Dual Retribution by Jolyn Wells-Moran

It was only slightly damp, warm, a kind of humor between her strong hands as she kneaded the golden clay. She knew she was procrastinating. So much of her time was caught up those days in a dreaming haze of thinking about creating her pots, rather than creating them. She wondered if she would just float away in a dream, once on her own. Hunger and the need for a bath would probably prompt her awake though.

Mira had caught her breath. Gilly, Ellen, and she swallowed. They would be baffled, but she hoped they would appreciate that she had waited until they were off to college. They had known the silence in their home, but not what preceded it. She washed her hands vigorously beneath the old kitchen tap, and dug at the clay under her nails.

She had crammed bits of underclothes fiercely into her old blue suitcase. Some were disintegrating from age, almost colorless and with strings dangling and lace half off. She found two respectable pair. The bras were worse, discolored, hooks missing and elastic with no snap. She cast one, a faded pink, into her bag and stuffed the rejected rags in the trash under the sink. She was finished with just bearing her life.

She hummed, My Funny Valentine, hmm mmm mmm humhum huuuuuum, cherishing the drama of the minor key.

Mira had looked back at the house through the car window as she coasted down the street. All of it amounted to nothing, just a lot of paint, boards, wires, pipes, glass, plastic, enamel. She had driven slowly away, searching internally for something, anything, some sense of connection, without result.

She had lost track of where she was, didn’t recognize the small brick houses, the sculpted shrubbery. Wondered how she had gotten here. Then saw the freeway sign and settled in with her foot on the pedal to a steady 10 miles over the speed limit.

That part of Wyoming was supposed to be primarily wilderness. There will be tiny white flowers, old farms and long-needled pines. Freshness. She smiled at herself. Funny Valentine, a long, silent and delirious giggle had spread through her limbs.

Mira drove until the iodine stained sky instructed her to stop. A small motel, washed out grey and scaling its skin, but the orange neon sign was illuminated. She lifted her solid legs up and out of the car slowly, wincing at the stiffness.

Asleep, she slid forward, exhilarated, propelled with a steady speed like gliding on ice. At dawn, she had roused slowly, but then danced quickly across the frigid linoleum to the bathroom. Today she would be there. Today she would open a wooden door and see a long, sturdy table waiting. Today, she would unpack. Set up her wheel. The new kiln would be delivered. She would locate a store and purchase greens, milk, almonds, what else?

A blistering day if she chose to work in the garden. Mira breathed in the heavily pine-scented air. So she wouldn’t. She padded out to the mailbox on the road, aqua thongs in the whispering dust. She braced her heart. Nothing there. Well, okay.

Len had watched from his window as he sipped at his hot coffee. Wondered vaguely about her. His reflection in the window made him start and he had turned away. The wisps of grayed hair and the slightly sagging jowls always startled him. His throat closed and he turned to the old, white stove where the soup simmered.

Later, hand holding open a book and his other scratching behind the soft ear of his old bulldog, Len wondered at his wandering focus. The world appeared to be under a wavering flow of water, but very hot water. Get up, he thought, go clean up that kitchen before you have to use it again. A rodent, or maybe a snake, stirred the dead grass under the porch.

Mira had finished the pot, the one that had been gnawing at her for its life, and she smoothed her hands over the black and sienna glaze from bottom to top, enjoying the sense of it as a living vessel. Still, not really what she was after. She lifted it up and placed it high on the shelf. The living room and adjoining kitchen were mainly a workroom now, or a studio, surrounded by the plywood shelves she had built and housing her wheel, the long wooden table that had come with the house and sturdy wooden chairs. Low cupboards held large bags of clay and, on top, stood jars of glazes and tools. The kitchen had a large, old-fashioned porcelain sink where she filled cans with water for her work and cleaned her tools and hands.

Mira fell on the narrow bed in the cool, back bedroom with relief. I’ll do some work in the garden when it cools off, she thought. Maybe the fellow across the street will let me borrow his shovel. Thank God this part of the house was so shaded, and she drifted off to the sound of swishing leaves blowing in the hot breeze outside the bedroom’s six-paned window.

When she woke, Mira splashed cold water on her face at the bathroom sink and smoothed back her graying hair while noting the bags under her eyes. When did I get those? She thought how good it was not to really care. Slipping on her shoes, she caught a glimpse of her neighbor in his pasture and set out to ask about the shovel.

No cow, no chickens, so no leavings. Len needed to buy a couple of those heavy bags from The Mercantile if his flowers were to be anything but meager and emaciated. Ridiculous name, as if the modern aluminum-sided building had been there since the eighteen hundreds, and Joe and Denise had inherited an old family business. He knew Joe had gotten the land for a song from old man Willoughby who had been in the nursing home, dying of a bad heart.

He checked the road, clumping along, large hands clamped to handles of the wheel barrow heavy with the bulky bags. He always checked and was almost inevitably disappointed. He knew his neighbor made pots out of clay. He knew she was from somewhere in the south. He had heard her soft voice, the expressive drawl, twice in the Mercantile. He would like to let her know he existed, that he lived near her, that he was a good person, maybe even unique. He had avoided women most of his life, had never married. He wasn’t really interested, he thought. He would just like her to be aware that she didn’t really belong here.

He didn’t own the road, he admitted, the trees, the Mercantile, or the property she inhabited, but she was guilty of disturbing his peace. Such a mild sounding charge, disturbing the peace. No, it was more like she was consciously and maliciously making the wind blow harder when it blew, the fields waft more fetid smell of cow pies; and even when the weather was hot and slow, like today, caused a chaotic and dissonant clanging through the tops of the pines.

She probably doesn’t even have the sense to know it. She’s oblivious to everything but her pots. She probably thinks she’s an artist. If you think you are something, then maybe you are: He surprised himself with this new thought. Yet, it did not excuse her presumption of a benign environment or the peculiar unsettling of his valley.

He had all the respect in the world for some neighbors. People who had been raised there. People who lived further away than the potter, most by miles, but he thought of as neighbors. Most had inherited family places with a few acres and lived off the husbands’ work at the pulp mill over on the Shoshone River. The wives often worked off the places too. Some as far away as Cody where they were real estate sales women, bank clerks, grocery checkers. One was the head of the utilities department there. Other wives ran home businesses, child care and berry sales shelters, in season, along the road at the end of their driveways. Old signs, mostly shedding their faded colors to the ground and some made of tired plywood or even cardboard. Some of these neighbors sold fireplace wood, one sold horseback rides, another bait and others, hay and feed.

He thought them invariably happy people, no guilty memories dragging at them since they had rarely experienced much beyond the familiarity of their old farms amidst the bucolic fields, friends they known since childhood and the little town 11 miles down the road. Len himself was from the valley, born there and grew up on his farm, and had returned after the death of his father to repair and make it home again. He left not too long after his mother had died. He was 17 and wanted away then. He respected the ones who stayed, as he had not respected them back then. Except for the occasional speeders on the roadway and the few who had old cars and parts piled in their yards year after year, most who had stayed appeared about the same as when he left. His valley had stayed much the same, surrounding him with comfort and a wild sort of beauty that he hadn’t been able to find anywhere else. People didn’t sell off their land here like other places. Not yet anyway.

Mira had held back a grin, her mouth a tightly closed coin purse containing the mirth that made her blue eyes shine and the ends of her graying honey-blonde hair shake against the back of her neck. She pushed the strands of her hair from her face. Good morning, Leonard, she said. She saw him jump, eyes widen for a moment and then the slow, sideways evaluation. Heard his mumbled hello, his shoulders hunched even further to his neck as he pushed the barrow across the road to his own side. That was the first time she had actually spoken to him. He had handed her the shovel from the wheelbarrow and said he would come get it later. She said she would bring it to him.

Then there was squealing, high-pitched and tortured. They both heard it and straightened. It continued, a primitive earsplitting cry for help; clearly an animal. Should we go? asked Mira. He looked like he might lose his balance for a moment and then turned and ran, thundering boots stirring dust devils on the road, toward the Mercantile. Mira opened her mouth to take a deep breath and ran after him. The dog sped low from the front door of the Mercantile, a blur of gray, brown and white headed for the field next door.

Len stuck his head inside the store and called, Okay in here? Mira looked around quickly inside and made out, through sweat streaming into her eyes, Denise standing rigid next to the row of cereal boxes. Her face and skinny, bare arms glowed faintly in the darkness of the room.

What’s happened? Are you okay? What happened to the dog?

Nothing, we’re okay, really we’re okay, the dog made Joe mad. He’ll be okay.

The shakiness of her voice belied the words, but within minutes, Denise had outwardly calmed. She convinced them to go on home. Len shrugged and Mira’s I don’t know, Mira began. He gave a slow shrug. They walked together without a word, Len picking up the wheelbarrow where he had left it on the road, Mira picking up the shovel from where she had dropped it, and both nodded goodbye.

Mira worked, but distractedly, at her vegetable garden. Stabbing at the earth with the shovel, she worked her muscles until she thought she couldn’t possibly lift the shovel one more time. Later, she thought of Denise and realized suddenly that she knew that look, the one that had been in Denise’s eyes. Maybe not, though. Mira went back to her wheel, and lost thought into clay as it went round and began to answer her wishes.

Joe prided himself on his efficiency. Dot every ‘i,’ he frequently boasted. He could never remember, but suspected there was another part to that adage. He never spent long enough to recall. He was a very busy man.

Very busy, Denise thought, his wife of 14 years. So busy she perceived him these days as a fat little hummingbird, sticking his beak in here and there and everywhere. Joe was never at ease. Thinking she understood the cause as being, at best, something weak or strange in him, turned back to the waiting customer. Joe had taught her to sell. The marriage between Denise and Joe was rooted in what she had learned from Joe, their foundation. She had rarely doubted that he knew most of what he told her, that he was right about sales, business, and people—at least in the beginning of the marriage. He knew what to wear, how to be, what to say, what was good, what wasn’t. He knew how she should run the store, as well as how to make the ‘big bucks’ on his real estate deals. He knew how she should talk and dress, how she should think. She had tried to follow his lead, struggled for months to think like him, to see things from his perspective. Now, she just pretended, and secretly regarded him with a loathing and fear she thought she hid well. He wouldn’t tolerate her disagreement with him. She had learned that the hard way.

Joe frequently disparaged her willingness to soak up everything he said. He felt that Denise had become a handful of natural sponge such as he used to wash his old classic Ford pickup. He never questioned his own part in her transformation from a shy, but bright and optimistic girl, to a faint-hearted shadow. And he certainly didn’t take any responsibility for her inexplicable tendency to astonish him unexpectedly with her mean-spiritedness, especially towards the things he cherished most. She had scratched the Ford, a one-inch long mark of metal showing through the paint job over the back, right-hand fender, when taking a rake from the garage wall. Six years ago and he still smoldered.

Joe could not seem to make her understand that she must close the shop at 5: 30 each afternoon. He had to tell her every day or it would be 5: 33, 5: 35 or even 5: 40 before she thought of it. She resolutely denied anything but respect for him and yet, he was certain she was getting back at him. For what, he didn’t know. He didn’t even try to discuss it with her anymore. She always promised to be more careful, quickly agreeing that she should and would be more responsible. She wouldn’t and he knew it. Better to stay at his work, focus on what he could do well in this world, what mattered most and remind her at 4: 50 each day that she should begin to close the shop.

What had happened to the lithe young woman with the swinging dark her whom he had held carefully in his arms before they married? He had been so proud of her slim, almost fragile figure, and large grey eyes with the dark lashes, almost feeling too awe-struck at times to kiss her. He had longed to be with her laughter when he was away from her. She had later become wan, didn’t wash her hair for days on end and was almost silent with him.

Put the sign just there. Run a dust cloth over the smooth surfaces of counter, deep wooden window sills, tops of boxes and cans on shelves. The floor would be swept tomorrow. Joe was sure that mice would track it up and it, therefore, it was best to sweep just before opening at 6Ŧ 00 AM. She counted out the day’s cash total. Denise was supposed to follow this order in closing the shop and she did. But then, she invariably left the chicken for dinner too long in the oven, burned it through the skin, or the meatloaf was underdone, the salad gritty or she forgot to take something out of the freezer at all.

She scraped off the burnt parts of whatever it was, and often covered it with barbecue sauce to hide her mistakes, or buried it in the garbage can outside; then started over with something simple and quick. Otherwise, such neglect would lead to unpleasantness all around. But, the rice and salad were perfect and even the barbecue sauce worked on that night’s baked trout. The only sound was from Joe as he crunched through his salad.

Len guessed she was all right, Mira across the road. He would try to think kindly of her. She had really cared about the dog, and remained worried even when they left the store that day. He still watched, though. It didn’t mean she could go ahead and wreak havoc around here, but his thoughts were split towards the dog that now often wandered to his porch for a scratch under the wide leather collar. His own dog barely stirred these days when the visitor came, although there had been growls and a lot of sniffing when the neighboring dog first began appearing at the bottom step. A few days after the torturous squealing, the dog had shown up there, and Len liked to think he came because he knew that Len would comfort it.

Len worked like a mule. That’s what people in the valley said. Len himself realized they admired him for it and felt ashamed since his working, he knew, had more to do with making up for the past, rather than any work ethic. They meant it as a compliment. Sitting on the porch, he shook his head slightly so that soft jowls rubbed against collar. A lost cause.

Len had noticed that Mira worked hard too. They always talked a minute, when they met on the road. Nothing special, just a few words about the gardens, the weather. Mira had occasionally brought him something she had baked and had surprised him one day with a large raku-finished flower pot she made to set next to his door. Pansies and Forget-Me–Nots had spilled over the top of it all summer.

Sitting together in Mira’s studio one day, they had talked about the night before, when Denise knocked at Mira’s window. Startled awake, Mira had run to the front and brought a bleeding, crying Denise into the studio. She had cleaned the broken lip for Denise and kept an arm around her shoulders while she cried, but Denise wouldn’t answer Mira when she asked what had happened. Mira had set her mouth in a tight line and pushed back her hair where it was causing sweat to run down the sides of her face. She had given Denise aspirin and a glass of cold water and told her to take the bed, but Mira declined and instead made her way home.

What can we do? Len had asked, If she won’t leave, what can we do? He thought of his mother, terrified, leaning against the doorjamb in the kitchen and sobbing. He had felt a coldness throughout his limbs and his stomach turn in guilt. I should have gotten her out of there. Instead, he had stayed and comforted her after his father had punched or kicked her, and anxiously wondered if his father would ever go so far as to kill her. When she died of a stroke, he had immediately packed and moved to Chicago where he got a job in a warehouse. He never spoke to his father again, but now in his head asked, What made you such a bastard? For the millionth time, he guessed.

I’m just having one of my petrified days. It will go away. Mira called the times she couldn’t rouse herself to do anything, her petrified days, lost hours and days to immobility and emptiness. She had thought these would go away when she left her husband. It was true that when she was working on her pots or in her garden that she felt a soaring freedom that she hadn’t felt in many years, and she was doing better pottery work. Yet, these awful days kept coming back. She thought again of her husband’s words, Stupid bitch. You cow. You ugly bitch.

She felt like she had swallowed a bag of clay in the night on those mornings she rose and could barely make coffee. She made herself look at the room, the pots, the wheel, the jars and cans, her shelves built high against the walls. She saw the sun streaming in through the windows and the patterns in the wood logs that made up her walls, and hoped for some inspiration to act, but she saw all of it from far away and couldn’t seem to move. Later, she would rise to use the bathroom or get a glass of water. She would go back to the small dark bedroom and fall asleep, waking as the sun went down and the house cooled, feeling better, but guilty at a wasted day.

Denise had shown up one of those evenings, in tears. She was holding her stomach and Mira had sat her on a wooden chair and kneeled in front of her, asking, Denise, did Joe hurt you? Denise shook her head no.

Can I take you to the hospital to see if anything is broken? Denise had nodded a vehement no. Mira had sighed, and risen, gone to the phone book and written down a number.

When you’re ready to take care of yourself, call this number. They’ll find a safe place for you. I really want you to call.

Denise had stared at her with wide gray eyes and held the bit of paper in her fingers. I have to get back, she whispered. Later, Mira found the bit of yellow paper where it had floated under the chair.

Len told Mira that Denise had come twice to his house the week before, both times in tears and hurt. Both admitted feeling desperate. Mira said Joe would kill Denise one day. Len had taken Mira’s hand and kissed her forehead before he went out the door and across the road.

Mira was working better than she ever had, with two rows of shining, sensuously shaped pots, vases and other containers in varying earth tones. Still, she knew she hadn’t refined her own style and felt some niggling sense of failure. Her garden was green and the vegetables seemed to be growing a couple of inches a day, though. She sat down to the clay on the table and thought fondly of Len and his dry sense of humor. He had just finished painting the barn to match his house, a light gray with a dark gray trim, and his flowers had brightened the farm, surrounding the house, barn and outbuildings. He was working on the fence to the pasture beside the barn that day. She had waved earlier and he had taken off his hat, waved it at her and wiped his brow, grinning.

She had looked at the pots lined up, and then at the open letter from Ellen on the table. She gazed out the window at her favorite Douglas fir. Then, she looked at her hands and was still. Denise should not live like that! She pictured Joe, his balding head bobbing self-importantly around the store, his paunch barely contained with a tight belt. The utter meanness she knew in him. She thought of her own husband, and then remembered he was no longer her husband. You stupid bitch. She punched drops of water into the clay, kneaded, punched and kneaded.

She punched hard and deep into the clay.

They both testified after Denise was jailed. Yes, they had seen and heard Joe beat the dog, more than once. Yes, they had seen Denise with a broken lip, bent over in pain, bruises and cuts on her legs and arms. She had come to each of them, in tears, but wouldn’t say what had happened. Len had wanted to approach Joe, to talk, but Denise had begged him tearfully not to do it.

Len, who had stopped by the Mercantile after hearing of Mira’s latest efforts, finally and impatiently warned Denise that Joe would eventually kill her. Denise had stood still behind the counter, mouth half open, shook her head and then hurried into the storeroom. No, both said, they didn’t know where Denise had gone the night Joe was killed. Yes, they had both heard a truck, a very noisy truck, pull up to the Mercantile. It was there for over an hour. It was late, almost 1: 00 AM, when Leonard heard it leave. Mira had heard it rumble past her place and had looked at the clock: It was 12: 53 AM.

There was testimony from people who had known Joe, and two who had known both Joe and Denise. Most of them said they had liked Joe or at least had a grudging admiration for his business sense. Most had given Denise the benefit of the doubt, at least before Joe’s death. Not especially outgoing and never seemed to have an opinion, was the consensus. But she was Joe’s wife. Then, the defense brought in one of Joe’s customers, and another. It seemed Joe hadn’t always been necessarily forthright in his real estate dealings. Not one of them had a truck with those tire marks, though.

No body either. Lots of blood, but no weapon. No prints anywhere that weren’t Joe’s or Denise’s. No stray hairs or other DNA materials. Denise was not convicted. No one was. Denise sold the store, but she had already moved by then. Someone said she had gone to live in Georgia, where she had a sister.

Stopping him one evening on the road in late fall, Mira smiled and said, Leonard? Come on over when you’re done with the chores.

He smiled back. The new tires held the grassy, wet ground well as he turned across the field towards the trees, the truck bed filled with another load of garbage. Mira had gone into the studio, sat at her wheel and felt the perfection of the clay as the wheel turned. It had been months since she had had a petrified day, she thought, as she cupped her hands around the clay. She smiled with satisfaction. Lately, she felt her work was going very well.

Mira was full of stories about her life with her girls in South Carolina, shop owners in the city where she distributed her pottery, jokes about southerners—okay for her to tell them, she had said, since she was a southern girl herself. She listened with close attention to his recounting of his years in the valley as a kid and later in the city as a warehouseman. He no longer felt boring. Actually, he was feeling pretty virile for an old bachelor, he thought.

He was thinking of the pie she had promised from the bowl of blackberries he had given her that morning, while he dug the deep hole far back in the woods, and then deposited the last of the garbage. He had filled the hole, as he had the others, and stamped the earth, replanted the bushes he had dug up and spread the dried topsoil around and under the plants. Sweating now, in spite of the late fall chill, he rubbed the metal of the shovel vigorously with dirt once again, his hands in his gloves. There were some visible pink stains left on the handle. He would launder the gloves again that night and burn the shovel handle before going to Mira’s for pie.

About the Author

Jolene Wells-Moran, PhD, wrote part-time for 24 years and has been a full-time freelance writer for two years. She has written four published non-fiction books, one novel, many articles, short stories, academic works, book reviews, policies and much more. She ghostwrites for a healthcare management newsletter on a regular basis, and writes healthcare and alternative healthcare articles and has a humorous non-fiction art adventure book planned for 2006. She lives alternately in France and Washington State.

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