side of Katie’s bedroom door. In a minute he was going to start scratching and leaving marks in the paint.

“This Sunday?” I asked. “In four days?”

“That doesn’t suit you, dear?”

“No. I can’t make it as soon as that, Mrs. McNadden.”

“Your husband will understand.”

I wasn’t so sure about that.

“Your mother won’t know the difference, dear, but it would still be nice for her to see you, after all this time.”

I didn’t think to bring sunglasses, and the day is crazy-brilliant under a sky of uninhibited blue. Now that I’m here, I’m nearly jubilant, exultant. I know I should be cautious, that soaring spirits can have a sudden, painful plummet, but it’s been so long since I’ve felt this way, I embrace the mood with an ache that reminds me how I once craved cigarettes.

The expressway is pock-marked, narrow, and closely banked by trees monstrous after the midget spruce of Newfoundland. They are turning orange and gold and scarlet as though bursting into bloom. My pupils are so shuttered by the intensity of the light that when an animal charges out from the shadows and darts across the expressway, I think at first it’s a small dog.

But no, it’s only a squirrel, and then it’s gone.

I wouldn’t mind a cigarette.

“What do you mean,” I asked Mrs. McNadden in a friendly way, “my mother won’t know the difference?”

“Dear, your mother lives over at Sunset Hills. She has a terrible disease. I’ve never seen anyone so addled.”

“Alzheimer’s?”

“Your father had such a time with her until he booked her in there. She never came in out of the cornfield. She was out there all night. Or at the stand, trying to sell vegetables in winter. It was the saddest darn thing.”

It appeared Mrs. McNadden may have gotten over her fear of my father.

“Was he able to visit my mother there, at this Sunset place, very often?”

“Your father was getting on, dear.”

“I know that.”

“He wasn’t keen on driving. She barely recognizes anyone. And my, can she get worked up. Well, you remember your mother. Your father was the only one could handle her. He could fix anything.”

Mrs. McNadden and my mother could not have been more unlike. Mrs. McNadden was groomed, even in her work clothes — clean coveralls, a ribbon in her hair, a flick of pearls at her throat; her day good or bad depending on the tone with which someone, say my father, spoke to her.

Whereas Mom was untidy, her hygiene wanting. She might wear the same jeans and sweatshirt right through August. There was usually soil under her nails and a bobby pin creeping out of her hair. Sometimes, bringing lunch to her at the stand during the corn-frenzy days of summer, I would see grains of sleep in the corners of her eyes. As though she had risen from her bed, stepped into her work clothes, and gone out the door. Before the sun was even in the sky.

She could appear so distant and lacking in personality that occasionally people wondered if she was slow-witted. But she sold sweet corn that was never more than a few hours off the stalk, lemon-yellow summer squash, string beans that were crisp and unblemished.

Throughout the growing season, a dozen cars were parked helter-skelter at our stand, which was cavernous and dim with a low roof. From outside, you could just discern the sloping wooden shelves and hanging scales, and Mom — pencil behind her ear, paper bags tucked under her arm — moving like a shadow from customer to customer, filling orders. Some received a baker’s dozen, some did not; some a generous half pound, some not. No one — not her daughters, not her customers, not her husband — knew her thinking on this matter. When my mother bothered to make a decision about someone, it was swift and unspoken.

The air inside the stand was sweet-smelling and humid, warmed in part by the vegetables themselves, picked shortly after dawn. Most never lasted longer than a day in the stand, but April and I took those that didn’t sell down to the house by wheelbarrow for freezing or canning. Or they were given away to Mrs. McNadden, who was crazy for snap peas.

——

When I am fifteen minutes outside Cranfield, I call Mrs. McNadden on my cell. She sputters, surprised, suddenly sounding elderly. She tells me she’ll meet me at the house. I imagine her grey-haired. Hollow-boned like a sparrow. I think what a magnanimous person I am after all. I have made the decent decision. I am coming to the rescue of a woman I probably never liked.

I turn off the expressway onto Route 17 and follow it to Cranfield’s centre, where it intersects with Assabet Road. The post office is gone and an establishment we simply referred to as Otto’s is there, but boarded up. At one time, Otto’s offered gas, a few dried goods, penny candy, but I see now it was no more than a shed.

Otto was a short, messy, scary man. Whenever he was outside pumping gas, you knew he was waiting to rush back in to shout at any Negro kid he suspected of stealing cigarettes or candy in his brief absence. My father said he was a primate.

Beside Otto’s shed stands a new — to me — Shell service station, housing a Papa Gino’s Pizzeria. I don’t see a car or person anywhere and am wondering if the service station is open, but then a face appears in the window of the pizzeria.

Beyond the service station is the blocky congregational church where my parents were married.

I turn onto Assabet Road and proceed slowly, keeping my eye out for our driveway. But it’s impossible to miss with my mother’s vegetable stand still there, barely upright, just before the turnoff.

The driveway is badly rutted and I take my time, not wanting to damage the rental’s muffler, and pass fields now overrun by grasses and raggedy wildflowers gone to seed, though in places I can make out the old furrows. I’ve gone no distance at all when I notice a sign, partly hidden by Queen Anne’s lace and purple vetch, advertising pumpkins and s...

Table of contents

• Synopsis
• Endorsements
• Also By
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Prologue
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Acknowledgements
• Author Bio