Mr. Splitfoot

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ONE HIGHWAY DEPARTMENT BUILDING, one gas station, one general store. The cashier is happy to see a pregnant woman, so is the man behind the deli counter. Ruth has a gallon of milk and some cereal in her basket. These are not our usual road supplies. These supplies suggest a place with bowls, spoons, refrigerators. “We’re almost there?” I ask. Ruth smiles. She places the basket on the counter, adds two chocolate bars to the order.

“Today?”

Ruth says nothing.

“Yeah, today.”

“Good luck,” the cashier tells me.

“Good luck,” says the woman pruning the shrubs outside.

“Thank you.”

Ruth carries everything now, the groceries, her bag, my bag. I carry the baby. The end is coming, and having it in sight makes the walking a little easier. At every curve in the road, I expect something hidden to be revealed. Specifically, what the end looks like. Is the end good or bad? Then we gain the curve, and there’s nothing around the bend except more road, some trees, and a farther curve up ahead I can’t see past. We keep walking. Ruth seems even quieter than before, quieter than she’s been since the car broke down back in another solar system. I can almost remember what color that car was.

We have a definitive number of steps remaining, a countable number, and then I don’t know what. A bed or a couch. A bathtub. A baby. The end. Or else a new start. A house near the Falls for Ruth and El and me and the baby. That’d be nice, to live with them, to be near the Falls. It’s important to live near water. I won’t go back to what I was before I started walking. I don’t want a lot of rubbish to smother things as quiet as Ruth, intelligent as this child, kind and complicated as El.

We head into another curve. Ruth twists the plastic grocery bag in her hand. The trees make a full canopy of shade with no power lines to cut them back. “Can we take a rest?” We sit on a rock covered with moss and British soldier lichen, little redcoats. Ruth is anxious to finish, but I’m a bit wary of the end as it’s unknown. She stands, dusts her butt, reaches out a hand to help me up.

Each step we take chokes the width of the road, the possibility of retreat. This is not a road many people take, and to evidence this, around the next bend we’re greeted with a sickening sight: a wooden trestle, rickety and ancient. It looks no sturdier than some jungle rope bridge. The river it crosses is so many hundreds of feet down that the boulders of the channel seem small and shadowy from here.

“We’re crossing that?”

Ruth nods.

“It’s not going to hold me.” I’m only half joking. On one side of the bridge, the railing has been replaced as if a car making a speedy descent misjudged the curve and launched itself down onto the rocks below.

Ruth steps onto the bridge. She jumps up and down to demonstrate its sturdiness. This does little to assuage my fears. Ruth doesn’t weigh anything. She’s a feather of a woman compared to me and the baby. But Ruth crosses so I follow, and the bridge somehow holds us.

We pass the remains of an enormous blast furnace that looks like a terrifying castle. From there, around another bend, Ruth points and I see it up ahead. Through the trees, there’s a lodge, strong and cold, built of stone on the shore of a lake. It could be the end. It looks magnificent enough. The wild beauty, pines and huge rocks, gives us pause. “Ruth,” I say quietly, following her down an unkempt driveway. A stone portico covers the entrance. The house has a roof so peaked, it could contain a helicopter landing pad, opening up into the biggest lily in the world. A number of slates are missing.

“What is this place?”

But then Ruth doesn’t stop at the house. This isn’t the end. She leads me down to the lake. There’s a small beach and a rotted dock. I stop at the water’s edge. Ruth keeps going as if she could walk directly across the lake bottom and pop out the other side, as if she can’t stop walking.

“Ruth!” My voice echoes back.

She’s wet to her knees.

“What are you doing? Taking a swim?” So she stops, but she doesn’t turn back to me. She stares into the water like she lost a ring under the surface and if she twists her face up just enough, she might be able to find it. “Ruth?”

When she finally turns, she’s smiling. She points up to the house.

“Is this the place? Are we there?”

Yes, she nods.

“It’s incredible. It’s beautiful.”

She agrees.

“Can we stay?”

She tilts her head to the left, shrugs.

“Can I see inside?”

She holds up a finger. One minute. She points back into the woods. Ruth tramps out of the lake.

“You want me to come?”

Plainly by now, clearly, Ruth doesn’t answer. I follow her into the forest. She pushes pine boughs and briars with her bare hands, opening a path. She grabs prickers carefully, making a way for me through the woods. The trees are old. The trees are twisted by the unimaginable winter winds. Orange needles cover the ground. The mushroom El calls toad umbrella springs from the tree bark. Ruth’s sneakers fart with lake water.

There are buildings in the woods. Small houses for a fairy population, an Adirondack summer camp. I count eight cottages each with window boxes and rhododendrons planted neatly out front. A number of goats graze nearby. Two women tend a vegetable garden where beans climb sunflower stalks. “Hi,” I say as we pass. They both stand. One’s hands are deformed. They look like claws. The other has the word “fukc” tattooed onto her cheek.

“Hi.” They wave. Ruth keeps moving.

A man dressed in a pink prom gown, wearing bright blue cream eye shadow, has fallen asleep in the sun, comfortable in a chaise beside the garden. A cane and a pair of sunglasses have been left on another chair nearby. It’s an Adirondack camp for circus freaks.

Among the cottages there’s one singular home, a shell of the others. It’s crusted with decay. Its wood is slipping back to humus and loam like it’s the sacrificial unit that keeps the other cottages vital. Moss and mold bloom from what was once its roof, floors, walls. Ruth bypasses the restored cabins and heads directly for the abandoned one. Just outside its door, the rusted handle of a refrigerator lies on the ground underneath a sapling sprouted from the damp remains of a small rug. The house is ready to collapse, delicate as lacy leaf litter wintered over and over. Ruth pokes her head through one window. Slowly she nudges a foot through the door. I follow but crouch low, spreading my weight evenly as I can. We stand in what must have once been a living room. The workings of some gas fireplace have spilled out onto the floor, and there’s a shred of wallpaper, a vine of green with purple violets clinging to one wall.

Ruth feels ahead with her foot before taking a step. She signals for me to stay put as she inches along, keeping to the joists, ducking through a collapsed jamb into the once kitchen. There are still a few human things here: a cast-iron sink and a small enamel stove, its name, Magic Chef, scripted in chrome. There’s a hole in the kitchen floor big enough to lose a family through.

Dropping to her hands and knees, Ruth circumnavigates the hole, making her way to the Magic Chef. The oven screams when she pries open the hinged door. Ruth pokes her head inside the oven as if she could climb through to a different universe, as if pulling out a birthday cake. But it’s not a cake. From the oven rack, Ruth removes a weathered cardboard box.

“What have you got there?”

The box flaps are closed. She jerks her chin back to where we came from, through the woods. Ruth and I keep on walking.

I thought the end would provide answers. “What’s in the box?”

Nothing. We return to the big house, and on the front step she passes the box to me. I kink out one thigh and balance the box there on the side of my belly. The lid’s not open enough to allow a peek inside, and, with both hands engaged in holding it, the contents remain a mystery.

Ruth rubs her hands on my cheeks, my ears, the baby. She hugs me despite the box. She’s so happy to get here, smiling, laughing some. I’ve never seen her so happy. Beautiful, teenage Ruth dancing with Nat in El’s kitchen all those years ago. The box smells of rot. Or else it’s Ruth. She squeezes me tight, kisses my cheek, hand on the baby. She takes such good care of me.

Then Ruth lets me go.

She butts one shoulder against the front door, holding it open for me to enter first. The foyer tile has been ripped up in spots, and wood smoke has stained the hallway walls brown. There’s sunlight and debris scattered on the floor, an ashtray, a clunky remote control, a Naugahyde jacket. The end.

I’m going to sit on a couch for two days, two weeks. I’m going to stare at the wall, take a bath, eat something I myself have cooked. I’m going to take a drive in one of the trucks parked in the driveway. I’m going to call El. We’re here and it’s over, and I can’t even tell yet what that means because I’m empty. One last footstep shakes the sour, dried last bits of noise from my body. Empty but for the baby.

There’s a stuffed moose head mounted to the wall. The rug in the foyer and the green curtains in the living room are worn reminders of the people who passed through here before. People like Ruth, others. People in bathing suits maybe or winter boots or grass skirts dressed for some skit night being held under lantern light down by the lakeside. All the masons and carpenters who built this place, working for years on a mountaintop far enough away from life that people forgot they were still alive. “What is this place?”

I turn back for Ruth’s reaction, but she isn’t there. “Hello?” I press my back against the living room wall, a moth on the bark of a mottled tree. The whites of my eyeballs beat left, right, left, right. My belly ruins my camouflage, and the box cuts into my hip. “Ruth?” I drop onto a dusty couch. I pry open the flaps.

Ruth’s Walkman rests on top of more money than I have ever seen. The rotten stench intensifies and turns my stomach. I never thought all this walking would end with something as regular and disappointing as money.

Quickly, before she comes back, I put the headphones on my ears and push play. Nothing happens. Dead batteries.

I touch a stack of the bills. The money is soggy and limp, having given up any hope of being palmed into the hands of Mafioso bouncers at a discothèque. It’s grown complacent, moldering in an abandoned house on a mountaintop.

Three windows look down to the lake. I don’t see her outside, but I hear someone close the front door. A few blue jays screech. “Ruth?”

El keeps a photo from that New Year’s Day so many years ago when Nat and Ruth came to visit. In the picture the four of us make a scraggly bunch, blurrier than memory. My mom has her arms around my neck. Ruth’s head is turned to look at Nat. Nat stares into the camera.

For years I studied this photo, and my eye always went to him like mica. His hair. His muscle T-shirt, jeans, and a bandanna around his forehead. He looked kind in a spare, genuine way. He looked small but, even in the photo, mighty.

Ruth didn’t come back for the money.

Nat squints as if I’ll make more sense that way. I grip my belly and a sound like a snarl, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, comes from his throat. His hands are rough. His stubble is flecked with silver. “They said someone had come.” He blinks, smiles. “You’re Eleanor’s daughter.” His words land like pebbles on a pond, a satisfying sound to my unused eardrums. “Cora.” He finds my name. “What are you doing here?”

“Ruth brought me.”

“Ruth?” Then he says it again louder. “Ruth? She couldn’t have.” He shakes his head.

“Why not?”

His smile leaves. “Because Ruth is dead.”