Page 65 of Upstate

Dragging my feet, I recross the lawn to the scene of the slaughter. Joe’s the asshole who sprayed the bees with insecticide, but I’m the one who brings death to everything I touch. I wasn’t a good enough daughter for my mother to live for. I watched my father take his last breath. I abandoned my husband on a New York City sidewalk. I let Joe onto my land to massacre the hive. It’s my fault the bees are lying in a heap, their fragile wings crumbling to dust.

I pinch a soldier bee’s body between my thumb and forefinger, forcing its stinger into the center of my palm. The insect is dead, but there’s venom in it yet. The pain doesn’t come close to what I deserve. I leave the stinger in my skin, pick up another bee, prick myself again, and again, and again, until the hand Sam held becomes a monstrous red mitten throbbing, useless, at the end of my arm.

Chapter 31

April 30, 2015

Schuywich, New York

My darling Evelyn,

I thought I’d figure out a way to fix things between my brother and my parents, but I was wrong. Mother canceled the Sunday afternoon party she’d planned to celebrate Billy’s homecoming. Daddy asked a lawyer he knew from church if they could discuss an urgent matter after the service. Later that week, Daddy picked me up at the library on my lunch hour and drove me to the lawyer’s office to sign papers that transferred the deed of his property to me, with a condition that my parents retain lifetime rights of residence.

I was shocked. Even if he was determined to follow through on his threat, I figured Daddy would be changing his will, not giving away his house. He must have worried that if he died before Mother, she’d change that will right back again. This way, he’d have the cold certainty of knowing the house belonged to his barren daughter instead of his only son.

Signing my name felt like stabbing Billy in the back, but you were right, Evelyn. Besides my college diploma, I had nothing in this world legally to my name. I’d be fired from my job under a cloud of scandal if anyone so much as suspected I was a lesbian. What would I live on then? You swore you’d never leave me, but that’s what every divorcée believes on her wedding night. The courts give a faultless wife the right to sue for support. I’d have no such protection.

I calmed my queasy conscience by telling myself Billy would understand once I explained. With Mother and Daddy staying in the house for the rest of their lives, it would be decades before he felt the impact of being disinherited. Once the property became mine, my plan was for us to share ownership. Billy could buy me out if he wanted the house, or we could sell and split the profits. Either way, I only wanted half. That was fair, wasn’t it?

I rehearsed the speech that would convince my brother I hadn’t betrayed him over and over in my mind, muttering it aloud while I cooked our supper, saying it silently while I brushed my teeth, writing it down while I was at work. I had plenty of time, I thought, to talk to Billy before the property transaction became public. I didn’t know his high school track coach was friends with the lawyer, who spilled the beans about my signing off on Daddy’s scheme to disinherit his son. The coach, in turn, told Billy when my brother called to apologize for scurrying out of town without saying hello. None of which I found out until it was too late.

I expected a call from my brother any day, but the silence stretched on for a week, then two, then three. We read in the Times Union that Billy got the job in Rockefeller’s administration, so I knew he and Mai were still in Albany. The scene with our parents had been terrible, but I couldn’t understand why Billy was giving me the cold shoulder.

Then an envelope arrived on the first Tuesday of November. I remember the date because we’d just come home from voting for Hubert Humphrey down at the firehouse. There was no return address, but once I saw the Albany postmark, I knew it was from my brother.

My hands shook so badly, I got a paper cut tearing it open. Inside was a clipping from the Schuywich Journal noting the transfer of my parents’ property to me. A scrawled note spelled out the accusation I dreaded:

Was this your plan all along, Hazel? Is this why you made me keep Mai a secret until I got home? We both knew how Mom and Dad would react, but I trusted you. Well, you got what you always wanted, as if either of us needed proof they love you more than me. I hope that house was worth losing your brother, because I swear to God, Hazel, I never want to see your face again.

I leaned over and retched, right there by the mailbox. I’d have written back to refute his accusations if he hadn’t withheld his address. What kind of brother believes his sister would betray his trust to steal his inheritance? Four decades of hindsight tell me his anger was fueled by rejection and pain, but I didn’t see it that way then. Fine, I thought. Two can play that game. If Billy was going to turn his back on me, I’d turn mine, too.

A month later, we saw an announcement in the paper that Mai had given birth to a girl named Patience. I’d have sent a card if I knew where they lived, called if I knew his number. Oh, sure, I could have dialed information. I could have sent mail to his office. I could have gone down to Albany and stood on the steps of the capitol until he crossed my path. But I didn’t do any of those things, because I was hurting, too.

Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon was old news by the time we got a second envelope from Albany, this one fat with stiff paper. Was it a bunch of letters Mai had written but never sent? A stack of pictures of my niece grown from infant to toddler? An invitation to finally come visit? I ripped open the envelope, eager to jump in the station wagon and speed down the Northway before we wasted another hour of our lives on this stupid feud.

Instead of letters or pictures, the envelope contained twenty pale yellow post office money orders, each payable for the maximum amount of one hundred dollars. Two thousand dollars—the exact sum we’d loaned Billy to secure Mai’s visa.

I had no idea how he’d earned that much so fast or what he’d gone without to pay us back. If he’d sent a personal check, I’d have torn it up uncashed, but these meant the money was already spent. If I didn’t deposit them, the only beneficiary would be the Federal Reserve.

“That ungrateful punk,” you muttered. “I can’t believe he’s treating you this way, after everything you sacrificed for his sake.”

“What you’ve sacrificed, too, Evelyn. You came here for me because I stayed for him. Billy owes you as much as he does me. He doesn’t know that, though. All he knows is that Daddy gave me what ought to have been his.”

I wasn’t just talking about the house. Affection, attention, approval—all of these our father had denied his son. Daddy’s war neurosis wasn’t my fault, but what did that matter in the end? My brother had lumped me and my parents and you, too, in the same heap of tossed-out trash.

As angry as we were with Billy, we kept following his career by scouring the paper for mention of his name. When President Nixon tapped Henry Kissinger to be his national security advisor, I expected Billy to pack up his family and follow his boss to Washington. Instead, he transitioned to a different position on Governor Rockefeller’s staff, sticking with state government up through Mario Cuomo’s administration. For all those years, my brother and I lived no more than fifty miles apart. It seemed like we had plenty of time to make things right. Somehow, though, we never did.

I thought for sure we’d reconcile after Daddy died in 1980. It was a miracle, really, that our father made it to sixty-five after everything his mind and body had been through. Mother threw a party to celebrate his retirement from the bottling plant that November, but apparently, the routine of showing up for work was what had been keeping him alive. It wasn’t unheard of for an old man’s ticker to give out during hunting season, so when one of the Sprague boys found my father’s cold body beneath that deer stand, the coroner concluded it was Daddy’s damaged heart, rather than his troubled mind, that triggered the fall that killed him.

I really believed Billy would show up for Daddy’s funeral. After all, wasn’t it our father’s fault that my brother had stayed away so long? Billy was still in touch with a few people from Schuywich, and you ran the obituary in the Times Union with William McIntyre named as a surviving son. There was no way Billy didn’t know our father was being buried.

My parents’ far-flung siblings sent flowers, but none of my distant aunts or uncles traveled to Schuywich for the service. In the end, parishioners and villagers and Daddy’s coworkers filled the church. It wasn’t your place, as my friend, to sit with family, so it was just Mother and I in the front pew. I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting to see Billy’s tall figure come striding down the aisle. When he didn’t turn up in church or at the cemetery, I held out hope he might still appear at the reception we held at Mother’s house. The day ended with heartfelt hugs and a heap of casseroles, but no sign of my brother.

That was the last straw as far as Mother was concerned. She’d already been telling anyone who asked that Billy hadn’t come home from Vietnam. While technically not far from the truth—does a fight in the driveway count as a homecoming?—the assumption that he’d died in combat was a lie she never corrected. Plenty of people in Schuywich knew the truth, but they weren’t the ones asking.

“A son who can’t be bothered to attend his own father’s funeral is no son at all.” Mother spat out the words as we covered casseroles with aluminum foil after the last of the mourners had gone. Clamping her hand on my arm, she hissed, “I swear on your father’s grave, Hazel, from this day forward, Billy is dead to me, you hear?”

“Fine, Mother,” I said, prying off her fingers. “You can pretend I’m your only child if that’s what you want.”